How to Make the Most Out of Your Landing Pages

The responsibility of a marketer is not limited to the moment a visitor converts on a landing page. Their job is far, far from being done just yet. If truth be told, the landing page itself has plenty of work that needs to be done before we can start celebrating to score a conversion.

Curious about those leads that do not convert?

Well, neglect them at your own risk!

Being data-driven marketers, we are acutely familiar with the fact that the majority of the site visitors won’t ever convert. In fact, in a few industries, conversion rates can be as low as 1-2%. But does that mean the rest of the 98-99% visitors that don’t convert are useless? No. There are numerous ways you can boost your chances of converting more site visitors gradually and extract more value from your landing pages.

In order to do that, you need to track what happens to every site visitor after click-through, page view, form submission, or phone call. Gauging and feeding this data into your campaigns will help boost your overall results as well as your ability to optimize your campaigns for better ROI.

Sounds good, right? Keep on reading to explore more.

Why You Should Not Ignore Visitors Who Don’t Convert Instantly

As we discussed earlier, suppose your landing page has a conversion rate of about 2%, meaning the remaining 98% of visitors do not convert.

Ignoring these non-converting visitors is a grave mistake. Now a lot of them won’t ever convert simply because of a disconnect in the offer, audience, or timing. But that’s the way of the world. When it comes to a landing page, there is no one-size-fits-all. But in the long run, some of these visitors will most probably convert:

• Via other channels or websites that might not be traceable to your landing page directly
•  Offline at a brick-and-mortar store or through phone
• After a very long consideration period

Before you can begin cashing in on these long-term converters, you need to understand better where those converting visitors are coming from to your website.

For that, check out the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels Report that displays the various interactions that take place before a conversion does. You can find this report in your Google Analytics by going to “Conversions,” then choosing “Multi-Channel Funnels,” and then “Top Conversion Paths.”

Data from different conversion paths can help you inform your future strategies to reach and convert visitors in the later stage of their journey. Once you get a better idea of where those converting visitors are coming from, you can implement these three tips to utilize this data wisely and squeeze more value from your existing landing pages.

#1 Measure Your Offline Interactions Triggered by Landing Pages

Businesses that have physical stores or an offline sales channel can use paid search and social channels to bring in visitors and utilize their landing pages to highlight their products or services.

However, if the end goal is to drive store visits and phone calls, marketers need to get a bit more creative with evaluating performance. Doing this is worthwhile as it will help you get a better idea of how your campaigns generate business.

Store Visit Conversions

Store Visits conversion types are available in Google Ads and Facebook Ads that let marketers view how ad interactions can impact foot traffic in a retail location like a shop. Each ad platform tracks the mobile device location of users who have opted-in to share it to extrapolate the number of people that visited your physical store within a particular time frame after seeing or clicking on your ad.

To put it another way, even if your landing page did not record an immediate online conversion, visitors who visited your physical store can still be included in your campaign performance report.

Let’s look at the three main ways store visits are helpful in PPC campaigns:

• Campaign objective: Both Google and Facebook have individual campaign types for local businesses, encouraging people to click to make a call or get driving directions.
• Input for bid optimization strategies: Store visits can be used as input by Google’s smart bidding. Facebook optimizes the Store Visit campaigns to display ads to users who are more likely to visit.
• Conversion event: Report and audit store visit performance by ad creative or campaign to ascertain which audiences or ads will most probably bring in-store traffic.

You will notice the data show up in your Conversion actions report in the Tools > Conversions menu, given that your Google Ads account fulfills the requirements for store visit conversions. If it does appear in the menu, you can build custom reports or see store visit conversion data at the ad, campaign, keyword, or ad group levels.

In addition to this, Facebook Ads campaigns that have store visits as an objective provide results for ad analysis and campaign as well. To include relevant metrics in your performance reports, choose Columns > Customize Columns from within the reporting interface, and then search for “Store Visits.”

Phone Call Tracking

Typically, lead generation landing pages contain a phone number that serves as a primary or secondary CTA to engage warm leads with personal interaction.

Most home services and healthcare businesses receive the majority of their contacts by phone only. Consumers who have complicated billing or scheduling questions prefer talking to a human mostly instead of waiting for a web form response. In fact, giving trackable phone numbers on landing pages to engage prospects before conversion or sale takes place has proved beneficial for many online retailers and SaaS companies too.

Phone calls present marketers with invaluable data:

• Marketers can decide the best-performing layout based on the phone call conversions generated by landing pages and/or test variants.
• The campaign or keyword level granularity can help the marketers recognize useful traffic drivers.
• Audio and text records are valuable to spot frequently asked questions, sales barriers, and frontline staff training opportunities.
• Supplementary conversion data can back up CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) bidding.

