26 Point Guide to PPC Landing Page Copy That Maximizes Conversion Rates and ROI

While landing page design and images bring the cool factor, words are the nerdy kids. But, it is the words on the page that can make or break the success of a PPC campaign. It can be easy to dismiss the importance of landing page copy. You may think that all you need to do is just say in different words what your ad copy says, keep to the talking points of your business, or come up with a catch phrase or two to enthrall your target audience into converting.

While these aphorisms can speak to (and actually guide) useful landing page copy, they are only part of the story. If you really want to be exceptional and beat your competitors out for conversions, you’ve gotta step up your landing page copy game.

1. Why Focus On Landing Page Copy?

From an early age, we’re taught, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.’

Via me.me

The idea makes sense – if humans didn’t have emotions. All of this is to say that words matter. Really matter.

We will discuss later how human emotions can be tapped in a healthy way to drive conversions. But many times, digital marketers will just be focused on conveying value in the most concise way possible. Furthermore, conveying value to a specific audience that already has their guard up with advertisements can be a challenge.

In order to stay ahead of the competition, it is important to not underestimate the savviness of your prospects. You need to be proactive in discovering new ways to speak from their perspective and in their language, and to constantly strive to shorten your message.

2. One Goal

It can be really annoying to hear over and over the importance of understanding your business goals, but these goals are at the core of your PPC campaigns. And it’s not just your main business goals, but touchpoints along the customer journey that lead prospects to eventually purchase your product or service.

Sales funnel awareness is crucial when planning and executing a campaign, because the nuance of each stage dictates different goals, which requires different messaging.

Via Smart Insights

3. Who Is Your Targeted Audience?

Speak to your audience. Focus on the user, not yourself. Don’t say ‘we’ or ‘our’; rather, use ‘you’ and ‘your’. Make the reader the hero, and appeal to their ego. As we go through life, we start to realize that most people aren’t really concerned with anyone but themselves. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. We could probably lower our anxiety knowing people don’t really care about us as much as we think.

More productively, we can be more persuasive by speaking to someone’s perspective and by knowing who they are. But who is really your potential customer?

Many companies running marketing programs fail to get a full grasp of who their customers are, opting instead to cast their net wide in order to get as many customers as possible. This is a mistake.

A wise person once said: ‘When you try to please everyone, you please no one.’ Digital marketers who don’t try to narrow their targeted audience invite wasted spend. Their messaging will often be ambiguous and their conversions will be variable in terms of quality.

All of this is to say that you should take careful inventory of your offering, its differentiators, and your target audience. One way to narrow down your target audience is to create a buyer persona to better understand your user.

Via Instapage

The greater the level of detail, the better you’ll be able to speak to your targeted audience. Seriously, do you want to convert users better than your competitors? This is what it takes. Attention to detail, anyone? While it may seem kind of overboard to create a detective-like profile of your potential prospects, this level of dedication and awareness will help you understand your client better, full-stop.

4. Sales And Support Team Interviews And Customer Surveys

One way to build buyer personas is to tap into your internal teams who have interacted with your customers along their buying journey.

Sales people are a great resource of information on those people who have chosen your product. They are a wealth of information – take advantage!

Sales people have also talked to those who have rejected your product. They truly understand the differences between people who buy or reject your product or service, and this information is valuable in discerning who your target audience is – and isn’t.

Via Laserage

You can also incentivize current customers to share information on your product, their experiences, and who they are with some kind of discount or offer. You don’t have to be too creative. Any kind of free offer can get people to fill out a survey that only takes a few minutes. Again, information and knowledge is valuable, and getting it from wherever you can is crucial to digital marketing success.

Fieldbloom, a lead generation and customer feedback SAAS solution, is a perfect example of using customer surveys (although, to be fair, that IS their business model).

They sought customer feedback while launching their product in a limited release. Originally Fieldbloom was just looking to help businesses increase lead generation via high-converting online forms. However, after receiving lots of feedback from their initial users, they discovered that many were interested in using their product for other purposes, like gathering customer feedback and employee feedback in order to create better company cultures.

