Performance Design : Part 2 : Landing Page Design

Thanks for the overwhelming response on the part one to the series on performance design for digital marketing. 

Here Part (2)DueX. Performance design in landing pages.

Now this is most interesting......

See firstly you need to understand, I am not changing the schematics of digital marketing here, all I am saying is, based on my experience, there is definitely some method to the madness of designing your creative content for performance.

So be it 

1. Mailer design.
2. Landing page design. 
3. Banner design.
4. SEM text creative. 

All of them are fine while they are in the space of design and creativity, where subtle nuances make the visitor feel nice and the user journey is all about experience. In performance design, all the above are put to rest to "insure"  some of the following.

1. Get the best "On Site Conversion".
2. Get the user to focus on the proposition .
3. Get a specific kind of response from the user.
4. Let the user not flutter away into a navigation abyss.

So as a marketeer you should be worried about the following

1. Bounce  Rate : this will tell you what you are targeting 
2. Out bound Links: based on the need, number of outbound links can be reduced etc.
3. Authentication (If it is a lead / registration based campaign)
4. Phone Numbers
5. Attribution 
6. Analytic's

Having said that, below are the schematics for some of the best performing landing pages for lead / signup based campaigns .

The "Sign Up"

This is a classic design, why do i say so , this will remind you of all the email service providers, social media signup's, product signup's you would have ever done. The tried & tested design that does not go wrong atleast for languages written from left to right. [ thats a large number of launages :-)]

The "Generator"

Very similar to the classic design but with more number of fields and for sure a authentication procedure built in.This kind of form are usually used for lead generation activity and can transform into many types of pages some of them shown below.

The "Requester"

A very interesting innovation in the lead generation world and some advertisers swear by it. This form of page design is typical of product companies that want the user to first understand the product in details and ask for the user details subtly.

The "Ancient Scroll"

This format came into existence in the late 1990's and  was primarily used by scam website from hair growth to slimming lotions but in recent times we have seen serious marketing being done with such formats. The Idea with the long scroll is to inform the customer about all the possible information that he can assimilate and then ask him to complete a desired action.

Don't go by the image typical scroll can be up---------------to 2000-2200 pixels in length

The "DisRupTor"

This format came into existence when the advertiser(s) got desperate :). Most of the times this methodology is used by advertisers who feel that even before the user has gone thru the website / content, he / she should register for a special offer.In the indian ECO-System this is "seen" to be working but I am not sure if any one has done the analysis from a user engagement perspective.

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One nuance that I would like to highlight for performance campaigns that have landing pages with numbers mentioned on them.

• An interesting thing that can be deployed, where for every referrer you show a different number, enabling you to track back the call-in's on each number.

On Authentication: one of the biggest things that can be done to improve your performance campaign results is to add an authentication layer. Some of them that can be deployed.

1. IP Validation 
2. SMS verification
3. Email verification 
4. Clip based verification
5. Voice call Authentication. 

Each of the above have their pro's, so you will have to try a few to get to know what works best for you.

Other things that are important, which based on my experience that should be present as a part of your registration form are as follows.

1. The registrations form should have 
1. NULL character check 
2. Phone Number validation (7,8,9) , Ten digit (for India)
3. Numeric check in numeric fields  
4. Protection & Check for SQL injection 
2. Analytics
1. Goal conversion matrices w.r.t 
1. clickable points
2. time on site 
3. exit links
2. UTM parameters shouldbe tracked and analysied
3. Content
1. Should be SEO friendly
2. The page should have a link in the sitemap.xml link

For a sales performance campaign the design is little complicated and is intertwined with technology, will try and cover that in a different post. 

As always, will look forward to the readers feedback. Banner Design will be next. 

Buying Efficiencies In Digital Marketing

First things first.

The Indian digital landscape is so used to buying advertising inventories in the following currencies CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (Cost per click), CPL (Cost per lead) that it does not want to try and use the full potential of the term digital (track-able) aspect of media buying.

I am sure that all digital media planner have to answer the following questions while doing reports to advertisers for digital campaigns being done by them or their agencies.

Q1. If I bought clicks then how come the number people visiting my site are 30% lower than the clicks being reported

Q2. The leads that I have got are junk, my call center tells me that out of all the leads that were generated 50% of them were not contactable.

Q3. Impression being served by "x" publishers are being served at places that the user will not see them.

Q4. Email ID registrations received from the media campaign have a very high bounce %.

On the performance side all the above questions are the ones we face every day. Here is my take on a few of them.

For the past so many years I have seen that all publishers feel very happy selling CPM inventories. The only reasons for doing that in India is because the "freeuser" mentality is very high here and I am sure it is world wide as well.

So it becomes very easy for publishers to sell these free user page views to advertisers at fantastic rates and be over with it. They don't want to bothered by the fact that the advertiser using this digital medium over the years have become intelligent and want that extra mile(s) for the buck they are spending.

Just to give you an example. INR 20 CPM inventory become a INR 20 CPC if the CTR is 0.1%. ie. 1 Click for every thousand impression. And typically an INR 20 buy on any good portal would mean that the advertisers banners are running at the bottom of the page or in some obscure location on the website, resulting in adding no value to the campaign. on the other side a CPM 200 purchase @ 0.4%(an acceptable normal response rate) CTR is actually INR 50 per Click. !!

The only thing this kind of purchase will look good in, will be the reports that the agency would be giving to the advertiser at the end of campaign and claiming that they were able to give a very high "Share of Voice" or reach to the advertiser. !!

But what the advertiser needs to understand is that this kind of share of voice is not relevant as a typical webpage will have 4-5 ad units and if at all they want to look at the share of voice then they should divide the impressions by a figure of four or five. which will make it base less to even talk about.

Coming back to the topic. Buying efficiencies is not some thing that is taught in any institute or part of any communication coursebook. The only thing mentioned in the best of marketing books is the fact that you can negotiate the best rates with publishers if you sit across the table with a lot of monies committed on top of it. I say committed because an advertiser might not spend the same but it a good figure to negotiate rates with. I am over here talking only digital inventory purchases. This statement might not hold true in-case of offline i.e. print/ tv / radio etc.

Efficiencies can be defined in a lot of ways. Cost efficiencies( most common but not the most logical), value add's ( one term used and abused by a lot of publishers), quality of traffic, inventory positions (first scroll vs mast heads) etc .

But what most digital planners forget to look out for are the following efficiencies .

1. Are the click being bought converting to real traffic on the advertiser site.
2. What is the user doing after coming to the advertiser's site
3. Is the data being collected on registration of this user any good, can he be reached out later.
   

A lot of advertisers have started asking these questions back to the planners and I am sure a lot of them are also working towards providing answers or at least a plausible  solution to the advertiser. 

In the next post(s) I will try and answer one by one a solution to these above questions as each one of them would require me to dig into aspects of technology, ad serving, tracking etc. and would be too long to add to just one post. keep reading...