Is your social traffic crash landing, and burning money?

More brands send social traffic to product and category pages than anywhere else. But there’s a problem: 70-80% will bounce straight off without engaging, and only 1% on average go on to buy.

The traditional solution is to build custom landing pages. But for social this doesn’t work for three key reasons.

Why custom Landing Pages don’t work for social traffic

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1. Social traffic is different

Social media traffic isn't uniform. A mixture of hot, warm and cold traffic with a wide variety of intents inevitably find landing pages dead ends. Social is a mixture of recreation and inspiration, so best practice is to blend social and shopping to avoid a crash landing.

2. Overly Focused on Conversion

Most landing pages are designed with a single goal: to drive conversions for a specific product. But social media content is often more nuanced, showcasing a combination of products in use or telling an aspirational brand story. For example, a social ad might feature a model on a beach wearing a jacket, top, shorts, and a hat. A landing page focused solely on selling the jacket misses the opportunity to engage visitors who might be interested in the hat or the overall look. Equally others may be interested in more general themes such as ‘summer outfits’ or ‘beach.’ Furthermore, social media audiences are diverse, ranging from new visitors to loyal customers, and a one-size-fits-all landing page generally doesn’t address the needs of such varied audiences, resulting in high bounce rates.

3. Static and Inflexible

Landing pages are typically static, meaning they do not adapt to changes in traffic patterns or user behavior. While they may provide a lift in conversion compared with product pages, their effectiveness is limited. Social traffic is dynamic, with different audience segments engaging with different elements of a campaign at different times. A static landing page cannot keep up with these fluctuations, leading to suboptimal performance.

4. Too Slow to Build at scale

For all but the smallest brands with only a few products, building custom landing pages isn’t scalable. It takes too long to design, test and optimize custom landing pages given the short life and high refresh rate of social content. The build process can take many weeks, and involve coordination of multiple teams which makes this completely impractical for brands running anything more than a few ads.

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Time to rethink landing experiences

In the post-privacy advertising world, we need to rethink how we land social traffic. In the process of running ads, from targeting, creative through to landing and conversion, the opportunities increasingly lie with creative and with landing.

The first part of fixing this is recognizing that you have a bounce problem, not a conversion problem.

Targeting is increasingly automated by the social platforms’ algorithms. You’ve probably also got most of the lift out of your conversion optimization efforts already. If you’re only converting 1% of social ad traffic, a 10% improvement through conversion optimization still is only 1.1%. What about the 98.9% that don’t buy? A 10% improvement on such a big number would drive a lot more revenue.  The first part of fixing this is recognizing that you have a bounce problem, not a conversion problem. If you make the landing experience more engaging, you’ll get more traffic and improve your conversion rate. Here’s how.

Connecting ad and landing experiences

Those spectacularly high bounce rates from social traffic are caused because of a lack of relevance. You’ve probably had the experience yourself – you click through from social only to land on a category page where you can’t find the product you were looking for. Or you land on a product page only to find the product is out of stock or looks different from the ad. Because you’re on social, youre highly likely to be on a mobile device making the experience all the harder.

Making landing experiences more relevant requires a mindset shift: we need to engage traffic, not just try and sell one focus product. Social traffic is a mixture of hot, warm and cold, your landing experience needs to cater for different types of visitors, not just those that are ready to buy.

Mirror the ad

Shoppers know that clicking through from social is a roll of the dice. Our research shows that 89% of shoppers have had a recent bad experience. Mirroring the ad reassures them they’re in the right place and that they’re seeing the same brand story that earned their click.    

Make it easy to find and buy all the products in the ad

The number one reason why customers bounce when clicking through from social is because they can’t find the product or it looks different. Think back to our model on the beach example – you need to make it easy to buy all the products featured in the ad: the jacket, top, shorts, and a hat and provide navigation to themes like ‘beach’ and ‘summer.’ Making featured products easy to buy will drive conversion for the hot traffic. But what about the warm and cold?

Get the next click

Many of your social visitors won’t be ready to buy. The goal is to get them engaged and exploring the product catalog. This means navigation to lots of different adjacent places to similar or first buy products and categories.  

How infinite scroll is a game changer

Pioneered by Netflix, infinite scroll is all about engagement. Scrolling down and across in a never-ending shop window tempts the visitor to click. The more they scroll, the more likely they are to click, and when they click the more likely they will click again. Infinite scroll is a very powerful concept, especially when the pages are dynamic, and not static like custom landing pages. Content can be automatically shuffled using Machine Learning to display the most engaging content prominently. Social traffic is not uniform though; it evolves as more users engage with the campaign. To maximize conversions, brands need to continually adapt their e-commerce experience to reflect these changing patterns.

Conclusion

Custom Landing Pages work best in static stable environments where campaigns and creative are long running, enabling the time and effort required to build them to pay dividends.  Social media marketing isn’t this – it’s a constantly changing, shifting landscape that drives a wide variety of traffic with different intents. Infinite scroll approaches have been proven to drive double or treble the revenue of custom landing pages and are much more suited to social media use cases.

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