5 Key Elements of a High-Converting Facebook Ads’ Landing Page

Have you ever a created a landing page for your Facebook ads or promoted social media posts to capture leads, drive resource downloads, or get sign-ups for your service?

If so, would you like to improve the conversion rates of those landing pages?

Of course you would! The primary goal of any landing page is to collect valuable information that allows you to market to, and communicate with, potential leads. That said, after someone clicks on your Facebook ad (or promoted tweet or pin, for that matter), the copy and design of the landing page you direct them to are instrumental in the process of collecting leads.

In this article, you’ll learn five key copy and design elements of a high-converting landing page — for Facebook ads and promoted social media posts.

1) Goal-Driven Copy Length

From your Facebook ad to your landing page, you have less than 10 seconds to grab their attention.

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The first element of your landing page you need to decide on is the length of your copy.

When a person is directed to your landing page from your Facebook ad, tweet or pin,you have less than 10 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention and get them to convert. “Convert” could mean to purchase your product/service, download your resource, register for your webinar, make an appointment, etc.

Depending on what your goals are for your ad or post, you will either design a landing page that has a little bit or a lot of copy.

Shorter copy is typically best used to meet an immediate goal. For example, you want to capture email addresses so you can email subscribers access to an exclusive, limited- time-only sale, or you want to get sign ups for a free webinar you’re having soon or downloads of an eBook you created. The idea is that when people arrive at your landing page the messaging is short and sweet and they know exactly the action you want them to take, now.

Landing pages with more detailed, scrollable copy are best reserved for times you have long-terms goals.  Let’s say you want to create awareness for a new product or to educate your audience about a problem and a solution your brand provides. In these cases, long-copy landing pages can help your brand establish trust and credibility with those who click on your ad.

Short-copy landing pages are best used when the purpose of your Facebook ads is to promote resources, newsletters and online events.

Long-copy landing pages are best used when the purpose of your Facebook ads is to educate your audience and/or create awareness for a solution your brand provides.

One warning: When it comes to longer landing pages, don’t expect to see too many hard conversions immediately. When you’re focusing on a long-term goal, your conversions often come in later. Instead, look at time on page as a success metric. If people are arriving at your Facebook ads’ landing page and not immediately leaving, this is a good sign your landing page is performing well.

2) Limited Form Fields

Keep your landing page’s form fields to a minimum for a higher conversion rate

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The amount of data you want to collect from your ads’ landing page visitors can affect your conversion rate. Ask for too much information and you could turn people away. Especially if your incentive, i.e., what you’re giving away in return, does not feel worthy of the information you’re asking your visitors to share.

Here’s a tip to keep in mind: Keep your landing page’s form fields to a minimum. Why? Your conversion rate goes down as your number of entry fields required increases, according to an infographic published by QuickSprout. When a form has only three fields, its conversion rate is 25 percent. Double the number of form fields and the conversion rate drops to 15 percent.

The number of form fields you have can affect the conversion rates of your Facebook ads.

3) Key Visuals

Visuals deliver emotional cues to your landing page visitors, without the additional copy.

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The use of visuals on your ads and promoted posts’ landing pages can help quickly communicate messages more effectively than text-only landing pages. Here are three reasons this may be:

1. Our brains process images and their meanings more quickly than they do plain text. This makes sense, as 50 percent of the brain is involved in visual processing and 65 percent of people are visual learners.
2. Visual elements allow you to design a landing page that flows nicely. People have a limited time to spend on your landing page, and they — we! — are all easily distracted. Just look at how many tabs are open on your smartphone or desktop right now….all those pages competing for attention. To help get the point of your landing page across quickly, use graphics and images to break up the page to make its content easily digestible. The last thing you want is for your landing page’s visitors to be faced with unappealing, like dense blocks of texts — this will surely lead to high bounce rates and low conversions. Let me repeat: Don’t neglect flow!
3. Visuals have the power to deliver emotional cues and messages to your landing page visitors, without the use of additional copy. For example, if you a have bold red call to action button, this sends a strong signal to visitors that they should take action quickly. Whereas, if your key visuals are primarily blue, the subconscious message is friendlier, more soothing.

