In the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and sales, it’s easy to get so caught up in the top of the funnel that you totally forget the bottom of the funnel and everything that happens in the “post-click” environment.
As important as pre-click elements are – including ad optimization and audience targeting /target audience– the reality is that you can’t complete the conversion without a compelling landing page. And one of the most significant elements of a great landing page is the effective landing page headlines.
Every landing pages has a number of vital elements that are integral to creating a meaningful onsite experience and ultimately driving conversions. They include:
But all of these important factors are a waste if you don’t get the headline right.
The PPC landing page headline is the very first thing a visitor sees after clicking the PPC ad and landing on the page. If it’s irrelevant, inaccurate, vague, or boring, you have almost no chance of converting.
Outside of page loading speed, the headline is arguably the first decision point for a visitor. It gives a reason to either stick around and learn more, or bolt for something else.
Headlines, regardless of whether it’s a landing pages or newspaper, have always been treated like gold by copywriters and marketers. David Ogilvy, who is known as one of history’s greatest copywriters, was adamant that headlines are to be given the focus they deserve.
On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar
he once said.
And while most marketers and copywriters think about headlines after everything else has been created, Ogilvy and other industry legends have always been adamant that the headline commands more attention.
Ogilvy had an unofficial principle that he called the 50/50 Rule. This rule states that you should spend at least half of your time and effort developing and iterating the headline. In other words, if it takes you two hours to write copy for the rest of the page, you should spend one hour brainstorming and optimizing the headline.
While Ogilvy created this rule with ad copywriting in mind, it’s still a valuable rule of thumb for landing pages/landing page headline. And with all of the advanced split testing that we can do with same landing pages, the value of spending more time with headlines is clear. The more headlines you can drum up, the more likely it is that you’ll laser in on the recipe that works for your target audience.
Headline writing is a mixture of art, logic, psychology, and persistence. It takes time and experimentation to land on the right “formula.” And while experience is the ultimate weapon in this war, here are some tips and tricks you can use to shorten the learning curve and get better results in less time:
There are three main characteristics that every headline should always possess:
Think of your headline like a three-legged stool. If it’s missing any one of these elements, the stool loses its stability and topples over. You might be able to prop it up, but you won’t be able to sit on it.
As you craft your headlines, keep these three characteristics at the core. It’ll serve you well as you learn to develop high-converting landing pages.
The headline is important, but do you know what the goal of the headline is? (Hint: It’s not to generate a conversion or produce a sale.)
The only objective of the headline is to get a visitor to read the subheading. And then the main objective of the subheading is to get the visitor to read the next line of copy, and so on.
Don’t feel the weight of trying to convert someone in 10 words or less – there’s ample room to do this below the fold. Your goal is to reaffirm their decision to click on the ad and give them a reason to keep reading. If you can do that, it’s a win.
It’s difficult to hit on everything you want to cover in one headline. Thankfully, you also have the option of creating a subheader (which is basically just a smaller heading that goes directly beneath the heading).
The subheading can be a bit longer and include more characters. It’s used to clarify, restate, or expound upon what was stated in the headline. In many cases, it lists off additional benefits and, as previously stated, serves the purpose of pushing a visitor’s eyes further down the landing page.
Specificity converts and generalities tank.
If you want to generate better results with your headlines and drive higher conversion rates for your landing page, it starts with being very clear. You might push some people away, but your clarity will bring the right people into the fold.
Think in terms of specific claims and clarifying language. If you’re selling consulting services, don’t talk in terms of serving “business owners” or “entrepreneurs.” Get super specific about the types of business owners and entrepreneurs you’re communicating with. Are they small local restaurant owners? Are they growing digital marketing agencies?
Don’t make vague claims about how something works. Instead, use data, statistics, or quotes from customers. Always avoid the macro language when you have the opportunity to go macro. You’ll speak to a smaller group, but that group will be so much more invested in what you have to say.
Length is another important element in headline writing. You want the headline to be short enough for a visitor to focus and long enough to include everything that needs to be mentioned. Where does the sweet spot lie?
According to one study, the human brain only has a certain capacity to process information. And if you want to grab peak focus and engagement, seven words is the bullseye. However, anything within the five to nine range generally performs quite well.
Don’t get too caught up on making headlines five to seven words in length, but avoid extremes. Anything super short – like one to three words – probably isn’t enough. Likewise, anything that’s 15 to 20 words is going to miss the mark.
The worst mistake – and one that’s unfortunately quite common – is to focus the headline on your brand or product. (Intuitively, this seems like the very thing you should be doing. But realistically, it’s a huge misstep that’s difficult to recover from.)
