A few months ago we wrote a post about whether or not to trap a visitor on a landing page.  This continues to be a dilemma for many of our clients.  However (I’m not afraid to admit it) I’m pretty sure I missed the boat on the most optimal approach for landing pages.  Thank you to Yahoo’s recent designs for the enlightenment!

With landing pages, we typically weigh the pros and cons of having a landing page that prohibits navigation, so we keep the visitor focused on conversion.  Or, having a landing page that is part of the regular website with all the links active, allowing the visitor to wander to gather the information they need in hopes they will get to a conversion point before exiting the site.  The biggest challenge with the trapping technique is that these pages often lack in data to keep visitors around.  While they may have improved conversion rates, their associated bounce rates are also much higher.

Yahoo’s recent designs seem to have the best approach here.  The goal is simple.  To make sure the visitor doesn’t need to search beyond the page by providing them with an engaging, multi-media experience where they can browse to find everything they need on that single page.

Yahoo is saying that user engagement on their pages is nearly twice the amount with their latest designs.  And since dwell time directly correlates to conversion rates, let’s see what we can glean from Yahoo’s designs that can be directly incorporated into landing pages.

One prominent concept is search by clicking.  For many, over half of the visitors who come to their site are using the search function to try to find out what they need.   But why not change the game by providing users with lots of different types of browse options and suggest related search terms for them to use for browsing.  This can prevent them from ending up on a search results page that is less than satisfactory to their information needs.

Utilize multiple media formats.  In order to provide an engaging experience and meet the needs of a variety of visitors, employ multiple media types on your landing pages – text, images, videos, slide shows, interactive widgets, news and social streams come to mind.   Multiple formats make your page more engaging and help meet the demand of all different types of learning preferences.

Make it Current.  Highlight for the visitor what’s trending now.  Try related news streams, blog posts, and social feeds and call out trending related search topics on your landing pages.  Become the source for all the latest and greatest information that visitors will come to.

Make it locally relevant.  This can be particularly helpful for national or global advertisers.  Are there dynamic snippets of locally relevant, related information that you can include?

Make it Infinite.  Incorporate infinite browse boxes onto your website.  For your products or services you can include infinite browse boxes for images, videos, news streams, whitepapers, blog posts, forum posts, slide shows, ebooks, awards, comparisons, analyst studies, upcoming events, you name it! The possibilities are endless.

The bottom line is to think about all the data points of research a potential customer needs to do before converting, and presenting that data on a single browsable page in a multimedia format.

Take a peek at your landing pages and start to brainstorm how you can start to keep an keep an ongoing dialogue with your visitors on the single page.

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic. Compare the keywords from the time period in which your conversion rate was good to the time period for which you have not been getting conversions. Are the keywords different?

For PPC, this is an easy problem to solve – pause the keywords which have been taking up budget but not bringing in leads. Then make sure the keywords that used to work have bids that will enable them to get the most traffic.

2. Have the natural search keywords that are bringing traffic to your site changed?

Comb through your analytics to get the list of natural search queries that were bringing people to your site in the good times. Are they still bringing you natural search traffic? Has your natural search rank for these keywords fallen over time?

If these keywords aren’t still working for you on the natural search front, get busy with some SEO activities. Conduct some on-page and link building around those keywords that used to bring in the converting traffic.

3. Are you receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions on Google AdWords?

If you’ve lowered your budget, raised your bids or have been busy adding keywords to your campaign, you may not be receiving 100 percent of your available ad impressions.

Look at your campaign inside of AdWords and if it says “Limited by Budget” in the campaign status column, you are not currently receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions.

Review your keyword list to make sure that the keywords that were bringing you conversions previously are getting 100 percent of available ad impressions. To ensure this you might need to pause keywords that have not been performing and lower bids for keywords that are not the true work horses. If you have a large volume of keywords, but only a tiny budget you may need to do a lot of trimming here to ensure the performing keywords get their full exposure.

