Imagine that you have been invited to a turkey dinner at someone’s house. Only, when you show up, you realize that nothing has been prepared. All you see are a couple peanut butter & jelly sandwiches out on the counter. Now, it’s not that you don’t like peanut butter & jelly…I mean, everyone likes peanut butter & jelly, right? But talk about not living up to expectations.

Maybe the delicious turkey is hidden complete with cranberry sauce and stuffing in some back room just waiting to be found, but what do the hosts expect you to do? Walk through every room in the house sniffing for the delicious smell of freshly roasted turkey, opening every door and drawer you pass by? Few guests will go walking around room to room in this endless search. Most will just turn back around, walk out the door, and head for the nearest restaurant.

This is exactly what you are doing to your audience if you entice them to your site with a specific advertisement or offer and then drop them on the homepage without any mention of said offer.  

You have spent the time (and probably a significant amount of money) to serve your target audience a tailored message to bring them to your site…and you need to continue this conversation once a visitor lands on your site. Otherwise you are seriously damaging your conversion rate and to be blunt, wasting your money. So instead of directing traffic to your homepage (or product category pages), direct them to a custom landing page that is specific to the ad they just saw. You need to make sure your visitors see the turkey they came for as soon as you open the door.

So here are our 4 insanely simple strategies to improve your landing page conversion rates:

Provide Context

When you are trying to sync up an ad to a landing page, the most important thing is to maintain the context. You don’t have to use the exact same headline and copy. In fact you shouldn’t. Don’t just copy & paste your ad onto the landing page. But the headline and imagery on this page should flow naturally from the advertisement that brought this visitor to your site. Think through the next logical thing that a potential customer needs to see after responding to your ad and give them this information.

This isn’t rocket science. If you offer a specific product for 50% off, then that better be prominently featured on the landing page so that your potential customers sees it again as soon as they land on your site.

Maintain Focus

Each landing page should have a single goal. Unlike your homepage whose job may be to route a variety of different customer segments down a variety of different paths, a landing page should be focused on achieving one particular user action.

This goal could be to sign up to an email subscription, purchase a product, watch a video, or share something…but it cannot be all of these. Pick one, the focus on this particular ad campaign, and build all of the content on this landing page around that goal. You don’t want to distract your user from accomplishing this single goal.

Make Them Easy to Create

If your landing pages aren’t easy to create, you’re not going to create them for each and every campaign. That is a core problem, because for landing pages to be very effective, they need to be specific. You should have a lot of different variations even within an individual campaign to target different audiences and channels.

You need to be able to quickly create them on the fly, and then dispose of them when the campaigns are no longer running anymore.

The content for each landing page will always take time. You can’t rush that. But the actual creation of the pages needed to be quick and easy. Try using one of these tools to get your landing pages up and running: Unbounce, LeadPages, Instapage.

Test, Analyze, Repeat

You should be testing individual elements within your landing pages in order to get better conversion rates through your landing pages over time. This not only improves the effectiveness of an individual campaign, but you can take those learnings and apply them to future landing pages.

Just make sure your sample size is large enough before calling the test winner and moving forward. Most of the platforms will let you know once your tests are statistically significant. If not, you can use this handy calculator from Optimizely.