By Gregory Smyth
The tight production schedules and many different variations of landing pages often mean they cause you more trouble than any other page on your website. However tempting it may be to simply leave the page as is when you get an error you don’t understand, missed opportunities from these landing page mistakes are literally cash walking out the door! All the SEO, paid ads, and social campaigns in the world won’t help your business profit if customers can’t get through your order or conversion form from your landing pages. We will look at some common types of mistakes on landing pages, such as message mismatch, privacy issues, slow page errors, and more. Then, we will explore how to handle them to best retain customers.
What Are Landing Pages, Anyway?
In short, a landing page is a web page where the customers land, created specifically for converting those customers into leads, or to your desired action. Each of your landing pages should have a single clear message or goal.
The “Big Mistake” When Choosing a Landing Page for
The single biggest mistake people make when choosing or setting up a landing page is failing to fulfil the promise that they made before arriving at their page. Landing massage mismatch is one of the critical issues that you need to address.
Everytime you make the customer think, your landing page reduces the chance of conversion. For example, if you promised the customer that you have a discount for group booking in your ads, and the customer cannot find that on your landing page, customers will bounce back from your site. This not only fails to convert the customer but also reduces the confidence level of trusting your company.
Steve Krug clearly stated about it in his book: Don’t make me Think. The quote is:
The fact that the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious-and easy-can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.
_Steve Krug
Privacy Issues on Landing Page and How to Handle Them
Privacy issues are one of the trickiest types to handle. This type of error occurs when a customer either leaves a field blank because they consider it inappropriate to ask for, or makes a “donkey” entry. Donkey entries may include fictitious names (Mickey Mouse, John Citizen) or obscure countries of residence. They can also be identified by sporadic blank fields throughout the form.
It is understandable from a customer’s point of view; however, they are frustrating from a conversion optimization perspective. The best way to tackle them is to provide a reason why the field is required. Use a tooltip or inline help text to explain why the information is needed, or include a short note in your error message.
If you see a high rate of privacy errors, reconsider whether the information you are asking for is worth the possibility of losing customers. Collecting demographic details might be useful for your digital marketing strategy, but unnecessary fields can increase abandonment rates. Review your analytics and form completion data to make an informed decision.
You can also prevent this by implementing the dynamic form that adapts in real-time. For example, if the user selects “Homeowner”, the form instantly reveals the mortgage-specific information that is personalized to what user needed. This reduces the cognitive load for users, and improves data accuracy.
Technical Mistakes to Fix on Landing Page
Google’s algorithms now account for what happens after the click. Technical mistakes on your site are now key factors that decide your Quality Score and Ad Rank.
Slow Page Load Speed
Slow-loading landing pages are one of the biggest reasons visitors bounce before converting. Even a one- or two-second delay can push bounce rates through the roof and frighten off potential customers. Your SEO budget and ad campaigns won’t matter if customers are never able to see the offer since the page loads too slowly. To fix this problem, you should optimize your images, shave off bulky scripts, use lazy loading, and use a quality CDN to get the load as low as possible.
Mobile Usability Issues
With the majority of traffic emanating from mobiles these days, an unfavorable usability of your website from a mobile phone is a significant error. Non-rendering of landing pages from small screens frustrates visitors. Tiny buttons, broken layouts, or non-mobile-friendly form submissions can all provoke instant exits. You should embrace a mobile-first approach and philosophy of design, and use responsive layouts, and inspect your pages on a number of real-world devices, and not desktop preview only.
Ambiguous or Vague Call-to-Action (CTA)
Your call-to-action is the key to everything your marketers do to get through to the customer’s decision. A generic CTA like “Submit” or “Click Here” doesn’t encourage action. Too many CTAs per page results in confusion and dulls attention and conversion rates. Take advantage of action-based CTAs like “Get My Free Trial” or “Book a Demo,” and one major objective per page of landing pages for maximum impact.