People respond positively to well-designed landing pages. Use images and graphics wisely to make your landing page visually appealing and you’ll reduce your bounce rate, improve visitor retention and help increase conversions.

Are you curious about what a visually appealing landing page looks like? Here’s an example from the payment company Square. The background visual they chose is bold, clean, and most important, shows off their product’s functionality.

For your Facebook ads’ landing page, choose visuals that reflect your brand’s asthenic and help draw people in, rather than overwhelm the eye.

4) Responsive, i.e., “Mobile-ready,” Design

Consider Facebook’s mobile users (40%) when you design your Facebook ads’ landing page.

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Every quarter, Facebook’s mobile usage has increased. So where are we now? As of March of 2015, there were 798 million (!) mobile daily active users, according toFacebook’s 2015 Q1 report.

Consider Facebook’s mobile users when you design your Facebook ads’ landing page.

What’s more, of Facebook’s 1.44 billion monthly active users, a whopping 40 percentof them use the social network on mobile devices only. (As for Twitter, 80 percent of its users are on mobile!)

Simple mobile usage all around is higher, it’s important that you design your landing pages with mobile in mind.

There’s nothing worse than when a mobile user clicks on a promoted post or a Facebook ad in their news feed only to discover a landing page that’s either blank, doesn’t function well, or not easy to navigate on a small screen. Including a form that’s difficult to fill out via a mobile device is even worse.

To create mobile-ready landing pages for your ads and promoted posts, you can learn HTML and CSS to create your own responsive web pages. Or, you can use a landing page builder tool like ShortStack.com. This will allow you to design landing pages — from templates or scratch —  that are automatically optimized for all mobile devices. No fancy coding skills are required.

How your Facebook ads’ landing page looks and functions on desktop is equally as important as how it looks and functions on a mobile device. Be sure to test your landing page on multiple platforms.

Before you publish your Facebook ads’ landing page, don’t forget to check how it looks and functions on a mobile device.

5) A Single Call to Action

It’s easier to get a person to do one thing, versus asking them to do two or three things.

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If you include more than one call to action on your promoted posts’ or Facebook ads’ landing page, you risk confusing your visitors. To stay clear of this potential danger zone, eliminate all clickable items on your landing page that might distract visitors from accomplishing the primary task you set forth for them.

How?

Don’t include multiple social icons, unnecessary links and tabs, drop-down menus, etc., because having too many “features” on a landing page will only confuse your visitors. The last thing you want to do is distract your visitors and give them reasons to bounce back to Facebook — without having done what you want them to do.

Keep in mind: You will have better luck getting a person to do one thing, versus asking them to do two or three things. Stick to one goal, or action item, per landing page you build.

Any information or clickable link or button that does not support the goal of your landing page should be removed.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other things to consider when creating high-converting Facebook ads’ landing pages. These five tips should, however, get you started off on the right foot.

Readers, what do you do to help maximize the conversions of your promoted posts’ and Facebook ads’ landing pages? Do you focus more on perfecting your landing page’s copy or design? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Improve Conversions on Your Social Media Ads With Landing Pages

Landing pages are an inseparable part of the web browsing experience: we have all visited one at some point, whether or not we were conscious of the fact. Whenever you click on an online ad, register for a webinar, download a survey or a white paper, it’s likely that a landing page facilitated your experience. It’s not surprising, then, that these types of pages are an essential tool for a marketer, as they help move the potential lead down the sales funnel, converting a visitor into a customer.

What is a landing page?

In the realms of marketing and advertising, landing pages are the web pages which are accessible exclusively through a link or a button, and built to serve a specific objective. Social media landing pages, which we will focus on in this post, are commonly accessible by call-to-action buttons on paid social advertising, among other times of digital ads.

