Unbounce Co-founder Oli Gardner
Teaches PPC Landing Page Optimization
This video is brought to you by Unbounce’s DIY landing page platform
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello, Startups. I’m Oli Gardner from Unbounce and I’m here to teach you PPC landing page optimization. I’ll show you why you should use Landing Pages and how to do it really well.
All right. Let’s kick things off with a demonstration of what you shouldn’t be doing or what you should be doing. A lot of people send their traffic straight to their homepage. Now, this is really bad in general but is especially bad for your paid search campaigns because you’re paying money for this traffic, right?
Here’s a typical homepage. You’ve got your logo, a function navigation up here, your main Havana area. You take a tour, sign up for a trial. Some other navigation here maybe for a slider then you got some of your features. A whole bunch of more here. Each of these has a link and you got your foot of a whole bunch more things than here. Typically, a homepage has between 20 and 50 links on it. This one has … I counted them. I think it’s about 48. Every link on your homepage or at any page can be considered a leak not a link because a leak is going to take you somewhere else that you shouldn’t be going. It removes the focus of the intent of your ad.
There’s a thing called attention issue. If this is what we want people to do on the page safe, it is the prone area down here. That’s one thing you want people to do and there are 44 things, 48 things on the page. You attention ratio is 48 to 1. That’s terrible. The chance of them doing exactly what you want them to do from you’re your ad, really low so that’s bad. Now, we have our Landing Page. Now, I’m going subscribe the elements that go into making a really good one in a second. If you just look again at the attention issue here, the only thing you want people to do at your startups. If you’re in an early stage, you might want to be capturing an e-mail address for notifications of your bigger release.
Right here, the only thing you would have to do is put their e-mail address in and click this spot right. This is the intent of your page. There’s nothing else to do here a part from learning about your idea. There are new links, new leaks, and nothing to do apart from this one single action. The attention ratio is 1 to 1 because of nothing else to do. This is what you should be aiming to do for all of your ad campaigns. Always send to a Landing page for this main reason, 1 to 1.
Seeing the purpose of a Landing page and why it’s better than your homepage for receiving your ad traffic. Let’s look at how we can create a really high performance page and you do that by focusing on five essential elements. First, is your unique selling proposition in USP which is made up typically of your headline and your subhead. This is what has to communicate the uniqueness of your offering of your business idea and why it’s relevant to your title audience. What the main pain relief for benefit is associated with your idea.
Second, we have the hero shop. This is typically the best photo or video of what you’re trying to sell someone. If it’s a physical product, that may just be a nice photograph but ideally, you want to show in context of use. A video is often really good. Think of those cheesy, slap job or [inaudible 00:03:29] commercials. You get a terrible but you get to see how the product is being used and you can identify really quickly with the perks of it and why it’s beneficial. If you have an online product, you might want to show a video demo of how it’s used, that’s the context which is usually informed.
Third benefits, you need to sell people on how you’re solving their pain, removing their pain rather. Typically, in the startup of your Landing page at the top, you want to list your benefits in bullet point form so it’s easy to read, to understand and easy to scan. You’ll get further on the page, you typically expand on those with more detail once people are caught in general idea a little bit.
Number four is proof. This can be social proof like a testimonial which can be the old school testimonials like this was blah, blah, blah, blah. Typically, you don’t want to just say, “This guy is amazing. I love this product.” That’s not really useful or trustworthy. You need someone to explain its benefits how it help them made your life better, faster, something like that. Actually, going back to that, you can modernize that by taking quotes from Twitter. If people are talking about you online, that’s a really nice modern way of approaching testimonials.
Most importantly to get rid of the whole single purpose of a Landing Page, one single Call to Action. That’s your CTA. Depending on the purpose of your page, if its e-commerce, you have typically like click through page which is just a button to continue in the funnel. If you’re gathering any kind of user information then it’s a form, a [inaudible 00:05:16] form with your button on it. Again for startup, if you’re collecting e-mails for your beta launch, then you have [inaudible 00:05:24] form with your … that’s your Call to Action area.
