Your Guide To Using Landing Pages In Personalized Ads

They say landing pages are what personalized ads were waiting for. Well, they don’t say that yet. But read this article to know why they should!

Has this ever happened to you? You are just browsing through the internet. And suddenly, you see an ad for something that you were viewing just a second ago.
Did you too feel like you were in some Godfather movie and Al Pacino was going to pop out of nowhere? Because we sure did! But hold on, maybe there’s a reason why this is happening, and we’re here to tell you all about it.

Trends in digital marketing have taken a leap in the past few years and personalized advertising is an important segment within it. Personalized ads allow you to look at ads that are important to you. Rather than barraging you with annoying promotions about things you don’t need, you can look at an advertisement templates that has been tailored for you.

Source: Inverse

Why Should You Use Personalized Ads?

Tyson Quick, the Founder, and CEO of Instapage, emphasizes how personalization is all the more important today because of the amount of information barraged at us every day. It is important to filter the relevant stuff out. Successful brands like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix are resorting to this kind of personalized marketing. This has resulted in more traffic than ever on these sites.

Studies show that 71% of respondents prefer ads tailored to interests and shopping habits. Personalized ads help boost customer engagement, as they offer something that the customer finds value in. People are almost twice as likely to click on an ad featuring an unknown brand if it is tailored to their preferences. 44% of respondents said they would be interested in giving up information including name, address or email address in order to get more personalized ads.

Creating A Buyer Persona

Personalized advertising begins with marketers creating a buyer persona, which helps them specify their target audience further. This not only helps reduce their customer acquisition costs but also increases their end conversion rates. Companies like Netflix and Spotify took to this method of behavior-based personalized advertising.

Netflix

Netflix is famous for its viewing recommendations, using an algorithm that’s constantly being developed and improved. But the personalization doesn’t stop there. The streaming giant has a firm strategy in place for what artwork subscribers see as they browse the product catalog. Based on previous actions, it aims to entice the right viewer to the right content. Spotify too aims to create a ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist based on what you’ve been listening to the past week. In both of these cases, users are more likely to use these recommendations first than search for new shows/music.

 Source: Netflix

Expert Opinion

Tyson Quick, in an interview also talks about ad conversion rates. For the longest time, he noticed that out of 100% of the people who clicked on an ad, only 3-5% of them actually turned into conversions. The rest 95% dropped out. The problem was that once a user clicked on an ad, it directed them to a general website, instead of something more relevant to the ad. There was no personalization as there was in the customer targeting. This was what gave him the idea  of landing pages.

A Landing Page For Personalized Ads?

A landing page (LP) is a unique page that appears when a user clicks on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online advertisement. Landing pages are important for your Pay-per-click campaigns because they lead targeted traffic to a specific web page. The LPs are designed with fewer distractions in an effort to lead the user to a specific goal. Generating leads and increasing sales is the ultimate goal for your Pay-per-click campaigns, which is why you should make the process as easy as possible for the user.

Instapage, a landing page building platform reported that conversion rates had risen upto 33% due to landing pages. Landing pages are cheaper to optimize, and give three times higher results. In 2013, for every $92 marketers spent on optimizing an ad, they spent $1 on optimizing a landing page. There are multiple other advantages of landing pages that have led to companies all around resort to the method.

However, we do feel that the best way to test the efficacy of landing pages is to put it to use. Thankfully, a lot of companies did.

Vita Companies

Vita Companies is a full spectrum employee benefits brokerage and consulting firm. They switched from a generic registration page to an Instapage landing page. This led to a 107% increase in their sign ups. This also allowed the company to keep track of the number of registrations, the buttons that were being clicked, the CTAs being clicked. The landing page integrated with their CMS and also their webinar registration form.

RealtyShares

RealtyShares, a real estate company also took to Instapage’s landing page tool. Therein they saw a huge decrease in their customer acquisition costs. Each of their paid channels directed their customers straight away to an Insta landing page. That page also allowed the A/B testing option, customizations, allowed them to test new landing pages, thereby decreasing their costs.

Advantages Of Landing Pages

Statistics show that using landing pages has provided numerous benefits to firms, ranging from increased conversions to more customer engagement. Even apart from these, landing pages offer a wide range of advantages to companies and you can find out here what they are:

1. Increase Leads And Conversions

There is a very good chance that anybody who hasn’t heard of your company will engage with it for the first time only through a website. These people are potential customers. A landing page provides the customers with a clear CTA and allows them to take that action. A well built, optimized landing page will get you more leads. Moreover, it will help you build your target audience more efficiently and increase your conversions. Adding a contact form for downloadable assets, newsletter subscriptions and webinar registrations or a relevant calculator lets you easily identify your most promising sales prospects.