4. Has your ad position changed?

Different ad positions perform differently. Which ad position is best? Well, that depends on many factors. But, if you were getting conversions, you can start to hone in on the ad positions that were working for you. Go back to the time during which those conversions were coming in and review the ad positions for those top-performing keywords. Compare this against the positions you are currently attaining. Have things changed? If so, modify your bids (this may mean switching from automated bidding to manual bidding) so that your ads for these keywords start to appear in positions that bring you results.

5. Has your offer changed?

Did you have an offer in your ad copy or landing page that changed? Has pricing increased or has an incentive expired? Go back to when those conversions were coming in and review the offers in your ad copy and on your landing page. If previous pricing or an expired offer was bringing you results, consider re-enabling that offer.

6. Is it the season?

Many businesses go through seasonal changes, but when the slow season comes around, they often forget that it happens every year. Go back through your analytics and your lead tracking and check to see if this same thing happens every year around the same time. If so, think about ways to motivate leads during the slow times – you might need to whip up some special attractive offers to help increase your conversion volume during these times.

7. Has your competition changed?

Check out your natural search and paid search competition for those top-performing keywords which were bringing in conversions. See any new faces on the block? Get to know the new faces and make sure you are highlighting your unique capabilities and offers as compared to them.

8. Has your competition changed their offer?

Look at the ad copy, landing page and website offers for your natural search and paid search competitors? Where do you stand? Are they offering more? Have they lowered their prices? Have they won awards? Have they added guarantees?

Review their offers and see what you have to offer that makes your business unique and a competitive winner.

9. Has your competition upgraded their landing pages?

This always seems to hit in waves. While reviewing your competition, check out their paid search landing pages and websites. Have some of them gone through website re-designs recently and raised the bar? Have they added new features to their sites such as reviews, testimonials, blogs, forums, photos, or social feeds?

If their websites are looking more professional, understandable, engaging, convincing or iterative than yours, it’s likely influencing your visitor’s impression of your company. Consider updating your website so you don’t lose out on sales due to this initial impression.

10. Has there been a lack of reviews or negative reviews on your business?

What have customers been saying about you online lately? Check out Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, City Search and any other applicable sites, which let people review your business online. Are there negative reviews that have come up recently? If so, reach out and take some steps to address them. Let people know that you care and inform them of the actions you are taking to improve.

Or, perhaps you don’t have any reviews but your competition does. In the online world of selecting services, reviews hold a lot of weight. If you don’t have many (or any) reviews, but your competitors do, many people will favor the business with positive reviews. Think about offering incentives to previous happy customers to get them to vocalize their great experiences on these review sites.

11. Has your landing page changed?

Have you changed your landing page content or layout? Have you increased the data, decreased the data, modified colors, moved your call to action, or changed your call to action text? All these things have an impact on user behavior. Try some a/b testing with the two landing pages (the old one and the new one) so you can see which one of them truly performs better. Sometimes the changes we make to our pages feel like an upgrade to us, but aren’t perceived that way by visitors.

12. Has your website changed?

Similar to #11 above – if you’ve been making some changes take a hard look at the things you’ve modified since your conversion rate plummeted. Think about the things that might be having the most impact on your visitor behavior and slowly try out some of the older concepts in your new site to see what content or layouts have the greatest impact on your conversion rate.

Obviously, you should use appropriate data from your Yield Web Marketing Suite reports to make these assessments to the extent possible. And be sure to the landing page optimization module to ensure only the best performing versions of these important pages are available to your customers.

A word of caution: don’t make too many changes at once. Go through this list in order and stop at the first item that is applicable to your situation and adjust it – then wait to see what happens. You may only need to make adjustments in one area, or you may need to make adjustments in several areas, but it’s important not to make too many changes at once so you can get to the root cause.

In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.

Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.

A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and landing pages at the same time. This ensures they work together.”

When developing your landing pages, you’ll want to include the same keywords, language and offer that you used in the ad. If someone is looking for a white paper on Internet Security, for example, you don’t want to send them to your home page or to a “resources” page that lists a dozen white papers, case studies, and reports.

Instead, send them to an exclusive landing page that includes the title of the white paper (the same title used in the ad), a blurb about the paper and why people should download it, an image of the white paper cover, and the registration form.

