Your toaster, the thermostat, that Keurig in your office — if only everything in life were as simple as “set it and forget it.”
Unfortunately for you, while many marketing processes are streamlined with the invention of automation technology, there are still some tedious digital tasks you need to do the old fashioned way.
That includes the post-publishing checkup you should give your post-click landing page once it goes live.
You already know how disastrous it can be to press the “publish” button before you’re ready. As you’ll see, it can be just as dangerous, if not more, to publish your page without giving it a once-over afterward. Some things you won’t know are wrong until it’s live on the web.
Address these glaring issues before your post-click landing page visitors arrive, or you’re in for a long and wasteful campaign. Then, if you want to make sure your post-click landing page is ready to take on traffic, download the rest of our publishing checklist here.
Post-publishing post-click landing page checkups for successful marketing
1. Check the CTAs of your marketing post-click landing pages
Your CTA buttons may be written well and they may be the right color to draw the attention of your prospects, but if nothing happens when you click them, your post-click landing page is about as useful as an inflatable dartboard.
Once your page is published, take a few minutes to click all your CTA buttons. Are they working? Are they linked to the right page or form box?
All of your CTAs should lead your prospect to the same place — even if they’re each written uniquely, and located in different spots on your post-click landing page.
Remember, every post-click landing page should be built with one purpose — to get your prospect to convert on an individual offer. The more offers available to them on one page, the more overwhelmed they’re likely to be.
So click every CTA to ensure it’s doing its job to direct your prospect to the correct destination — whether that be a “thank you” page or the second post-click landing page in a two-step click-through process.
Your prospects will have no patience for dysfunctional buttons. If they click it once, and it doesn’t work, don’t expect them to hunt around for a button that does. A swift exit from your post-click landing page is more likely.
2. Make sure your visitors’ data is feeding through your form
Your prospects’ email addresses are only valuable if they make it to you. What we mean is, if your form isn’t feeding your prospects’ data through to your CRM, a MailChimp database, or wherever you’ve designated it to go, then it’s worthless.
Give your form a test-drive. Enter information into every field to make sure it’s being transmitted correctly. You don’t want to find, after your page has been live for days and you’ve generated hundreds of conversions, that your form hasn’t captured any lead information.
3. Make sure your promotional channels are good to go
It’s been a full 24 hours since you’ve published your page, yet you’ve not only failed to generate a single conversion, but no one has even visited your post-click landing page.
How could that be?!
Whoops. You forgot to make sure the campaigns charged with generating traffic were actually running. No wonder you haven’t seen any visitors to your page.
Once you publish, make sure that:
- You’ve shared your post-click landing page with your social networks
- Your PPC campaign is live
- Your social media ad campaigns are switched to the “on” position
- The blog that announces your offer is published, too (with functioning CTAs in the article)
- The email announcement is scheduled to be sent shortly after your page and offer is published
Without a traffic source, the only thing your post-click landing page can do is sit on the web looking pretty. Make sure it has a steady stream of visitors knocking at its door once you publish.
4. Make sure you delivered the content you promised
“Thanks for downloading! Your ebook will be sent to the email address you provided,” the headline of your “thank you” page reads.
Aside from realizing that your headline could be better, after testing your post-click landing page you noticed that the ebook hasn’t been sent to the email address you provided.
You checked your inbox, waited for a few minutes, and checked again. Still… nothing.
If that happens, here’s what you should do:
- Check all your email folders
Sometimes for one reason or another, important emails get filtered into our spam folder. Check not only your spam folder, but Gmail’s “social” and “promotions” folders as well. The more you know about where the email ends up, the better directions you can give to your prospect on your “thank you” page about where they can find it.
- Check to make sure it wasn’t an error on your part
Did you enter the wrong email address into that form? Check your database or go back and convert again through your form. If the content made it to you the second time, it was probably a result of a spelling error on your part.
- Make sure your “download” is in the right place?
You may have never noticed, but many times when you click the “download” button on a post-click landing page to redeem content, you’re not actually downloading a file. Instead, you’re sent to a page on which the report, white paper, or guide has been uploaded by the marketer.
If this is a technique you’re using (driving your new leads to a page instead of sending them a downloadable file), ask yourself if you’re sending them to the right page. Is it live? Is it linked correctly?
