Less than half of marketers create a landing page for native ads. Get more return on ad spend by directing your native traffic to a landing page versus your homepage.
3 Reasons To Use a Customized Landing Page Versus Your Homepage for Native Ads
You’re no stranger to native ads and some of the key factors that improve your campaigns’ success—from bids to audience targeting. And you know the importance of optimizing ad performance on platforms like Google and Facebook.
But what about your landing page? Where are your ads taking users?
If you’re like most marketers, you’re directing traffic ad traffic to your homepage or to an existing landing page. By doing this, you could be negatively affecting your customers’ experience and, as a result, your return on ad spend (ROAS).
To get the most out of your native ad campaigns (and stop wasting your advertising dollars), you need to join the 48% of marketers who are doing it right—and that starts with creating a customized landing page for every single one of your marketing campaigns.
Read on as we discuss how the extra time and effort can pay off, big time.
3 reasons to use a landing page versus your homepage
An investment in native advertising can reap big dividends, but when you link your native ad to your homepage instead of a relevant landing page, you’re losing valuable traffic.
Every native ad needs a completely separate, unique landing page. Yes, it means your team will have some extra work to do, but it’s the right move if you want to measure results, boost conversions, and improve the customer experience.
1. Measure results
Attribution is a huge problem in any marketing campaign. But when advertising dollars are on the line, it’s even more important to understand your native ad campaign results.
When you direct traffic to your homepage, you have no way of knowing which ads led to conversions. While tracking pixels can solve a piece of the attribution puzzle, they aren’t foolproof. The best way to understand campaign performance—and justify ad spend—is to have a unique landing page for each ad.
Create a landing page for every ad in your campaign and give it a unique URL. This lets you tie each ad to an action on your site. You can tell which ads encourage conversions and which don’t perform well, which will help you create better ads over time.
The impact on conversions and revenue just isn’t possible without link tracking. Using a unique landing page versus your homepage gives you cleaner conversion data so you can see where your dollars are best spent.
2. Boost conversions
What’s the purpose of your homepage? Generally, homepages aren’t intended for conversions. They’re a hub of information for site visitors, routing them to where they need to go.
The downside is that your homepage is too general: You’re competing against yourself by distracting users with your blog, products, and other extraneous links.
Using a landing page versus your homepage results in less clutter because they have a single purpose: converting visitors. Each landing page has just one audience, action, and idea behind it. Done well, a landing page minimizes confusion and makes the visitor’s next steps clear.
Remember: Your homepage is a starting point, not a sales generator. Never assume that the next steps are obvious to site visitors; spell them out in black and white.
3. Improve the customer experience
Imagine you’re running a t-shirt campaign. When a visitor clicks on your ad, they expect that it will take them to a t-shirt product page. Instead, you route them to your homepage, which lists all of your product lines. It’s confusing for your customer, and they abandon your site because they don’t want to dig for the right product page.
This is why every native ad needs to be paired with a hyper-focused landing page.
Promises in the ad, like discounts or limited-time offers, will be consistent with what your user sees on the landing page. This consistency helps you reduce customers’ frustration, build trust, and speed up decision-making.
Using a focused landing page versus your homepage can also make audience segmentation possible, allowing you to craft personalized, relevant information for your site visitors (messaging for new customers, lost leads, and abandoned carts, for example). And since 88% of marketers see an improvement in campaign performance when they focus on personalization, this isn’t something you want to ignore.
Invest in landing pages versus your homepage
Native ads help brands stand out online, but only if you optimize them the right way.
You’re investing a significant amount of resources into native ads, and you want to see a return on your investment. To do this, you need to create specific, relevant landing pages for each marketing campaign.
Not sure how to build conversion-friendly landing pages? Brax.io can help! Check out our quickstart guide to get your team on the right path.
