Due to the growing popularity of landing pages, questions began to arise more and more often: what is the significant difference between entry points and special landing pages (aka landing pages)?

You can read more about landing pages. In this one, we will look at what is common and what is the difference between these, in general, similar concepts, but with their own characteristics.

1. On the login page, the user must understand where he is

The entire site must be made as a single unit. Wherever the user goes, he must immediately understand where he is, what kind of site it is, what is being offered to him, and where to go next. Hence the required attributes: a single style, standard elements, as on all other pages (header, footer, standard menu, end-to-end blocks). Bread crumbs are a must.

Landing page doesn't need this. Of course, it should be made in a general style, it should also be clear what the company is, there should be a logo, but it can be in a completely different place and of a different size. This page is self-sufficient and seems to exist on its own.

2. Site journey and call to action right now

If, for example, the site has clearly defined target audiences, then landing pages they make them “breeders”. For example, banks often offer to immediately switch to the section for individuals or legal entities.

3. Specific offer and choice of options

There is always one specific offer on the landing page. It must be clearly formulated, well described, and look convincing.
On a regular login page, the user is always given some choice:

This is the strength and at the same time the limitations of landing pages. For example, you sell electric kettles. You can make a standard website with a catalog of teapots and product cards by model/brand. Thus, if a user is looking for a specific model, he gets to the product card. If it’s a brand, go to the brand catalog. If you have a general request for teapots, go to the catalogue.
But if you want to make a special landing page, you need to decide what exactly you want to promote. For example, if you have an exclusive offer for a certain brand, we create a special page. Or you have a sale (discount on all teapots) - we do the landing at a discount.
If there is no special offer, you can simply make a specially general page for dummies, but in this case the effect will be minimal. Firstly, for such a general proposal, users will have a lot of ambiguities, and they simply will not contact you. And secondly, the load on managers with “left” orders and clarifying requests will increase significantly.
Therefore, I would like to point out once again that the landing page should have a clear offer with your unique advantage.

4. Difference in performance evaluation

One of the problems of a landing page is assessing its effectiveness. The fact is that standard indicators (as for login pages) are not suitable, since the landing page is a separate page, the bounce rate on it is always 100%, as well as views per user is always 1. Time on the page also most often does not mean anything:

The only thing you can look at is a heat map of clicks and a scroll map in Yandex.Metrica.
An adequate indicator of effectiveness, of course, is the number of applications from the landing page. It is also impossible to compare it with regular landing pages, and it is quite difficult to determine which indicator is good. But it is believed that 5% conversion is the minimum limit. If it’s lower, something needs to be done.
Although you must understand that everything very much depends on your offer and the quality of the traffic itself. For example, look at how my conversion from context differs from my conversion from organic. Even though the number of requests is approximately the same, the effectiveness of requests is very different.

The only thing I can recommend is to make regular changes to your landing pages and run A/B tests to identify the best options.
So, both landing pages and entry points play a very important role on your website. Each should be thoughtful and relevant to the purpose for which you create it (and for which the user gets there). The purpose of the landing page is a quick sale. The purpose of the entry point is to lure the user to the site and ultimately sell him something, but with greater alternatives and prospects. Design these pages wisely.

If you have questions about landing pages, or would like to order one for yourself, write to me. I'm sure we will find effective solution your tasks.
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Skype: last_elven

Specialist

Features and difficulties of contextual advertising for financial organizations

Speaking at the FinPlace conference in 2016, I asked bank marketers if they run contextual advertising. Few answered in the affirmative. But it turned out that many are actively buying traffic from the “context” from CPA networks. Arbitrageurs receive payment for a targeted action on the advertiser’s website, for example, filling out an application, subscribing to a newsletter, or purchasing a product. They competently set up contextual advertising and, in fact, resell this traffic (that’s why they call it arbitrage).

The question arises: why do marketers of banks and other financial organizations buy up traffic instead of engaging in contextual advertising themselves and purchasing it directly from Direct and AdWords?

So, let’s try to figure out why it is often difficult for financial organizations to independently achieve high efficiency from contextual advertising.

Problem #1: Semantic Scope

Semantics is a set of key phrases that an advertiser targets when promoting their products in Yandex and Google searches, and negative phrases that they use to exclude inappropriate search queries. Banks have a huge amount of semantics.

