Landing pages perform much better with paid advertising than a regular website home page.
When it comes to online lead generation using paid advertising platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook ads, landing pages (sometimes called “funnels”) are much more effective than a website home page in most cases.
Using your website home page, or even an internal service page, results in sub-optimal response and return on ad spend (ROAS). And shockingly, most small businesses (and even the marketing hacks working for them) still make this inexcusable mistake.
Landing pages are meant to compel visitor action, such as calling or completing a web form to request a quote, and are proven to convert paid traffic into leads much better than a full website.
A distraction free visitor experience is the essence of a landing page. Landing pages limit visitor attention to just one page instead of allowing visitors to explore many pages and/or blog posts. This increases the likelihood visitors will take the desired conversion action.
“One page, one goal” is best practice for lead generation.
But there’s too much fuss about landing pages in general. Marketers endlessly debate which landing page design, layout, funnel sequences, and software are the best.
Design is one of the least important components of landing page effectiveness in my experience (as is the case with full websites). And I’ve used every popular landing page software on the market, including:
- Clickfunnels ($97 – $297/mo)
- Lead Pages ($37 – $321/mo)
- Unbounce ($80 – $300/mo)
- Instapage ($149 – ?/mo)
- Converdy (no longer available)
- Many others
I now use WordPress for landing pages, which is the platform my client sites already run on. This saves me (and therefore my clients) from having to pay the ridiculous software fees above. And pricing isn’t the only drawback of these tools. Most of them have unacceptable usage limits, such as, traffic limits or number of pages/funnels users can build. That alone is a deal breaker for me!
My go-to landing page design is a very simple one column, mobile-first layout used on a few of my client websites, such as this one—with one key difference. To create a landing page, I just remove the global navigation. Simple!
It helps that my client sites already use a distraction free, high converting layout and design. I usually recommend one or two designs that have been proven to work really well for my clients, but if a client wants a custom design, the WordPress Theme we use will accommodate any design…without sacrificing performance (page loading speed).
Most WordPress landing page plugins feature drag and drop capability—primarily targeting non-developers. The problem with these plugins is all the extra code necessary to create drag and drop functionality, which introduces a ton of moving parts and performance killing technical debt.
Now let’s talk about the landing page features that ARE important.
Below is a sample LP that I’m using for a Google Ads campaign that is doing extremely well for my client.
It checks all the important boxes, including:
- Featured area with compelling headlines and a click to call button
- Persuasive copy writing that conveys trust and value
- Huge: Pitch video or work showcase video—I recommend both
- Super fast page loading
- Mobile-first, distraction free, single column layout
- Golden ratio typography for easy content consumption
- Several call to action (contact us) areas throughout the page copy
- See more from my expert website services full feature list
So with all of that said—go ahead and take a look at the page below:
Sample landing page that converts
Client Campaign Updates
9/17/20: The client reported that he’s getting too many electric gate estimate requests and is booked for over a week.
9/22/20: The client reported that he’s made over 15 gate install estimates in the last few days. He needs to hire more guys.
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