As you will be well aware of, there are many different types of landing pages an advertiser can use to guide their PPC traffic to. One of the popular choices for advertisers to use is the lead capture landing page – this is a landing page which has the objective to gain information from the web user. When it comes to optimising a lead capture landing page, there are many things one can do. Here are three ways to make a lead capture page more effective.
 

#1 Don’t Ask For Too Much Information

Gaining information from the web user can sometimes be quite difficult: especially if the web user has no incentive to give such information away. You can usually categorise leads into 1 of 3 categories:

• Those that are interested in the contents of the landing page. Therefore, they will be more than willing to complete a conversion on the lead capture page.
• Those that are a little interested, so will give information over depending on how much information they have to give over and how much effort this will take them.
• Those that are not interested at all and will need some sort of incentive to get them to give over information.

Of course, we all want to only have the top bullet point. However, on many occasions, you may find your landing page will apply to all three bullet points. Therefore, limiting the amount of information you ask for as well as offering small incentives will work wonders in getting leads.
 
 

#2 Location of the Forms

Where you decide to place the forms on your landing page can sometimes significantly improve the performance of the lead capture page. For most people, they will think sticking the form in the central area of the landing page will gain the most leads. However, the way lead capture pages work is by enticing the web user into completing the forms and then actually completing them. For this reason, the page needs to win the web user over first into completing the forms. Therefore, it can sometimes work best to have the form below the fold of the page with the enticements above the fold of the content (an alternative is to stick them side-by-side above the fold of the page too).
 
 

#3 Use a Call to Action

Call to actions are brilliant in PPC advertising because they are an efficient use of space to get the web user to do what you want. In previous articles, I speak about using call to actions in PPC search adverts. However, call to actions can also be used in landing pages too and work very well on lead capture pages. Therefore, somewhere closely located to the form, it would be wise to have a call to action to outline what you want the web user to do – examples can include ‘Sign Up Now’ and ‘Find Out More’ etc. which will encourage the web user to fill out the form and create a lead for you.