As I have said time and time again, the landing page is one of, if not the, most important aspect of a pay per click advertising campaign. This is because it is the element of the PPC campaign where the conversion actually takes place. Before the landing page, all the steps are only in preparation for the conversion.

For this reason, it is important to optimise and make sure your landing page is as good as it can be. For those that want to gain a lead or information from the web user, the likelihood is that they will go for a lead capture landing page. Of course you can stick text boxes for the web user to fill in and more. However, is that really effective in getting them to convert for you (is a web user willingly going to give over their details so easily)? This is where optimisation comes in. Here are 2 things you can do to make your lead capture page that bit more successful in gaining conversions.

#1 Offer an Incentive

At the end of the day, it is always going to be a challenge to get web users to do something for you for free. There are two alternatives to this:

• Make the web users want to give their information to you. This happens when the web user is generally interested in the contents of the landing page (which, hopefully, will be the majority of your traffic going through your PPC campaign).
• Entice the web user to give their information to you. If the web user has reached your landing page, it should become apparent that they are, to some extent, interested in the contents of your campaign. However, it is another question whether they are interested enough in the contents of your landing page enough to give over their details for you. In these situations, it is best to offer an incentive, a prize if you will, to those that give over their information to you. This will help nudge them into giving you the lead.

For incentives, anything from a raffle to an actual prize or discount can work – as long as the web user sees the incentive as beneficial to themselves.

#2 Nibble – Do Not Bite

I know you are looking at this point like I am crazy. What I mean when I say nibble, do not bite, is that many PPC advertisers fail when it comes to using lead capture pages because they ask for too much information. Instead of ‘nibbling’ they bite the whole hand off and ask web users for basically their whole life to be filled in.

Lead capture pages work best when the page only asks for a little amount of information from the web user: enough to make you, the advertiser happy and little enough to not scare web users into not converting. For this reason, always make sure you have the bare minimum amount text boxes to fill on the page as the general rule of thumb is that the less the web user has to fill in, the higher your conversion rate will be.