If you’re about to launch a new marketing campaign or promotion, a key consideration should be the landing page experience after someone sees your ad. Build a successful campaign landing page with these dos and don’ts:

Do Consider Your Campaign Goals

The landing page you’re driving traffic to should directly reflect the information you want users to get from it and the action you ultimately want them to take. With this in mind, you can then determine if a separate page makes more sense or if a page within your main website would suffice. For example, do you want to generate leads with a whitepaper, event sign-up, or another type of content? If so, a single focused landing page with a form will suffice. On the other hand, if you’re running a brand awareness campaign to educate people about your brand and your products or services, then utilizing your main website where people can browse various pages would be a better experience.

Don’t Complicate the Journey

Regardless of whether you create a separate landing page or not, you want your users to have a clear path to get the information they need and complete the action you want them to take. If a user needs to complete too many steps or click through multiple pages, you may lose them (and you’ll most certainly lose tracking, making reporting the success of your campaign very difficult).

Do Keep it Clear and Simple

The design, messaging and call-to-action (CTA) should be clear and easily accessible. There should be content and keywords that correspond with the ad copy you used in your campaign directly on the page you are directing them to. This not only creates consistency from your ad to your site, but it’s also a recommendation directly from Google. When those keywords are present, your campaign will have stronger relevancy and allow you to rank higher at a lower cost per click.

If you are using a form as your main conversion action, keep it as simple as possible with minimal fields requesting only the essential information. Not sure which fields to keep and which ones to remove? Try A/B testing and measure the conversion rates to make the final decision.

If you want people to take a different action such as a phone call, ensure that your call button is noticeable on the page. This is also an opportunity to implement call tracking with a tool like CallRail to understand beyond how many people clicked the button, but the quality of those calls and what keywords they converted on.

Don’t Forget to Track

Setting up tracking from the very beginning is key to proving your campaign’s success. But when you’re under pressure from your stakeholders to go to market quickly, setting up tracking may be last on the list or seem too daunting.

Time and time again, we have seen organizations make the mistake of not carefully considering their campaign goals and therefore what advanced tracking may need to be set up beforehand to track toward those goals. As a result, after the campaign has launched or even concluded, they start to examine the data to, unfortunately, realize they had not set up tracking to collect the data to begin with.

Depending on what you want to track, it may mean more than just ensuring Google Analytics code is on the page. You might also need to set up additional tags and triggers in Google Tag Manager and then subsequently events or conversions in Google Analytics. Want to track the number of clicks on a personalized homepage banner? Or, perhaps you want to track the success of a mailed postcard. Both of these common examples require advanced tracking to be set up in Google or through a QR code prior to the launch of the campaign. Not sure how to even go about this tracking piece of your campaign? Learn how our analytics and reporting experts can help.

Do Consider All Devices

You’ve likely heard of mobile-first landing pages, but we would argue that it’s important to design for all devices. We know that mobile is important and while many users are reaching your pages through their phones, we also know that this might not be the only touchpoint they have with your brand. More and more, we’re seeing cross-device engagement throughout a person’s journey before they make a decision and convert. This is especially true for longer sales cycles that require lots of research. Additionally, with the rise of remote work, desktop usage has made a comeback. This is precisely why tools like Google Analytics 4 were set up for cross-device tracking to better understand how users engage with you and your ads on their smart TVs, desktop computers and smartphones. Ultimately, your landing pages should be designed and optimized for all devices.

Don’t Set it and Forget it

Just like anything else in digital marketing, your landing page shouldn’t be a one-time set and forget it. Instead, you should be looking at the data to see what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments as needed. After all, that’s the great thing with digital, you can make changes even after you’ve launched! The data may reveal that you need to make simple changes to your campaign settings, targeting, keywords you’re bidding on, or keywords you need to adjust on the landing page itself.

Not sure of the best strategy for your digital marketing campaigns? Need help designing the landing page? Our team can help! Contact us to learn more!