Most advertisers aspire to 1:1 personalization, but they largely miss the mark.
It’s understandable. A lot has to go right for 1:1 personalization to work. You need the right strategy, people, and the right tools.
Mostly, though, you need to rethink the post-click landing page. It needs to be treated like we treat ads.
Why post-click landing pages must be treated like ads
You never run just one ad. That would mean treating your audience like a homogeneous group. And they’re not. They’re a set of individuals considering your project differently.
And so, you target differently. You tailor your creative; you tailor your offers to the stage of the funnel. You even test variations of these ads before you pick the best. It’s not uncommon to have ten, twenty-plus ads per campaign with different arrangements of the headline, media, copy, etc.
And that’s because you know audiences will respond better to a more relevant message. Through testing, you’re attempting to create a level of personalization. The more personalized the ad, the more likely you are to earn a click.
What happens after the click, though, is rarely personalized.
Instead of driving prospects to a post-click landing page that matches the ad, most advertisers use one landing page as a catch-all for campaign traffic. The result is a gap in campaign personalization.
For campaigns to deliver the highest ROI possible, personalization needs to extend beyond the click of an ad. The same way ads are targeted, tested, tailored to their audience, post-click landing pages should be, too.
Of course, there’s a glaring problem with that. Read on to discover what it is. And to find out if you’re doomed to suffer more problems with scaling post-click landing pages, download the Instapage Scalable Creation ebook:
The problem with scaling post-click personalization
The major problem with extending personalization beyond the click is that it takes a lot of work. If each ad or ad group has its own landing page, you’re talking about creating tens of landing pages per campaign. It’s not possible with traditional methods of design. But, that’s true of today’s landing page builders, too. Here’s why:
Templates aren’t sufficient for post-click personalization
Nearly all landing page tools are founded on a WYSIWYG template editor. They allow you to choose a template and insert page elements, edit them, drag them to new positions, and publish a page.
For some kinds of pages, this is sufficient. For post-click personalization, it isn’t.
First, what happens after the click of an ad is about more than just the landing page design. There are page load times to be considered, assets to be delivered after the conversion, “thank you” pages to complete the conversion, etc. A WYSIWYG builder can only take you so far.
Second: starting from templates, while easier than starting from scratch, are not scalable enough to provide the level of personalization you need.
Again, we’re talking tens of pages per campaign. That’s even more when you’re running simultaneous campaigns.
Loading a template, editing, publishing, and repeating this process until all your pages are fully personalized is not scalable. Especially when you consider they’ll likely need editing. After an A/B test that determines your audience prefers an image to a video, are you going to edit every page manually?
You may say, “Well, this tool comes with dynamic text replacement. My pages are automatically personalized already”
To you, we’d say, for true 1:1 personalization, you need to match more than keywords from your ad to your post-click landing page. Muhammed Fahad elaborates:
Dynamic text replacement works for simple word changes like a particular location match. But, it’s near impossible to match the context of a visitor’s intentions with a simple keyword or location insertion.
To do this, you need robust context matching that requires an entirely new experience. This means that every post-click page should have different page layouts, different image backgrounds, and a different story narrative based on who’s looking at the page.
More than matching words in headlines and copy, you need to match context, narrative, and intent. For this, you need deeper personalization. You need the freedom of a highly customizable builder, but also the scalability offered by a feature like dynamic text replacement.
The only solution is post-click automation.
The 2 features that make post-click automation scalable
Post-click automation is a solution that allows advertisers to create personalized campaigns from the first ad impression to the final click. It’s built on four pillars: Ad mapping, Scalable Creation, Personalization, and Optimization. The Scalable Creation feature is what gives it the edge over templates from landing page builders. Here’s how:
Scalable Creation
Scalable creation is the pillar of PCA that allows users to create tens of post-click landing pages effortlessly. Consider a basic scenario:
You’re running a campaign for an audience segmented into four: males aged 18-28, 29-40, 41-51, and 52-65. You know that each of these groups use your product differently, they talk differently about it, and they have different motivations for purchasing.
You decide that, while you want to adjust elements of your page for each audience, you want to test the same body copy and CTA across each.
If you’re the user of a landing page builder, you have to load a template for each of the groups and recreate the page several times.
If you’re a post-click automation user, however, you need only create one landing page and save your body copy and CTA as an Instablock.™ This allows you to save both page sections in one location, then import them into any future page.
For scalability, this is invaluable. As is another feature, Global Blocks.
Let’s imagine your run all of these landing pages, and eventually want to improve them. You test your original body copy against some new body copy, and after your test, the new body copy wins. So, you want to replace the old body copy with the new on multiple pages.
If you’re the user of a landing page software, you’ll have to change these manually. And, while it’s only four pages at maximum, consider what it would be like if it were thirty or forty. What if you went through a rebranding and had to change your logo, company name, and color scheme on each page?
Depending on your business, you may need days, weeks, months even. With Global Blocks though, it takes only a few clicks.
After the conclusion of a test, or a rebranding, or even something as small as updating your copyright information, Global Blocks can help. Global Blocks allows you to use Instablocks on more than one page. Form a central dashboard, PCA users will be able to insert an Instablock on any number of pages they please: images, copy, headlines, CTAs, and more…
As far as scaling custom page designs, there is no feature more valuable.
Learn more about scaling post-click landing pages
To create truly personalized post-click landing pages, you need to be able to move at the speed of advertising. The lagging design process with templates won’t cut it. But, this isn’t the only mistake advertisers make when trying to scale post-click landing pages. Are you making any of them? Find out, by claiming the Instapage Scalable Creation ebook.