2. Build Credibility

Landing pages tend to focus on the main objective of the website. They take the problem/solution approach to show the potential customer that the company can pin-point their problems and give results. Even having a few testimonials or company logos can add to the authenticity of the company.

3. Can Be Changed And Tested

Once you separate independent campaigns and make them on standalone landing pages, you have the freedom to change and subject them to A/B testing. With this you can easily test them, edit them, and make changes without compromising with the rest of the website.

4. Freedom To Design

When you have standalone landing pages, it is also easier to make visual changes, without having to change the entire website. You can customize each of your landing pages as per the message you want to convey. You don’t have to stick to the architectural restrictions imposed by your website design.

5. More Targeted Messaging

With landing pages, you can be more clear with the message you want to deliver. You can customize it according to the audience that you want to target. It does not have to be generic or pertain to the rest of the website. You can fine tune each customer’s path along with the help of A/B testing.

Apart from these, landing pages also allow for simpler campaign management, promote new products and services, improve your brand awareness and add to your email lists among other benefits.

Best Practices For Optimizing Landing Pages

Landing pages, in no way, replace a website’s homepage. Instead, it is a more focused page that typically includes the specific elements of the tool that the prospect would be interested in.. Jamerie Milkovik, from Instapage talks about how landing pages are important because they increase your conversion rates in the most powerful way possible. Here are a few recommendations that we think would make a good landing page-

1. Embed Interactive Content On Your Landing Page

Interactive content helps increase customer engagement with the page and develops a kind of trust in the user. It allows the user to derive some kind of value from the content even before clicking on the CTA. Even a first time visitor of your website, who is not likely to convert will use the interactive content. This also increases their chance of coming back a second time.

Infact, 93% of marketers agreed that interactive content is more effective in educating its buyers than just 70% of static content. Some examples of interactive content are quizzes, polls, calculators, etc. Going for this might seem a little cost bearing and complicated because you require developers to create this kind of content. But now, platforms like Outgrow help you do this without any kind of technical expertise and coding, in a very cost effective manner. Here are a few examples of landing pages with successful interactive content:

A) Outgrow

Outgrow, a platform for interactive content, uses this chatbot on this landing page to make the user engage with the website. Once you click on ‘Well, I do want more qualified leads’, it will guide you through a premade chat template to give you beneficial answers.

Source: Outgrow

B) Airbnb

Before even getting you to sign up for their website, Airbnb allows you to calculate how much you can earn as a host. This is a fun activity and the most users are bound to give it a try before leaving the website. They would be willing to give more than just their contact information, because this kind of content actually provides value to the user. For instance, here AirBnB offers to calculate the amount of money a host prospect could earn in Boston. In return, the prospects are happy to provide valuable information like details of their house. Thereafter, this information can be used to create the lead’s buyer persona.

And you know how it goes: “Detailed buyer persona=More and more sales!”

C) Bills.com

Bills.com allows you to answer these three questions and find out whether you would actually benefit from their advice or not. You can input data according to your preference and if you’re satisfied with the results, you have a better probability of giving the website a second visit.

So, how can you create such amazing landing pages?

We might have an idea or two…

2. Create Eye-Catching Headlines

Most landing pages use a main heading to deliver their objective and a sub-heading to offer a little more insight into it. For eg., Outgrow here uses a very simple yet informative headline to give a clear view of what the page is about.

Source: Outgrow

3. Simplify Your Landing Page

You need to have a decluttered landing page to be able to shift your customer’s focus to the most important thing – CTA. A lot of elements on the page may distract your customer and reduce your chances of a conversion. You should have only one clickable element, usually a CTA button. And moreover, your CTA button should be short and straightforward, like ‘Join Now’, ‘Download Now’,etc. Here is an example of Dropbox’s landing page, which has only five elements, displayed concisely to put emphasis on the CTA.

Source: Reddit

4. Include Relevant Imagery

The images that you use on your landing page should instantly send a message about what your page is about. You can’t focus on the object kept on the table if you want to sell the table. Here in this example by Blue Apron, the background image gives the right direction about what the website wants to convey.

5. Use Trust Indicators Among Other Things

Your landing page should include trust indicators, for eg., you can include the logos of your well-known clients on your landing page, so as to establish a level of credibility and authenticity.

6. Have A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing is a method where you can place two versions of the same page side by side to compare and see which one is better. The more A/B tests you run, the more accurate your data becomes. Each A/B test should include a single change to one variant, such as your CTA. Here’s an example of how an organization multiplied its conversion rates because of regular A/B testing their pages.

During President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, his campaign committee wanted to optimize every aspect of his campaign. The idea was that the right web design potentially meant the difference between raising $10,000 and $10,000,000 in campaign funds. The team looked at 24 different versions of the splash page using a mix of images and CTA buttons to determine which combination produced the greatest results. You need to take into consideration the cost of the website for this.

