If you work in Paid Search, it’s safe to assume that you’ve heard about the importance of creating PPC landing pages for your campaigns.
Some of the top reasons might include:
- Relevancy
- Landing page content and ad copy should be relevant to each other to positively impact Quality Score.
- Advertiser Control
- By reducing options, like removing the navigation header, you are helping to guide or influence the user to complete a specific or desired action.
- Conversions
- Typically PPC landing pages will have a prominent call to action, whether it be a phone number or a form fill-out in plain sight. This circles back to the above point of helping to guide the user to the desired action.
In theory, this all sounds great.
Except when the user DOESN’T want to do what you want them to do, and then you end up with a bounce rate of 82% and low conversion volume. Typically, healthcare decisions require extensive top of funnel research and awareness before users ultimately will make their decision. Seer thought that limiting users to one page could be detrimental to the campaign’s performance.
In this post, I’ll share two examples of how PPC specific landing pages actually negatively impacted two different Seer healthcare clients, and what we did to turn our campaigns around.
Example 1: When Users Aren’t Ready to Commit
Our first client is a long-standing Seer veteran, who launched a new service line in the Fall of 2016. Bare One’s Soul is a mental health counseling service that provides phone counseling & therapy sessions with real certified licensed professionals. Based on our campaigns, we created two identical landing pages (pictured below) for two different themes. The first was tailored to a “therapy” theme and the other towards “counselors”.
The landing pages included a short bio about the company, user testimonials, and a “Schedule Now” button. The page had limited content to encourage users to take action.
After a period of limited conversions and a high landing page bounce rate, Seer had a hypothesis that users might need a little more information about the Bare One’s Soul company before scheduling an appointment.
As this is a new brand, we know that research is an important step in the conversion funnel.
With this in mind, we decided to run a new test. We decided to send the ads to the homepage, instead of a standalone landing page, to allow users to navigate through additional content to get a better sense of Bare One’s Soul brand and service offerings.
Almost immediately after changing the landing page we saw a positive impact.
- Conversions increased 400% in the span of 2 weeks
- CPA decreased 79%
- Conversion Rate increased 354% from 0.11% to 0.50%
Example 2: When There’s Not Enough Information
Coincidentally, during the same time frame, I was running another landing page test for a second healthcare client at Seer. This client has two very unique target audiences, caregivers vs. healthcare professionals.
The goal of our new PPC landing page test was to help us identify what audience our paid search ads were currently attracting. A new PPC landing page was created that was designed to speak to both audiences, asking them to “self-select” what audience bucket they were in.
A user could click one button if they were a caregiver, or the other if they were a healthcare professional. Either of these links would then take the user to the respective webpage for that particular audience.
There were no other navigation options on the page, thus limiting where our audience could go.
We implemented the new PPC landing page on March 6th, 2017. After about two weeks of data we pulled an analysis comparing the performance of the current landing page to the previous period with the original landing page.
- Forms Submissions decreased 33% from 12 to 8
- Calls decreased 86%, from 70 to 10
- CPA increased 390%, from $58 to $284
For both clients, following these analyses we immediately updated the ads to direct to the higher performing site pages, the homepage for Bare One’s Soul and the original site for the second client.
The Takeaways
When it comes to PPC landing pages, what works for one brand and its audience might not work for another. Take your audience into consideration and try to understand the “higher” conversion funnel.
Research is one of the most important steps of the buy process, especially in the healthcare field. Give users the right balance of information on your product or service that will enable them to make a smart, educated decision and you won’t risk them bouncing as a customer due to a poor landing page experience.
Interested in more like this? Read about how we broke the landing page mold with a fitness client and increased their conversion rate by 70%.
