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You can spend hours creating great visuals, copy and targeting for your Facebook ads, but if you’re sending your audience to wrong or poorly executed landing pages, chances are you’re going to lose them.
We’ve been collecting data across different industries to find the best performing landing pages and I’m here to give you all our wisdom on creating amazing Facebook Ads landing pages that actually convert.
Why run ads on Facebook?
If you’re reading this then you probably know the value of advertising on Facebook but let us just indulge for a minute.
Social media marketing is one of the most popular ways for brands to advertise and is only becoming more popular and effective. In fact, SproutSocial reported that “91% of executives will increase their social media marketing budgets in the next 3 years,” so it must be working.
But why Facebook ads?
As of Q3 of 2021, Facebook had 2,910 million active users worldwide. That’s a pretty big number and a massive audience to market to. Obviously you’re not going to be showing your ads to 2,910 million people. However, this vast number does mean that your audience, now matter how niche, is likely to be on the platform.
This makes Facebook Ads a great option for marketing your business, whatever industry you’re in, and yes, it’s great for B2B too. It’s also a surprisingly affordable advertising platform and their super advanced targeting means you’re less likely to waste your ads budget on irrelevant audiences.
What is a Facebook Ads landing page?
Landing pages are pages that are created specifically to drive users to the next stage of the process after they’ve clicked on your ad. The purpose of your landing page will depend on the purpose of your ad, and they should always match.
Your landing page could be used to drive conversions or purchases, sell tickets for an event, download a guide or ebook and much more. The goal of your landing page is to push people to make that final click, whatever it’s for, which is what you’d call a conversion.
If you clicked on this ad on your Facebook homepage:
You’d be taken to this page, which is the landing page for this particular campaign:
Notice how the designs match (I clicked on the first button on the ad), and how the goal of the Facebook ad and landing page are the same; to sign up for a digital marketing certification.
Landing pages can be separate pages on your website that take users away from Facebook, like the example above. Alternatively, you could send users to your Facebook Business page. However, in this article we’re going to talk about dedicated landing pages on your website.
Why should you make a landing page for your Facebook Ads?
Ads only give you a small amount of space to work with and people are unlikely to spend extended periods of time looking at your ad on Facebook.
A dedicated landing page for your Facebook Ad allows you to give users more information about both your business and your product or service offering, making it easier to convert them to paying customers.
Landing pages give the users that have clicked on your Facebook Ad a little bit of encouragement to make that final purchase decision.
Why should you make a campaign specific landing page instead of using your homepage?
1. Landing pages are more focused on the conversion
For the best possible chance of conversions, you should always try to make your users’ journey to buying as easy as possible. This is what a landing page does.
Landing pages will usually have the call-to-action (CTA) right at the top of the page, often in the header. We saw this in the Hubspot example above.
Adobe has also put their CTA, free trial, in the header for this Photoshop ad.
Putting this call-to-action right in front of the user when they click on the page makes it super easy for them to do what you want them to do.
Conversely, you don’t find homepages that have the CTA or a direct conversion link in the header. It’s quite often at the bottom of the page, where users will have to hunt for it. This just adds more friction to the buying process, which is definitely something we don’t want.
2. Landing pages are less distracting than homepages
There’s a famous (in the marketing world) study conducted by Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University, who tested how the number of choices you present to a customer affects how much they buy.
We won’t go into the details – you can read more about it here – but the study essentially found that the more options you give your customers, the less likely they are to buy. Interesting!
Back to landing pages, and we can see how this theory would be in favour of landing pages. Whilst homepages are stuffed with information about you, your business, your products and reviews, a landing page is hyper-focused on the product you want people to buy.
Compare these two pages from Better Help.
The first image is their Facebook Ad landing page, instantly presenting you with a quiz to find a therapist, which is what their ad was wanting you to do. This is the only thing you can do on the page, you can’t even click on their logo. The decision here is get a therapist or don’t get a therapist. Easy.
In contrast, the second image shows their homepage where you’re instantly presented with 3 options, plus all the options to navigate to other pages in the menu. We won’t count how many choices there are here, you get the idea.
Narrowing down the options to one product or service gives customers a simple decision. To buy or not to buy. Let’s hope they buy!
How to create a landing page in WordPress using the Divi Builder
The Divi theme is probably the most popular theme used to build WordPress websites because it’s so simple and intuitive to use. It’s super easy to make landing pages within the Divi theme, and that’s what we’ll show you how to do.
If you’re not using the Divi theme, you can still download the Divi Builder plugin and follow the same steps.
1. Once you’ve downloaded your plugin, head to Pages > Add new in your sidebar.
2. Add your landing page title and click ‘use the Divi Builder.’
Tip: your title should be optimised for SEO, so think about what keywords are relevant to your page and you want to be found for. You can change this at any time.
3. For ease, we’re going to select ‘choose a premade layout.’
You can also start from scratch if you want to get a bit more creative.
4. You can then scroll through and pick a design you like.
Tip: Don’t worry if there are small bits of design that you don’t like in your chosen pack, everything is customisable. Pay attention to the layout you like best as that’s the hardest part to change.
5. Once you’ve picked your design pack, select the ‘landing’ template and click ‘use this layout.’
6. You can then start editing your page!
Tips on editing:
Hover over elements to bring up a box around them.
Click the ‘settings’ icon to manage everything about the block, including content and design.
Grey boxes indicate modules – anything like text, images and videos will be a module.
Green boxes indicate rows – these house your modules and allow you to create columns.
