PPC Essentials Part 3: 5 Mistakes to Avoid & 4 Strategies to Maximize Your Landing Page Performance

"Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today, I will be joined by Garrett Craigan from our paid media team, and we're going to talk all about landing pages. We'll discuss five things that people are doing wrong and how they can do them right, and then four things that you can do to be exceptional with your landing pages. I think there's a ton of value in this episode, especially at the end, so enjoy and let us know if there's anything that you want us to cover in future episodes."

"How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good. How are you?"

"Doing awesome. Excited for the topic today to dig into everything. So for everybody's information, today we're talking about landing pages. This is part of our who-knows-how-many-parts series on all the pillars of PPC, all the things that you have to get right to do well. The topic for today is landing pages. Landing pages are one of the biggest places where I see issues when I'm doing audits on accounts of people that are coming to me and basically saying they're not getting the success that they're looking for with PPC."

"As for the topic today, we do have Garrett, our research and development lead, product lead manager of most people in the company, like whatever we want to call him – superhero."

"Yeah, so we're going to talk over five specific things that we keep on seeing in these audits that people are getting wrong and how you could fix those. Then to end, we're going to talk about four things that you can do that even your competitors aren't. The beginning is just like how do you get on par, and the end's about how you actually accelerate ahead of what your competitors are doing to get exceptional results by doing things exceptionally. So let's get started."

"Number one on most common things that we're seeing that people are doing wrong: page speed. Still a huge issue for landing pages. You want to elaborate on that?"

"Yeah, people are very impatient, and they expect a quick load speed, especially on mobile. We see consistently that businesses don't do a great job of keeping their pages lean and quick, and that has a huge impact on how that page performs."

"Absolutely, and we do see for the most part desktop pages seem to be okay. It's mobile that's just getting destroyed for some reason. Why do you think that is, that it's so much harder for mobile?"

"I think people still build out their designs on desktop, and so they optimize it for how they're designing it and they just forget that most of their traffic is going to be mobile. With the power difference of a phone versus a desktop, it just needs a lot more refinement and attention to have that page perform well, whereas on a desktop it can load faster because it has a bit more processing speed."

"That totally makes sense, and it's definitely really interesting. I think a lot of people would pay a lot more attention to this if there was a metric to measure this, but this is pay-per-click advertising, right? For each individual click, and so many times I don't think people realize how many of those clicks you buy and then people bail before your page loads. So you still paid for the click, and then they didn't actually get to see everything else."

"I actually built out a metric like that for one of our clients. I called it the cost per non-bounced visitor. So you can import bounce rate from other sources and then your cost, and then you can estimate our cost per non-bounce visit. If your page doesn't do well, it'll have a high bounce rate, and that kind of gives you that metric."

"Just to define bounce rate for people, it's when a visitor comes on the page and spends under what is it, like 1 second?"

"I thought sessions. Is it under one session?"

"Yeah, I think I forget this metric. Bounce rate is one of those weird ones. I actually think it's a really common misconception in this industry too. We've had some clients judge our pages too much on bounce rate, but let's just say you were running traffic to your home and now you run it to an action like a single action landing page. Bounce rate is measured on the number of sessions that only have one page load opposed to multiple page loads. Then if you have a single action landing page, your bounce rate is the inverse of your conversion because someone either bounces or they convert, no other option."

"Yeah, and if you're running to your main website, then it's not because maybe they're going to click on all these other links, they're going to go to all these other places. That's where people are seeing these like 50, 60% bounce rates on main websites, and then on our landing pages, they're seeing an 80% bounce rate, but really what that means is a 20% conversion."

"Actually, really? Yeah, it's just in the main website might have been a 10 or 12% conversion rate. It's just there's less people going around to all these different places on the website."

"Correct. There are ways to do time on site, but I guess the header code would load before the rest of it."

"Yes, that's a little bit harder to implement on a landing page. Like a 10 seconds on site might mean 10 seconds waiting for site to load after the header loaded, but it's loaded. So anyway, it's just a sad thing to pay for that traffic."

"And the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is if you have that poor load speed and people are clicking and then it's not loading, then they're clicking back, it also can affect your cost per click."

"Yeah, because if they are waiting and getting impatient, go back and reclick again, you're getting charged twice for that click, but that's not a different user."

"Absolutely, and the other thing is that it would affect the quality score too. Google has this mysterious landing page experience score. I don't know how much you know about the things that go into that."

"I know it's a lot of behavioral metrics that they measure, and I think one of those is time on site before bouncing back, if I'm not mistaken."

"I think you're right. So if people are coming on your page and then they're clicking back immediately, then that's a signal to Google that people don't have as good of an experience clicking on ads when they click on your ad compared to maybe your competitor where the page loads more quickly. And in Google's eyes, you have to pay a premium for that experience."

"Yeah, which is annoying. A lot of people don't realize that everybody pays the same cost per click. Google favors people who provide a better experience to users."

"So that's number one, page speed. What are some things that people can do about it? Like why is it common for page speed to be so bad in general?"

"What I've seen is it's due to the images that are on the page being too big. So it's very easy to just reduce the size of those images or even taking off videos if they're not essential for the experience because those take up a lot of space and they load pretty slow. So that's where I see the biggest impact is in reducing the size of those image and video files."

