The average conversion rate for ads on Google is 3.75% across all industries. However, a vast majority of these ad clicks do not lead to conversion— and this is often because the landing page is not optimized.
Marketers usually pay the most attention to pre-click initiatives to get people to click on ads, but at the cost of optimizing their post-click strategy. Neglecting this stage of the customer journey prevents a brand or business from maximizing results, which can translate to wasted resources.
What comes after a customer clicks on your ad is just as important as getting them to click in the first place. Once you get through the initial hurdle of cutting through the rest of the content on the digital space, you’ll need to effectively engage visitors on your landing page and get them to convert.
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Optimize Your Landing Page for More Conversions: 7 Key Elements of the Perfect Post Click Experience:
Post-Click Experience vs. Pre-Click Experience
Marketers utilize plenty of data and insights to craft a great ad that compels consumers to click on them. However, it is important to remember that while an engaging ad is vital to an ad campaign, it’s still just the initial step to having a customer convert and close a sale.
The total ad click experience is divided into two parts: the pre-click experience and the post-click experience. It’s important to note that both these experiences must be prioritized to ensure the success of an ad campaign.
The Pre-Click Experience
The pre-click experience covers the elements and strategies involved in getting potential customers to click on your ad. This stage includes planning for the ad content, from crafting creative copy to putting it together with attractive or eye-catching visuals that can hold a prospect’s attention. The colours, copy, and headline are some of the elements in an ad that can influence how willing a potential customer would be to learn more about whatever it is you’re offering and click on your ad.
The Post-Click Experience
The post-click experience is everything that happens once a potential customer does click on your ad. Whatever happens on this stage influences their willingness to convert or purchase your product or service. Some of the factors included in the post-click experience are landing page images, the loading time of your website, and the message with your offer.
What Are the Pillars of Post-Click Optimization?
There are four pillars you should consider when it comes to post-click optimization. They are scalable creation, ad mapping, personalization, and optimization. Each one plays a vital role in the success of not just one post-click experience, but the overall marketing process after a customer clicks an ad.
Scalable Creation
This refers to your ability to make several post-click landing pages at an accelerated pace. Being able to scale the creation of post-click landing pages is important because this allows you to create customized pages capable of appealing to different demographics within your target audience.
Being able to create more personalized, targeted messages helps drive more conversions. It should be noted that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that delivers a tailored shopping experience.
Ad Mapping
This pillar optimizes the way that marketers collect and analyse data. It can be overwhelming to handle large volumes of data without automation, as well as tedious and time-consuming. It also makes it incredibly difficult to accurately gauge the effectiveness of the ad campaign during and after it is finished, which leads to wasted insights on potential improvement or how it could have performed better.
Ad mapping provides a form of automation in documenting the entire ad campaign, providing marketers with a holistic view of their ads and their respective landing pages. It helps PPC marketers get a better grasp on the advertising funnel, and they are able to save time and resources doing so.
Personalization
Personalized marketing strategies have become key in winning over potential customers. As an advertiser, you want to make sure that your products and services reach consumers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and may already be inclined to make a purchase.
Personalization can be achieved not just by including customer names in messages, but by also creating relevant audience segments and developing buyer personas for them. Buyer personas help you better tailor your messages to a respective segment by putting yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers. You can develop post-click landing pages for each segment of your target audience instead of making a single general page for everyone, which will help boost your conversions.
Optimization
To properly measure an ad campaign’s effectiveness, marketers will need access to insights behind customer behaviour surrounding their ads. One method to quantify effectivity is by using A/B tests. This form of testing determines how well certain components of a marketing strategy achieve their specific functions by releasing the same ad, but with one specific element changed and comparing which of the options performed better.
When it comes to post-click marketing, there are two steps that can be done to optimize performance: testing and user research. Here are some methods that can be used to optimize a post-click experience:
- Heatmaps
- Page duplication
- Analytics and metrics dashboards
- Built-in experimentation features
- Traffic allocation
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Key Elements in Crafting the Ideal Post-Click Experience
From the pre-click to the post-click stages, delivering exceptional consumer experience is key to converting. Ensuring that your landing page loads quickly is one important factor, but it shouldn’t be the only one to consider.
Here are seven of the key elements you should focus on when developing a landing page for your ads.
An effective headline and customer-centric copy
Your page’s headline is one of the first things that visitors will focus on before their eyes wander to the rest of the copy. This makes it important for your headline to be thought-provoking enough to make visitors compelled to go through the rest of the content.
