Learning how to create a landing page on Facebook is one of the most important parts of running Facebook ads. But, before you know how to do it, why is it so important?
Let’s all imagine for a second that someone actually does what you want them to do and clicks on an ad of yours on Facebook. Gasp! They want to know more!
But… where do they go? What happens after they click on your ad? What convinces them to do more than just click? It’s a mystery – wait. No, it’s not.
They go where you tell them to go! Sometimes, even most of the time, this means you’re sending them to a Facebook landing page. And hopefully, with a little pixie dust and a lot of hard work, you’ll start seeing people converting and clicking through… which means you’re using your Facebook ad spend wisely, and that’s the goal, right? Right.
However, saying “send them to a high-converting landing page and make some dollars” isn’t particularly helpful. That’s especially true if you don’t even know how to create a landing page on Facebook and what could possibly make it “high converting.”
There’s a lot to cover here folks, and instead of trying to cover it all, we’re going to focus on five things you just have to know about how to create a landing page on Facebook for Facebook ads. If y’all like this topic, we’ll write more about it later. Utilize the comment box below to tell us if you want to know more.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What a Facebook landing page is
- Why we care about landing pages
- Types of landing pages and alternatives
- What all of your landing pages should include
- What every landing page should avoid
1. What is a Facebook Ad landing page?
Before you learn how to create a landing page on Facebook, this section is going to start with a more fundamental question: what’s a landing page?
A landing page is something we think a lot of us “experts” (read: we’re sometimes winging it too guys) take for granted. It’s just one of those words that you know by living the hustler life, but you might not be doing that, so…
A landing page is the place where someone who clicks on your ad is going to wind up.
Sometimes this is the final place someone winds up and sometimes it isn’t (you might also have a thank you page or other offer pages after the landing page). However, it’s always going to be the FIRST thing someone sees after they click on your ad.
A landing page is the place where you expand on your offer, make it more enticing, and wrap an arm around your potential customer and guide them through a journey you hope will end in them buying.
The landing page is gonna get you the sales, and that’s where the real magic is going to happen. That first page after a click is crucial. Are you trying to get someone’s email by offering a freebie if they give it up? Are you trying to get people to join your Facebook group? Are you trying to get someone to buy a book? All of that is going to happen – or won’t happen – based on the content of your landing page.
2. Why we give a hoot about Facebook landing pages
It may seem a little much to care about the landing page. The ad was clicked on, was it not? Clearly, your audience is interested.
And to a certain extent, this is true. If you’re using the Facebook Pixel on your landing page, you’ll have captured valuable information on who has landed there and clicked-through. You can even use that information to retarget an audience that didn’t buy. If this is Greek to you, go take our course. Seriously.
But let’s be frank for a second: you’re paying really, really good money to serve your ads to an audience; and while the retargeting data is basically gold, it means you have to spend MORE money to bring in your audience… again.
When you know how to create a Facebook landing page that is really good, or at least one that converted, you’d have fewer people to target because you made more sales the first time.\
This means a higher ROI for you. Less work, more profit.
Conserve the retargeting budget for people who need more convincing, not those who walked away because you didn’t have a good enough landing page. That sucks, for them and you.
There is also a secondary reason we want to touch on…
… the importance of bringing people off-site.
We’ll talk about alternatives to off-site landing pages below, and we want to preface this with the fact that we’re betting on Facebook being around for a long time.
But what if it isn’t? What if it gets Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow? Snap. Poof.
What would you lose? What would your business lose? How much money would you have poured into Facebook ads only to have all of that data literally disappear?
Yuck. If something catastrophic like this happens, you want your business to survive, which means all of those relationships that are based on the platform need to exist off the platform, too.
You don’t own Facebook. But, you do own your own website. You do own your own materials. You can nurture the crap out of all of those relationships as much as you’d like, on and off Facebook. Let your audience experience your stuff above and beyond what you have to offer on someone else’s platform – your wallet will thank you for it.
3. Types of landing pages and alternatives
To be completely honest with you, a landing page is a landing page. There aren’t exactly types of landing pages as much as there are landing pages targeted at different audiences with different offers. In fact, we think that this lovely article over at Wishpond breaks it down very well. It goes through the basic design elements involved as you learn how to create a Facebook landing page. You can tweak these until the cows come home, including wording, spacing, colors, form fields, and different types of offers like contests, freebies, polls…
We promise the list goes on and on. Landing pages come in all shapes and sizes, but the point remains the same: to get your audience to do whatever action you want them to do.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of landing pages are going to link to a thank you page as well. Even though thank you pages aren’t technically a type of landing page, they still play a very important part in the conversion process and should look and feel like your original landing page. The final destination is just as important as the journey, you know?
Alternatives to creating a Facebook landing page
Maybe you’ve just starting out, don’t have a website, or don’t care about all of that “owning your audience” nonsense (protip: you should care, but we can’t make you!). You don’t want to go through the hassle of creating a landing page and a thank you page and all of that jazz, so you decide you want to keep it all on Facebook and just download the information when you have time later.
