Yesterday I was on the phone with a fairly new client who has some pretty aggressive revenue goals they want to hit with their digital marketing. This is not uncommon.
When we first started running their ad campaigns, they were all performing really well and generating a lot of clicks and transfers to their website. Great news, right?
Kind of. This is where it gets interesting and becomes an important cautionary tale for every business running digital ads.
We were running a split test with their landing pages. Some ads were sending people to the homepage while others were sending people to an internal page. When we looked at the data, we saw that those going to the homepage were converting at 5% and the leads going to the internal pages were converting at 0.4%. Big difference!
It’s easy to overfocus on the ad campaigns – the creative, the targeting, and how they’re performing. This is important information, but it is only half the battle. There needs to be an equal focus on the website and the quality of the landing pages.
As you can see in the example with my client, the internal pages were preventing them from seeing better results. We now have a plan in place to improve the internal pages and we are using a tried and true process for content that converts on landing pages:
- Short introductory copy at the top that’s related to the product or service.
- Benefits of the product of service.
- Company features and unique selling points.
- How to get started.
- Social proof in the form of testimonials or reviews.
- Call to action.
That is the formula for internal page success. If your ad campaigns have stalled out or plateaued, it might not be an ad problem. It might be a website or landing page content problem.