Your copy should be centred what your products and services can do for your customers. Consider these points when writing your copy:
- Focus the discussion on how your products and services will benefit consumers. This provides better results than simply listing out product features that may or may not be relevant to an inquiring customer.
- Make your copy readable. Nobody wants to read a wall of text. Use subheadings, easy-to-digest words, shorter paragraphs and bullet points to drive your point across quickly and more effectively.
- Avoid using industry jargon. This goes in line with making your page copy readable. Keep your copy easy to read for customers who aren’t necessarily familiar with your industry.
- Continue your ad narrative. Continuity is important between the message on your ad and your page copy. Consistency makes prospective customers more willing to learn more about your brand after they’ve already established an interest from your ad.
Sufficient white space on the landing page
Utilizing white space on your landing page helps focus your message and avoids overwhelming potential customers. No one wants to be barraged with cluttered images and text when visiting a website. No white space can make your landing page messy, disorganized, and hard to navigate. Even worse, your overall message can easily get lost in translation.
Having a balanced amount of white space and content on your landing page makes it easier on the eyes, guiding prospective customers in a more natural way along your content. A simple and straightforward, landing is more likely to encourage conversions than a busy landing page packed with content.
Ad-to-page relevancy
Your pre-click and post-click experiences need to be in sync. This makes the consumer’s journey more consistent, relevant, and holistic. However, this goes beyond making similar ad copy and using the same colors for your landing page.
To ensure ad-to-page relevancy, utilize data like visitor intent and factors for personalization. This helps you develop a landing page that effectively engages with your target audience. Take it one step further by developing a landing page for a specific audience segment, which delivers a more personalized message.
Message matching
Another potential reason while so few ad clicks convert is that the landing page often does not match what the ad promises. For this element, your branding plays a crucial role. Your ad’s aesthetic, tone, copy, colours, and imagery should be consistent with what is portrayed on your landing page. If there are major disparities, prospective customers are least likely to trust you, which makes it less likely for them to convert.
Personalized landing pages for your target audience
The pillar of personalization previously established that tailored shopping experiences are key to securing a customer, and this is especially true in the digital space. This is because prospective customers will only click through for products and services they are genuinely interested in and are likely to purchase. Here are three statistics that highlight the power of personalization:
- 36% of consumers prefer that retailers provide personalized shopping experiences
- Only 36% of consumers feel like the brands they shop with know them
- 66% of consumers expect the brands that they shop with to know what they want and need when it comes to products and services
Even if a potential customer has already clicked on an ad, they will likely exit your site if you present them with an impersonal or overly general message and offer . Knowing your target audience is key to developing effectively personalized landing pages, and using retargeting technology can help you.
With retargeting technology, you can track and analyse other sites that your prospective customers visit and get a better grasp of the offers that interest them. Adapt these strategies to your own landing pages and assess how you can improve based on resulting behaviour.
An eye-catching CTA button
Once a consumer gets to your landing page, getting them to convert also depends on your call-to-action (CTA). This can be a button, a hyperlink, or even sentence, depending on what you want prospects to do. However, this makes it important for your CTA to stand out from the rest of the elements of your page.
Factors like your CTA’s copy and even colour can influence a consumer’s decision to click on it, but most importantly, it has to be easy to find. This is why CTAs in the form of buttons are eye-catching colors, such as red.
Testimonials from happy customers
Trust is a significant factor for brands to not just foster engagement with its customers, but also to build loyalty. However, it can also be one of the most difficult things to earn in the digital space. To better connect with prospective customers, it can help to display social proof. For example, testimonials and good reviews from existing customers can showcase your brand’s reliability and encourage prospects to try your offers.
By showing social proof, you can build your brand’s credibility and authority using authentic messages and feedback. Good reviews will inform potential customers that your products and services are tried and tested, as well as legitimate.
Here are other ways to showcase social proof:
- Customer counters that show how many customers have already bought from your brand
- Customer badges that show other brands that have been your customers if applicable
- Customer notifications that pop up whenever another customer purchases one of your products
Pay Attention to Your Post-Click Experience
To sum it up, your ad campaign’s pre-click stage serves as a preview to what your brand has to offer. The post-click experience then reiterates why a prospective customer should choose your brand and is the key in conversions that drive up your revenue and growth.
When developing your ad campaign, make sure that you optimize both your pre-click and post-click stages to get the most out of your ad campaigns. Gather and analyse insights your results and make improvements to the whole click experience to generate increased value for your business.
