Can you replace a Landing Page with a Bot?
Picture this.
You are looking for a car insurance policy. You Google “car insurance” and a whole bunch of Google Ads show up. The first link is from a huge company whose ads you’ve seen on TV, so it must be trustworthy. You click on it and the landing page is exactly what you’d expect. There is a picture of a smiling insurance agent staring lifelessly into your soul, promising that if you provide your zip code in the single input box below, you’ll get quick and easy quote. It isn’t particularly engaging but it’s car insurance. How exciting could it really be? A few key taps later, you’ve entered your zip code and hit submit.
Everything from here on out is a slow moving train wreck.
Hitting submit causes your screen to go blank. The page is loading. While waiting for it to finish, you look up at the ceiling of your bedroom and notice a weird spot. That’s odd! You were staring at your ceiling the night before while candy crush was loading, and the spot wasn’t there. Or was it? Your mind is probably playing tricks on you. You look back at your screen.
The UI elements have started to appear. There is clearly a form you are going to have to fill, asking for your name, address, etc. But, as is often the case with mobile websites, the page keeps jerking around as new elements are rendered on screen. You go back to staring at the spot on your ceiling. Is it bigger since the last time you saw it? Is it mold?! Holy shit! It’s probably mold! You have to find out. You open a new tab, and look up what a mold spot looks like. Google has you covered with an article (from ABC news of all places), which you start reading. Apparently mold can make you really sick! You had a headache yesterday! Was it mold related? New tab, new google search: “Mold sickness.” Things are not looking promising. It turns out mold sickness can kill you.
It’s now been 20 minutes and you have completely forgotten about your car insurance search. Instead you have somehow ended up on the Wikipedia page of famed civil rights activist and academic W.E.B du Bois. From the perspective of the company whose Ad you clicked, you are 50 bucks down the drain.
This sort of interaction is not uncommon in the PPC industry and is reflective of a bigger problem in the industry.
The way we think about PPC landing pages is broken.
Good quality images, videos, testimonials and CTAs are all considerations you are told to keep in mind while creating a post-click experience. But no matter how many of these best practices you incorporate in your landing page, the end result is un-engaging and yields abysmally low conversion rates. It is no accident that the average landing page conversion rate across industries for Google Search Ads is 2.35%.
Why do PPC landing pages suck?
A co-worker of mine, likes to compare the way the PPC industry thinks of post-click landing pages to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Within the industry there is a definite picture for what landing pages should look like and how they ought to function. Any suggestion that there could be a better way to go about things is met with indifference at best and derision at worst.
Like the individuals in Plato’s Allegory, the PPC industry is chained in a cave looking at a mere shadow of what their post-click experience could look like.
According to one of the industry’s leading landing page tools this is a good landing page template:
On the surface it looks great! Clean(-ish) design, colors that pop, a clear value proposition, some stats to show that the company is legit, a form to capture leads and even a number listed for those who want to speak to a real human.
Prospects who land on such a page are expected to read through the site for more information and fill out a form to express interest in the product or service. These tasks are easy enough to complete and are the standard for all post-click interactions. Most, if not all landing pages, follow this same formula of visuals, text and forms to capture leads.
But have you ever stopped to consider whether this is truly the best way to design a landing page?
To me, there are three glaring deficiencies in traditional landing pages:
- not optimised for phone screens,
- their interface feels unfamiliar,
- and they are not engaging enough to interact with.
Static Landing Pages are Mobile Unoptimised
To be clear, when I speak of mobile optimization (or the lack thereof) in traditional landing pages, I am not focusing on the technical aspects of optimization. Rather, I adopt a more design-focused critique. Traditional landing pages are made primarily for desktops and laptops first and then re-configured for smaller screen sizes. In the process of adjusting the elements on the page to make them usable on phones, the UX loses a lot.
In the example above, the mobile version looks more cluttered. The background image is completely obstructed and worst of all the vast majority of the page is covered by a form.
The issue is that nobody likes forms. They are a mundane part of the web which we reluctantly tolerate.
Greeting prospects with a page that is almost completely a form is a sure shot way of telling prospects to drop off from your page. Of course, the small screen size means that designers have little recourse to solve the issue. Making the form smaller would render it unreadable and unusable, and having the form lower down in the page will confuse prospects as they won’t know how they can take action on the page. In either case, the result is prospects unnecessarily dropping before converting.
Static Landing Pages are Unfamiliar
Since traditional website design is so unwelcoming, it is easy to assume that the interactions a prospect has to engage in to navigate a traditional landing page are intuitive. This is however untrue. While the general template of PPC landing pages does remain the same, changes in color, CTA, images and even custom placement of certain standard elements (e.g. phone number), are disorienting.
Think about it. Most landing pages look different from one another. Every time you land on one, it takes a few seconds to orient yourself and figure out where everything is. While this might seem like a minor issue to someone who is comfortable on the internet, keep in mind that prospects are often not as familiar with navigating websites as you. For example, if your Google Ad campaign targets older demographics (e.g. your parents or grandparents), having an interface that is even slightly too complex might cause prospects to drop without converting.
