How to Create CPA Landing Pages that Convert

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Landing pages are one of the building blocks of CPA affiliate marketing. They’re the glue that connects a traffic source to an affiliate offer. Oftentimes can be the deciding factor on whether or not a campaign is a success.

After putting in all the work to get your paid ads started, your SEO optimized, your social ads working, or whatever your traffic generation strategies may be, don’t leave conversions on the table by leading that valuable traffic to a dud of a landing page.

The following CPA landing page best practices have brought many top affiliates success, and if you implement them, we’re certain you’ll see results too.

Create Captivating Headlines

It’s estimated that 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy – great news! But from there, only 2 out of 10 will actually continue to read the rest. Consumers decide within a split second whether they should continue reading, or flip back to the task they were addressing before navigating to your landing page.

From a copy perspective, your headline should be catchy. But you still want to ensure it’s direct enough language that consumers know exactly what they’re getting into. Unless you’re dealing with a product or service that has huge brand recognition (like the Nikes® and Coca-Colas® of the world), using compelling, explanatory titles will likely result in higher conversions than clever, but vague titles.

From a design perspective, remember to check the design of your landing page from different screen resolutions and sizes. This ensures that your headline remains above the fold and is legible no matter what type of setup a consumer may have.

Don’t Skimp on The Design

We are largely visual creatures, and it can be argued we’ve only become more reliant on imagery for our decision-making with the rise of social media over the past decade. For that reason, make sure you aren’t cutting corners on your landing page design. You could have the most compelling copy in the world, but if it’s not accompanied by the right imagery or laid out clearly, many consumers will never read it.

Keep your landing page design clean and simple. You want to use eye-catching images, but not too many. White space, or space without design elements, is important for keeping your audience honed in on the landing page’s CTA. An additional bonus of keeping your landing page free of visual clutter is that it will improve load time, which improves the chances of a consumer staying on your lander.

Luckily, you don’t have to be a design expert to create visually appealing landing pages, as there are numerous tools available online to help you. Here are a few of the tools SEO and Digital Marketing Expert, Neil Patel, recommends.

Limit Choices

What’s the best ways to increase the chances of your target audience converting on your call to action (CTA)? It’s to make that CTA one of their only choices on your landing page. It may seem like providing more places for a visitor to click will increase the chances of a conversion happening. Actually, in the end it acts more like ‘information overload’ and typically just increases your bounce rate.

Keep your call to action towards the top and try moving any administrative links towards the footer of your lander. If you do need to include secondary CTAs, give them less visual real-estate or emphasis than your primary CTA. By limiting choices, you create a clearer buyer journey with a greater chance of a conversion.

When you are able to use social proof on your landing pages, you feed into a consumer’s psychological reliance on the feedback and actions of others to make a decision. As social creatures, we naturally place a higher value on things that we know have already been approved by others.

Social proof comes in many forms, some more blatant than others, but all will help with conversion optimization. Here are some examples of social proof:

A customer testimonial
A list of current customers (many companies will list the logos of the brands they work with)
Press mentions
Product or service usage statistics
Social media share counts

Oftentimes a consumer might already be logically bought-in to the product or service on your landing page. Then social proof gives them the emotional buy-in they need to move forward with the purchase.

Ensure Your Message Matches Your Offer

Consistency throughout the entire customer journey is key! It’s crucial that what your target audience sees or reads about a product or service that it matches the product or service on your landing page. Keep this consistency by ensuring that the images used in your banner, article, email, social post, or whatever your media choice maybe, match the images used on your landing page. The same goes for the brand name. If you’re using one brand name within your content, it must match the brand name used on the landing page.

While this may be a non-issue for affiliates running one offer per landing page, for those who need to switch out offers as budgets are hit or dayparting comes into play, it can be a tedious task remembering to switch out brand images and names at the right times. But if you don’t make the switches, the likelihood that a consumer will convert on a landing page that does not match the information on the preceding page is virtually nonexistent.

At Perform^[cb], we’ve taken the hassle of our affiliate partner’s plates with our Brand and Image Rotation feature (a refresher on this feature can be found in our recent blog here). This feature automates the process, ensuring the brand name and image displayed will always match what’s on the landing page, with no manual changes required.

Conclusion

There’s no exact art to creating the perfect landing page. Optimizations will always be necessary (A/B testing is always a smart idea!). But the good news is that there are some tried and true principles that have proven to be successful no matter what trends or consumer changes have occurred. By following the recommendations above, your landing pages will be clear and compelling – and in return, converting!

Looking for top-performing offers to feature on your landers? Apply to be one of our affiliate partners today! You can find the application here, or reach out to our team with any questions you may have.

What is Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)?