How to Get the Most Out of your Facebook Ad Campaign with Landing Pages

There’s no point in spending a dime on any online ad if you haven’t made sure the page that ad is sending people to is ready to receive them.

It’s like creating flyers, TV ads and a billboard promoting your new restaurant, and then, when people arrive at the address you’ve given, the place is dingy, dark, filled with rats and you’re out of food.

Not good.

This article will take a look at a few Facebook Ads I received and examine their corresponding landing page. I’ll give my thoughts on the effectiveness of the campaign as a whole and recommend how your business can find more success with Facebook Ads through best practices and optimization tips.

Facebook Ad and Landing Page Campaign Best Practices

Firstly, let’s start with a few of the top best practices we hope to see in the Facebook Ad/Landing Page combos below…

• Message Continuity: Assure your landing page/website visitors that they’ve come to the right place. The last thing you want them to feel is that they’ve been conned or tricked into clicking an ad only to be sent to an unrelated, salesy site.
• Design Continuity: Red in your ad? Use red in your landing page. Image of a person modelling your product in your ad? Show the full picture in the LP.
• Single Conversion Focus: The key point of a landing page is the single conversion goal. Any more than one will distract visitors from your campaign objective.
• Repetition of Value Proposition: Whatever value you’re hooking users within your Facebook Ad, make sure you don’t lose that hook in your landing page, or the subsequent pages for that matter. Signup, pricing and checkout all need to reflect whatever discount you’ve advertised as well.
• Landing Page Adds Clarification for Anything Alluded to in the Ad: This is a big one. If you introduce an idea which needs a bit more explaining, be sure you do so in your landing page. And equally, try to avoid introducing totally new ideas to your visitors within your landing page (that was one of my criticisms of the Wordstream LP).

Ad and Landing Page Combo #1: Article.com

Let’s start with an example many of you might find relatable…

Article is an e-commerce seller of high quality home furniture. Let’s take a look at one of their Facebook Ad campaigns.

First, their Facebook Ad:

Critiquing this Facebook Ad:

• Very high-quality image. Well-sized. Showcases the quality and style of their product line.
• Having a model helps the Facebook user imagine themselves in the scene.
• The orange of the fire helps to grab the eye of people scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds. Color contrast is always a good call.
• The headline is super short and snappy. It tells you what you get and is reminiscent of a slogan: “Spend less. Live more.”
• The value proposition in the link text (“Designer Modern Furniture Up to 70% Off Retail. $49 Flat Rate Shipping Anywhere in Canada”)

The corresponding page their ad is sending people to:

As you can tell, this is a homepage.

We have the top nav bar, no clear call to action button, and it’s pretty long (actually longer than the image above, which I cut by about 1/3rd).

What’s wrong with this?

• The ad is promoting up to 70% off retail and $49 flat rate shipping. This promotion is a huge part of the value proposition in the ad, but isn’t a focus point of the homepage. This means that everyone who’s excited by the value they see in the ad doesn’t see that value continued.
• Essentially what we’re talking about is a single marketing campaign – a targeted, focused single offer and value proposition – with an unfocused, untargeted endpoint.
• Don’t get me wrong. Article’s homepage is a beautiful one: high quality images, great branding and mention of an upcoming Groundhog Day sale. But that sale should have its own landing page and ad set.

Let’s take a look at three other Facebook Ad and landing page campaigns which are a bit more optimized for conversion…

Ad and Landing Page Combo #2: Canadian Blood Services:

Their Facebook Ad:

Critiquing this Facebook Ad:

• First and foremost, we can be confident this ad is targeted well. I’m a male between 17 and 35 in Canada. So, at the very least, we know Canadian Blood Services isn’t wasting ad budget showing their Facebook Ads to grandmothers.
• Secondly, we have a large red button with a simple but impactful message: “You have the power to give life…” Since Facebook removed their restriction on more than 20% of an ad’s image being text, many businesses are finding success with eye-grabbing, high-impact value messages.
• This ad is also very simple. There’s no background image to distract me from the message in the foreground. If anything, the directional cues in the background draw attention to the copy.
• The ad copy is also impactful. First it calls me out, asking me if I’m part of a group (a club, if you will) and then it tells me that “patients are looking for you.” These copy elements create a feeling of being a part of something valuable – a desirable emotion.

