Ep 106 - LinkedIn Ads Landing Page Tweaks
SHOW RESOURCES
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Google Analytics 4 events Episode
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Are your landing pages leaving something to be desired? If so, your LinkedIn Ads aren’t performing as well as they could be. We’re teaching you how to make your landing pages super powered on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, your landing pages dictates so much of your performance that you can get from your LinkedIn Ads. But it’s really complex, because a lot of marketers who are responsible for paid social are not responsible for the landing pages or the website. But with landing pages that are inefficient, it makes everything you do look worse. Never fear, I’m about to give you a framework for landing pages that perform on LinkedIn. And let’s be honest, every other channel too, because that’s kind of how it works. But first in the news thought leader ads now support video. We’ve shared in the past how thought leader ads could only boost a post that was single image or text only. So now thought leader ads can boost video posts, which I’m really excited about. The more power we can get from thought leader ads in my book, the better. Eric Jones brought up the LinkedIn ads fanatics community that document ads now have their own version of retargeting, which is amazing. The more ways that we can retarget also the better. So now when you run a document ad, you can now retarget anyone who interacts with the ad in any way or just people who performed chargeable clicks on your ad, or those who downloaded the content of the ad. This is awesome! LinkedIn, keep it up. I really hope this means that dynamic ads retargeting, text ads retargeting, and the messaging ad formats, event ads even, I hope all of these are going to get their own retargeting very soon, I want to highlight a review that we got on the podcast Vaanee Goel says, “Such a fantastic LinkedIn Ads podcast. I’ve been following AJ on LinkedIn for a while. And about a week back, I subscribed to the podcast and started listening to it. When I heard the first two episodes, my mind was blown. It’s been just about a week and I’ve listened to almost 10 episodes. They’re incredible, so much content, such great explanations, and very articulate and coherent. I see these helping me a lot. I’m gonna listen to them all over the course of time. Now, thanks for sharing your knowledge with people including me. This is an abundance mindset in its truest sense. And it really helps.” Vaanee, a LinkedIn Ads consultant out of India. Vaanee, I hope I’m pronouncing your name right. Thank you so much for sharing that review. That means a ton to me. And as you guessed, I am big on an abundance mindset. So I’m really excited that you’re getting a lot of value out of it, as well as everyone else, too. I’m not trying to keep this all for myself. And neither are any of us here in the B2Linked team. We’re constantly looking to see how we can share better. And everyone else, I want to invite you to leave a review on the podcast. I would love to shout you out live like this as well.
Alright, without further ado, let’s hit it. Our topic here is on landing pages. And it’s a really complex topic, because there’s so many different elements of a landing page. And I want you to consider the landing pages that you’re currently using. And think about ways that you can use these tips to make your landing pages even stronger, or fix them if they’re not performing very well. I’m gonna list a lot of different kinds of elements, I want you to know that these are really in no particular order, unless I say this one is really important. And I will say that.
Consistency in Messaging
The very first one is consistency in messaging. Now one of the big challenges that we run into is that oftentimes, we say something different in the ad than what we say on the landing page itself. It may seem like a small thing that in your ad copy, maybe you’re talking about this free content. And then when they go to the landing page, they don’t see you talking about the content in the same way. But this can be a real source of confusion for your visitors. So what I recommend is make sure that whatever way that you’re referring to the content in your ad, make sure that the landing page itself reflects that. Use the same words, use the same title of content, any way that you can connect that original thought so that when the visitor gets there, they’re not left confused or wondering if they made it to the right place.
Meeting Expectations
And this leads us to our second point your landing page should fulfill and meet the expectation that it’s been given. So in your ad, if you’re saying something like get access to this free ebook, if they get to that landing page, and they have to hunt around to understand, like, where is this ebook? Or is it being offered? Or was I bamboozled? And is this a bait and switch for something else, you need to make sure that your offer is easy to find. They clicked on an ad specifically promising them something, as soon as they get to that landing page it should be abundantly clear exactly what it is that they requested and they get access to it right then. This also means that you need to clearly articulate the value that your visitor is getting. A lot of times when I audit landing pages, I notice that right up at the top, this is the area of the webpage that everyone is going to see, it’s the most important, that people waste time. They start talking about something else, rather than getting right to the benefit. If you’re offering a free piece of content, your first paragraph should not be about your product or something unrelated, it should be all about, here’s the content that you’re getting access to and here’s why it’s valuable.