If your post-click landing page visitors go through the trouble of submitting their personal information, but aren’t delivered the content they were promised, you can bet they won’t respond to any of the marketing messages you had planned to send them.
5. Make sure you’re optimizing
Only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. A successful post-click landing page is one that evolves over time to better serve its visitors. More satisfaction for them means higher conversion rates for you. So how do you do that?
Through testing and analysis.
Now that your post-click landing page is live, it’s important to keep an eye on your analytics dashboard to determine next steps for optimization.
A/B test to see which of your post-click landing page variations is performing better, and set display rate percentages to divide your traffic between them based on the results.
Then get even greater insight by integrating your post-click landing page with Google Analytics, and track things like:
- How many total people viewed your page
- How much time your visitors spent on your page
- Which page or set of pages your prospect entered your website from
- The percentage of people who leave your website after only viewing one page (bounce rate)
- The value of your post-click landing page — which is determined by calculating the value of all the pages that drove your prospect there
Knowing statistics like these will help you determine if you’re generating bad traffic, and if you’re delivering the right message at the right time.
6. Test to see if your CRM synced with your page
Every one of your new leads is unique — with different wants and motivations. To effectively nurture those leads to sale, your marketing messages need to meet their needs as personally as possible.
Customer relationship software from companies like Zoho and Salesforce allow you to sort those leads and send them highly targeted messages based on where they are they are in the buyer’s journey. Here’s a quick refresher on its stages using an Instapage prospect as an example:
- The awareness stage: the prospect is experiencing symptoms of a problem. For an Instapage prospect, this problem would be something like “I don’t know how to code or build my own post-click landing page. This is frustrating and too complicated to learn. There has to be an easier way.”
- The consideration stage: the prospect has clearly defined the problem and is researching ways to solve it. An Instapage prospect might Google “build a post-click landing page without coding,” or “designer-friendly post-click landing page builder.” She’ll see a link to Instapage’s website, along with links to other post-click landing page software, and likely evaluate each to see which best meets her needs.
- The decision stage: the prospect understands her options, and decides which is best for her. For an Instapage prospect, this means signing up for a trial of the software.
Delivering the right message at the right time is crucial to gently guiding your prospects to the final stage.
If your post-click landing page visitors have just converted to claim a short tip sheet and the first message you send them now that you have their email is “Start your free trial,” chances are you’re not going to get a great response.
Prospects in that stage likely aren’t ready to sign up for a trial of your software. According to Regalix, something more helpful in between, like a case study or a research report, might more effectively push your prospects toward a purchase.
Check to make sure your leads are being sorted correctly in your CRM database. Just one misguided marketing message at the wrong time has the potential to drive your prospect to the “unsubscribe” button in their email account.
7. Make sure your click-to-call contact info is working
Since the majority of internet users access the web via mobile, a click-to-call phone number is an easy way for your prospects to reach you via their mobile devices.
When working correctly, a click-to-call phone number allows your prospect to just tap the contact information on your post-click landing page to call your business.
Visit your post-click landing page from a mobile device. Is your click-to-call button working? Does the tap of a finger initiate a call with your customer service representatives?
If not, it’s time to troubleshoot.
8. Test your pixels to see if they’re firing
Snippets of code called “pixels,” used to perform some marketing functions (like deliver advertising for example), have to “fire” to do their jobs correctly. “Firing” means that when a prospect takes a desired action, like visiting a specific page on your website, that pixel registers the visit and subsequently adds that prospect to a list to be targeted later.
Let’s take the Meta pixel for example. When you want to create an ad campaign to target Facebook users who have visited your post-click landing page but haven’t converted, you’ll add pixels to both your post-click landing page and your “thank you” page.
When those pixels are firing correctly, you’ll be able to run ad campaigns targeted toward those who have visited your post-click landing page while excluding audiences who have visited your “thank you” page (people who have already converted). (Read more about that here.)
But, techniques like this one will only work if your pixel registers the people visiting your pages. To see if your pixel is firing, test your post-click landing page by converting and see if your analytics dashboards register a conversion.
(Learn more here about testing Google and Meta pixels.)
Is your post-click landing page ready for visitors?
Think your post-click landing page is ready to take on massive traffic? You won’t know for sure until you download the rest of the checklist here.