The Corresponding Landing Page:

Critiquing this Landing Page:

• Right off the bat we see (in direct contrast to Article’s campaign above) that the message on this landing page is the same as that of the ad. Continuity is everything in your ad/landing page combos. Visitors to this page are immediately assured that they’re in the same place.
• However, once I get past the headline, a bit of the continuity is lost. Ideally, this landing page would take into account the 17-35 year old men who are clicking on the corresponding Facebook Ad. This seems to be a generic landing page for (I imagine) multiple Facebook Ads for their stem cell donation campaign.
• There are three Call-to-Action buttons (CTAs) on this page. This is okay, so long as all those buttons direct people to the same place. Unfortunately with Canadian Blood Services, they don’t. They send people to three different parts of their website. Your marketing campaigns need to have a single focus, not three.

Let’s see if online ad agency Wordstream can do better…

Ad and Landing Page Combo #3: Wordstream

Their Campaign’s Facebook Ad:

Critiquing this Facebook Ad:

• Firstly, let’s notice that this is an advertisement for a piece of gated content (a toolkit). Advertising gated content is always a bit of a sketchy strategy, as landing page conversion rates – lead nurturing conversion rates often don’t work out to a positive ROI. In other words, you’ll pay too much driving traffic to your lead generation page. The chance of them converting (unless your product is a home, car, or high-priced software) doesn’t work out to be worth it.
• As a result of the above, I’d expect to see Wordstream asking for a lot of information about the visitors to their landing page, as they’ll be able to improve conversion rates if they know more about their leads.
• Regarding the ad design, I like the blue and orange. The blue is visually appealing and matches Facebook’s own color scheme and the orange stands out and grabs the eye. The image itself is very simple (which I like); complicated images, particularly platform screenshots, can be confusing when their as small as they appear on Facebook.

The corresponding landing page:

Critiquing this Landing Page:

• Wordstream’s landing page is simple and optimized. The icons from the Facebook Ad are duplicated and used here as well. The headline “Adwords Optimization Toolkit” is also repeated, as is the color scheme.
• As expected, we’re seeing a request for a lot of lead information. Phone number, website, job title and ad budget will allow Wordstream to segment the contacts they get from this page into optimized drip campaigns – increasing bottom-of-funnel conversion rates and making their ad budget worth it.
• My only criticism is that the bottom right section seems to come out of nowhere. In both the ad and the above-the-fold section of the landing page we’re told the toolkit will give us the three major obstacles that Adwords advertisers face. I’d like to see a hint about what those are, and I’m thrown off by three seemingly unrelated topics.

Ad and Landing Page Combo #4: CaliforniaClosets

Their Campaign’s Facebook Ad (screenshotted from my phone)

Critiquing this Facebook Ad:

• I like this headline, “Save up to 20% with a free upgrade to a woodgrain finish.” There’s a few elements which are, traditionally, high value for copywriting: “Save,” “20%,” “Free,” and “Upgrade.” This headline has all of them. That’s a value proposition, my friends, even though it’s for a wood finish… Honestly I barely even saw what it was for, just the discount and the word “Free.”
• The image has a bit too much going on, but at least I’m seeing the product and its full potential.
• The “Winter White Event” communicates that this deal has an endpoint, which creates a bit of urgency (subjectively increasing the value of the offer).

The Corresponding Landing Page:

Critiquing this Landing Page:

• We’ve talked a couple times about matching ad copy to landing page, and this page has all the elements of great continuity. The headline matches, the image matches, and they’ve clarified a bit of when their Winter White sale ends (soon!).
• The two CTA buttons work here because they’re for the same conversion objective (a free consultation). I like that the ask is to “request,” implying you may get a no answer. This kind of language – like “exclusive,” “Apply to get,” etc, – can also increase the subjective value of the thing being offered. I’m far more likely to think your club is cooler if I’m not automatically made a member.
• All in all, great, mobile-optimized landing page.

Good luck!