You’ve created the perfect ad, with a solid strategy, outstanding targeting, and exceptional creatives.
Excellent.
Your job is about half done. The ad is only as great as the landing page that follows it.
The landing pages that users arrive at after clicking on your ad play just as important of a role in terms of conversion as the ad itself. The last thing that you want to do is to lose interested potential customers just because you had a low functioning landing page, thinking that the ad itself had sealed the deal.
Your social media landing pages need to be an important part of your overall social media strategy, so it’s crucial to get it right.
And if you aren’t sure how to create a landing page for social media ads that will actually convert, we’ve got good news: We can help you there!
In this post, we’re going to show you how to create marketing landing pages for your paid social ads that align with Facebook’s requirements, appeal to your audience, and create a seamless experience that will cause leads to become customers.
Why Marketing Landing Pages Are So Essential for Paid Social Ads
Your landing pages are essential for paid social ads, no matter what types of ad you’re running. There are multiple reasons why. Let’s take a look at each.
The Customer Journey Doesn’t End At a Click
While we’d all love the idea that our customers would see an ad and be so swept away with our outstanding products that they click and immediately purchase, that’s not the reality.
More often than not, they click your ad with questions.
They want to learn how it works, what the price is, or how you get the great results the ad says it can offer. There are a number of objections that you likely need to overcome and questions to answer.
From a user's perspective, take a look at this ad:
The ad looks great, but you might have a lot of questions. How much does it cost if I get $100 off? How good of a deal is that? Why is it better than my current non-stick pots and pans? How well does it really work?
The marketing landing page they see when they click "Shop Now" needs to answer those questions to get you to convert. Their landing page answers each question effectively here:
In other words, your job isn’t even close to being done. A user clicks on an ad as an act of consideration— that’s it. If your landing page isn’t exceptional, then there’s a good chance the customer journey will end at that point.
Landing Pages Impact Ad Deliverability
A strong landing page isn’t just about the customer journey: It can actually have a significant impact on ad deliverability and even the standing of your ad accounts across multiple platforms.
We’ll discuss a bit more what requirements your landing page needs to meet in a few sections, but the reality is that if your landing page violates a platform’s regulations, your ad won’t be approved (or could be disapproved). If this happens often enough, your account could be suspended or banned.
Landing Pages Can Impact Ad Cost
On platforms that use any kind of quality score metric (Facebook is included in this), landing pages are typically factored into that cost.
Ads with high-quality scores can actually have increased deliverability and significantly lower costs per action (CPAs). This means you get more results for a lower cost.
Ads with low-quality scores often have higher CPAs and lower deliverability.
Marketing landing pages can go beyond impacting conversions, therefore: They can directly impact how much you’re paying for actions like clicks and site traffic.
Landing Pages Can Be Used for Retargeting
When users click on your ad to be taken to your landing page, something crucial happens: Your tracking pixel (or the Facebook Conversions API) sees that the user has visited your page.
They get a platform-specific user ID, and you can then create custom audiences to create retargeting campaigns relevant to them.
You can follow up with UGC ads, an on-platform lead ad, Collection Ads to show more products, and more. You can do this on almost all paid social ad platforms that exist today, including newer platforms like TikTok.
Getting users to spend time on that page and potentially visit other pages (for additional retargeting) is therefore important.
4 Social Marketing Landing Page Rules to Remember
Each individual social media platform has its own landing page rules that you’ll want to double-check when creating campaigns.
These are the most universal regulations that you need to keep in mind:
No Instant Downloads or Malware
When a user visits your site after clicking an ad, nothing can be downloaded automatically. Even if they clicked on an ad for a lead magnet like an eBook.
This means no malware, and it means that content needs to have a clickable CTA button that allows them to either download the item on the landing page or somewhere to enter their email so you can send it to them.
This also means that the landing page must be a website and not a PDF or JPEG.
Your Landing Page Must Match the Ad
This seems like a no brainer, but it’s actually fairly easy to slip up on this one.
Some of the most common ad-and-landing-page-mismatch errors include:
- Having a price that’s different on the ad than the landing page, either due to a promotion or general price changes
- Accidentally having the wrong product link paired up with an ad
- Sending an offer promoting different features than you promoted in the ad
- Sending a single product link for carousel ads instead of changing the link
Remember that everything you promise in your ad needs to match its counterpart on the landing page: the offer, price point, currency, product, availability, and how to buy. Even the domain needs to line up.
