Landing Pages in Affiliate Marketing. From Beginner to Pro Level    – AdCombo

We are launching a short series of articles about landing pages. We’ll start with the theory, and in the following parts, we’ll do a practical analysis of AdCombo landing pages. Don’t forget to like it if you are interested in this topic! 

The first part will help you to structure the landing page blocks, prevent possible mistakes, give you some ideas for A/B-test, and tell you about decision-making mechanisms. 

Let’s start!

We’re going to talk about landing pages! Their major purpose is to drive Internet users down the marketing funnel and motivate them to leave their contacts in the form. This is how the sales magic works: an average viewer turns into a really valuable lead. 

For your convenience, this article is divided into three levels. 

Junior level. Here we’ll cover the essential base. It’s suitable for those who have just opened the door to the niche and are still learning the main things. 

Middle level. Here we’ll share helpful tips for those who already have experience in launching ad campaigns but still need to learn some key points. 

Pro level. If you are an experienced affiliate, you have seen everything, and nothing surprises you – go to the end of the article! There you will find the info beyond affiliate marketing and learn facts about the psychology of perception and how to influence decision-making on a subconscious level.

Table of contents

Basic level   

Let’s start from the beginning. What exactly is a landing page? What is it for, and why is it so important?

A landing page is a website consisting of a single page. It is easy to create. And it perfectly manages its main function – to lead people to the target action. Most often, it is to purchase a product by filling out a form. 

In fact, the types of target actions can be different. It depends on the selected offer. For example, leave contacts in the form, download an app, sign up on the website, etc. 

Whatever your goal is, the landing page should grab attention and encourage a person to take action. 

What is the key indicator of a landing page to track? 

The conversion rate is considered to be the most important indicator.

The calculation formula is simple:

How to determine a good CR? 

According to WordStream’s source, the average conversion rate of landing pages is around 2.35%. A quarter of the top LP had it at 5.31% or higher. And the highest-ranked one-page websites (the best 10%) had an average CR of 11.45% or higher

Perfection is hard to achieve, but you can strive for it! What to do about it? 

1. Design a clear structure

The first screen should be clear to the customer. Check if the product name is easy to read. Product photos should be of high quality. You can add a brief description of the offer and a CTA button. This button takes our visitor straight to the form-filling block. If the potential buyer belongs to a hot audience, he/she doesn’t need an additional product description. He or she already knows the pros and cons and came in to buy right away. The best thing you can do is to ease the customers’ path on the way to check out. 

Next, place a block with a description of the product’s benefits. Try to specify here a unique selling proposition (USP) of the product. Well-designed USP will be a nice addition, but remember that the main thing is ease of use. When the text is placed on a beautiful picture but is impossible to read, no one needs it. Buyers refuse the purchase when it is hard for them. A minimalistic and clear UI is better!

Then add a trust indicators section. It often includes customers’ feedback. It will help make a quicker decision. Also, you can add a block about safe and environmentally friendly manufacturing and product quality certificates. Especially in Tier 1 countries people care about the quality and safety of goods. 

At the end, place an order form. 

Tip: Make as few blocks to fill as possible. And add hints for the users, making the ordering process simple. 

Mark mandatory fields with asterisks, and make masks that will tell people how to correctly enter a phone number or email. If possible, make buttons or drop-down lists instead of manually filling fields. 

Tip: ask someone you know (better not related to marketing) to fill out the form and see how quickly they can do it. What problems did they have filling it out? What questions they had, and what wasn’t obvious? Find some difficulties? Fix it asap!    

2. Know your TA 

To sell someone a product you should understand people’s needs and desires. These are the basics, without which it is impossible to close the sale. 

What to write in the product’s USP? Should there be a section on eco-friendly production? Does the description text need a bigger font size (relevant for seniors)? Is it worth placing NSFW adult pictures right on the first screen? Can this picture of a person in a white coat be used? 

Analyzing the target audience, its age, gender, cultural characteristics, devices, and time of purchasing will help to close most of these questions.   

We hope these tips will help you to create a well-structured LP. Let’s move further to the middle level. 

Middle level 

For those who have already made more than one landing page, we will provide statistics and tips to improve landing pages’ CR. 

What to do if traffic seems to be from a quality source, but, for some reason, there are no orders, and all leads end up in the thrash statistics column? 

Do you need to change the offer? GEO? Complain to the affiliate manager about the advertiser, who does not give payment for seemingly “quality traffic”? Run to another CPA network with thoughts: “Now everything will go as it should”?  

Or maybe you should study and improve your landing page?

When did the user leave the page? Maybe he didn’t understand where to click? Or entered the wrong number but the form accepted it? 

Haven’t thought about it yet? 

In this case, it is better to take a deep breath and calm yourself. Then start to check the efficiency of your LP. 