Via Fieldbloom

Gathering customer insights made Fieldbloom realize that they were actually too narrowly positioning the potential uses of their product, which they corrected in the landing page copy above.

Fieldbloom is a unique case where their whole business was customer surveys. They were also still half in product launch mode, and had very engaged users. However, their story is a case study on the huge benefits of surveying your customers to improve your messaging and product.

5. Customer Data Research

There are also ways to scope out your audience on the internet. You can use social media or analytics tools. (FB Audience Insights or Google Analytics contain lots of user data to broadly characterize your audience.)

Blog comments, customer reviews of your product and competitor products, web forums, Quora, and even Amazon reviews of books related to your industry can get you inside the minds of prospects when they are voicing their opinions, concerns, and pain points.

6. The Modern Attention Span Conciseness

There is no shortage of studies and statistics concerning the continual decline of our attention spans. While this is no surprise, it is worth re-stating to emphasize a key tenet of landing page copy: be concise.

Give the user only beneficial information. If any words on the landing page are not contributing a functional purpose to convince prospects to convert, get rid of them!

Get to these crucial points fast. Who you are, what you’re offering, and why you’re offering it are what matters the most to the visitor.

7. Combine Pain Points With Benefits

Know and understand the unique selling points of your offering. Have you made a list of what makes you special? Have you honed this list to make it as all-encompassing and as precise as possible? What differentiates you?

Make statements that make your potential customers say, “I have that problem, too.” Focus on their outcome. Here is Justin Rondeau of DigitalMarketer:

Via optinmonster.com

Roberta Rosenberg of ACEC says prospects are focused on an outcome, not the product. In other words, “What’s in it for me?”

Use all that data you gathered about your customer to speak the same language that they do, and let them know exactly what is in it for them.

Try using phrases like “Here’s how”. An example of this at work is: “We help [targeted audience] save time and get more customers. Here’s how.”

It can be hard to focus on the view of others, but as digital marketers, that is one of our core tenets. We simply have to empathize with our audience or else we’ll sink. Here are some more visual examples.

Via Instapage

Humans’ memory capacity can be notoriously bad, and Evernote hits nail on the head with its two word headline. The subheading is okay; a ‘modern life’ and ‘everything that matters’ are vague, but Evernote is a huge company with an all-encompassing goal. Indeed, they call out all their apps and products in this copy. Still, the copy is short and to the point.

Via Unbounce

I’m not familiar with Asana, but their headline makes it clear what they do. If you’re working with a team that is frustrated by email (and many teams are) then it looks like Asana can help you out with that. Three words is not as good as the two-word headline by Evernote, but still impressive. The subheading calls out conversations and tasks – still a bit ambiguous, but this speaks to the difficulty in summarizing your offerings in so few words.

Via Basecamp

This example above is interesting. I’m not sure if I agree with the headline, which focuses more on developing rapport with the user. The subheader continues the conversation that the header starts – ie. all businesses go through this. This conveys a sense of expertise which makes sense, but is definitely a unique take on landing page copy.

Via Hubspot

This Hubspot example is good at using ‘you’ and ‘your’. Also, for an analytics website, the copy gets down to what they do without any use of technical language, which is great for lay users.

8. Time Is A Major Benefit

Time is arguably our most valuable resource and everyone could use more of it, just ask any parents you know. You can usually fit this benefit into almost any product’s benefit list, so this is something to test out.

Via Ad Espresso

While the benefit doesn’t mention time directly, ‘as easily as making your morning coffee’ alludes to a relaxed activity that is not time or resource intensive.

Squareup via kickofflabs

Time is alluded to in the headline and more directly mentioned in the subheadline. Their message is clear: starting a business can be a hassle – especially setting up payments, which can be complicated – but not here!

9. Differentiators

Discuss ways in which your product is different than your competitors. If you can’t express a way in which you’re different from your competitors, then why should a user choose you over anyone else?