Not long ago, Tinkoff Bank posted a vacancy for a context specialist. It indicated that the specialist would work with large budgets and semantics of more than 30,000 keywords. These are quite significant volumes, especially if we are not talking about an online store. In the case of online retail, such figures are not surprising, but for another type of business this is a very impressive figure. I assume that this is not all the semantics, but only a part that will be offered to a specialist at initial stage work. And later he will be entrusted with the entire context of tinkoff.ru, and the volume will increase even more.

Only in the main areas of b2c (loans, deposits, mortgages) semantics of 400,000 key phrases or more are easily collected. It’s hard to work with such a volume: select the necessary key phrases, minus (weed out) inappropriate requests, group by directions and campaigns. But for each ultimately selected key phrase, you need to select a suitable landing page and write a relevant ad.

It is interesting how bankers and representatives of advertising agencies themselves describe the complexity of this problem.

Director of the Digital Business Department at Vostochny Bank

Indeed, there is a lot of semantics, and all of it has to be selected “by hand”, for this you need a team. Automation is difficult, and you need to proofread everything in order to catch rare negative keywords (for example, “cash loan where to complain”) and find the most relevant queries. Vostochny Bank has two key products: cash loans and credit cards. People ask questions about loans in a thousand different ways, specifying the required amount, conditions, etc. This mass of requests needs to be analyzed and structured in order to further work with each group separately. All this is predominantly manual labor.

I'll tell you how we worked. For loans, we collected primary semantics from 18,000 queries, and about 10,000 for credit cards. We made masks in advance for the highest-frequency queries, which include many keyword phrases with clarifications. Then we expanded these masks using all nested mid-frequency and low-frequency queries - we got 40,000 phrases of “dirty” semantics. Then we manually found negative keywords, which were then minified throughout the entire sample. Then we structured the requests into four groups:

• branded (for example, “get a loan from Vostochny Bank”);
• competitive (everything is the same, but the names of other banks appear);
• general queries (for example, “cash loan rate”: the user is interested in the product);
• transactional (requests with formed “hot” demand, for example, “get a loan in three days”).

We divided the queries into these categories - taking into account the deleted words, it was necessary to mark approximately 18,000 key phrases. The collected semantics were structured by geography: separate accounts were created for several dozen regions. Then headings and texts are prepared for all categories, advertisements are designed according to our standards (working with extensions, providing “highlighting”, etc.). All of the above took a team of three people about five working days from start to launch.

Problem #2: Creating ads for every search query

When I offhand analyzed the advertising for one of the requests, I got the impression that banks present their clients as people who are motivated to take out a loan from their bank, who do not need to be convinced of anything, who do not need to simplify the process of converting from a visitor to a lead .

In search advertising, it is very important to show relevant ads and direct visitors to the most suitable landing pages, which succinctly answer all the user’s questions and remove doubts. In the ad and on the website, the user should see exactly what he expects: exactly the words and wording that he himself used in the search query.

What does this look like in practice? Let's take the search query “cash loan on the day of application using a passport without income certificates,” which is high-frequency, despite the large number of words in it. In Moscow and the Moscow region, users enter such queries more than 2,600 times per month.

If you look at the real Yandex search results in Moscow, we will find that of the three ads in the most expensive block above the organic search results th (in special placement) not a single advertiser provided a specific answer to the user request .

In the first advertisement, Moscow Credit Bank offers a cash loan. But the fact that “only a passport is needed for registration” is announced only at the end of the advertisement. By this request this information should be, if not in the title, then as close to it as possible.

The third ad - from LOCKO-Bank - offers cash loans from the bank at a low rate. There is no information corresponding to the user request: according to the passport, without certificates, on the day of application.

The banks' answers do not correspond to what the user is looking for. If the bank does not issue such loans, then such requests should be rejected. If the advertiser is ready to issue a loan on such terms, then this should be written in the advertisement itself.

Contextual advertising specialist Konstantin Dobrov conducted an interesting study: he analyzed the queries for which banks are advertised and the number of unique ad titles. On average, one unique title accounts for from 7-8 unique requests to 66-125. That is, work on creating the most relevant ads for each key phrase is not carried out .

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the complexity of this process. In online commerce, the process of creating ads can be automated: a product has a brand, model, price, and characteristics by which users search for the product. By assembling these elements, the advertiser can automatically compose key phrases and ad titles that are immediately relevant to them. Advertisements for banks are compiled manually, since all semantics are obtained organically - from search engine statistics, and not generated.

Secondly, the most relevant headlines do not always provide a real increase in advertising effectiveness, for example, they lead to a reduction in the cost of attracting a loan application. Sometimes reducing relevancy by more clearly emphasizing the benefits of a particular bank increases ad click-through rates and landing page conversions. But only appropriate tests can show this.