By the way, ClickFunnels makes it ridiculously easy to create landing pages and cohesive thank you pages, and if you sign up here we’ll send you our bestest most awesome funnel for list building. Ahem, carry on.
You decide you don’t want to bother with any of that off-site nonsense and start looking for alternatives. What else can you do?
- Use Facebook’s built-in lead capture form. Facebook has a built-in lead capture form so if someone clicks on a link, they get a pop-up that you can customize. They fill out the pop-up and the information is sent to your account. Done! No messy websites or off-site learning… Facebook does it all for you.
- Hire someone else to manage your ads. If you really don’t want to tango with all of the semi-complicated stuff that comes along with Facebook landing pages, then just hire someone else to do it. They’ll usually create the funnels, landing pages, and lead capture all for you and send it to your email or phone, depending on your preference.
- Direct traffic to a different page. You can run ads that send clickers back to your Facebook page or a different post. For example, these ads are easy to design and intuitive. You can also boost and design ads for events, which simply lead back to the event’s page on Facebook.
4. What every landing page ever created for Facebook should include
Not that we’ve covered that important stuff, here’s the stuff that’s really going to show you have to create a Facebook landing page that converts customers.
Continuity
Don’t skimp on making your elements match. Your ad should look like your landing page, and your landing page should look like your thank you page. You might think it’s funny, but people can get confused if you’re not properly matching elements – confused prospects don’t buy.
Limit your asks
The information you ask for should reflect where you are in the journey with a prospect. You wouldn’t hug someone randomly on the street after you introduced yourself with just your name, would you? RIGHT? Right. It’s just not the order of things. So, when you’re introducing someone to your brand, don’t ask them for a hug. Ask them for their name and a way to contact them. Later you can ask for more, but make ‘em like you first. Take them on a date. Go for the steakhouse.
ONE call to action
We established above that confused audiences don’t buy, and having multiple calls-to-action (read: “Do this! Click here! Sign up here! Watch this video here!”) can lead to overwhelming amounts of shellshock. This will just make someone click away. Don’t make your landing page noisy. Keep it smooth, simple, easy to read, straight forward.
Consider your visuals
We stumbled onto this really cool infographic… we see what you did there with visualization, Quicksprout… that considers and presents the importance of visuals in your ad. In our Facebook Ads course, we literally have an entire section committed to testing little stuff in visuals to make them more appealing to your audience, especially since the average attention span of a human is now below that of a goldfish. We take in a lot of data these days, and the visual part of that data is usually what gets us started in on something in the first place, so make your visuals count.
Experiment
Little things are going to matter here. Are you instilling enough urgency? Are you using the right tools? Are you testing your headlines, your buttons, your links, your photos? Optimize your pages by experimenting. This will be key in designing landing pages on Facebook that works for your audience.
Bonus tip: Offer something that people want at a cost they can afford. Once you figure out that offer and that cost, you’re going to do a lot better at reeling in your audience.
5. Do NOT do these things when building your Facebook Ad landing pages
Listen, we all make mistakes, and this is a great time to go ahead and learn from those mistakes instead of burning holes in your ad budget and learning the hard way. Here’s a whole bunch of don’ts of creating Facebook landing pages…
Don’t use your website front page as a landing page
We know, it’s so tempting! The page is built and it’s right there! Resist temptation. In the long run, this never works out. In some cases, it results in a 0% conversion rate. Every landing page should be fully optimized for the campaign it is for, and a homepage simply cannot be everything you need it to be for all campaigns.
Don’t use your Facebook page as a landing page
Facebook business pages are meant to show off your company and build your online personality, which in turn builds relationships. It is not meant to introduce your entire brand to a new potential customer. Landing pages are simple. Facebook business pages are not simple.
Don’t forget about small screens
It’s not as common these days, but there was a time not too long ago when landing pages would load on a mobile device and be completely unreadable until the user pinched and prodded their phone or tablet until they could read it. Some 80% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their phone or tablet in the past six months, so you should definitely make sure those words are crystal clear as soon as they hit the page!
Don’t forget the pixel
You’re paying for that data – hoard it! Make sure you take the time to get all of your backend bits in order before launching a landing page, especially if it’s for an ad campaign on Facebook. You can run ads without including the pixel, but you’re losing a big chunk of really, really important data. Stop that.
Don’t assume you know it all
Even if you’ve been doing this for a while, it makes sense to try new things sometimes and consult others. Make sure you’re tapping your tribe for valuable information. Facebook and other social media are constantly changing, so brush the dust off that ol’ knowledge and crack open a beer with your people and share. The moment you think you know it all is a moment you learn less, and doing this right is ALL about learning.
So there you have it. If you want to learn more about Facebook ads and all of that awesomesauce, go explore our blog a little more – we have nuggets for days.
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