10. Objections To Your Offering

Put yourself into your potential customer’s shoes. Empathize with your user’s plight. What is their point of view? You actually want to do this first before you even try to sell your audience on your product.

You can also use a ‘reassure’ method of pointing out objections first. We will describe this in more detail in the next section.

11. Appeal To Emotion

Humans are naturally emotional beings. While using emotions may seem like a manipulative way of appealing to potential customers, emotions are at the heart of pain points that need solving.

Ad Espresso identifies five emotions at the heart of advertising persuasion. This is not an all-inclusive list of emotions; it may not even be a list of emotions that applies to your business. However, this list can be a good starting point to help persuade your target audience when thinking about how to use emotions in your landing page copy.

Caring is one of the emotions that is mentioned and relates to benefiting not just prospects, but the things or people that prospects care about. In this case, it can be their pets.

Via Ad Espresso

Reassurance is another emotion that can be addressed to boost conversion rate through persuasive landing page copy. Reassuring someone tends to coincides with testimonials and reviews, so try to include these aspects in your copy when and where you can.

Via Ad Espresso

Inspiration is a very captivating emotion, and Pinterest exemplifies that in their headline here.

Pinterest landing page Via kickofflabs

12. Deliver On The Promise Of The Ad

If you’re running a PPC campaign, this basically means you need to continue the conversation that you created in your ad copy. If the idea and expectations set up by the ad copy don’t align with your landing page, then you’re already starting off on a bad note by confusing your new website visitor.

Keeping the messaging aligned also affects Quality Score, so you’re killing two birds with one stone by focusing on the conversation you already started in your ad copy. Quite simply, you want to keep the messaging symmetrical.

This will save you time and work anyway, since you presumably put a lot of effort into the ad copy.

13. Use Scarcity To Drive Up Urgency

This is an oldie, but a goodie.

Authentic urgency is the goal, whereas fake urgency can drive potential customers away.

Via Ad Espresso

This ad uses loss aversion and ‘fear of missing out’ effectively without overly dramatic statements. Humans tend to be conservative and protect themselves from regret, as opposed to being on the offensive and seeking out luxurious benefits.

This may seem contradictory to the first section that advocated delineating benefits, but solving a pain point is different. A phrase as simple as ‘availability is limited’ can be the difference between a user converting or passing. Try to create offerings that have an expiration or limited aspect to boost conversion rate.

14. Nail The Headline

Answer the ‘what’ – as in, what is being offered – so that the user immediately begins to assess if they’re going to convert. The better your ‘what’ is, the better the likelihood is that the user will convert. And don’t be arrogant enough to assume that the prospect already knows who you are.

Via Unbounce

Here, Jana mostly uses the headline to hype up their product and expect an ambiguous growth message to propel users to sign up. Bad move.

The headline is the first place users start reading and is a crucial starting point for connecting the ad copy to the landing page, so make sure the messaging is consistent.

Keep the CTA in mind. The CTA should be tied in to all elements of the ad copy. You should always have the CTA in mind when writing any of the copy on a landing page – especially the headline. If you can allude to certain elements of the CTA in your headline, more power to you.

Another method to nail the headline is to ask a question and have your audience answer it.

Use a ‘How’ headline. How can you, or your product, solve [insert pain point]?

Via CrazyEgg

Avoid the urge to write a catchy – but uninformative or irrelevant – headline, like Jana did in the example above.

Via Unbounce

Here’s another example which speaks to the idea that your landing page copy shouldn’t add more questions. It should add clarity.

iBoske’s heading makes you wonder what a decision tree actually is, who I should be sharing my knowledge with, and how I can show my expertise. It’s confusing and hard to figure out what the user is actually about to get.

15. Subheadline

Put anything you missed in the subheadline. Any runners-up to important facets to your offering, the ‘why’ of your offering, and USPs can be included here. While you’re allowed to get more detailed, the subheadline still shouldn’t be more than a sentence or two long.