You Can’t Deceive Users
We know that all of our students wouldn’t ever intentionally deceive users, but the reality is that there are a large number of brands who launch ad accounts, try to generate a lot of quick sales before they’re banned, and then start over again when they are banned.
Be honest about what your product does and what results users can expect, both in the ad and the landing page.
Your Brand Can’t Track Users With Third-Party Tracking Without Permission
You need to ask users for permission before tracking them with your own on-site cookies. While different platforms’ pixels will capture information, you can’t capture and track any user information without asking.
How to Create Marketing Landing Pages
Want to see how to create a landing page at a core level to help increase overall campaign performance?
There are three simple steps to keep in mind.
Know the Essential Components of Marketing Landing Pages
There are a few essential components of a landing page.
In order to examine them, let’s look at a real example.
When you click on this ad:
You get this landing page:
It looks straightforward, but there are actually several core elements here, including the following:
- The product or service value proposition. You explain what users are getting, why it benefits them, and why they should purchase with you.
- The offer. This must be prominent. It can promote special pricing, a discount code, a freebie, or just state the purchase price.
- An urgency-driven component. This isn’t always a requirement, but it can be incredibly beneficial. Why should users act now instead of later?
- A strong call to action. Tell users what they’re going to do next and how; make it easy with clickable CTA buttons that take them to that next step.
- Integration with the rest of the site. Some tools help you create standalone landing pages, but you always want them to integrate with the main site so users can click around.
- A privacy policy and terms of service. Many different ad platforms require this, even if it’s in fine print at the bottom of the landing page.
Knowing this, it’s easier to see the different components in the landing page above and how they work together to drive conversions:
You’ve got the value propositions and product descriptions highlighted in blue, which includes the product demo video.
There’s the offer highlighted in green.
You can see two different CTAs in purple— one to watch a video, and one to buy now, so users can take the appropriate action depending on their stage of the customer journey.
In orange, you can see how the landing page ties in with the rest of the site.
There are two components on the site that just didn't fit into the picture. The first was the sense of urgency (a reminder that the sale was almost over that would pop up). The second was their terms of service at the bottom of the page.
Keep the Design Simple
As you’re creating your landing page, remember to choose a simple design. Whether you’re using a template with a tool like Unbounce or building the page manually, this is important.
You can (and should!) incorporate text, video, and image blocks as appropriate, but the design itself should be clean and easy to navigate, with all crucial information that we discussed above appearing above the fold (aka before you have to scroll down) to see more).
Waze has a clear and concise landing page that looks close to a website's main page.
Its intent is clear: To get you to advertise your business, and the tools to either find more information or sign up for their service are easy to see.
It’s effective. The landing page looks professional. The different sizes of font and contrasting colours help draw user attention to crucial parts of the landing page. You get the information you need quickly so you can determine whether or not to convert.
And remember to break up the different components discussed above, placing white space between them. Your CTAs should be clickable buttons in contrasting colours. You should have features and benefits (the value proposition) in bullet points or be represented with graphics. Have your core USP and offer close together so users know why it's important to act, with a powerful visual alongside it to drive the point home.
Build the Page
Now it’s finally time to create the landing page for your paid social ads! And remember that each campaign needs to have a relevant landing page to send users to, which means that you may be creating multiple landing pages regularly.
You can build landing pages with third-party tools like Unbounce to split test or build the page within your site directly.
Whichever you choose, know that you have more options to consider.
If you want to, you can have the landing page unlisted in the main navigation bar if you’re running special promotions. You can also keep it from being indexed in Google so that it won’t show up in search.
You can also have it unlisted on your site through the main navigation so people can only visit that page with a direct link coming from your ad (or their history).
Final Thoughts
Knowing how to create marketing landing pages for your social media ads that answer every question a viewer has about the product will always help you maximize conversions.
If you follow the directions and check that all of the page’s information is accurate and matches the ad, you should see a higher rate of conversion at this point in your sales funnel.
Want to create stronger marketing campaigns at every touchpoint? Check out our digital marketing course to learn more.