When you write a headline that’s brand-focused, you’re basically making yourself the focal point. You’re like the kid who stands on the table at a high school party and screams, “Look at me!” People might look, but they’re rolling their eyes.
Headlines should always, always, always be focused on your target customer. Your product might solve their problems, but leave the product out of it. Focus on benefits instead of solutions.
The best brands don’t try to position themselves as the hero. Instead, they position the customer as a hero and offer to be a guide who points them to a solution that makes their problem go away and/or fulfills their underlying desire. (This solution just so happens to be the product.)
Listicles have emerged as a favorite style of copywriting in recent years. And though they can feel generic and repetitive, the truth is that they work. And the reason why is tied to the specificity of numbers.
Numbers are psychologically proven to generate a response in the brain. When the brain sees a digit amongst a sea of words, it has no choice but to slow down and process the number. It also establishes parameters and allows for easy classification. If you’re giving someone the “5 Reason Eating Red Meat is Good for Your Health,” it tells people exactly what to expect. They don’t have to go searching for the takeaways. They know there will be five – end of story.
Numbers are especially powerful when attached to a data point. Statistics and percentages are powerful on many levels – use them to your advantage.
Generic and boring words won’t get you very far. Your headline is the curb appeal. If it doesn’t pull people in on an emotional level and communicate tangible value, people aren’t going to read on.
Creative wording doesn’t mean lying or embellishing. It doesn’t mean being flowery and over-the-top. It does, however, require you to improve your word choice.
Don’t have the deepest vocabulary? Use an online thesaurus or a book like Words That Sell to get ideas for more impactful language. Sometimes upgrading a single word can make a major difference in the perception of your landing page headline.
The headline is so important that you should dedicate a specific amount of time to brainstorming options and creating different options. (As Ogilvy’s rule states, you should spend at least half the amount of time it takes you to write the accompanying copy on the headline.) However, don’t get so lost in headline writing that you forget about the rest of the PPC landing page.
A headline is only effective if it has proper alignment with the body copy. Never mislead a visitor or make someone search for relevance. The headline can evoke curiosity and intrigue, but it can’t deliberately lead someone astray. You might get people to spend time on the landing page, but they won’t convert.
Word choice, sentence structure, and grammar are only part of what it takes to write a good headline. Sometimes you have to get creative with how a headline looks to the eye. And whether you realize it or not, you have a number of powerful tools you can leverage to analyze competitors and get results. They include:
As you can see, there are countless ways to improve a Search engines headline without even changing a word of copy. Success is in the details!
Everyone wants to be original and flex their own creative muscles, but when it comes to writing headlines, your decision to leave the herd may actually hurt your ability to convert. This is one area of life where following the pack and mimicking what’s already been done helps.
According to one study, 200 of the best ads that produced significant sales and gained global recognition across a wide swath of industries were actually very similar to one another. In fact, 89 percent of these Google ads could be classified into one of six headline formulas.
It’s rare that you need to reinvent the wheel – simply installing the wheel correctly is enough to get you to where you need to be. Become a student of the game and build up your own library of effective formulas and examples to pull from. Never copy, but always mirror.
Now that we’ve thoroughly dissected some elements and tips for crafting superior landing page headlines, let’s take a look at a few copy-and-paste formulas and high-converting examples that you can use to improve your results.
Feel free to add these formulas to your own personal swipe file and/or experiment with a few of them on your next landing page project. As always, you’ll want to tweak and test until you find the best fit for your landing page.
Did you know that less than 25 percent of PPC ads produce any conversions? Yes, that’s right…more than 75 out of 100 PPC ad campaigns are able to convert clicks into customers. This means the majority of ad campaigns are a waste of time and money or your PPC agency is simply doing it wrong.
When your ad campaigns don’t work, it’s easy to blame the medium and assume that PPC ads or effective PPC landing page headlines don’t work. But if we’re being frank, it’s not that PPC doesn’t work – it’s that most agencies are doing it wrong.
At PPC.co, we work with small businesses and enterprise companies on a daily basis. And because we have such a large sample size and experienced track record working with a variety of brands in all industries, niches, and stages of growth, we know that PPC landing pages advertising works. We’ve also discovered that so much of the results depend on the post-click experience.
Want to learn more about how you can develop winning ad campaigns that meld compelling pre- and post-click experiences to generate results for your business? We’d love to fix your broken ad spend and help you boost the bottom line.
Contact PPC.co today and get a no-strings-attached audit and proposal for your next campaign! We have great incentives for those just starting out in PPC that may need some white label assistance!
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