Coding and Backend
We do need to talk about the coding and the back end of the landing page and website as well. Hey, LinkedIn charged us for 100 clicks, but when we look at analytics, it shows only 40 visitors came from LinkedIn. No, this is not LinkedIn trying to trick you or overcharge you. What inevitably happened is someone clicked on that ad. And so LinkedIn charged you as the advertiser, but then when they sent them to the landing page, there was enough of a delay, the visitor got impatient and left before the page fully loaded. This is the same issue for all channels, but I definitely hear it a lot related to LinkedIn Ads. Anytime that you have a redirect happen, it takes some time for that redirect to occur. When you click on a LinkedIn ad, LinkedIn reroutes you through a different link. And so there’s just a little delay there, maybe it’s a fraction of a second. And this is exacerbated where maybe you have a bitly link or some sort of a shortened company link in your ad, then it has to go through two redirects, which takes even longer. And then your landing page will take some time to load. Generally landing pages load faster on a desktop than they do on mobile. But we know that 80% or more of your visitors from LinkedIn Ads are going to be on mobile. So my best advice to you is work on your mobile landing page experience. Make sure that it loads as fast as possible. Generally, this is going to be on mobile, you want your page to load in less than one second. You’ll obviously want to talk to your developer about this. Because this is not a skill that most marketers have is being able to minify their code on their website and speed things up. But your developer will know this is incredibly important. Some things that can help here are getting faster hosting. So if your website is using any sort of like a shared hosting, that’s going to slow it down, because at different times, the server may be getting more requests for another website and so it’s slower to serve yours up when it’s requested. So one of the best things you can do use cloud hosting, I know it’s a lot more expensive, we’ve considered exactly the same thing for our website, but don’t cheap out on hosting. Get good, fast, dedicated hosting support. Another thing that can really help your page load speed is you’ll have a lot of different JavaScript libraries being called in your code. You’ll also have a lot of different CSS files. There are different tools that developers can use, where they can do what’s called minifying. They minify the JavaScript and the CSS files, that could mean shrinking them all into just one simplified file and getting rid of all of the redundant calls there. Or just making it so the server doesn’t have to request as many documents. This is definitely outside of my paygrade, but I’ve worked with developers in this process of minifying, JavaScript and CSS, and you really can get a big benefit here. Now I’ve been a digital marketer for a long time, especially near the beginning of the WordPress heyday. WordPress is especially susceptible to this. But what happens is, if you add enough plugins into your website, because hey, there’s so many plugins that do great things, well, all of those plugins can bog the website down, because every time someone requests a page, maybe four, or five, or 15, plugins all have to be called and referenced. So one of the best things you can do is remove plugins. If you’re running off of something like WordPress, or Drupal. You can decrease your page load speed very quickly, just by doing some of that. Another thing that I’ve seen web developers do is to go through and specifically resize images just for what they need. So for instance, if you upload an image, that’s like four megabytes, but you’re only displaying it as a thumbnail, even though your web server is showing that only as a thumbnail, it has to load the whole four megabyte image and send it to the user. And that slows down the page, giving them anything else. So there are a few tips that you can give to your web developers, and hopefully give them a big leg up in speeding up your pages. I might also suggest have them design the page to be mobile first, because a lot of times we design a desktop version of a website. And then the mobile version is just like a scaled down version of that. But if you build the whole website or page specifically for mobile, and then maybe have a separate desktop version, that can help your page load speed quite a bit as well.
Alright, here’s a quick sponsor break and then we’ll dive into the design and general appeal areas of your website.
9:57
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.
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Design and Appeal
I want you to look at your landing page and your website and assess how easy it is to actually read the content that’s there. Look at it as a new user, like you weren’t the one who created it and see how attractive is it? Are there giant paragraphs that look like big walls of text that no one’s going to want to start reading. If so try to break up your paragraphs to where they’re just a line or two a piece. This is going to invite a lot more people to start reading and keep reading. Think about what you have above the fold. Because if we know that not everyone is going to keep scrolling all the way to the end be really thoughtful and intentional about what you put at the top of the page that you know is going to get read the most often. And of course, with landing pages, the name of the game is really minimizing distraction. The purpose of most landing pages is to get you to either fill out a form or take some action or leave. That’s really lit. Like give someone an opportunity, and if they’re not willing to take it, there’s not much there for them. A lot of times, this means removing links that go anywhere else except that landing page itself. That means the logo at the upper left hand corner, you might want to take the link out of that so that they can’t go back to your homepage. You might want to remove the navigation that’s at the top of that page that’s global across your whole website, just to allow fewer distractions and the ability to leave the landing page that you’ve crafted. Do you have multiple popups that could annoy someone, obviously try to get rid of them or at least minimize them to just like one pop up. Realize that most of the people who are visiting your landing page are going to be on mobile and a pop up takes over the entire screen so I would highly recommend don’t use any pop ups if you can. Now the same thing I think goes for the GDPR cookie banners that you see, I’ve seen some really good cookie banners. And I’ve seen some really poor ones. Obviously, from a data perspective and from an analytics perspective, you want as many people to accept those cookies as possible. So make that really easy. It shouldn’t take up the whole screen, but if it does, you may not want it to take up the whole screen. Or