This Simple Strategy is How Smart Marketers Use Landing Pages to Increase Profits

Marketing is all about experimentation. Sometimes, you have to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

Of course, the process is a little more refined than that.

You've probably at least read about A/B testing, even if you haven't implemented it yourself.

Testing two different approaches at the same time — whether it's different versions of the copy, different images, still images versus a video, or different headlines — is one of the best ways to find out for sure which one is more impactful.

But how do you go about setting up an A/B test for a landing page? There's more than one way to do this, but one of the options you can consider is paid search ads.

A lot of us either use an adblocker, or just kind of mentally filter out the ads at the top of the page when we Google something. But despite all of this, paid ads are still quite effective. People actually do click on them, and you can use that to your advantage.

In a recent article from Hubspot, the author explains how you can use paid search advertisements to test out different versions of a landing page, helping you optimize it for maximum conversions.

Landing Page Testing

One great way to use paid search is for testing and optimizing your landing pages. So, for instance, here's the search engine results page for “cat food for older cats”, and you see some paid results for this specific search query:

[image source: HubSpot]
You can take that one ad and actually set it to go to two different destination URLs, and therefore, to two different landing pages.

So for a cat food ad, you could have one ad going to a page with one offer (a guide on feeding techniques for your older cat), and the other to a page for another offer (an actual product page for cat food).

You could also have the ad go to two different landing pages that are for the same offer.

For example, if you wanted to test a feature of your forms, you could have two versions of the same landing page, each with a different form layout, and send the ad to each of those. This is called A/B testing, a very important and highly recommended practice for optimizing your landing pages.

Paid search is a great way to do landing page A/B testing because it allows you to direct traffic to your choice of pages, split this traffic to different pages, and ultimately find the pages that convert at the highest rate.