6. Optimizing Creatives and Landing Pages for Paid Ads
- Arindam Paul Founding Member and CBO, Atomberg
- Nitin Agarwal Head of Growth & Revenue, Shopsy by Flipkart
Arindam observes the importance of aligning creatives and landing pages in performance marketing, emphasizing the need for consistent messaging and rigorous testing to optimize conversions.
One of the most crucial aspects while planning your campaigns is the quality of your creatives and landing pages. Without compelling creatives and optimized landing pages, it’s challenging to succeed in today’s marketing landscape.
Even today, if you click on any random ad, you'll notice that the ads and the landing pages often don't align. For example, the ad may promote stretchable yoga pants, but the first thing you see on the landing page is "50% OFF." But, I'm not coming for a 50% discount. I'm looking for information about the product's features.
Many businesses use the same landing pages for both their prospecting and remarketing campaigns, which can lead to a disjointed customer experience.
I think 90% of brands still do this. If you conduct a proper audit of brands and examine the kind of creatives and landing pages they use, you’ll find out that they often don’t align.
In our case, we had three different creatives on Facebook. The first one focused on energy savings, and the landing page also emphasized energy savings, featuring a savings meter showing how much voltage you save per day and the savings over five years.
The second landing page highlighted smart features like controlling the fan with a remote or Alexa, and so on. The landing page also conveyed the same message.
The third approach focused on interior décor. It showcased how these fans would look in different interior settings – wooden interiors, modern interiors, and more.
A lot of effort went into identifying these categories and creating different landing pages for them, along with varied creatives. We tested multiple formats, including video and static. All of this required testing.
Creatives and landing pages in paid marketing always require testing. But you should not test ten poor-quality creatives. I see many people doing this. This doesn't serve any purpose. It simply helps you identify the best among ten very bad creatives. Benchmark your creatives against industry averages.
Speak to folks in the industry to discover the numbers they are seeing. The way to improve these numbers are very similar across companies. If something has a low conversion rate to start with and you can’t get it to improve up to industry benchmarks, you know it’s not working.
Much of this understanding also comes from consumers. But, a lot of it is first principles.
Ask yourself if your copy and design is working. Ask yourself if your creatives address consumer problems and barriers to purchase.
Reach out to ten people and see if they can understand your ads and landing pages just by reading them. Ask them what they took away.
You don’t need a machine to tell you that if your ads and landing page don’t align, that’s the wrong thing to do.
Nitin zooms into one common mode of failure for Search Ads — taking users to homepage and not specific product pages, making the purchase decision more complex and hindering conversions.
One common mistake people make in Search Ads is taking consumers to home pages.
Say, I’m looking for healthy snacks; I search for the snacks, the brand name comes up, and I am led to the homepage. The problem with this is that I need to figure out which product to buy — all over again!
Teams do this because we think we want to show our customers everything we offer. But that works against you.
As marketeers and as salespeople you should always make choices simpler for consumers. Consider when you go to an offline store. The salesperson will ask you your budget and will only ever show you two-three products you should consider. He will not take you around and show you 10 different options.
Offline salespeople know that if they give you 10 options, you’re going to be confused, and you’re going to walk out without buying anything. This is the same in Search ads.
Try to take your customers directly to your most-selling product or product pages you think can sell well, and you will see a much higher throughput on your conversion funnel.