Let’s take a look at two effortless ways to incorporate phone call tracking into your landing pages:

• To derive maximum advantage, you can use a phone call tracking tool. Just add tracking scripts to all your landing pages using Google Tag Manager or any other third-party software.
• If you are not entirely ready to have a dedicated phone call tracking provider, you can go for Google’s built-in phone call conversion tracking tool to track all calls generated by your Google Ads campaigns. However, its implementation is a little tricky, and compared to other dedicated third-party software; it provides lesser call-level data. Nevertheless, it still works wonders for tracking call conversions and integrating the data into conversion-based bidding strategies and reporting.

#2 Incorporate Lead Data With Tools to Boost Sales Results

When it comes to converting prospective consumers into actual consumers, capturing leads and contact details is only the first step. Sales cycles differ in span, and they can last days, weeks, or even months. How will you determine which landing page or original traffic source generated leads that converted into high-value customers?

This is commonly known as attribution, which is one of the toughest problems today’s marketers face.

Its solution generally requires passing the data in and out between marketing and sales teams to verify the lead quality and recognize the leads that finally closed into sales. Here are a few recommended methods to connect your marketing and sales teams to comprehend landing page performance.

Combine Marketing Automation and CRM Platforms With Landing Pages

Whether your sales team uses a spreadsheet or a CRM platform to track leads, you should save as much marketing campaign data about every contact as possible. All this information will be added to the sales contact and can be examined to ascertain the most productive offers and campaigns. Here are a few examples of data you might want to gather:

• Date and time of the first and subsequent visits as well as interactions
• Landing page URL and variant that captured the lead
• The call-to-action (CTA) and offer the potential customer responded to
• The ad creative, campaign, placement, audience list, and keyword that generated each visit

In addition to this, with more data, marketing automation platforms become more powerful. Having attribution data can help personalize or customize your campaigns to increase your conversion and open rates. To accomplish this, it:

• Matches your email content and subject lines to the ad creative or copy prospects engaged with originally to strengthen your positioning
• Displays the same CTAs and offers in your text/email campaigns, landing pages, and website personalization efforts to bolster your messaging

Connect Your Landing Pages to Other Platforms

Don’t get intimidated by the initial setup.

The majority of the marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software has built-in integrations with the influential ad platforms already. In case yours doesn’t, you can integrate them using a third-party tool. The data above can be registered automatically for all prospective customers allowing you to focus your precious time somewhere else.

#3 Utilize Landing Pages to Create Audience Lists for Future Ad Targeting

Simply because a visitor did not convert into a buyer on their first-ever visit to your website does not mean they won’t ever. Maybe the timing was not ideal, or perhaps they are just comparison shopping before making any final purchase decision. So in place of giving up already, use targeted ads based on their past behaviors to give them a reason to return to your website.

Building segmented audience lists for your remarketing ads or search campaigns is the best way to re-engage those non-converting visitors. You can start with the audience types mentioned below and expand them later as you find out what works best for you.

• Audience Based on Engagement Triggers: For example, suppose you have a product/service page with an embedded video. Maybe you want to re-engage those visitors who watched it but did not convert. When it comes to remarketing to very particular sets of visitors based on their behaviors or intent, building audiences from Google Analytics events stands as a potent tool. Prepare a list of the significant engagement points on your landing pages and then create audiences with the aim of delivering ads to them afterward.
• Audiences for All Stages of Your Customer Journey: Maybe you want to reach the old leads with another offer to help them move further in their customer journey. Wondering how this works? Let’s suppose you are a custom home builder, and a prospective customer downloads a PDF of home plans from your website. You add them to a new audience list and start sending them ads offering free model home tours and testimonials from your existing customers. Not only will this help you stay on top of mind of your prospects but will surely help them move further towards becoming your customer.
• Similar or Lookalike Audiences: Make an audience list based on any of the points mentioned above. Google Ads and Facebook Ads will then identify other leads with similar attributes in their networks. That’s an incredible way to grow your reach and discover new prospects.

Creating audiences for remarketing in Google Analytics is comparatively straightforward. All you need to do is go to “Admin,” then select “Property Settings,” then “Audience Definitions,” and then click the “Audiences” menu to start building rules-based audiences from your existing site traffic.

Restrictive Remarketing Policies

A few industries, such as personal finance, have more restrictive remarketing policies, of course, limiting the way marketers can re-engage their past landing page visitors.

Keeping this in mind, it is highly recommended that you adhere to Facebook and Google’s rules strictly if you want to avoid getting your account suspended. Moreover, make sure you check these policies frequently as the ad platforms update them often to keep up with privacy regulations. So stay current with the latest changes, mainly before you build a new remarketing audience for industries with more restrictive remarketing policies.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to overcome these remarketing restrictions by producing engaging content that makes the visitors stay a bit longer on your landing pages.

Wrapping It Up

All visitors are equally valuable to your business regardless of whether they convert immediately or not. It all depends on how you handle them – whether you decide to throw your hands up in the air or take considerable measures to stay on top of their mind and drive them back to your website. Do not let those invaluable prospects go away! Unleash the true potential of your landing pages by implementing these three tips. It’s time to start treating your landing pages as a vital part of your marketing strategy instead of just seeing them as a quick stop on your overall customer journey.