And what about the leads that don’t convert?

Ignore them at your own peril.

As data-driven marketers, we’re keenly aware that most visitors won’t ever convert to a lead or sale. In some industries, conversion rates are as low as 1-2%. (See Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report for details.) But that doesn’t mean the 98-99% of non-converters are worthless visits. There are many ways to improve your chances of converting more visitors over time—and squeeze more value from your existing landing pages.

To unlock the full value of a landing page visit, you’ll want to track what happens to each visitor after the page view, form submission, click-through, or phone call. Measuring and feeding this data back into your campaigns will improve overall results and your ability to optimize campaigns for higher ROI.

Sound like something worth trying? Keep reading, and I’ll show you three smart ways to do it.

Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Visitors Who Don’t Immediately Convert …

As I wrote above, if your landing page converts at 2%, that means 98% of visitors aren’t converting on that particular session.

It‘s a mistake to ignore these non-converting visits. Sure, many will never convert because of a disconnect in the audience, offer, or timing. That’s life. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all landing page. But taking a longer-term view, it’s very likely that some of these prospects will eventually:

• Convert through other channels or sites not directly attributable to your landing page.
• Convert offline via phone or at a brick-and-mortar location.
• Convert after a longer consideration period.

Before you can start to take advantage of these longer-term converters, though, you need a better picture of where the visitors who do convert are coming from.

To see the full picture of conversions with multiple touchpoints, take a look at the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels report, which shows the variety of interactions that occur before a conversion. To find this report in GA, open the “Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths” report.

The example report below shows that paid search contributes many more “assisted conversions” than “last click conversions”: 

See how many conversions have direct, email, or organic search touchpoints after a visit to a paid search landing page? Those return visits likely come through different landing pages. Even though the paid search landing page did not generate the eventual conversion, data from conversion paths can help inform strategies to reach and convert visitors later in their journey.

Now that you’ve got a sense of where conversions are coming from, follow the three tips below to use your data wisely and put your landing pages to work.

Tip 1: Measure offline interactions generated by landing pages.

Businesses with physical locations or an offline sales channel can use landing pages to highlight their products and services to visitors from paid search and paid social channels.

But marketers have to be a little more creative with measuring performance if the ultimate goal is to generate phone calls or store visits. Taking this step is worth it, though: it’ll give you a fuller picture of how your campaigns drive business.

Store Visit Conversions

Google Ads and Facebook Ads offer Store Visits conversion types that allow marketers to see how ad interactions can influence foot traffic in a retail location such as a salon, shop, restaurant, or hotel. By tracking opted-in users’ mobile device locations, each ad platform extrapolates the number of people that showed up at your physical location within a specific number of days after viewing or clicking your ad. 

In other words, even if your landing page didn’t register an online conversion, the visitors that showed up at your physical location can still be counted in your campaign performance reports. 

Here are the three primary ways store visits are useful in PPC campaigns:

• As a campaign objective: Google and Facebook have separate campaign types for local businesses that encourage users to click to call or generate driving directions.
• Input for bid optimization strategies: Google’s smart bidding can use store visits as an input. Facebook Store Visit campaigns are optimized to show ads to viewers that are more likely to visit.
• As a conversion event: Report and analyze store visit performance by campaign or ad creative to determine which ads or audiences are most likely to drive in-store traffic.

If your Google Ads account meets the requirements for store visit conversions, you’ll see the data appear in your Conversion actions report in the “Tools > Conversions” menu. From there, you can create custom reports or view store visit conversion data at the campaign, ad group, ad, or keyword level. 

Facebook Ads campaigns with a store visit objective also provide results for campaign and ad analysis. Within the reporting interface, choose “Columns,” then “Customize Columns.” Search for “store visits” to add relevant metrics to your performance reports.

Phone Call Tracking

Lead generation landing pages often include a phone number as a primary or secondary call to action (CTA) to engage “warm leads” with a personal interaction. 

Many of our healthcare and home services clients receive 80-90% of their contacts by phone. People with complex scheduling or billing questions prefer to talk with a human rather than wait for a response from a web form. Even SaaS companies and e-commerce retailers benefit from providing trackable phone numbers on their landing pages to engage prospective customers before a sale. 

Phone calls provide precious data for marketers:

• Phone call conversions by landing page and/or test variant can determine the best performing layout.
• Keyword or campaign-level granularity can help identify valuable traffic drivers.
• Audio and text transcriptions are useful for identifying sales obstacles, common questions, and training opportunities for frontline teams.
• Additional conversion data can support Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) bidding.

How do we know this works? When coupled with Unbounce landing pages, phone call data helped us generate 219% more conversions for a legal client. These insights and performance gains wouldn’t have been possible without the qualitative and quantitative data gathered from phone calls—in addition to landing page form submissions.

Here’s a sample top-line report of calls generated by PPC campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. Drilldowns allow us to see new and repeat calls by campaign, keyword, and more.

Here are two simple ways to add phone call tracking to your landing pages:

• For maximum utility, use a phone call tracking platform such as CallRail and add tracking scripts to each landing page using Unbounce’s custom javascript, Script Manager, or Google Tag Manager. 

