When you’re starting up a LinkedIn ads campaign, you may be wondering should you use a landing page or a LinkedIn lead gen form. Lead gen forms are convienient and save you the hassel of making desiging and creating a landing page. But landing pages get traffic to your site, meaning you can retarget and have more “real estate” to sell your offer. These are just a few points you be contemplating.
So which to choose? Let’s discuss.
Landing Pages Best Practices
Most advertisers like to start by sending people to their site to convert. This is a great way to build awareness of your brand, get traffic to your site, and build retargeting audiences. In our experience, individuals who go to a website to convert tend to be slightly higher quality leads. That being said, CPL’s tend to be higher as landing pages convert at a lower rate than LinkedIn lead forms. So what can you do to see the best performance from your landing pages?
Answer 3 questions in the first 10 seconds.
When someone comes to your landing page, they need to know: who you are, why they should care, and what you want them to do. Answering these questions in as quick a time as possible is what we’ve seen succeed. A punchy, concise headline paired with a concise description below, with a clear CTA is the best way to do this. We recommend also including any forms you need filled above the fold to ensure the best conversion rates.
If you’d like to learn more about conversion focused web design, Unbounce has a great article on “The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design” that we would highly recommend reading.
Note: If you want to use landing pages with your ads, remember to set up conversion tracking on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn insight tag needs to be on every page of your site and any conversion actions will need to be created in LinkedIn. This should be found under the “Analyze” tab.
Lead Gen Form Best Practices
LinkedIn lead gen forms are something we often recommend. They are perfect for companies who have struggled to convert on their site and are looking for consistent lead flow. They tend to see higher conversion rates than landing pages due to them being very easy to fill out.
The main weaknesses of lead gen forms is that intent usually is lower and you will lose out on pixel based retargeting of the traffic to your site. Even with these weaknesses, LinkedIn lead gen forms are the perfect avenue to generate high-funnel leads through content. Do not run demo, or low funnel offers through lead forms. These types of offers need additional information to sell someone on the offer and perform best with a well optimized landing page.
Setup of lead forms is easy. You will go into the “Assets” tab and there will be an option for “Lead Gen Forms”. All you will need is a link to your privacy policy and a link to where you will send people once they’ve filled out the form.
Keep your form copy punchy and to the point. Always end your description paragraph in a CTA. Keep the information you request to a minimum. Avoid having questions where they need to write in answers. This will drop your conversion rates by at least 30%. Requesting info that can be filled automatically from the info within an viewers profile helps smooth the conversion process and ensure the highest conversion rates possible.