"Yes, absolutely. And I think that's definitely a big area for improvement. We've seen other things like we used to use a form software, for example, that would slow things down with an embedded form. This is really common with CRM forms. If you're just like throwing your Podio code on that site, it can be really slow sometimes from a page load speed standpoint. Salesforce, same deal."

"There's also, for anybody who's interested in improving their page speed, there's a tool called Google Page Speed Insights that basically breaks down everything that could be wrong with your page speed."

"Yep, it's cool. Although there's specialized developers that work on this stuff and definitely know all the ins and outs of optimizing a specific page."

"One other technique I would share is lazy loading on our pages, where if you do have things that load more slowly, you can decide the order in which you want them to load. So you don't just load everything all at once, and where you'd be better off maybe loading everything and then loading the video after, especially if it's like you have to scroll down to find it or something like that. Just so people have a functioning top of the page before the bottom of the page loads or something like that."

"Correct, yeah, that's huge."

"Absolutely. What would you say people want to shoot for on their page load speed? How do they know if they're doing well or not?"

"I think the best benchmark is that Page Speed Insights that you mentioned. It gives the score out of 100, and on mobile, I think a good target is probably 80. Just because of the average of that device, 80 is going to be pretty strong. On a desktop, I think it's very doable being over 95."

"Yeah, absolutely. The only caution I would give to this is I've seen some people who are completely obsessed with page speed to the extent that their landing page doesn't have anything good on it either."

"Correct. Huge. If you want the fastest page speed, you would just have an HTML thing that says like 'Please send me your information' like 'We Buy Houses' lead form and that's it."

"Be fast, but no, not even a lead form. You just put like an email or a phone number to contact you."

"Yeah, so that could work because a form would be slow, but anyway, it's not all about page speed. There are people in this industry that preach like page speed is like the most important thing, and it's important. I would definitely say it's important, but if you're going so far that you're hurting your page in other ways because of page speed..."

"Another example of this is like analytics and tracking codes and things like that. By the time you put like conversion tracking in and Google Analytics and you might have even some additional tools that track keystrokes or whatever the case is, we'll talk about some of that stuff later. That stuff all has a negative impact on page speed, but it also has a positive impact. So it's kind of balancing those things, I think too."

"Totally. So that was number one. Number two here is optimization for mobile. I want to jump right into this one just because it branches off from the page speed. Like a lot of people, because they build it on desktop and then it's adapted to work for mobile, it's not efficient or optimized for mobile. That's where a lot of people say mobile-first is the way to design today."

"Where're I think it's close to 80% of our traffic. Does that sound right to you?"

"Probably. Last time, 75 to 80 is mobile."

"Yeah, like a lot of our traffic is mobile. I think that makes a ton of sense. Just people work on computers and people always forget that. But what else in terms of mobile are people getting wrong?"

"I think a big best practice in how your page performs is having things, the most important parts of the page, be visible above the fold. And that fold is like where people's screen ends, and on mobile, that looks different than on desktop. So it's important to have your form be higher up on the page on mobile because it might not be if you're doing the design on desktop. It's just a much smaller screen, and so having the important stuff packed up on the top is very important on mobile, and people always forget that."

"Yeah, the simple test for this, just to make this like black and white: if you pull up your website on your phone and you can't see the form and the button to submit the form on your screen without scrolling, then it's probably a problem."

"That's bad, yeah."

"I know it's like the default with Carrot sites because they have all that text beneath the headlines and everything. On desktop it works because the text is on the left-hand side and the form's on the right-hand side, but then you pull it up on a phone and all that text is the entire first screen. There's not even a form."

"So that's, yeah, that's a good example. And actually, that's number three here: is the form above the fold, which is true for desktop and mobile, although you'd be surprised how often I find in audits that people have like the forms at the bottom of their page."

"Yeah, or something like that, which is just not standard. Because you'd be surprised, I think everybody when they design a landing page, they just picture someone just going through and reading all their landing page. They're not going to read. The vast majority of form submissions are people who just clicked and then they don't even scroll, they just submit a form right then."

"Do you have a good call to action? And I think having some additional content if they do scroll to help towards conversion for those people that need more convincing, I think it's good. But you do lose conversions if you don't have a call to action immediately available. Even if they are going to load everything, at least they understand from the very beginning this is the purpose of the page, I'm supposed to do this."

"Yep, and then they're thinking about that the whole time. Am I going to do that?"

"Anything else about the form being above the fold?"

"No, I think that's a good summary of that best practice."

"Cool. Let's talk about call to actions. Should somebody have a phone number on their landing page? Should they have a form? Should they have both?"

"I think it's probably best to have both. In all of these things, I would say test it, but I would start with having both because people have different preferences. Some people don't like talking on the phone, and some people want to like explain their whole situation, talk to a human, and not wait for an appointment. So I think having both is beneficial to maximize the audience's response by having a method of contact that they prefer."

"Absolutely, and I've seen probably the biggest one I don't like is when someone just has like a form only and they don't have a phone number. Because some of our clients, like when we do track the quality of phone calls versus form submissions, the phone calls are better quality than average."

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