Never. Start. A. Marketing. Campaign. Without. A. Dedicated. Landing. Page. Aka the NSAMCWADLP principle, you might’ve heard of it at some point in your marketing life. At Unbounce, we’re definitely a huge advocate for this (obviously), especially when you’re paying big bucks acquiring traffic from your PPC campaigns. After all, you don’t want your expensive traffic clicking through to a landing page with links aplenty where they won’t know which link to click on when they get there. Worse, they could click on a leak, aka a link that navigates away from the landing page, and you’ll lose 'em altogether.
A common debate among marketers is whether you’re better off sending your campaign traffic to your homepage (because it’s already built and ready), or a landing page built specifically for your campaign. Some of you may be wondering…what’s the diff? Don’t they all mean the same thing? Well, not quite.
When running a campaign, you have three options available to you:
- The homepage - the entry point for the rest of your website. It acts as your brand central as it probably contains the most links that lead to other webpages on your website. For Unbounce, it’s unbounce.com.
- An internal website page - a page on your website that talks about one or few specific topics so it ends up linking to other webpages on your website. In Unbounce, some examples are the pricing page (unbounce.com/pricing) and the templates page (unbounce.com/landing-page-templates).
- A dedicated landing page - a webpage that has only one goal, whether that be clicking through to another page or getting someone to fill out your form. It contains no other links so your visitor can stay focused on that one goal that you want them to take. An example is unbounce.com/persuasive-information-hierarchy.
Our customers have discovered that using option 3 Ñ a dedicated landing page Ñ is the way to go. For example, prior to becoming Titan PPC’s client, EZBind used to send their Google AdWords PPC traffic to their homepage.
Using the Link Counter Tool, we can see that this homepage has an attention ratio of 9:1. This means that there are eight other links to internal website pages such as Programs, Billing, Service and Claims in addition to the most important campaign conversion goal Ñ for the visitor to complete the form and click Ò_Get Quote_Ó. This homepage has a 6-7% conversion rate.
When Titan PPC took over the account on October 2014, they created a dedicated landing page for each of the six U.S. states where EZBind operates. Using location targeting in AdWords, they directed PPC traffic to each of the state’s landing pages. Here’s a screenshot of the landing page for Pennsylvania:
As you can see, the only thing that’s clickable on that page is the Get Quote Call to Action button. There are no other links that could steal the visitor’s attention away from the landing page’s main goal. Instead, all elements on the page are working together to get the visitor to Get Quote. As a result, the conversion rate for this AdWords campaign has increased from 6.17% to 39.52% in one year.
SMBclix, an Ireland-based PPC agency, experienced an increase in conversion rates for their client Masterkabin when the number of links decreased on the webpage. Prior to SMBclix jumping onboard, Masterkabin was sending their paid traffic to the webpage below:
Again, using the Link Counter Tool, we can see that this webpage contains a total of 56 links, including the main goal Ñ Get A Quote. This landing page ran for three months with zilch enquiries Ñ none, not even a single one, nada.
When SMBClix got the account, they created an Unbounce landing page that’s designed specifically to collect enquiries and nothing else.
The result? Conversions jumped from zero enquires in three months to four enquiries in four weeks. Not too shabby. For more details on SMBClix’s tactics, you can check out the PPC case study here.
Another UK-based digital agency, Digital Wisdom, experienced something similar with one of its clients, Choice Overseas Homes. Previously, the client was directing traffic to one of their internal website pages that contained a total of 11 links.
When hired, Digital Wisdom created an Unbounce landing page with only one goal in mind: collect the visitor’s information in exchange for a house quote and a couple of free guides.
Over time, this campaign started generating 40-50% more leads than when traffic was sent to the regular webpage. You can read the full story here.
These success stories aren’t just limited to digital marketing agencies. TelePayroll used to link their PPC ads to their main website’s service pages that had a contact form on the side. Although their ads generated a lot of clicks, they weren’t getting many conversions. In other words, a lotta ad spend for nothing.
When they started using Unbounce, they were able to create tailored landing pages based on the keywords that they were bidding on. As a result, they were able to convert their traffic into leads. In 2015, they more than doubled the leads they generated in 2014, about half of which came from dedicated landing pages.
What about you? Have you seen any cases where a homepage/internal website page converts better than a dedicated landing page? If yes, I’d love to hear from you! Let’s compile our findings and see which campaigns perform better with dedicated landing pages and with the alternatives. Just hit reply below and answer the following questions:
- What was your main campaign traffic source?
- What industry are you in?
- What was your webpage’s or landing page’s campaign goal?
- How long did you run the previous and recent campaign?
- What was the previous conversion rate with homepage/webpage?
- What is the new conversion rate with a dedicated landing page?
If possible, please attach before and after images of the homepage/webpage and the dedicated landing page.