Where should you direct your online traffic?
We recently worked with an electrician and doubled their leads with just one change to their online advertising.
They had a brand-new website which looked beautiful and had strong calls to action. They were using Google Ads, which they’d set up themselves, and were sending the traffic to their new website and it was generating leads. It was doing OK … but they wanted to grow.
If you need an electrician, you turn to Google. You search for “electricians Hamilton” and a myriad of companies show up in the results. They’re all competing for the business. What makes one company more likely to win business than another? It becomes more important when you’re paying per click for your Google ads!
In the evolving world of digital media, digital marketing has empowered local businesses to compete, survive and boost business growth. Small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) have limited resources and that’s why digital marketing provides them cost-effective marketing channels that deliver measurable results.
When we work with SMEs we try to use proven strategies and techniques that attract not necessarily more traffic but traffic that gives results i.e. leads, crucial for their survival!
We had a look at the client’s existing campaign and this is what we recommended: Send Google ad traffic to stand alone landing pages and NOT to the website.
The client was hesitant to try our recommendation. They had already paid an awesome web designer to create a beautiful website for them and everyone praised the new look the website had. And hence came some good questions:
“Why do I need to create special landing pages? Why can’t I just send the Google ads traffic to an existing page on my site?”
“I need the option to tell people all the services we offer and sell more to them. A short landing page won’t let me do that.”
A 50-50 Experiment Campaign
Here’s why we recommended ad traffic should not go directly to the website. The website offers navigation which gives customers many options to get distracted from contacting you. The goal of a landing page is to keep them focused on the action you want them to take. And for most local businesses, that action is to call you or fill a form for a free consultation/quote.
For local businesses generating leads from AdWords, you will get more leads by sticking to “one decision landing pages.”
We convinced the client to let us do a split test for one month. We ran a 50-50 experiment campaign, where half of the traffic coming from AdWords was sent to the website and the other half to the custom designed landing pages.
The landing pages that we designed were built with just one major objective – turn page visitors into leads. They were short and succinct with no navigation. The images and content were benefit driven, and included clear calls to action. We were keeping a close eye on the campaign and at the end of the month, this is what we found:
Results Were Doubled!
The leads produced from ad traffic going to our custom designed landing pages were doubled in number, as compared to leads from ad traffic going to the website. This meant that by doubling the conversion rate, the client received twice as many leads for the same exact ad spend.
The key thing is, a well-designed landing page could be the difference between one local business who spends a few thousand dollars on Google ads and decides “This isn’t working for me” and another business that gets leads for half or one-third the cost because their great landing page is able to increase revenue to their business.
Under certain specific circumstances, it may still make sense to send Ads traffic to a full website. However, in the vast majority of cases we have tested, if you’re looking to generate leads for your business from Google Ads then using well-crafted landing pages can be the one change that can potentially double your leads, just like our client found.