Static Landing Pages are Not Engaging
Perhaps the most egregious shortfall of traditional landing pages is that they are boring. Once a prospect has gone through the process of orienting themselves on your landing page, they need to interact with the site to get something done. Whether that is setting an appointment, buying a product, subscribing to a service or even signing up for a newsletter. The methods traditional websites use to get these tasks done are mundane.
In the age of Instagram and Facebook, even tasks as simple as filling out a short form, or reading a short block of text are too cumbersome for most prospects to bother completing. Further still, they are impersonal. All of these tasks are completed wholly by the user. The company behind the website, is not truly present for the interaction. They have essentially dumped the information and CTA they think a prospect will need and hope that the prospect will have the patience and wherewithal to use them.
Put simply, traditional landing pages are un-engaging.
This might seem like a trivial issue, since the purpose of an Ad campaign is to conduct business, and not to have fun. But the effects of an un-engaging post-click experience are nothing short of catastrophic for a business which is dependent on paid traffic. With ever-shortening attention spans, prospects who are unengaged will drop without converting. Low conversion rates mean wasted ad-spend, less business and a never-ending spiral of increasing costs, and lower revenue.
Conversational Landing Pages are the solution
This is what a conversational landing page looks like:
Its universally understood, universally beloved chat interface addresses all the three shortfalls of traditional PPC landing pages.
Conversational Landing Pages are Familiar
Chat apps in the modern age have become ubiquitous. More people today use chat apps than social media apps and I am willing to bet that even you spend a considerable amount of time during the day in a chat app (e.g WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Viber):
This means that when you show a chatbot to any of your prospects (regardless of their demographic background), they will not take long to understand what the website expects of them. They will know that they have to respond to the messages the bot on the other side of the screen has sent.
Conversational Landing Pages are Mobile Optimized
Unlike websites, chat interfaces were made primarily with the smartphone screen in mind. The existence of WhatsApp is a proof of this. Years ago (2010 or 2011), I bought my first internet connected phone. It was one of those Nokia phones that ran SymbianOS. While the phone’s measly specs and hardware keypad pale in comparison to the smartphones of today, I would still consider it to be the first smartphone I have ever owned. What differentiated it from the previous feature phones that I had owned was not that it’s web browser was more advanced, but the fact that it ran WhatsApp.
The chat interface of WhatsApp defined early on what would be considered a smartphone and what would not. Eight years on, chat apps like WhatsApp continue to be popular with little change to their interface. The paradigm of to and from message bubbles persists.
This sustained popularity regardless of unchanging design is the proof that chat interfaces feel like the most natural way to interact with a small screen.
Conversational Landing Pages are Engaging
The difference between having a Traditional Landing Page and Conversational Landing Page, is the same as the difference between a grocery store and an Apple store.
When you walk into a grocery store, you have to pick out all the products you want to buy on your own, enlisting the help of signs and memory to navigate your way around. The process is doable, but mundane. In an Apple store on the other hand, you are greeted by a smiling store attendant who figures out exactly what you need, shows you what options you have, answers your questions and even gives you advice based on what they would do.
The interaction at grocery store, is not necessarily a negative one but it certainly isn’t memorable. The Apple store interaction, on the other hand is positive experience that the customer will remember for days.
Conversational landing pages are the Apple store of the web.
The back-and-forth nature of the interaction, makes users feel like they are getting a personalized experience whose direction they can control. The fact that they have to read only one of a few message bubbles at a time instead of a whole page of text, means that they have a better sense of what you expect of them and what they should do next. Traditional landing pages on the other hand are like grocery stores. Filling out forms and clicking on buttons are mundane tasks that will fade from memory.
Over the past month, I have been experimenting with the idea of a bot landing page for PPC campaigns. In the process, I spoke to a lot of businesses using chatbots on their landing pages to ascertain the exact value that they see from chatbots. A recurring theme along the way was that engaging a prospect in conversations creates a sense of investment in the prospect’s mind. They feel more inclined to continue interacting with the site till they convert than they would if confronted with a traditional landing page experience. One business, for example, found that prospects that opted for a conversational experience on their site were 2x more likely to convert than those who opted for a traditional experience.
The Upshot
Using conversations to drive business is not a new idea. Throughout history, and even in the present, conversations have facilitated trade between individuals. When you walk into a clothing store and an attendant helps you find the right pair of jeans or when you go to the farmer’s market and someone offers you a free sample of their organic strawberries, you are conducting business through conversation.
In the past decade, this pattern of conducting business has been disrupted by the internet.
In return for the convenience of buying things from their office cubicle, couch or bed, customers have accepted that they will have to endure landing pages where they have to search, research, select and buy products using purely their own effort and time. This has made businesses complacent. We assume that the tradeoff between convenience and service is an indicator that the public doesn’t care for frivolous things like engagement, or human connection. Such an idea is misguided to say the least. While human behavior patterns might have changed in the past decade, our basic instincts and desires have not. Every prospect that clicks on your PPC Ad wants a good customer service experience post-click. Till recently, you could throw up your hands and say there was nothing to be done. Pictures, videos and shorter forms were the pinnacle of good user experience.
Conversational landing pages raise the bar. They allow you to give users the personalized service that they want and deserve without making them concede any convenience.
Also read :
Please tap or click “♥︎” to help to promote this piece to others.