Elements of landing pages include a brief description of the offer, a call to action, and a preview of the product or service. In an ideal landing page, both the copy and the page design converge on a single purpose: to drive the customer to a specific action, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar.

Almost as important as knowing the definition of a landing page is knowing what the landing page is not. A landing page should not just be the homepage of your website—there are too many buttons to click, options to choose from, and products and services offered. If the goal of your social ad is to increase traffic to your domain, consider other options and leave landing pages for what they do best—help acquire sales leads.

Why does my social media ad need a landing page?

It might seem like a lot of work: first, you have to toil away at your social media advertising strategy, and now it turns out that’s not enough? In fact, landing pages can help you support the customer experience in areas that ads often fall short: they provide more context for the value add of the initial offer, capture more information about your customers, and allow you to zero in on a specific product or offer.

Landing pages help businesses increase conversions on the social media ads by honing in on the juicy details of the offer. This helps make the ads more effective, since most of them are limited by character and image size on the host social network—the landing page helps elaborate more on the value of the initially advertised offer. It also segments the value proposition into several easy-to-understand parts: for example, your social ad may contain a call-to-action button that simply says “Learn more,” which takes the user to a landing page with an added offer of a free trial. However, it’s important to be consistent with your offers across the advertisements and landing pages, even if the offer is segmented into two or three parts.

Landing pages also provide a better social advertising user experience: a user who noticed your ad while browsing their Facebook News Feed will have a dozen distractions—friends’ updates, photos, birthday and event notifications, etc. By taking the user to a dedicated page, you are removing all the extra noise and helping them focus exclusively on your offer.

Another advantage of using landing pages for social media ads is their increased capacity to capture leads. Major social media networks offer ad analytics for businesses, which include the user’s location, gender, and age group. But capturing the specifics, such as their name, occupation, and email address is a different story. This is where landing pages come in: most of them include a lead capture form that encourages users to fill out their first and last names, email address, company they work for, and their job title. Not only does this help marketers get a better picture of their potential customers, but it also presents an opportunity to contact these customers with similar offers in the future. However, be careful about how much you ask of your customers—the general consensus among conversion experts is that the more information you ask to disclose, the lower your conversion rate will be.

9 tips on using landing pages for your social ads

There are many elements to a landing page, and the best way to find out what helps your business achieve the best conversion rates is to test, test and test. Keep this in mind when you consider implementing any of the following tips—these practices have been effective for other businesses, but your product or service may call for something completely different. Don’t be afraid to trust your instinct, but make sure it’s always backed by conversion data.

1. Keep your copy consistent across ads and landing pages

The last thing you want to do is mislead a potential customer with inconsistent offers. Since the landing page works best as an extension of your advertising, make sure the copy is consistent in both the ad and the landing page. For example, if you’re drawing people in with a 2-for-1 offer in the social media ad, your landing page should give more details on how the customer can get the 2 items for the price of 1.

This social media ad popped up in my News Feed, and lead me to the shop’s homepage—but the offer is site-wide, which makes one of the few exceptions to the “no homepages as landing pages” rule.

2. Acknowledge the social media referral on the landing page

The way brands communicate with customers on social media is often different from any other communication line—there’s room to show off personality, have a sense of humour, and stray off the beaten path for different approaches to interaction. Thus, it’s advantageous for brands to address the referral source on the landing page, especially if you know the customer will be arriving there from a social network. This can be done by including the brand’s official Twitter handle or Facebook page in the body of the landing page copy, or simply open with a line that mentions the network.

This is especially helpful for brands involved in social media marketing or e-commerce, since they know their customers will also likely to look for profit from social channels. Take a look at the way Shopify frames their landing page originating from a Facebook ad:

Shopify’s Facebook ad

Shopify’s landing page originating from the Facebook ad

In addition to directly addressing the way the Shopify app can be helpful for Facebook marketing, the landing page also contains clever design cues that tailor it to the network. The page’s colour palette is congruent with Facebook’s colour, and the header is designed to look similar to a Facebook search bar.