maybe you do and have it take up the whole screen just to make it really easy to click accept all. That’s totally up to you how you handle it. But you should look at your cookie banner as a new user with fresh eyes and see if there’s any way that you can improve it so that it’s easier to click accept. Now we definitely need to talk about form fields. Because many marketers your whole goal in sending someone to a landing page is to get them to fill out a form. So first, consider how many form fields you have. Because if people have to fill out too much information, they’re gonna get bored, they’re gonna get distracted, they’re gonna get upset or frustrated. And they may just leave entirely, whereas they were maybe close to just clicking Submit. There are some big SAS companies that make us look pretty bad. You may know the ones I’m talking about, but you go to register for a webinar. And they asked 15 questions about how much you spend, and what your title and position at the company are. I would try to keep it as short as you possibly can. First name, last name, email address, if you can keep it down to a minimum, that’s going to help you way more Plus, you can always enrich that data later at a pretty low cost. So it doesn’t make sense to add more form fields trying to qualify people. I think we also have to address that your landing page should be nice to look at. It shouldn’t be visually offensive. Now I will say that I’ve sat through conversion optimization presentations, especially from Chris Daly that we’ve mentioned on the show before. And in his presentations. He does the results of AV tests. So he shows you the before the after which versions tested and then he shares the results. And I will say I was shocked because in one of those examples, it was the ugliest possible version of the page. It didn’t match the brand colors or style guidelines. I mean, it looked like a Frankenstein of a page but it converted better. So I do realize that sometimes ugly converts, but I also realized that you’re paying a significant premium to be advertising on LinkedIn and every interaction every touch that you have with someone is a touch with your brand, but it really is nice to make sure that that touch that they have with your brand, every touch is on brand. And it feels modern and appealing and isn’t a real turnoff. It inspires confidence that you’re good at what you do.
Social Proof
And next, that brings us to a really important category, here are things that go on your landing page, which is your social proof. Wisdom of the crowds is a real thing. No one likes to be the first person to comment, or the first person to like, or the first person to click. They feel like a guinea pig, they feel like they’re being tested. And maybe if no one else is willing to do this, then maybe they shouldn’t be either. As humans, we just feel more comfortable taking the same action that other people have already taken. So I think a section of your landing page, specifically devoted to like, here are the companies we’ve worked with that can quiet people’s fears, because they realize they’re not the first ones who are going through this. You’re already proven with other brands like them, or maybe even larger than them, I suggest the same kind of treatment with where you’ve been featured. So if you or your executive team has been featured, maybe they’ve been interviewed on podcasts, or they’ve been featured on the news somewhere or even in press releases, you can claim that. You’re gonna have logos that say like, hey, here’s where we’ve been featured. You can pepper in other elements like case studies and testimonials that help people realize that they’re not alone. And they’re making a smart decision by deciding to work with you. And this relates a little bit to the coding of the webpage. But I see a lot of marketers get tripped up here. The way that your tags fire on your page, your JavaScript tags is really important. If your analytics and conversion tags and your retargeting tags for all of your different stuff. If they all load at the very end of the page, then what’s happening is these visitors that come to the page, and if they decide to leave before the whole page is downloaded into their browser and displayed to them, then your retargeting is not tracking them, your conversion tracking is not tracking them, your analytics is not tracking them, you get the idea. So most digital marketing channels have this little JavaScript pixel. LinkedIn calls their’s the Insight tag, and they’re pretty lightweight. So my recommendation would be to take all of your least your most important pixels, that would be your LinkedIn insight tag, maybe your Google Ads tag your meta tag, and make sure that these fires really early on in the head section of your HTML. That means even if a user leaves before the page fully loads, at least they’ll qualify to be in your retargeting audience, if they were on a conversion page, then at least you get to mark that as a conversion. And your analytics is marking them as having come from LinkedIn. In episode 105, All about Google Analytics 4, we told you exactly how to set up page scroll depth and time on site events. These can be really helpful in understanding how people are interacting with your landing page. If you send a bunch of traffic and no one scrolls past 50%, or no one sticks around long enough to actually read what it is you have, then there’s an obvious issue there. All right, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.
18:17
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
Alright, in the shownotes, you’ll see a link to Episode 105. It was the last episode all about Google Analytics 4, so I would highly suggest checking that out if you haven’t already. These are things that you can do as a marketer that help you evaluate your LinkedIn Ads traffic better. If you haven’t already, make sure that you’ve joined the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. That will get you access to our four courses that take you from beginner to expert, and they also give you access to the whole community of other LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You can bounce ideas off and ask questions anytime. Me and my staff are constantly in there as well. Depending on when you listen to this, you may still be able to get in at the lowest cost it will ever be, our founders rates, but you’ll have to act fast. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com to see exactly how to sign up. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We’re excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button wherever you’re listening. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the show. Nothing would be more meaningful to me than going and leaving a review. I would appreciate that so much. And it really helps out the show with any questions, suggestions or corrections on what we’ve talked about. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
