Tuning ads to landing page offers - a case study
Last week I explained why landing pages for PPC have such great potential for generating leads and sales. Today, I’ll use graphics to show how you can get ads and landing pages working in sync.
The following case-study is from two years ago, but still highly valid. A little testing and optimization of the link between ad and lander raised an already great conversion rate of 11.4% to 19.3%, a CR lift of 69%.
The answer to the significantly different performance of the various ads lies in the ad copy, the type of visitors it entices, and how the landing page meets their search expectations.
The client sells financial products in various US states, using PPC as a major lead generation source. The leads are converted by offering a free educational video for the financial product.
The ads shown below went through several rounds of testing. For the sake of brevity, I’m showing only three ads—from the early, middle, and late stages respectively.
The KPIs were Click-through-Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CR) and Cost-per-Conversion ($/C). Ideally, we would have measured ultimate closing rates and cash profit to determine accurate ROI; however, for various reasons, these figures were not available to us.
When looking at these ads and the landing page copy, I’ve used hi-lighter to differentiate between the different types of copy—red for Product Name, blue for Offer, pink for Benefit, yellow or green for Calls to Action.
Ad #1 – While the CTR was average, the CR was good. Continued testing led to Ad #2
Ad #2 – The CTR improved slightly, while the CR improved significantly. This was attributed to the question asked in the copy, awakening curiosity, and at the same time better appealing to the target audience for the offer. The jump in CR relative to the earlier ad is likely due to this ad matching the landing page focus much better than Ad #1. Ad #1 had a good chunk of the description devoted to describing the benefits of the product instead of pushing the offer—hence sacrificing clarity.
Ad#3 – Further testing led us to the winner in this round. CR jumped to an impressive 19.3%. It came at the cost of lower CTR but this was not surprising, considering the big impact on CTR of being geo-specific. However, exchanging the geo-specificity for offer in the headline ensured better matched visitor expectation and led to the high conversion rate.
Compare the ad-copy with the below landing page copy. See if you agree with our findings. There are many other lessons that can be gleaned or speculated on based on this data too, but that is for another time.
Landing page layout and copy
There are of course other considerations not discussed here, including:
• Is a focus on free information ultimately profitable? Are there other, potentially better or more profitable differentiators?
• It does get the name in front of prospects, but when it comes to big financial decisions, aren't people used to rate/fee shopping these days? Especially considering the product is widely available from other sources.
• Focusing on Informational ads—while providing high traffic volume—could be losing out on higher intent prospects who are closer to the end of the sales cycle.
Tracking your online marketing effort all the way to conversion is essential. But without tracking closing rates, ROI and $ profit, and tying those to your PPC and other marketing spend, you will not know whether you are indeed maximizing your profits.