Not ready for a dedicated call tracking provider? Google has a built-in call conversion tracking solution for tracking calls generated by Google Ads campaigns. The implementation is a bit trickier and Google provides less call-level data than CallRail. But it’s great for tracking conversions and incorporating the data into conversion-based bidding strategies and reporting.

Tip 2. Integrate lead data with tools to improve sales outcomes.

Capturing leads and contact information is just the first step in converting a prospect to a buyer. Sales cycles vary in length and can span hours, days, or even months. How can you tell which original traffic source or landing page generated the leads that convert into high-value customers?

This is commonly referred to as “attribution” and is one of the most challenging problems facing marketers today. 

A solution usually requires passing data back and forth between marketing and sales teams to validate lead quality and identify which leads eventually closed into sales. Here are tools and methods we recommend to connect marketing and sales teams to understand landing page performance.

Integrate CRM and marketing automation platforms with landing pages.

Whether your sales team tracks leads in a spreadsheet or using a CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot, you’ll want to store as much marketing campaign information about each contact as possible. This data gets appended to the sales contact and can be analyzed to determine the most effective campaigns and offers. Some examples of the data you’ll want to collect include:

• Date/time of the initial and subsequent visits and interactions.
• The campaign, keyword, placement, audience list, and ad creative that originated each visit.
• The offer and CTA that the prospect responded to.
• The landing page URL and variant that captured the lead.

Marketing automation platforms such as Marketo or Pardot get more powerful with more data as well. Attribution data can help you customize or personalize your campaigns to improve your open and conversion rates by:

• Matching your email subject lines and content to the ad copy or creative that users initially engaged with to reinforce your positioning. 
• Showing the same offers and calls to action in your landing pages, email/text campaigns, and website personalization efforts to reinforce your messaging.

Connecting Landing Pages to Other Platforms

Don’t let the initial setup intimidate you.

Most CRMs and marketing automation platforms already have native integrations with the major ad platforms (or can be integrated using one of the tools listed below.) The information above can be automatically recorded for each prospect so you can focus your time elsewhere. A few quick pieces of advice for getting started:

• Unbounce has native integrations to automatically push lead data into the most common CRM systems, including Salesforce, Hubspot CRM, Marketo, and more.
• Zapier integrations cover nearly every system used by marketers. Can’t find a way to connect two (or more) pieces of software? Chances are, Zapier can make it as easy as pushing a few buttons. 
• If you can’t find an existing integration between your landing pages and your CRM, you may want to build your own API connections or use webhooks to push data from one platform to another.

Tip 3. Use landing pages to build audience lists for future ad targeting.

Just because a visitor didn’t convert on their first visit to your landing page doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. Perhaps the timing wasn’t right or they’re comparison shopping before making a final decision. Instead of throwing your hands up in the air, give them a reason to come back using targeted ads based on their previous behaviors.

The best way to re-engage visitors who don’t convert is to create segmented audience lists for remarketing ads or search campaigns. Start with these audience types and expand them as you learn what works best for your goals:

• Audiences based on engagement triggers: Do you have a product page with an embedded video? Perhaps you want to re-engage visitors that watched the video but haven’t converted yet. Creating audiences from Google Analytics events is an incredibly powerful tool for remarketing to very specific groups of visitors based on their intent or behaviors. Make a list of the meaningful engagement points on your landing page, then build audiences with the intent of sending ads to them later on.
• Audiences for each stage of your customer journey: Perhaps you want to reach previous leads with another offer to move them further along in their journey towards becoming a customer. Curious how it works? Here’s a real-life example from a successful campaign we ran for a custom home builder in the mid-Atlantic region: Once a prospect downloaded a PDF of home plans for inspiration, they were added to a new audience list. We started showing them ads promoting free model home tours and testimonials from existing customers. It worked like a charm, and we were able to stay top of mind with relevant information.
• Lookalike or similar audiences: Create an audience list based on any of the above. Google Ads and Facebook Ads will then find other users with similar characteristics in their networks. This is a great way to expand your reach and find new prospects.

Building audiences for remarketing in Google Analytics is relatively simple. Navigate to the “Admin > Property Settings > Audience Definitions > Audiences” menu to start creating rules-based audiences from your existing website traffic. 

Restrictive Remarketing Policies

Of course, some industries (e.g., healthcare and personal finance) have more restrictive remarketing policies that limit how advertisers can re-engage previous landing page visitors.

I highly recommend playing by Google and Facebook’s rules to avoid account suspensions. These policies constantly evolve as the ad platforms keep up with privacy regulations. Be sure to check them regularly, and especially before building new remarketing audiences for healthcare, financial services, and other affected industries.

But it is possible to work around remarketing limitations by creating engaging content that keeps visitors on our landing pages longer.

For example, we recently created an interactive “Are you a candidate for {treatment}?” that provided customized responses based on a visitor’s answers to simple questions about their condition. We could not remarket to visitors to this landing page because it was about a specific health condition. But we did capture more leads based on high initial engagement.

---

Don’t Let Valuable Prospects Get Away

Get those incremental conversions! Your landing pages have a lot more to offer if you treat them as a crucial part of your marketing strategy, rather than just a quick stop on your customer’s journey.

Build your free WordPress website with Host2.us free hosting today!