Blue boxes indicate sections – these house rows and modules. This is where you can add full screen background images and colours and create different sections on your page.
7. Once you’re done editing, click the purple circle with three dots at the bottom of the screen and hit publish. Your landing page is now ready to connect to your Facebook Ads!
What content should be included on your landing page?
This is going to vary slightly depending on what the goal of your Facebook Ad and landing page is, as well as what you’re offering, but there are a few things you should definitely include.
1. A headline stating your offer
The headline should be clear and concise, and visually stand out from the page.
This is a pretty great example of a headline from Shopify and it definitely stands out!
2. A call to action in the header
This could be a call button, purchase button, form, or anything else that gets your new customer over the ‘conversion’ line.
Navitas have their form to book a demo clearly in the header next to their main headline.
3. A brief ‘sales pitch’
Remember, people have already seen your ad so they know a bit about what they’re getting and are interested.
Use this space to add a few lines about how your product or service is going to solve their pain points. Why is your product something they can’t live without?
Milanote uses a one line sales pitch that tells users exactly why they should pick their product. Easy-to-use and visual.
4. An image or video
Images and videos are going to give your page a bit of personality as well as adding some visual interest.
Always remember that people buy from people, so your image or video could definitely feature yourself or your team in it. Try to avoid generic stock images.
This image on the Alo Yoga landing page perfectly conveys their aesthetic and what they’re all about.
5. Social proof – optional but highly recommended
93% of customers will use reviews to influence whether they buy something or not, so they’re an important element to include on your landing page.
You could do this with a plugin that brings in your reviews from Google My Business or another platform. If you want to get a bit more creative, you could include a customer review video, screenshots of happy customer messages or screenshots of people Tweeting about your product, to name a few.
Tips on creating a landing page that works – and makes you money!
So we’ve gone through how to build your landing page and what type of content to put on it, but what’s going to make your page successful and drive customers to buy?
Unfortunately, it’s not going to be as easy as setting up your page and letting it work itself. There are some best practices and tips that you should follow to make sure your landing page actually converts the visitors into paying customers.
A wise marketer, (Daniel Murray; make sure you’re following him), once said:
Here are our tips on how to make your copy and content great!
1. Know your goal
Much like knowing your target audience when creating content, knowing the goal of your Facebook Ad and its accompanying landing page is going to give you direction.
Facebook Ads generally fall into two categories: brand awareness campaigns and sales led campaigns. Since Facebook is an interest based platform, brand awareness campaigns work amazingly. There’s a great analogy on interest vs. intent based ads in a previous article, should you want to learn more.
Whatever the goal of your Facebook Ads, make sure you and your team are clear on what that is so you can tailor your content accordingly.
2. Integrate your messaging
This is really the golden rule of advertising across all industries, ad types and products. Integrate your messaging. No one is going to listen to you if your message is confused.
So, match your ad copy to your landing page copy, and your ad creative to your landing page creative. Simples.
3. Reduce the options
One of the key reasons that landing pages work so well is that they’re streamlined and don’t give the user many options.
We’re constantly faced with decisions like what Netflix show to watch, what coloured socks to wear, latte or flat white. You know, life’s big questions. So don’t give your consumers anything else to think about. As we said before, the decision should be to buy or not to buy.
Landing pages convert best when they’re targeted towards that one goal you defined before starting your ads.
Some ways to reduce options are:
– Removing the navigation menu
– Keeping all CTAs the same
– Only promoting one product or product category
4. Speak to the people
Writing great copy isn’t something that comes easily, but once you get it right, it can be one of the driving factors in converting your audience.
Make sure your copy sounds human. More and more, consumers are looking to buy from people, not brands. So make sure your copy reflects your personality and doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a robot.
Keep it simple and reduce words that don’t need to be there. Go over and over your headlines until you can’t take any more words out. If you can get your point across in 5 words, amazing.
I could go on for hours about writing great copy, but we’ll leave that treat for another post. For now, here are a few of my favourite landing page copywriting examples.
Some other things to consider when creating your landing page
1. Optimising landing pages for funnel stage
As an agency, we test hundreds of Facebook Ads and landing pages across a huge range of industries and have come to some conclusions. Whilst there’s no one-size-fits-all answer (how many times have you heard that phrase used in marketing), there are some Facebook Ads landing pages that just work better for different campaign types and funnel stages.
We recently launched a Facebook Ads campaign for an ecommerce brand looking to raise brand awareness. This means our target audience were top of the funnel. They didn’t know the brand and weren’t engaged with it in any way.
As all good marketers do, we tested two landing pages for performance: a homepage and a category page. In this instance, the homepage won for every metric including time spent on the page, number of viewers and bounce rate.
A homepage worked amazingly for this top of funnel audience because it gave them a deeper insight into the brand without jumping straight to driving a sale. A homepage typically tells you everything you need to know about a brand, and that’s exactly what we want in order to drive awareness.
Whilst we wouldn’t at all recommend this for conversion lead campaigns, using your brand’s homepage as your Facebook Ads landing page can really work for brand awareness, top of the funnel campaigns.
2. Niche audiences
You might run a business that has an extremely niche audience, like selling batter to fish and chip shop owners in Nottinghamshire.
When we’re talking about Facebook Ads, in a case like this your audience might be so small that there just aren’t enough people for a custom landing page to convert. This is the perfect time to send your Facebook Ad clickers to a page on your website, where they can get a feel for your whole brand.
I will note, however, that landing pages for niche audiences can work amazingly well for email marketing, direct mail and organic campaigns.