Now, we’re going to talk about message match. This is probably the number one most important thing you need to pay attention to. You can create a really great Landing page with those five essential elements but it’s kind of worthless if you don’t achieve a strong message match. Message match is the connection between your ad and your Landing Page. It’s based on the concept of information sent which begins when someone searches in Google and then they see the ad, your PPC ad which maintains the scent and then when you get your Landing Page. If you don’t continue that, that scent trail, then people just can head back and they’re going to leave and maybe go check competitors at instead which is terrible.
Let’s get an example ad. This is for your super creative startup idea, Project Management Software without Deadlines which is pretty innovative. Here is the URL, try getitdone.com/whenever. This is the most important part. It’s going to be related to the search that happened and this what people are going to see and relate to. Read this too, remove the fear of deadlines from their projects and start delivering late, as late as you want. Deadlines are dead. This is your theme and this is the headline you’re going to be clicking on and change. When people click on your ad, they’re going to come down to your Landing page and the headline is the first thing they’re going to see.
Being an entrepreneur, you’re probably used to pitching your ideas so think of the classic elevator pitch idea. The first thing you have to do is get your foot in the door, that’s what happens with your headline. If somebody reach your headline, understand it and they’ll like it, that’s when you get the foot in the door with the visitor, right? After that, you have a short period of time to explain your concept. He can grab their attention with the headline. You don’t get even be in the elevator and pitch your idea. If we look at this, here’s our headline. We click on this and it comes down to the Landing Page. There’s an exact match here. Coaching my new software without deadlines is exactly the same.
The intent to get this, that’s what they clicked on it. When they’re right on the Landing Page, they received this backup of the initiation of the information scent that started here and then your subhead back some of the claims that were started in here. This whole thing is kind of recreated here and the URL is kind of a branch here as well. getitdone.com/whenever is. Writing URL as a sentence is a really good way of explaining your purpose as well. If you don’t have a strong message match, you will fail. The cost of your ad is going to go up because there’s a history involved in PPC.
If a lot of people are coming down that are likely you’ve written because it’s not a good match, they’re going to leave. You start then Google will track this information. These guys aren’t very good. They don’t match their ad to the Landing page so I’m going hang the price up a little bit. That’s the only point. That’s probably you want to have a strong message around. We just learned how message match works, what the concept is and how to do it really well. Let’s look at some message match. Before I look at that, you can click on pretty much any paid ad. This is a great exercise. Start clicking on them and see how many Landing Pages where they got home pages too bad to match the ad. You’ll get shocked. Maybe 1 out of 10, 2 out of 10 if you’re very, very lucky.
It’s a larger waste and a lot of money. If you do it right, you’ll be way ahead in [inaudible 00:09:23]. Here’s the bad message match. Here is our ad has landed again, project management software about deadlines and here’s the homepage like someone is getting sent to you. It says, “Get more projects done with less management.” This still fits the grand promise and the person who likes the ads. Someone comes in here without deadlines. I’m missing something here. It says something down here, no more deadlines but I surround this with like nonsense here. This will be more hidden but they have to go right down to one of your bullet points in the benefits area before you even understand the connections. The chances are, others leave ’cause it’s not focused on the headline here.
If you like analogies, then imagine buying a ticket from Madonna concert online and then that’s your ad. You show up in the gig and Metallica walked up on stage. Now, I’d be pretty happy about that because chances are most of the ticket buyers there would be pretty pissed off. That’s an example of bad message match. Your expectations are set by the ad and then when you arrive at the venue which your Landing page is not tied together, people will leave.
All right. We’ve learned why you should use the Landing page versus the homepage. How to construct a great Landing page and then how to use the message match to make it effective so your ad span is getting the feedback from your [inaudible 00:10:56]. Your homework is to build an epic Landing Page. No pressure. Here’s the URLs to go to: https://try.unbounce.com/epic-homework/ and needless to say your unsurprisingly best course to a Landing page so you’ll get a bit more reinforcement about all the concepts I talked to you about when you go to this page. All right. That’s it we’re done. I’m Oli Gardner from Unbounce and I hope you learned [inaudible 00:11:26] about PPC Landing Pages. Cheers.
