Figure 4-17. Bassett Mirror Company category page on HomeGalleryStores.com
That is where personas play a key role when creating ad campaigns, landing pages, and entire sites. Ads must cater to specific personas, and your landing pages should address the issues that are relevant to that persona. Not all companies can create campaigns that target specific personality types, so the challenge is to make an ad and design a landing page that can address and maintain relevance to all your target personas. To do so, you should ask the following questions:
As visitors navigate through a site, continuity is as important, if not more so, than when visitors navigate from an online ad to a landing page. However, we spent most of this chapter reflecting on the continuum between ads and landing pages because there is often a lack of continuity within a site, and although it may be subtle, it is enough to lose a few potential buyers. Figure 4-17 shows the Bassett Mirror Company category page on the website of one of our clients, HomeGalleryStores.com. Analytics revealed that a large number of visitors were navigating to the mirror subcategory from this page. By following the continuity principle, the next page should show the same mirror that was displayed on the parent category page. Figure 4-18 shows the Bassett Mirror Company Mirrors on HomeGalleryStores.com, but the mirror that was displayed on the parent category page is nowhere to be found on this subcategory page. By merely adjusting the way items are listed on the subcategory page to maintain continuity, HomeGalleryStores.com increased its conversion rate by 10%.
The key is to ensure that whenever visitors click on your site, continuity doesn’t stop.
Here are some of the problems our clients run into regarding continuity:
Ad campaigns should be monitored carefully to track what keywords visitors are using to land on the site. Adjust ad creative and landing pages to address user motives. Ensure that you geotarget your ads to the correct location where your offering is relevant. Finally, use negative keyword bidding to ensure that your ads are not displayed for terms that are not related to your offering.
Don’t underestimate organic results. Ranking first in organic results for a term is a lot better than spending hundreds of dollars on a paid placement. The key is to attach the most relevant page on your site to the particular search term.
Home pages are wonderful, but they are multipurpose pages, and therefore they lack focus. The more focused a landing page is on the actual objective of the user, the more likely that visitor will convert.
You might have noticed both Amazon.com and Target.com in the previous example used the search results page as a landing page for the term “Dora Dolls.” Sites resort to this approach because creating a custom landing page for tens of thousands of terms is not feasible. Although we understand the logic, you should make certain this works for your site. Driving visitors to your search results page will only make sense if you know your internal search technology and search results will display relevant results. You can rely on the internal search to display results, but add logic to your system so that the search results page adapts its look and feel for users landing on that page from an external source.
