The Three Types of Searchers and Why You Need to Know More about Landing Pages

INTRODUCTION…

Making a success of a Google Adwords campaign involves far more than optimising the actual campaign itself. Think of your own internet searching experience and it probably goes something like the following

A) You surf the net and you become aware of a product you might be interested in.

B) You look for more information about that product in preparation to satisfy your curiosity and to find answers to possible concerns. You look for review type sites and check out alternatives for size colour, price and so on.

C) You decide to buy and pull out your credit card and complete the transaction.

Searchers at the (A) stage are not even thinking of buying … They are BROWSING.

Searchers at the (B) stage are more interested. They are taking the trouble to investigate and to compare. They are SHOPPERS

Searchers at the (C) stage are obviously BUYERS

Search Engine Optimisation techniques on the whole are aimed at groups (A) and (B) and such web pages should be full of good useful and valuable information and not hard sell … obviously with a BUY NOW option button as well.

PPC is aimed more at the (C) group and recognizing this should have a very specific bearing upon the web pages or landing pages you will want to create. We’ll now focus on this group (C).

THE REALLY IMPORTANT BIT… MAKING THE SALE

This is What You Have to Do to Improve Chances of Conversion of an interested BUYER to a real buyer.

Always remember only a fairly small proportion of potential buyers will end up buying from you so you have to do everything possible to catch the buyer at this stage and convert to an actual sale.

The landing page design is critical and this is the thinking behind creation of a great landing page.

1. Your headline must match what the searcher is looking for … this is called meeting the buyer’s motivation (we’ll call it M). If the searcher typed "John’s Guest House" into Google and then saw an ad which in the headline said "John’s Guest House" then lo and behold that’s exactly what the searcher expects to see when the click to the landing page is made.

If your landing page says "Guest Houses Gauteng" then you’ve lost the sale. The visitor will not stick around to investigate. If you want to prove this take a look at the average time spent on your website and look at the bounce rate (info available from your web logs… if you don’t know what I mean I suggest sign up to Google Analytics free tracking software for your site(s).

If you’ve got the headline and sub paragraph right then you’re well on the way to a conversion. Here’s what you need to do next…

2. In no uncertain manner and as briefly as possible preferably in bullet format tell the searcher what is unique about you and what the value of the product and/or service offered is. This is called USP or Unique Selling Proposition. This must be clear, concise and truthful. Let’s call this V for value proposition.

3. The next point to be seriously considered in creating a good landing page is to remove as much friction as possible (call this F). By this I mean make it easy for the buyer to get what is wanted. Don’t make the searcher register or fill in a long form for example or scroll half way down the page to find the buy button. These are sources of annoyance or friction in the buying process. The more friction you place on a web page the greater must be the incentive (we call it I) for the buyer to stay around and overcome the friction.

The goal of a landing page is to reduce friction and thus reduce the need to incentivise the searcher more. Think of trying to minimise an equation such as (I-F)… this equation says if F is high then I must also be high and vice versa.

There can never be zero friction (the buyer has to fill in the form sooner or later)… just make it as easy as possible.

If you’ve met M, done a good job of V and reduced F as much as possible and provided the right level of I then there is only one more serious hurdle that needs to be catered for by the landing page.

4. This last factor is referred to as ANXIETY (we’ll call this A). Anxiety is experienced by all of us at the stage we have to enter the credit card details… we say to ourselves: Can I trust these guys? Will I get it as promised in 24 hours? Will they honour the guarantee? Does the cost include transport? Include VAT or exclude VAT? And so on and so forth. These anxiety factors if not addressed will result in significantly lower sales.

You have to identify and overcome as much as possible every point of anxiety relevant to your offering.

Landing Pages are NOT EASY

Hopefully you will now agree that sending PPC visitors to Home Page is not a good idea normally.

I’ll leave you with a question… can you rank these 4 factors: M, V, (I-F) or A in order of importance in terms of the impact upon sales? (Hint: all are not equal).