Problem #3: Irrelevant Landing Pages

A landing page is a website page that a user lands on after clicking on an ad. Like ads, landing pages should be relevant, answer the user's question, and contain information they expect to see.

Let's look at the bank landing pages from the example above. Follow the link from the first advertisement to the website of the Moscow Credit Bank .

The user sees approximately what he expects. There is not much text on the page, it is divided into separate paragraphs and is easy to understand. You can also work on usability, for example, reducing the number of fields in the application form or making it more convenient. But in general, the user receives an answer to his question.

To proceed to the next step, he needs to enter the characters from the captcha). A potential client must have a very strong motivation to take out a loan from this particular bank - after all, just to figure out whether he can get a loan on the terms he needs, he will have to work hard to decipher difficult-to-read characters.

In the third case, the user ends up on a huge landing page of LOKO-Bank with large full-screen illustrations.

It will be very difficult for the user to figure out whether he can get the service he needs. There is no application form on the landing page, and the “Fill out an application” button blends into the background and does not attract attention.

I suspect that the reason for the lack of relevant landing pages is the excessive bureaucratization of the process of approving the development of new pages and their implementation on the websites of financial organizations. Colleagues who have worked in similar areas confirm this.

Head of Client Relations Group at i-Media Agency

There are problems with approvals, and it is especially difficult when they relate to graphic materials (banners, etc.). You send a banner, and it takes several days for three different people to approve it along the chain. Amendments are made, then re-agreed, and so on again and again. Therefore, it is better to prepare graphic materials on the client side. A trusted designer thoroughly knows the brand book, banner placement policies, rules for using characters and all other subtleties, and both parties will save a lot of time and resources.

Common technical mistakes

So, we can highlight several technical mistakes that are made when launching advertising for financial organizations:

1. Financial institutions do not cover full semantics. If online stores can automate this aspect of work, then in the field of financial products this is almost impossible. It is not profitable for the agencies that banks turn to to do so much manual work; it simply will not pay off.

2. Banks are often advertised based on non-target requests. The reason is poor semantics. During manual processing, the larger the volume of semantics, the more difficult it is to eliminate all inappropriate search queries and the easier it is to make a mistake.

4. Lack of relevant landing pages that match different search queries.

For search advertising to be effective, it is imperative to speak the client’s language, use his wording from search queries. Otherwise, the user will quickly leave your landing page - after all, he has several links open at once; maybe next there will be a site where the information will be presented more clearly and accessible. Affiliates know this and optimize ads and landing pages for each individual need.

Typical organizational mistakes of banks when working with agencies

When a bank orders a service for setting up contextual advertising from an agency, it wants to increase the number of approved loans. But for some reason, the bank often sets other KPIs to the agency: the cost of attracting a loan application and the volume of applications. The contractor collects these applications to meet KPIs, but the bank does not approve most of them. As a result, the customer remains dissatisfied with the agency’s services, demands that the situation be corrected, but does not tell which applications were rejected and for what reason. In such conditions, the agency simply does not have the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns: it is not clear which key phrases and sites generate bad applications and which ones generate good ones.

Thus, here we have two errors at once:

1. initially incorrectly set KPIs;
2. providing the agency with incomplete information.

Directions for solving problems

What can financial institutions do to stop buying traffic and engage in contextual advertising on their own and achieve good results?

1. Automate the creation of advertising campaigns

This will most likely require custom development. Almost every contextual advertising automation system has an advertising campaign generator, but they only cope well with simple topics (for example, Appliances and electronics). Not all advertisers have a simple product structure consisting of product type, brand and model (e.g. Lenovo laptop IdeaPad). In the automation market, as elsewhere, the rule “demand creates supply” works. For example, for the online hypermarket Ozon.ru, our team of mathlinguists and developers created an individual solution - an advertising campaign generator that takes into account the features of such difficult-to-generate topics as children's products and clothing.

2. Get rid of bureaucracy when developing landing pages

A contextual advertising specialist should be able to independently edit a landing page and create a modified copy for a specific key phrase. Give him clear rules about what can and cannot be written in public space, a brand book and other recommendations. But don’t force him to approve each page in several instances.

3. Determine and set the right KPIs

The bank's marketer must set agency specialists the correct KPIs that reflect the company's business goals, and not intermediate metrics. For example, if you need approved loans, then you need to set a corresponding task, but in this case you will have to disclose the data to the agency so that it can optimize advertising campaigns. The agency must understand how many approved loans it has attracted, and how many have not passed the scoring and why.