7. Have Statistical Evidence

Statistical evidence is yet another good example of a trust indicator. Statistics show that your information has been researched for well and your claims have a certain foundation.

Different kinds of landing pages, such as the click-through page, the lead capture page and the squeeze page are the most effective kinds of landing pages.

A. Click Through Pages

The click-through pages warm up the customer to your product by informing them about your offer and then quickly direct them to your product or service via the CTA button.

B. Lead Capture Pages

The lead capture pages are more in-depth because their main intent is to gather personal information like your name and email address.

C. Squeeze Pages

A squeeze page is specifically designed for a visitor to submit their email address in order to proceed further into their page. This page is effective in increasing your email list and guiding your customer down the marketing funnel.

These landing pages are easy for the customer to understand and are extremely appealing. They answer specifically to the customer’s problems and allow them to reach the solution through an easy number of clicks.

What Is The Future Of Personalized Ads?

‘Perfect identity recognition’, as Tyson Quick, Founder of InstaPage suggests, is the answer. What is a perfect identity recognition? It’s simply about connecting the dots. It involves taking a single piece of contact data about a person (e.g., e-mail address, social media handle, cell number), and connecting it to signals from that same individual across other channels and devices. It takes the information through landing pages, quizzes, surveys, polls, etc.

Companies also store information about the user based on their searches, the products or pages they’ve viewed or researched about. It then recognizes that individual anywhere builds a psychographic and demographic profile, and develop a deep understanding of that person’s interests, preferences, attitudes, brand affinities, etc. According to Quick, personalized ads will pave a way to a healthier environment for customers by acquiring an even greater level of this persona recognition.

According to research:

• 60% of consumers expect brands to deliver tailored customer experiences.
• 70% say they prefer content and ads customized to their interests and shopping habits.
• 43% report an increased desire for personalization in the past year.

Companies Using A Landing Page For Personalized Ads- Success Stories 

Now let us walk you through an example that actually shows you what personalized marketing can do. It’s not all talk and no play, don’t worry.

1) Coca Cola 

In 2012, Coca Cola had launched a new advertisement campaign called ‘Share a Coke’, beginning with Australia. The idea was to spread advocacy and love for the brand by replacing the soft drinks logo with consumer names, encouraging people to share with friends and spread the brand’s message using the hashtag #shareacoke.  ‘Coca-Cola Co. is seeing sales rise for the first time in more than a decade, thanks to its personalized bottle campaign’ reported The Wall Street Journal.

The main success was attributed through the digital platform, wherein each bottle mentioned the hashtag #shareacoke, in order to pursue users to share bottles with their names on social media. People felt that the ads were personal and shared an emotional connection with the brand. As a result of this campaign, The Facebook website saw traffic increased by 870% while the Facebook page, on the other hand, grew by 39% in terms of fans. The campaign earned around 18.3 Lakhs media impressions. The ratio of young to adult consumption of Coca-Cola was up by 7%. And this was because Coca Cola resorted to a more personalized form of branding of its product rather than a generic approach to it.

Source: Coca-Cola

2) Eurosport

Next, Eurosport, a pan-European television sports network used Instapage to re-energize its digital presence. Eurosport was facing obstacles in its ability of customized messaging and creativity. Certain updates that required dedicated developer resource made it challenging to run up-to-date campaigns. Eurosport then resorted to Instapage and found an easy way to manage content across platforms. They began to test and optimize post click page experiences for the Eurosport Player. Infact, they ran 4-5 tests at a given time. EuroSport was able to set up campaigns for events simultaneously. including La Vuelta a España for cycling and the US Open for tennis. Eurosport began to create up to 100 post-click experiences a month with new content, updated pricing, and localized campaigns.

They saw a 30% uplift in personalization, 20% increase in CVR from A/B testing  and reduced production time by 90%.

3) Lattice

Another firm, called Lattice, a people management platform set out to multiply its conversion rates to new heights with the help of Instapage. With Instapage, Lattice streamlined the entire design process without having to use a developer and can now launch four creative campaigns in two days. By using Instapage to build post-click experiences, Lattice has saved time, reduced the cost of its advertising campaigns, and increased its conversion rates:

• 360% increase in conversion rates
• $325+ in savings per post-click experience
• Reduced production time by 75%

Instapage helped Lattice flourish with an easy one-step solution by providing them with a platform that did not require any kind of coding, provided an immense amount of utility and was easy to use.

Conclusion 

Ah! It was a long and hard road but we finally reached here. We hope you learned a lot about how landing pages and why they are a great fit for personalized marketing. They help companies reach a more targeted audience and guide them to the right place. And there are a good number of ways by which you can make your landing pages even more effective. Do you have any other ideas on how to make your landing pages and ads even more personalized? Let us know your thoughts!