3. Place essential page elements above the fold

The central part of the landing page is the call to action button—whether you’re encouraging the customer to start a trial, download an asset, or sign up for a webinar, all the design and copy are designed with the single purpose of driving the user to click the button. In order to accomplish this, design your page to have all important elements “above the fold,” or in the portion of the page that is visible in a browser window when the page first loads. If you’re not sure if your landing page presents the information right away, look at the portion above the fold and ask the following questions, from a user’s perspective:

• Where am I? What’s the purpose of this page?
• Do I know what they’re offering?
• Does this page explain what I have to do in order to get the offer?

The first question might seem a bit silly, but you’d be surprised at how many landing pages fail to identify their brand association. Whether it’s a logo, recognizable brand colours, or a headline that mentions your company, your ownership of the page should be explicit. Take a look at the ‘above the fold’ portion of the landing page for our latest white paper on Social Governments:

Once the page first loads, I can see that this is a Hootsuite property, I know it’s about social media strategies for government bodies, I can glean that it offers a white paper from the little icon underneath the headline, and I can read the first couple of lines of its description. While I can’t see the call to action button, I see an arrow that shows me how I can access the advertised resource, and the top of the lead capture form. These directional cues are a great trick to draw the user’s eyes to the important elements, even if they end up below the fold.

4. Don’t reuse copy for multiple ads or landing pages

Since landing pages are such an important part of the lead conversion process, your company needs to pay special attention to the text on the page—which can be a challenge if you don’t have a dedicated copywriter. Thankfully, there are plenty of online resources that can help you optimize copy for the purposes of your landing page. Plus, if done right, your word count for landing page copy shouldn’t be that high anyway.

The main thing to remember is to tailor each landing page to the value prop of social media ads that refer to it, as well as the offer. Don’t reuse copy from other landing pages, even if the chances of the same customers seeing the copy twice are low. Not only does it appear lazy, but it can also hurt your conversion rates, especially if the copy is inconsistent with the offer from the social media ad.

5. Focus your landing page on the value add for the customer

The purpose of landing pages is to gather more leads, but all elements of the page need to focus solely on how the offer can help the visitor, not your business. As such, it’s important to highlight the value of the asset or the offer every step of the way—whether it’s done by cleaning up the copy and removing any jargon-heavy parts, using more possessive pronouns, or including customer testimony. James Scherer of Wishpond advises marketers to “[h]ome in on what the visitor gets, not what they should do.”

For example, if you are designing a CTA button for an offer concerning a cleaning product, encourage customers to “Clean up my kitchen!” instead of “Buy now.”

6. Optimize your call to action button

The CTA button is the crown jewel of your landing page: it’s what the user will be looking for when they first arrive on the page, because it’s what gets them the asset or offer promised in the social media ad. So make sure your CTA button is clearly visible, ideally above the fold, and the copy is consistent with the offer. For example, if the purpose of the landing page is to get users to download a white paper, your CTA button copy should have a variation of “Download now” or “Read now.”

When it comes to the landing page’s CTA buttons, the testing rule is more important than anywhere else on the page. Test the colours of the button, the font of the letters, the actual call to action text, and directional cues around the button itself. You might be surprised what gets you that three-digit spike in conversions—sometimes, it’s something as little as changing a possessive pronoun!

7. Consider trust badges

If the conditions of receiving an offer ask the user to disclose personal information, it’s important that the customer feels safe to do so. In landing page design, this means including trust badges and displaying them in a prominent spot. Ideally, you want these badges to be close to the call to action button, so the customer is reminded of your trustworthiness as a final motivation to consider your offer.

You can also mention your partners or clients that belong to an industry that may be similar to the visitor’s occupation (especially if you target your social advertising to a certain demographic), as a way to show off recommendations from professionals in that field.

