The Daily Carnage

The better you are at ensuring your customer that you are the unique answer to their specific need—and guiding them to take action—the higher your landing page conversion rates will be. Here’s how:

1. Create unique landing pages for unique audiences. Improve your conversion rates by providing a hyper-relevant trail for users. Send remarketing traffic to a new landing page that addresses the obstacles they might have encountered the first time around. Plus, you should segment your landing page by traffic source and funnel stage. For example, a Reddit landing page might be more text-heavy and educational than a Facebook landing page.
2. Test smarter. In split testing, isolate items like selling proposition and elements of trust. How are users perceiving these items within the first few seconds of landing on the page? Pay special attention to features above the fold, like headlines, hero images, and CTAs. Consider also testing dramatically different page layouts—instead of just single elements—to understand how audiences interact with content.
3. Begin with the end in mind. Eliminate distractions by limiting navigation—include one CTA and no option to click away to another page. Most users will only scan content and few will scroll, so rely on bullets and pictures to convey your message. Consider a sticky bar so the CTA follows users down the page.
4. Less is more. Write clearly and concisely with a readability at a fifth-grade level (depending on your industry). When it comes to design, user experience will always win out over the wow-factor. Ensure your page loads quickly and meets accessibility requirements.
5. Nothing beats a great offer. You know the deal: a great offer is urgent, provides immediate gratification, and is novel—but still believable.

Ready to land the perfect landing page? Dig deeper at Search Engine Land.

We’ve rolled with the punches—banner ads built for desktops (2000s), mobile-friendly ads (2010’s), social media and video formats (now!). But how will the burgeoning age of machine learning change digital campaigns? Here are 4 rules-of-thumb:

1. One-to-one marketing. We will no longer have to determine where a user is in the purchase journey—the algorithm can do that for us. Provide it with enough assets to reach every step of the purchase journey—from explainer videos to product benefit videos to static ads with offers.
2. Feed the machine. Machine learning requires a lot of input in terms of creative assets. For maximum portability, provide it with multiple aspect ratios for static and video, and test a variety of ad formats, such as text overlays, UGC, animations, and more.
3. Account for short attention spans. We’re down to a six-second window, folks. Move your story arc to the front, highlight your logo in first few moments, and get that CTA in quickly.
4. Actionable tests. Algorithms excel at testing minor differences in creative. But traditional A/B testing will still be useful for measuring statistical significance ahead of major shifts in brand positioning, for example.

Read more over at Search Engine Land.