Landing Page CTRs - How to Improve Them & When They Don't Matter (6)
Landing Page CTRs - How to Improve Them & When They Don't Matter
I've seen quite a lot of talk on the forum about landing page CTRs...
"What is a good CTR to aim for? How can they be improved? Why do some countries draw much fewer clickthroughs?"
Well, there are a lot of variables.
In my opinion, the first thing you need to understand about landing page CTRs is that the world does not revolve around them.
Here's an example of an (admittedly low volume campaign) campaign I setup a while ago on JuicyAds.
Unfortunately, I made a big mistake.
I didn't bother to split test from the very start. I saw that my initial LP effort was drawing a 63% CTR and thought "Well done Finch, go pour yourself a cold one. Job's a good'un"
Well it's only this week that I tested a variant of the Map LP that you can find in this thread here. Sure enough, the LP CTR remained strong at over 60%. But the overall conversion rate (CR) leapt up from 3.85% to 7.81%. That is effectively doubling your ROI just by using a LP that sells the offer better.
Couple of points I want to draw from this:
- Just because you've got an impressive landing page CTR, don't assume that your work is over. You can always improve your overall conversion rate by selling the offer better.
- Don't be lazy and wait 13600 clicks before split testing.
The reason I stuck with one landing page was because I'd perfected it on another offer and didn't think I could optimise it any further. Every campaign is different. You should never assume that a top performing LP will retain its champion status on a completely different placement.
What's Easier to Optimise? A low CTR and high CVR or high CTR and low CVR?
Take these two examples:
Landing Page X
CTR of 10%
Offer CVR of 30%
Landing Page Y
CTR of 30%
Offer CVR of 10%
The ROI is exactly the same. For every 100 clicks that each landing page receives, you get 3 conversions. But for each landing page, you can improve your performance with a separate approach.
Landing Page X
With a low landing page CTR / high offer CVR, my first variable to test is the banner.
If you are familiar with chat creatives, like this one from the STM spy:
...then you're probably already familiar with some very low landing page CTRs.
In short, the drop-off is caused by users clicking a banner that doesn't accurately portray what they're going to get on the landing page. If Debbie DD wants to chat now and the user clicks her banner for that reason, is it any wonder that the landing page CTR will drop off if she's nowhere to be seen?
Something that many affiliates have started to do with chat creatives is bridge the gap to a chat-based LP. You might design your LP with the colours, font and layout of Facebook, while choosing a picture that matches the girl you used in your chat creative. This will sooth the LP CTR and transition through to the offer better.
In nearly all cases, I find that the faults of a low landing page CTR rest in how your banner transitions to your landing page. Are they giving the same message? If they're not, this is what you should aim to fix. You already have a strong conversion rate so fixing the banner >> LP transition should put you in to profit.
Good times.
Landing Page Y
So your landing page CTR is fine at 30%. Well, it's reasonable. Depending on the traffic source, I think there's plenty of room to improve it and push closer towards the 40% mark. In some cases, with a nailed in conversion flow, even beyond 50%.
But 30% is not bad.
What about your conversion rate though? It's dropped to 10%. What is likely to be causing that drop off?
In this case, I would place the blame on either:
a) A bad offer. Get in touch with your AM and find out what's converting the best.
b) Your landing page is not selling the offer correctly.
Some affiliates take the approach of using banners that draw super high CTRs, and landing pages that make overly bold promises (free everything, no credit cards, 25 second registration, 'only women of type X when merchant page uses type Y')
If this is you, take a step back and look at how you can transition from landing page to offer more effectively. Steps might include:
- Matching the terminology used by the merchant.
- Matching the layout and colour scheme. Copy the button style.
- Picking out a merchant LP that uses the type of model/attraction that you've built your landing page around. For example, if you're teasing Asian girls, deliver an Asian girl from the merchant's LP selection. Tell a consistent story.
- Write stronger copy that highlights the offer's USP.
- Add scarcity or a time constraint.
"What is a Normal CTR?"
One of the questions I'm seeing a lot is, "What is a good LP CTR?"
It makes sense that affiliates would want to compare, but it's important to understand that every niche is different, as is every country, and so is every traffic source. That's without even considering the impact of your creatives.
There's one rule that remains the same:
Always test different classes of landing pages.
Most niches have 2-3 popular classes of landing pages that around 80-90% of affiliate campaigns rely on. Here are some of what I would call the different 'classes':
- The flog (fake blog)
- The farticle (fake news article)
- The product review page
- The long sales letter
- The short ‘4 bullet point’ squeeze lander
- The ‘rules’ qualifier
- The map landing page
- The ‘chat now’ window
You are never going to isolate an average LP CTR vs. a poor one vs. a great one unless you test different types of landing pages.
I know a lot of affiliates will choose a different image, mix up the headline and maybe tinker with the colour scheme.
Well, that's not a different landing page class.
It's the shit that you should be doing after you've found the most effective format for the page to be in - not before.
Test your types of landing page first, work out the best theme, and then test everything else. You want to go with the LP that delivers the best overall conversion rate.
Everything else is optimising around the edges.
Ace post! The taxonomy of different LP styles is particularly useful - I don't think I've seen a "checklist" of LP classes before.
Another couple of LP classes that occur to me, btw (since this seems like a very useful resource to build up):
- The "Coupon" - particularly popular on PPV
- The survey/quiz lander
- The dating site profile
If your ROI is 50% and you double your revenue, your revenue goes from 150% of spend to 300% of spend... which is a 200% ROI. So doulbing your CVR% would have actually QUADRUPLED your ROI.
If your original ROI was 20% you would actually multiply your profit by a gazillion (I think 7 actually) by doubling your CVR%.
Incredible post Finch, just what I needed.
If I could give two "thanks" to this post - I would do it.
So I took Finch's advice and started to ad lp's to my campaigns. Here's the results.
I was only running the middle lp with this campaign and added the top and bottom after reading Finch's posts. I'm going to keep testing until I hit my goal of 7-8% CVR and then test some more 
Keep testing and keep stacking guys. Big shout to you the Finch man.
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