The most common way to check the correctness of the improvements is split testing or A/B testing (they are the same things).

To implement it, you need to go through several steps: 

• Define the purpose of testing; 

• Formulate a hypothesis; 

• Important: it is better to test one thing at a time. It is useless to put several hypotheses into one test and then try to find out what exactly led to the better results;

• Specify the desired values; 

• Analyze the results.     

But this can be completely useless and costly if you act blindly. What to rely on when looking for ways to improve? Of course, on analyzing statistics. Each step in testing should be based on specific figures. 

What to check in the statistics? 

• Average time spent on the website

All these tools will help you to analyze when the user leaves the page and does not reach the target action.

Of the non-obvious but significant mistakes can be found: 

• Non-obvious CTA button: small/ unclear text/ unnoticeable color/ blends into the background/ not clickable;

• Many customers use mobile devices, but the landing page is not adapted for them. The user finds it difficult to navigate and refuses to order. Maybe he can’t hit the button because the clickable area is too small;

• Long loading time. The size of pictures/ gifs/ videos and animations should match the internet speed in different regions. It is better to compress all files to the smallest possible size without loss of quality;

• Problems with form filling. There are no hints, masks, or mandatory fields/ it is impossible to fill out the form using a phone/ it is too much to write in fields/ the buyer can write down an incorrect phone number, but the form will accept this answer anyway, etc.

What services can help you collect statistics: 

For example, Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, Hotjar, Roistat, and others. 

You can always share helpful services in the comments! 

And what website builder can be used to create LP? 

There are so many services. Here are some of the most popular ones: 

Tilda, Wix, uKIT 

We will also be glad if you share useful services in the comments! 

And we move on to the next section…

Pro level

At this level, we want to go a step higher and talk not about landing pages themselves, their structure, and statistics. 

It’s time to talk about equally significant related topics.

Psychology of color

You’ve probably noticed that different colors can subconsciously evoke various feelings and emotions. 

Here are some examples of the connections between colors and the feelings they can evoke.

As you can see, colors that are close to each other can have similar influences. To choose the right palette for your ad creative or landing page, you need to first determine what emotions you want to evoke in your audience. Then choose the right color, its brightness, and saturation. 

But don’t forget that color perception is a very individual process. The same color can evoke various emotions and impressions in different people. You shouldn’t expect the same reaction from all people from your target audience. But it is interesting to experiment with this topic. You can conduct a split test and write the results in the comments! 

In addition, there is also a cultural aspect to the perception of color:

Finally, you can study the scheme of famous global brands’ logos to make sure that the color tool may be really helpful. 

The psychology of decision making 

Now let’s talk about how you can influence the buyer’s decision-making without being pushy.

The essence of this approach is not to force a product through changing the buyer’s way of thinking. But customize your content to fit the buyer’s habitual way of thinking. Remember: using psychology to manipulate customers is unacceptable! 

Next, you’ll find a short list of 4 lifehacks, let’s go! 

1. Tendency to constancy and consistency

Sales funnels are built on this mechanism. Each successive suggestion to a customer takes your interaction a step closer. People tend to keep their actions consistent. If potential customers have already started interacting with you, they are more likely to move on to the next step. Unless they became negative experiences of the interaction. 

2. Tendency to establish points of reference – anchors 

Humans tend to use the first piece of info as a reference point for subsequent decisions. 

For example, when a customer sees that an item is now discounted, they:

• First, he may think that it is a great offer;
• Second, the cost and value of that good is higher. 

The chances of how well this technique will work depend on a deep understanding of your target audience. What is the chance of such a user’s way of thinking? 

If this is a working technique for your TA, you can offer the customer several options of product courses with different costs. Make sure to show how much money he/she will save depending on his or her choice. 

But you should be careful with the enormous number of options, and that’s why… 

3. The paradox of choice 

If you give a customer too many choices, likely they won’t buy anything. There’s a parable about a Buridan’s ass (donkey) who couldn’t make a choice between two equally attractive haystacks. In the end, he starved to death, having never decided to choose one. 

On the topic of landing pages, the page should have one clear call to action on the CTA buttons. If your goal is to close a sale – a button leads to the order form and does not dissipate the buyer’s attention. 

4. Social proof 

In new circumstances or when solving new tasks, people tend to follow other people and repeat their experiences. 

In our case, this means that you need to take care of placing a section with testimonials. It will be better if besides the text you add photos of people. It generates more trust. And try to update the testimonials block. 

If it is not possible to write reviews of several people, you can add a block with the total number of buyers. For example: “Our product has already been bought more than 1000 times!” This option will work as social proof too. 

We hope you found this article helpful and your new lending pages will bring you a great ROI! 

If you have any tips, suggestions, and recommendations, we look forward to hearing them in the comments!