4. Use all the capabilities of advertising systems

Today, contextual advertising is not just search ads. Yandex.Direct and GoogleAdWords tools include bid adjustments, remarketing based on data from CRM, audience targeting for precise and wide coverage, and different advertising formats. Be sure to allocate part of your budget to testing new approaches, try combining different types advertising.

One of the trends in online advertising in 2017 is the combination of display, contextual advertising and CRM data into a single system. For example, you can introduce a Yandex pixel into a media banner and increase bids already in search advertising for that segment of users who have seen media advertising. Those who have already seen the ad are, on average, more likely to convert. Or, for example, you can reduce rates for those social-demographic audiences that show a high percentage of refusals on scoring. Or gather an audience by geolocation in areas of new buildings and offer them a loan for renovations in a new apartment. There are many options, don't ignore these additional options.

As of 2015, 66% or 23.3 million Russian Internet users aged 18 to 64 years living in cities with a population of 100 thousand or more use Internet banking for individuals, their number increased by 51% in 2014, and the amount of payment orders is 1.1 trillion rubles.

We solve the problems of promoting a bank website

Promoting a website on the Internet for a financial organization solves two main tasks: selling banking products and managing the bank’s reputation.

• Bank reputation management
• Attracting deposits from individuals
• Attracting business to RKO
• Mobile banking application promotion
• Sale of credit products and cards
• Attracting clients to RBS
• Sale of bank guarantees and tender loans

The decision-making process of users when choosing a banking service provider looks like this: unconscious need - conscious need - search - comparison and evaluation - transaction. The bank’s reputation—feedback from clients and employees—plays an important role in this process. We take into account all the nuances of promoting banking products on the Internet, from monitoring and reputation management to conducting large-scale contextual campaigns and search engine promotion.

Advantages of promoting a bank on the Internet

In banking, numbers mean a lot. According to the results of a survey of clients of the largest banks, conducted by the analytical agency Markswebb Rank & Report, when asked where you learned about the bank’s services, 30% of respondents answered via the Internet. More than 80% of potential consumers search in global network information about banking products using search engines. For example, in July 2015, in the capital region alone, users asked the Yandex search engine the query “bank deposits” 5,200 times. Number of similar search queries from target audience tens of thousands in Yandex and Google. Behind every search query are potential clients who are directly interested in receiving quality services, and their number is constantly growing.

According to Markswebb Rank & Report, in Russia more than 2.7 million people use Internet banks for legal entities and individual entrepreneurs. Over the course of a year, credit institutions receive payment orders worth 284.3 trillion rubles from legal entities via the Internet.

The share of electronic channels in the volume of all payment orders of legal entities from 2008 to 2013 increased from 79% to 88%. The share of payment orders sent via the Internet over the same period increased from 31% to 68%. This is due to the active transition of bank clients from old software systems"bank-client" to more modern "Internet clients".

Features of bank website promotion:

• High level of competition for high-frequency queries;
• Services for individuals and legal entities;
• Complex financial services for the b2b sector;
• Multi-channel measurement of website conversion - applications, calls or contacts directly to the bank;

Stages of promoting banking services on the Internet

Promoting a bank into the top 10 of Yandex and Google searches begins with setting goals and identifying tools to achieve the goal. Initially, the semantic core is collected by which the audience is looking for banking services. Then the semantics are distributed across the pages of the site; this work determines the pages that will be shown in response to a specific user request. The page must contain a comprehensive answer to the user’s request and encourage him to complete a targeted action, call or application. Landing pages are assessed for completeness of information and simplicity of design (usability). The landing pages of competing banks, their functionality, usability and design are assessed. The landing page must meet the following criteria:

• The user immediately finds the information he is interested in; for this purpose, the information on the page is structured and visually highlighted.
• The page allows you to decide on the benefits of a product, for example by comparing tariffs, interest rates or the amount of interest accumulated over the year.
• On any page, the user can easily find contacts and addresses of branches or ATMs, opening hours and a guide to popular bank services.
• The page clearly formulates the user’s further target action - it conducts an initial collection of information and contacts of the user, and then stimulates a call, application or visit to the bank.

