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A Landing Page Tip: Anticipate the intentions of your visitors.
As many of us already know, if you are driving traffic to a landing page, with Pay Per Click ads for example, you would do well to match the headlines in both places.
In other words, if your Pay Per Click ad headline says something like, "Free Teleseminar Software" then you'll want to have a landing page headline that includes the phrase, "free teleseminar software".
A great deal of testing by many companies has shown that this approach raises landing page conversions significantly.
Plenty of online marketers have known this for some time. So what they do is optimize their PPC campaigns, finding the ad headlines that give them the most qualified traffic for the best price, and then set up a whole series of landing pages, each with a headline that matches its corresponding ad. Or they simply change the headline "on the fly" on one page.
This is all well and good, but often leaves you with landing page body text that doesn't quite match the headline.
And there's another problem that occurs when you optimize for a phrase instead of optimizing for the reader.
All too often, the landing page fails to address the intentions of the visitor.
How can you anticipate a visitor's intentions?
While you can't always discern a visitor's intentions when he or she clicks on a Pay Per Click ad, or on a link from a banner or an email, there are times when you can make a reasonable guess.
For instance, let's say I'm selling an essential oil diffuser kit from my site.
Like everyone else, I'll try to optimize my PPC ads and work with headlines that get me traffic and convert well.
Here are two PPC headlines I might discover work particularly well for me:
1. Free Shipping with Essential Oil Diffuser Kit
2. Review of Top Essential Oil Diffusers
Can we figure out the intentions of our visitors, depending on which ad version they click?
I think we can make a decent guess.
I think people who click the first ad are more or less ready to buy.
And I think people who click on the second version are more likely to be at the stage where they are still doing some research. They want to check out some reviews.
I'm not suggesting that either headline is a particularly good one. But I do think they illustrate that different headlines will attract visitors with varying intentions.
Now what happens at the landing page?
What is called for here is at least two totally different landing pages – one that closes the sale, and the other that informs the reader with product reviews.
Unfortunately, not many companies go this far. Perhaps it feels like too much work to write a series of different landing pages based on the reader's likely intentions.
Or perhaps there is just a communications lapse between the person working on the PPC ads and the copywriter who writes the landing page.
Concluding thoughts...
Sometimes, when we are optimizing our landing pages, we get too caught up with particular headline phrases and the technology that delivers them.
And we don't think enough about the likely intentions of our visitors.
Which is a pity, because once you identify your visitors' intentions, you can deliver exactly the information they are looking for, and convert more of them into customers or subscribers.
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