Creating landing pages that relate to your ads (and by extension keywords) has an additional benefit: it helps you receive a higher quality score.

According to Google, the “AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword by looking at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and a user’s search query.”

Ad ranking is determined by multiplying the Quality Score by Max CPC. This means that if your competitor has a higher quality score, their ad can appear higher than yours – even though you may be willing to pay more per click!

(To see your Quality Score within Google Adwords, navigate to the Keywords tab, click the “Filter and views” drop down menu on the right, and then click “Customize Menus.” You’ll then see a new screen where you can then check the “Quality Score” box.)

Increasing your Quality Score – and paying less for clicks! – is why it’s important to set up ad groups for each campaign. Having ad groups allows you to test which keywords / ad copy raises or lowers your ads’ Quality Score.

In addition to assessing your ads, Google also looks at your landing pages. If your landing page doesn’t describe (or match) the keywords and copy in the ad, you get penalized with a low Quality Score.

According to PPC expert Brad Geddes, “Google thinks of searchers as their users, so they want them to have a good search experience so they come back to Google to search again.” Thus, your landing page needs to provide searchers with a good experience.

We’ve covered how to create optimized landing pages in the following posts:

Add Muscle to Your Landing Page Headlines

Landing Page Calls-to-Action that Inspire

Six Steps to Creating Compelling Landing Pages

Don’t forget, our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage and optimize your PPC campaigns and landing pages across all three search engines (not just Google). Read about how we can help you, then take our free, no risk, no obligation 30-day trial for a test drive.

Transactional landing pages have one purpose only: to get people to take one specific action, whether it’s filling out a form for a white paper, purchasing a product, or even subscribing to an e-newsletter.

Yet many companies lower landing page conversion rates by providing opportunities to browse for related goods and services or offering all kinds of back-up information to support their offer.

In other words, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your Webinar and on your landing page you have links to your Website, YouTube video, and white papers, you’re encouraging people to click away from your landing page – perhaps never to return.

I call this “Distraction Interaction.” Think about what happens when you go online to do something:

Initially… you open your email client to send someone an important email, but first you read your new messages and find an interesting newsletter, which you click open to read.

Then… within the newsletter are a few links to blogs and articles, which you read. An industry guru wrote one of the blog posts and you see her Twitter handle, so you open TweetDeck in order to follow her and then get sucked into Twitter . . . .

An hour later… you come up for air, completely forgetting you were supposed to send your customer that important email.

This exact process is what happens when you include links to additional information on your landing page!

To significantly decrease Distraction Interaction and increase conversions for various types of landing pages, consider the following tips:

Eliminate ALL links to your Website, blog, etc. – Eliminating links discourages people from clicking off your landing page and falling into a rabbit hole on your Website. If you want people to visit your site, give them a link on the “thank you” page once the transaction is complete.

Keep forms simple – A MarketingSherpa report on white papers revealed that people do not want to fill out long, complicated forms. On another note, have people outside your company test your forms before they’re live; you want to ensure they work smoothly and that your spam filter isn’t gobbling up the response emails.

Focus on one objective – The objective of the landing page is to get people to do one thing. Whatever your objective, ensure all landing page components support that objective, from the headline and body copy to the design and graphics.

Don’t “bait and switch” – If you’re using PPC, SEO, or other “inbound” methods to get people to the landing page, make sure the headline and the offer match what people are expecting to get. Nothing is worse than getting to a landing page that’s offering something completely different then what the ad copy proclaimed.

Include a “hero shot” – If you’re offering a product, white paper or other tangible item, include a graphic of the cover, a headshot of the Webinar presenter, or a photo of the item.

Once you have these elements in place, you can then begin testing headlines, images, form and copy to see what increases or decreases conversions, some of which we’ll cover in subsequent posts to this one.  And remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a landing page optimization module that enables real-time multivariate tests of landing pages. Our wizard takes you step-by-step through a process of creating test pages from your original; serves different versions as people click on links to your landing page; and automatically begins to favors the page that converts best overtime, improving your conversion rates in real time.

Do you have other suggestions for improving landing page conversions? Send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.