Be aware of the design of these badges: you want to follow brand standards of security brands, as well as your clients and partners, but avoid piling in too many logos or conflicting colours. This might actually take away from the overall impression of your landing page, and that’s the opposite of the effect you want to achieve.

8. Optimize your design assets

In the same vein as the text on the landing page, all design assets should show off your offer in the best light without being too excessive. Follow a simple colour palette, don’t add too many images or videos, and don’t overdo it on the directional cues. With landing pages, less is more—try to include as little extra elements as possible, but make sure all of them contribute to the main purpose of the landing page.

9. Test, test, test

Remember how I said that testing is the most effective strategy to increase conversion rates? Before you implements changes based on any of the tips above, run an A/B test to see if these factors actually influence conversion on your brand’s landing pages. At the very least, test two different versions of the landing page to see how the different changes affect your numbers. However, according to WordStream founder and CTO Larry Kim, if you want to break the top 10% of winning landing pages, the more pages you test, the better are your chances of drastically increasing conversion rates. Kim recommends testing ten (!) landing pages with different offers, messaging and flow to find the winning combination for your business. So, suffice to say, designing landing pages is not for the faint of heart—but if it helps you gather more high-quality leads, these efforts will surely pay off.

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How to generate leads with a focused social media campaign

Landing pages make all the difference

If you’re like most real estate agents, chances are you have at least started to build a presence online. More and more agents understand the need to have a website or blog — it is your virtual storefront.

More than half of homebuyers start their home search online. It’s clearly important to have a website (storefront) for customers to enter and browse (figuratively speaking). Your website or blog helps you capture natural traffic, i.e., people looking for an address, a neighborhood, a golf course home, and so on. The concept is similar to consumers seeing an intriguing new store in a favorite shopping center, then going inside. They may browse around, find something they enjoy, and give you their information or make a purchase.

You’ve heard the saying “location is everything” — and it really is, but what if you’re not getting that natural traffic?

If business isn’t pouring in, then it’s time to start advertising. In order to make the highest return on investment, you want your advertising to be as targeted as possible. You should target not only the demographic but also the service you are promoting.

Human beings are a lot more likely to make purchasing decisions or give out personal information when they are not overwhelmed by a large number of choices and when you make the process easy for them.

Don’t confuse your prospects

Recently, a colleague of mine saw a limited-time offer in a Facebook ad and was intrigued. She saw that season passes were 40 percent off at a local ski resort, and she thought she’d found El Dorado.

Sadly, this is where the ad took her.

Landing on this page after clicking a Facebook ad for 40 percent off a season pass leads to a broken heart. Cold, lost and alone. There’s not a single hint of a season pass here, just a bunch of distractions.

You can’t expect a prospect to behave how you’d like if you send them to a page that doesn’t acknowledge where they came from or what they hope to do.

Don’t do this with your real estate social media campaigns. Instead, send visitors to a dedicated landing page.

Targeted marketing

If you’re promoting your service or listings on social media, then there is no reason to send people directly to your home page!

If someone clicks on your ad, they are likely looking for your service. So make it easy to find and use!

For example, I run targeted Facebook ads to generate seller leads.

I link every targeted ad to a dedicated landing page that continues the conversation that the ad started.

I match the headline of my Facebook ad to the headline of my landing page, which tells the visitor that they are in the right place. I also keep a consistent design across all channels. The design of the landing page is familiar to the prospect and has already enticed them to act once.

Using this technique, I have seen a significant drop in my cost per lead throughout my businesses. Landing pages make all the difference in social marketing.

What’s your favorite way to farm leads from Facebook? Have you experimented with using landing pages in real estate? Let me know in the comments — and remember that although the examples reflected in this article should apply to most of you, never assume results. Test everything!

Next time, I’ll share my step-by-step guide for setting up real estate Facebook ads.

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