Case Study: Landing Pages vs Websites

Hey everybody, Adam Arkfeld. Today, I wanted to go over the results of a case study of an optimization that we had made for a bankruptcy attorney. And the case study revolved around the common question that we receive: should we send traffic to a website or to a landing page? And we get this question all the time, and in many cases, it happens really early in our sales process. We’re talking to a client about taking over their AdWords management, and they say, well I want the traffic going to my website, and we say, hey, we think that landing pages can work better and over the last year, two years, we just have started tracking data. And this is just the most recent example of a case study that will show the results of whether or not traffic is performing better going to a website or going to a landing page.

All right, so, when we created the landing page for this client, we actually moved the landing page to Unbounce so then it created a separate subdomain. And so because of that, for some reason Google right now is giving errors about if you have too many domains in the same ad group, then they’re disapproving the ads. So we had to actually create a new campaign which is definitely a little bit annoying. They said it’s a bug, but we had to deal with it anyway. And so, essentially we had to create a new campaign, that’s why we’re seeing two campaigns instead of just a straight up comparison. But the campaigns were exact mirrors of each other, except for the ads go to a different landing page, go to a different URL instead of to the website.

Okay, so on the top here, the darker colored row, we have Landing Page, which is the new landing page, and then the bottom we have Website, which is kind of the more grayed one, all right? So the budgets were pretty much the same, and we’ll look at cost per leads and stuff that normalize that. And we actually did have a different bid strategy, so that’s a whole different conversation I’m not gonna get into.

All right, now when we start looking at some of these metrics, the top again is the landing page So our, our click-through rate actually decreased. And I think this may have decreased because we switched the landing page from a bankruptcy-specific URL to a kind of non-bankruptcy-specific URL, and so we’re gonna look at that next and see what that click-through rate looks like, but, it’s very interesting to see that it decreased fairly dramatically. It didn’t have an impact on the performance, but it’s good to know that the click-through rate did go from 4.49% to 2.59%, that’s interesting.

Now, the cost per click is about the same; we have $26.52, $26.48, virtually no change. You see this change here because they’re in separate campaigns, but really, there was no change. And then the ad spend, this is a little bit of a higher-spending account, 84,000 and then just under 82,000 for the month, so, that’s their monthly spend. All right, now, on the top here for the landing page, we see 743 conversions and remember, the ad spend was a little bit higher by 2,000. 743 conversions, and then 496 conversions for the website leads. That’s just a massive, massive, massive difference. And the difference is so dramatic that the cost per lead went from $165 to 113. And so, you know… That’s about a 40%, well let me actually… Let me actually calculate that, because I didn’t have a calculator before, so, 52 over 165. That’s a 32%, 31.5% decrease in cost per lead just by sending traffic to a landing page instead, instead of sending to your website, so that’s pretty huge.

I’m also gonna segment this by conversion action. All right. Now this is gonna show us what different types of conversions took place. I’ll move my guy up here. Okay. So up top here is the landing page. We’ve got 288 form submissions. And… Yep, that’s the, the Unbounced form submission and then 209 website form submissions. So you can see just the form submissions are dramatically, dramatically different. The Call Extension, we have 176 on the call extension 61. And then Phone Call, 225 versus 263, so basically, conversions all across the board. We had a couple people that ended up going to the website and converting. We had a couple people convert on the bankruptcy form on the website.

So these conversions just kinda trickle in. But I think the major component is the bankruptcy landing page, the call extensions, and just the… These phone calls are from CallRail. They are fed into the CallRail integration into AdWords. Those three things are pretty hugely different than the pre-landing page. 209 versus 288, 225 versus 263. So we didn’t really change anything. I like to show the metrics in, actually in AdWords to show you that these are the exact numbers. Going from a website to a landing page is hugely, hugely, hugely, hugely important, so, if you’re not already experimenting with that, or if you’re not trying out landing pages, you must do so immediately, because the results are massive.

And again, as usual, if you have any questions or comments please leave them below. I hope you liked the video and subscribe to our channel. We post all types of content like this all the time. So again, my name is Adam with ParaCore, we’re a pay-per-click lead generation agency. Thanks for watching and let me know if you have any questions.

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