16. The Use Of Engaging Numbers

Surprising statistics can bring full circle what your offering is – and why it is valuable. Numbers can increase credibility – and therefore, conversion rate – due to their tangibility and inherent social proof.

Via Ad Espresso

Via Leadformly

The headline in the example above is short and to-the-point with a very well-placed number to get the user excited about using the product.

17. The Body Copy

The part of the landing page with the most content can also be the place where readers absorb the least.

Scanning text is a common practice among web browsers. In fact, a study found that nearly 80 percent of internet users scan, while less than one-fifth read the text on a webpage word for word.

What does this mean for landing page copy? It means you’ll have to employ some tricks to get users to read your copy, like:

• Bulleted points
• Bolding or highlighting main ideas or important concepts
• Subheadings
• Start with the conclusion

The school of thought towards writing the body is anchored by one of the main ideas we started with: attention spans are short. Copywriters simply don’t have time, space, or words to convince internet users these days.

A good rule to follow is to always try and be as concise as possible with the points you are trying to convey.

18. The Privacy Statement

Including the right kind of privacy statement – that doesn’t include anxiety-inducing terms like ‘spam’ in the wording – can help increase conversion rates.

19. Try Unique And Inspiring CTAs

The days of ‘Submit Now’, ‘Learn More’, ‘Subscribe’, or ‘Get Started’ are over. Many above average landing pages now use different colored buttons and are savvy enough to include detailed (or at least unique) calls-to-action to stand out, including:

• Send me the free gardening ebook now!
• I’m ready for my exclusive sushi-making webinar!
• Give me the free video course!

It doesn’t take a whole lot of work to change up your wording from generic terms; in fact, it is low-hanging fruit that is fast becoming common practice.

20. Testimonials And Social Proof

Save yourself time and effort. Have your satisfied customers write your copy for you by asking them to tell their story. Incentivize former customers to give feedback, which you can then turn into quality marketing copy.

Via Highrise

Via Conversion XL

Highlighting quotes from actual customers can be an easy way to build trust and credibility into your headline immediately, without having to fit in a testimonial at the end of a landing page like a lot of campaigns do.

Via Instapage

Having a testimonial at the end of the landing page is better than not having a testimonial at all, but the afterthought testimonial can be played out. Experiment with placement and see what works for you.

Via Shopify

21. A/B Testing

A/B testing is at the heart of PPC, but it applies especially well to landing pages. Any little tweak can make a world of a difference. Once you have a pretty good template, you can tweak the landing page very granularly to see how very exact changes can affect conversion rates.

There are now countless DIY companies – like Instapage and Unbounce – that provide the tools necessary to do A/B testing. You can also outsource your PPC work to professionals who can put in the time and effort it takes to get the most out of a PPC campaign if you don’t have the resources in-house.

22. Copy Competitors

If competitors are already using great copy, it often doesn’t take a whole lot of tweaking to shape new messaging that fits your specific offering. A corollary of this tactic is to use great copy from other industries and create analogous copy related to your business.

23. Remove Social Icons And Other Distractors

Always aim for conciseness – this cannot be stated enough. The shorter and more direct, the better. This includes site navigation, clickable social icons, or any other CTAs that you have mistakenly put on the landing page.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone, and don’t try to do more than one thing at a time. If something in your copy doesn’t relate to the main goal, delete it.

24. Proofread

This seems pretty obvious, and presumably you’d make sure all the grammar and spelling would be perfect before you made an ad live. But it is worth noting, because nothing could derail your brand credibility more than a sloppily written ad.

A Final Word

If we were talking about baseball, then the landing page would be the closer of the PPC ad campaign team. You’ve got the lead, or in the case of PPC campaigns, you’ve gotten the user onto your landing page. More than half the battle has been won. This is no time to slack off because you’ve got to finish what you’ve started. A common nickname given to the top closers in baseball is to add ‘Lights Out’ to their name (e.g. Lights Out Lidge). The idea is that it’s time to go home (in a good way, with a win) and turn off the lights. So, turn out the lights with killer landing page copy and go home.