Are you running paid digital ads with the intention of generating leads? Have your attempts led to little to no success? If this is the case, there could be several reasons for the lack of leads ranging from the paid media source, to the ad creative/copy, to the offer or even the audience. From our experience in running paid digital advertising campaigns for our clients, we have found the most critical factor in generating leads through paid digital advertising is having an effective landing page.

Before we jump into what makes a good landing page for paid digital advertising, let’s first define what is considered paid digital advertising. Paid digital advertising is a marketing method that involves businesses paying an online platform to show advertisements to consumers in either a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression model. The most popular forms of paid advertising are paid search, social media and banner advertising.

Now if you are doing one of these forms of paid digital advertising and you are not seeing results, here are some reasons why your landing page isn’t converting on paid ads:

Landing Page was Designed for SEO

When designing a page for SEO (search engine optimization), it is usually put together in a way where it is packed with a ton of information pertaining to the product or service that you are trying to rank high on organic searches.

There isn’t anything wrong with this when you are looking at it from a perspective of SEO. Moreover, when consumers are working through the journey of a purchase decision process (read the linked article to learn more about a buyers purchase decision process), having such pages with a lot of information helps satisfy the discovery and research phases.

When you send potential consumers to this page with the intention for converting them to leads, you will find all of this information is too much.

When advertising to generate leads, you are advertising to an audience that is much further down the process in their purchase decision process. Overloading them with more information will likely cause the future customer to overthink their decision and potentially draw them back into a research phase.

If you are running paid ads and you want to convert leads, do not send these customers to your SEO designed landing page.

Too Many Options on your Landing Page

If you are indeed sending paid advertising clicks to your SEO landing page, now you know to send them to a dedicated page which only those that click on paid ads will see.

Now there are businesses that do this already, knowing that their SEO designed pages are not the best destination for paid ads. Are you still having conversion issues? If so, it is probably because you are giving your visitors too many options to click on.

The first thing that you want to do is eliminate your menu and eliminate your footer. When you paid good money for someone to visit your site and convert into a lead, you do not want them to start exploring your website.

Ideally, you would want this landing page to be as simple as possible with only 1 outcome, fill out the form and convert! Now, if your business sees a high conversion rate on phone calls, this might be the 2nd option available, but that should be it.

If the page that you directed them to has many links or opportunities to leave that area, you run the risk of them leaving before they convert.

Lead Capture Form Needs Attention

So, now that we are sending customers to a dedicated landing page and we’ve reduced the options available to click on, we need to figure out what else can be a barrier to submitting information on your landing page.

One other area that we have found affected landing page conversions was the amount of inputs required for a visitor to fill in before they can submit their information. In some cases, having the extra inputs leads to higher intent inquires, but on the flip side this could potentially deter someone immediately as it might optically seem too cumbersome.

With all of our lead generation landing pages, we incorporate quiz style lead capture forms. What is a lead style capture form? This is a form that hides all of the required fields as steps so that the initial shock of what needs to be completed is not initially realized from the start.

Moreover, with this style of form, you can ask questions that can either filter people out based on criteria, or it can ask specific questions based on answers provided. As an example, if your company installs both windows and doors, you probably shouldn’t ask your visitor for how many windows that want replaced if they came for a new door. This form will help you ask the right questions at the right time.

Do these techniques work?

We ran an A/B test with 10 of our home improvement clients where we sent half of the ad viewers to a page on their website pertaining to a service, and then we sent the other half to a proper landing page designed to convert paid advertising visitors.

Our test ran for 30 days and we made sure that the traffic to landing page A and landing page B were of similar size. The results were as follows:

Landing Page A – Regular Page on Website

  • 5.82% of all visitors converted
  • Best client had a 8.61% conversion rate
  • Worst client had a 2.02% conversion rate

Landing Page B – Landing Page Designed for Paid Advertising

  • 11.86% of all visitors converted
  • Best client had a 18.57% conversion rate
  • Worst client had a 8.06% conversion rate