Promotional landing pages are developed depending on the product and its target audience. Their main purpose is to convert visitors into applications. The simpler the effective action, the lower the cost and the higher the number of applications. It is important to understand the process of choosing a service provider during the search and comparison/evaluation phase, and provide all the necessary information on the page, focusing on the key benefits of the offer. Web services work well, for example, loan and mortgage calculators, calculators for assessing the profitability of deposits, etc.

Advantages work with our company

We follow the principles of search engine optimization of Yandex and recommendations for webmasters from Google

All pages and queries are generated by a relevance map. The missing pages and services are being developed. For each service, a unique product offering and related services are formulated. As a result, the site becomes a sales funnel scenario through which users go through all stages before conversion. For each group of search queries, their own landing pages are created; if there are thousands of queries, hundreds of pages will be created. For example, banking offers for individual regions or pages for each type of service.

After completing the preparatory work on the site, you should set up tracking of leads - applications to the site and calls. This way you can accurately estimate the cost of an attracted user for each channel. The ideal situation is the exchange of information about leads with the bank’s CRM, this allows you to quickly evaluate and optimize contextual campaigns up to the ruble, disabling ineffective requests.

Working with landing pages includes search engine optimization(SEO) of the entire site and landing pages of the site. It includes work on adjusting page titles and texts for key queries (text relevance) and bringing the technical condition of the site to the recommendations of search engines.

Next, we set up monitoring of site positions by semantic core, we monitor the relevance of site pages in search results. Then we begin promoting the site’s materials on third-party thematic resources and carefully increase the site’s link mass. To do this, we use only thematic donors with good attendance and trust indicators.

Promotion across a broad semantic core allows you to achieve good results for the promoted product line in certain regions of the bank’s presence.

Search Engine Optimization Tariffs

Promotion through positions has become unpredictable, and it has become impossible to guarantee positions in the search. Search results for each user may vary depending on their behavior and location. The number of words in queries has increased thanks to search suggestions. Search engines they try to guess what the user is asking when typing a word and shows the queries that users ask most often. We have developed the most effective rates for website promotion, tailored to the goals various types business.

Dmitry Dementiy

You've probably encountered the creation and optimization of landing pages while promoting online projects. Developing a quality landing page is a critical component of marketing campaigns. This material will introduce you to three examples of cool landing pages, and will also show you the components of their success. But first things first.

Landing pages: definition, performance criteria

Effective landing pages meet the following criteria:

For a landing page to bring good traffic, it needs to be free of errors, which we talk about in the video.

Three examples of killer landing pages

There are no perfect landing pages, since static is one of the enemies of a good landing page. However, the examples below are very close to the ideal option. Let's take a closer look at them.

Content Rules landing page

American content developer Content Rules has created an effective landing page to distribute its e-book.

What Content Rules did right:

• Design

The landing page looks nice and simple. The headline attracts the visitor's attention to the conversion action (Download the book for free right now - this is an approximate translation of the headline).

• Photo

The only photo on the landing page is a preview of the e-book cover. This photo attracts the visitor’s attention and clearly demonstrates the product to him, but does not distract him from performing the necessary action.

• Brand strength

The Content Rules logo increases the visitor's confidence in the quality of the product.

What can be improved:

It significantly increases the effectiveness of your landing page, as users can sign up for your newsletter within seconds.

What can be improved:

• Content

This landing page contains too much text that distracts visitors from the registration form.

• Design

ALM specialists should test versions of the same landing page with a simplified design. Reducing the number of information blocks and eliminating a large number of colors are ways to quickly improve appearance pages.

Windows Intune landing page

Microsoft uses a landing page to distribute a 30-day trial cloud service Windows Intune.

What Microsoft company did it right:

• Review

Compared to a regular site. Remember Lebedevsky LP for Tinkoff Credit Systems", landing pages of Alfa Bank and others. In a word, the time has come to study the experience of business sharks.

Landing page loans: where to start

Let's start by studying the offers on the market.

A compact page option with only the essentials: logo, offer, key benefits, registration form and button. Tinkoff Credit Systems is testing various (stacks of money, stopwatch, etc.) and several header options. Another option from them:

Check out some more options landing pages for applying for a loan.

And one more option to make sure that landing pages selling banking services are similar:

Why are all these landing pages made like carbon copies? The answer suggests itself.

Basically, with the help of landing pages, “quick” loans are promoted, for example, secured by an apartment, without guarantors, quickly and simply. The decision to take this type of loan comes spontaneously, often suddenly (money is urgently needed), so the landing page appeals, first of all, to the borrower’s emotions. Short benefit sentences, no more than three or four words, are ideal for this.