Why Message Matching Landing Pages Are Critical?

Message matching landing pages are crucial. Chances are that you are doing it right.

Whether or not you run paid campaigns, your visitors should be able to click through an ad or a link and “land” on a landing page.

It’s not fancy. It’s not “nice to have”. It’s imperative — whether or not you believe in it. I’ve seen so many businesses not using landing pages and wondering why they don’t see conversions or sales as results.

At a time when you can barely get any conversions assuming you do everything right, leaving gaps in your funnel can only prove disastrous.

Not just any landing page will do, mind you. You’d need well-crafted, beautiful, converting, clean, mobile-responsive, and message matching landing pages:

Old Gardner of Unbounce defines “message matching” this way:

A measure of how well your landing page copy matches the phrasing of the ad or link that brought the visitor there. For PPC marketers, this means matching your ad copy to your landing page headline. Strong message match increases conversions because it reassures people they’ve come to the right place.

If you write 30% off on your ad, your landing page must say something similar on your landing page (and then add some more to it)

When your ad says “free trial”, your landing pages must have “free trial” on the headline.

In a Google Adwords campaign, for instance, you’d have plenty of ad groups with keywords tightly themed together. Given that, each ad must then point to distinct landing pages different from what the other ads point to.

Here are a few examples:

One of our clients specializes in Junk removal services. Within their Adwords account, we’ve split their ad groups into specific “Junk removal” service types that their customers are likely to type in such as

“Furniture removal”

“Sofa Removal”

“Junk Removal”

The ads are packed together within these ad groups. Each ad points to a landing page that correlates to these ads

Different ad groups, different ads, different landing pages. Those are just the basics.

Why are Message Matching ads & landing pages Important?

Congruence, context, relevance, and sticking to the theme.

Your ads can’t afford to send your visitors to a page that seems to have nothing to do with the ad itself. The longer you run a campaign this way, the more you’d suffer by paying all that money for nothing.

Your ads aren’t working.

Your conversions will suffer.

You’ll drain your money faster than it’d ever take for you to barely keep up.

This problem is almost universal. Raphael Paulin-Daigle of SplitBase wrote a guest post on Wordstream pointing out just universal this problem is. Some of those campaigns are run by some fairly large companies (and that’s a shame).

How to Build Message Matching Landing pages?

When I consult and inform my clients on message matching landing pages, they usually look up to the skies and pray that I don’t continue anywhere further than “build a landing page”. They think it’d be so much more expensive to do this.

It’s not.

It’d take roughly 16 minutes (I did the match and put myself on a timer for this) to create different versions of the main landing page tailor fitting each page for the ad group or for the ads that those landing pages will point to.

If you use a landing page builder like Unbounce, Wishpond, or LeadPages, it’s only a matter of few clicks before you have a complete set of landing pages (each with two variants A and B to allow you to test these pages out and improve your campaigns)

Stop Sending Traffic to Websites

I see this all the time. Most ads on Facebook and on Google Adwords directly point to “home pages” (Even “digital marketing agencies and PPC agencies” are guilty of this).

Pointing your ads to your homepage is a sin.

Your visitors lose their attention span the moment they arrive on your home pages. They’d never know where to click, what to do, and your offer (CTA) is going to be lost.

On Attention Ratio, Oli Gardner puts it all in one line:

“One Page. One Purpose. Period”

Convertize defines Attention Ratio as:

Attention Ratio is a cognitive bias that demonstrates the way in which people are more likely to follow through on an action if their focus is concentrated and their attention is not split between lots of different elements. This is because having too much choice, information or visual stimuli overwhelms the human brain and can lead to indecision and distraction.

You are giving your visitors overwhelm. Your billing for the paid ad spending is overwhelming too, I am sure.

Can a typical web visitor actually have any focus while floating between your moving sliders, fancy graphics, and tons of content out there. You’d have that glittering copy, pages of videos, and podcasts on your website.

You’d have that glittering copy, pages of videos, and podcasts on your website.

By the time your visitor checks you out, they forgot why they clicked the ad. They have no idea about the offer you tried to make.

Given that their attention span is way less than a few seconds at best, what just happened to the $2 you must have spent on that click?

Poof. It’s gone.

Visitors leave. You’d have no way of getting them back (Unless you do retargeting, which will cost you money again).

Your aim is to capture visitors the first time she lands on your landing page instead.

It can get simpler than this:

1. Craft simple ads.
2. Make an offer.
3. Send visitors to your message matching landing page.
4. Get leads.
5. Nurture leads.
6. Make sales.
7. Make sales again.
8. Get rich

Note: Use landing pages for everything — every link you’d ever send your audience to. Blogs, social media updates, email messages, and even your occasional conversations on Quora. Landing pages are not limited just to paid advertising.

If you want someone to signup, use a landing page. Period.

Why do you have to complicate this? Are you using Message Matching landing pages at all? Tell me about it.