By Taylor Miles
Using landing pages made from Unbounce is probably the best decision that you’ve made in your marketing career so far, right? Why not, it’s one of the easiest ways to create, test, and launch a plethora of pages without ever bothering an IT guy.
If you haven’t tried using Unbounce yet, get started by signing up for a free account and follow our detailed “Ultimate Guide to Unbounce Landing Pages” post to get started.
But on their own, landing pages -- even from Unbounce -- can’t give you enough leads that can make the marketing gods smile from ear to ear. You’ll have to make people discover or come to your highly-optimized pages by using tools like Google Adwords.
If you’re already using Adwords in directing traffic to your Unbounce landing pages, then the advanced tips (and its benefits) I’ve outlined below will help you more in taking your paid advertising efforts to the next level.
Getting Started
In no particular order, here are some of the advanced tips that you can do right now to maximize Adwords:
1. Make sure to link Google Analytics with Adwords. Connecting both Google services, which is now easier, will give you an overall picture of your Unbounce landing page’s performance. Start linking your Adwords and Analytics accounts.
Why link Adwords to Analytics? Search Engine Land’s Ginny Marvin shares: “Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts opens up a whole new world of opportunity for campaign execution, management and analysis.”
2. Use Adwords Conversion Tracking pixel on conversion pages. To set it up, all you need to do is copy the code snippet and paste it in your Unbounce conversion page.
Why use conversion tracking? According to Fabiola Sanchez of White Shark Media, “If you are spending a lot of money on a particular pay-per-click campaign or you’ve spent quite a few hours setting up what you hope is a high-quality campaign, then it’s nothing less than good basic business sense to use some sort of tracking mechanism to find out whether your time and money are paying off.”
3. Properly tag your Adwords campaigns using Analytics. This is important if you want to display the most detailed Adwords data. To do this, you can either manually add tags or use the auto-tagging feature.
Why tag your campaigns? This PPC Hero article explains: “When you manage pay-per-click campaigns in conjunction with other online marketing efforts, it is extremely important to keep your data neatly separated. In the case of Google Analytics, if you don’t take care to tag your destination URLs, the data you receive will be meaningless at best.”
4. Set up “Goals” in Google Analytics for all your conversions. Goals will help you find out if you’re indeed meeting all your objectives. Once you have Adwords and Analytics linked together, you can set up and edit Goals.
Why Goals are important? In the KISSmetric post titled ”4 Google Analytics Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business”, Lars Lofgren writes: “Tracking pageviews and visitors to see how much traffic you’re getting is incredibly important right? WRONG. Finding out if your website actually helps your business is MUCH more important.”
5. Get Unbounce External Conversion pixel on other pages on the same domain. This is important if the real conversion action happens outside your Unbounce landing page. To get started, embed the Unbounce tracking script on the target conversion page.
Why measure tests beyond the landing page? Nina Martinez of Three Ships Media says, “Making the most of the traffic you receive should always be a priority that involves testing your landing pages for improved performance. Sure, it doesn't guarantee increased traffic to your website, but conversion rate optimization (CRO) of landing pages can easily shift the value you receive from traffic in a positive direction.”
6. Use the Unbounce hidden fields feature on forms. This is useful if you have some field values that your CRM needs but don’t want to show to your landing page visitors. Or, if you want to grab Google Analytics’ UTM parameters and pass the data to a CRM or internal database. You can do this by adding prefilled parameters to your form.
You can also take advantage of the Field Mapping feature, which is designed to map custom fields to some of Unbounce integrated third-party apps like MailChimp, Salesforce, AWeber, and Hubspot.
7. Use the Moz On-Page Grader to get actionable insights to your Unbounce landing page keyword usage. Before you can begin, you need to have a Moz Analytics or PRO subscription. Once you have that, you can then start using the On-Page Grader tool.
Utilize the grader to prioritize keyword volume, look at top keywords on each landing page, grade page, and make changes. Also, use Google similar search to add a few of those keywords.
TJ McCue has this to say about the Moz On-Page Grader: “The best part about this tool – they don’t just point out the problems on your site. They give you a detailed, easy-to-understand set of steps to fix each problem. They rank them, too, as Easy Fix or worse.”
8. Push UTM parameters from Adwords campaigns to other pages. For example, from your Unbounce landing page subdomain to your main website. To do this, just contact us for the code to start pushing UTM parameters.
My Unbounce Wish List
While Unbounce is already loaded with all the bells and whistles that you need to create high-converting landing pages, there are still features that I wish Unbounce would include in their product development queue. For someone who’s working on a full stack marketing team like me, I think the list below can greatly help improve landing page creation on Unbounce.
Ability to easily add JavaScript code (e.g., Google Analytics, KISS, etc.) to all pages
Ability to add universal footer change or row change as a template to other pages
Ability to have another form, especially on long-form pages
Ability to track two (2) goals separately (e.g., form fill, sign-up)
If you have your own Unbounce wish list, make sure to add it in the comment box below. Who knows, maybe someone from Unbounce is going to read this post and see your suggestion.
Conclusion
When you implement all or any of the above tips, make sure that you always perform tests to find out if it’s working or not. Like for instance, making sure that your conversion tracker is working, Google Analytics is installed properly, or form fields are being pushed to CRM completely.
Whether you’re doing test for Unbounce or other third-party tools, it’s important that you account for tracking across Unbounce, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, other analytics software (e,g., KISSmetrics, MixPanel), your CRM (e.g., Salesforce, SugarCRM, Nimble), and your internal database.
Now it’s your turn! Are you already using the tips mentioned above? What ONE piece of advice would you recommend for someone using Unbounce with Adwords? Share your comments and thoughts in the box below!