5 Biggest Landing Page Mistakes You Should Avoid

September 14, 2021 Pixlogix

Your landing page is your chance to give a great impression to your viewers about what your brand has to offer to them. If it is not optimized for conversion, then it won’t bring you the desired results even if you invest a lot of money into advertising.

While working on your ad can bring a lot of traffic to your site, working on your landing page can potentially increase conversions. Many high-traffic websites have found out the hard way that leads visitors to a home page is not enough.

What you need is a dedicated landing page that is optimized for conversions. By doing so, you can also give a huge boost to your page relevance. The more relevant your page is, the higher your Quality Score will be, which is the value that affects your ad costs and results.

Investing in ads only works if the abundance of people visiting your site doesn’t leave at the beginning of the sales funnel.

Start Using Targeted Landing Pages

A landing page has to be specific instead of being cluttered with different CTAs and offers. Visitors are often looking for a specific thing on your website.

When they get bombarded with offers that are not even related to their goal, they are going to leave. For a business, it is best to spend every single dollar with the growth of the brand in mind.

Before you start spending money on ads, take a look at the 5 most common landing page mistakes and do your best at avoiding them.

1. Failing to Optimize Landing Page Speed

Today, a web page that takes more than 5 seconds to load is considered way too slow for people that are browsing the Internet. A landing page that takes that long to load will result in you losing about 74% of your visitors, as measured on high-traffic websites.

If you would cut it down to 3 seconds of loading time, you would still lose half of your traffic. Therefore, one of your main priorities should be to create a fast-loading landing page. It should be concise and on-point, displaying only those elements that are necessary.

The best-performing e-commerce websites out there do not stop working on their landing page until it takes less than one second to load. But what are the main points one should consider when it comes to reducing loading time?

First off, you need to find out how long does it currently takes for all the elements to show up on your viewer’s screen. PageSpeed Insights by Google is probably the most popular tool for checking loading speeds. It analyzes your site in great detail, showing you all the elements that slow it down.

Here are the most common issues that can cause websites to slow down:

Messy code that needs to be set in order. Get rid of unnecessary code and make sure to minimize different parts of it such as CSS and JavaScript.
Reduce the size of imagery and other files that need to load on the web page. There are plenty of tools available that can convert images into smaller versions while maintaining their quality.
Choose your hosting package wisely. It can make a world of difference to run your website on a high-speed server.
Redirects can also be minimized to make your landing page load faster.

All the above-mentioned issues are easy to fix and can give a huge boost to website performance.

2. No Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is Displayed

Get rid of those distractions on your landing page and show a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to your visitors instead. A USP is the most valuable product or service you have to offer to your targeted audience.

According to a branding agency, Digital Silk, you need to prepare a sales point that immediately catches the attention of your visitors and raises their interest. Ask these two questions: What makes your brand, product, or service special? What are the main things that differentiate you from your competition?

Answer these questions and you are going to end up with a USP or Value Proposition that will generate conversions. Every targeted landing page needs to have its USP for its target audience. Depending on the type of business you are running, the proposition can be about a promotion, a product, or a certain statistic that encourages visitors to subscribe.

We are not talking about setting up a Call-to-Action (CTA) here. While USP represents the value, you have to offer to your customers, CTA is the type of content that encourages your visitors to take action based on the USP.

Here are a few examples of how a Value Proposition looks like:

Hand-made or all-natural [the product you want to sell]
We provide the best, strongest, fastest [product or service]
We are the number one in [product or service]
We deliver [product] to your door in [X time] or else it is free!

You can come up with any short, clever slogan that describes what differentiates your product from the others that people can find in the market.

3. Your Ad Offers Something Different than Your Landing Page

Visitors hate to see that the promise you made in the ad is not there on your landing page. Many brands fall into the mistake of presenting a great Value Proposition in their ad which is not in line with what they offer on the website.

Potential customers need to be just as excited about what they see on your landing page as they were when they saw your ad, if not more. If you are offering any less, they are going to leave in a second. Make sure to publish your landing page with content that is relevant to your ad.

The point is to welcome them with another Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and then continue with a good Call-to-Action (CTA). This will make your visitors more likely to convert.

4. Your Landing Page Lacks the Required Visuals

Besides using textual content, you also need to present a few images or a video about what you have to offer. It requires a lot more effort to read the description than to take a look at a few images of a product.

Another mistake you can make is to clutter your landing page with images that are not relevant to your product or service. The reason why visitors landed on your website is that they want to learn more about your product. If there are too many distractions, it might cause them to leave instead.

Here are the two most common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to visuals:

The images are not relevant to your offer – This is similar to our previous point where we talked about your ad not matching your landing page. For example, adding a video guide to the page where you show how your product works is a great idea. Any other video or image that is not about what you offered in the ad is not going to work.
Using only text on the landing page – The lack of images may have been okay at the beginning of the Internet but it certainly doesn’t work today. Using imagery is a great way to communicate with your visitors and to encourage them to buy your product. The visuals should be clear and concise while making sure that you only use as many of them as necessary.

5. Not Optimizing for Smartphones

Today, more people are surfing the Internet on mobile than there are on desktop computers. Google searches made by smartphone users started to dominate back in 2015. This is not going to change any time soon and mobile phones are also where dynamic ads bring the most value.

When designing your landing page, you can expect about two-thirds of your visitors to open it on a mobile device. Therefore, you can’t afford to optimize it for small screens and operating systems such as Android and iOS.

You need to do your best at ensuring an impeccable experience for those users. Otherwise, you are going to lose a lot of money and credibility in the long run. It is not only that the device is different, but the intent of the user is not the same either.

Your landing page has to communicate your offer shortly and concisely. Use a font size and style that is readable and get your point across as quickly as possible. Smartphone users are often on the run or in the company of others, meaning that they are more distracted than your typical PC user.

Also, take into consideration that most people use their smartphones with their thumb. Using something like a stylus pen is not as popular, as it is easier to just take the phone out of your pocket and start browsing with one hand.

Since most of your visitors will use their thumb, you need to make your Call-to-Actions at least 72 pixels wide, which is about an inch.

Summing up

An optimized landing page is essential for a successful marketing campaign. First and foremost, these landing pages must be targeted. It’s also very important to improve not only the speed of your website, but also your landing page because if it’s slow, it will have the same, but more significant impact on conversions.

Web designers emphasize that a single well-designed CTA is the centerpiece of landing pages, but omitting the USP can be a big mistake. But don’t try to over-promise, as the ad needs to be consistent with the landing page, otherwise, potential customers may be frustrated by the discrepancy.

In addition to promising words, use attention-grabbing visuals, because a picture is worth 1000 words. Especially if it is optimized for mobile.