Landing page experience is essential to achieving healthy conversion rates and top quality scores, driving more leads and wasting less budget on overcoming a poor ad rank.  A key factor that most advertisers continue to miss is the value in creating specific landing pages for mobile users. Sending mobile users to a generic desktop landing pages poses increased of low quality scores and a higher bounce rate.

In this post we will explore the three main ingredients in creating perfect mobile landing pages coupled with some best practices to ensure your visitors are achieving your goals.

1.   Page Content

Headlines should tie in directly with your PPC ad and should not be more than 4 words. Compare these two headlines for a desktop landing page to one for mobile:

Desktop Landing Page:                     Free Tax Consultation from Sydney’s Leading Tax Professionals (8 Words)

Mobile Landing Page:                        Free Sydney Tax Consultation (4 words)

Any content that directly assists a conversion should be kept above the fold.

 It’s essential that you prioritise your supporting content. Do not try and cram everything on desktop landing pages into the space you have available – this will reduce load speed and dilute the impact of your call to action.

Once you have defined your headline and call to action, decide on:

• A key graphic – ensure this loads quickly.
• 1-2 lines of text or bullets – ensure these are legible.
• A third party endorsement – a badge or seal of approval will take up less space than a testimonial.

The potential conversion benefits of adding additional content should be carefully weighed up against the page performance.

Once mobile landing page has been created, utilise A/B testing extensively to ensure you are maximising conversions and reduce your bounce rate.

2.   Call to actions

The moment your mobile landing page has loaded, the user should be aware of how they can proceed to the next step. Mobile users are commonly looking for a quick solution. Follow these creating your call to actions:

• Avoid forms or check boxes
• Limit text to 3 words or less.
• Keep them clear and easy to click.
• Support your call to action a benefit to clicking
• Utilise click-to-call if appropriate

3.   Page Speed

Page speed is fundamental to the success of your mobile landing page and has a direct impact on whether the user has wait patiently for your content to display or bounce. To get this right:

Avoid:

• Flash: this may be incompatible with certain browsing and time a long time to load.
• Too many HTTP requests: remove any non-essential scripts from your code.

Use:

• HTML5 / JQuery
• Save Images for Web
• CSS Image sprites

Test your page extensively with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Once you have your mobile landing page designed and ready to be implemented, speak to you developer about implementing your landing page to cater for all major browsers and devices.

Conclusion

When targeting mobile users, considerations need to be made above and beyond your treatment of landing pages for desktop browsers to ensure a successful conversion rate and quality score. Keep in mind that minimising your content, sharpening up your call to actions and optimising your page speed performance are all critical to the success of your mobile landing pages.

By Anthony Coe

Image Credit: Lightfairy, Wiki Commons, Under Licence Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported