You will be able to keep the promise of an ad or post consistent with the headline and offer on the page.
You see an ad for a free trial maths lesson for your Primary 5 son. You tap it. The page that opens says "Welcome to our learning family" above a photo of preschoolers and a list of programmes from nursery to secondary. You scroll for a moment looking for anything about a trial or P5, cannot find it, and go back to your feed. It took about four seconds.
That visitor did not reject the offer. She never found it. The page broke the promise the ad made, and she assumed she had clicked on the wrong thing.
When someone clicks an ad, a post or a link in an email, they arrive with one idea in their head: whatever the thing they clicked said. The first job of the page is to confirm they are in the right place, and the fastest way to do that is to say the same thing in similar words.
If the ad says "Free trial lesson for Primary 5 maths", the page headline should say something very close, such as "Free trial lesson for P5 maths, this Saturday". The visitor sees the words they clicked on and relaxes. The ad and the page feel like one conversation.
This is sometimes called message match: the headline and offer on the page match the promise in whatever brought the visitor there. It applies to the words, the offer and the look. If the ad showed a photo of a small group of children at a table with a tutor, the top of the page should show something similar. If the ad offered a free trial, the page should lead with the free trial, not with a term fee and the trial mentioned in small print.
A visitor deciding whether to stay on a page is not reading carefully. They are glancing to check one thing: is this what I came for? If the first thing they see does not confirm it, many leave immediately. They do not scroll to find out whether the offer is further down. It feels quicker to go back.
A mismatch can also feel dishonest even when it is not. A visitor who clicked "free trial" and lands on a price list wonders whether the trial was real. That doubt makes the rest of the page harder to believe.
The usual causes are ordinary. The business sends every ad to the homepage. The ad was rewritten for a new campaign and the page was not. Two people wrote the ad and the page without comparing them. The fix is equally ordinary: before an ad goes live, put the ad and the top of the page side by side and read them together.
The same offer can interest different readers for different reasons. Priya's free trial appeals to parents whose child goes blank in exams, and to parents who mainly need a Saturday slot because both work. One ad speaks to the first group: "Knows it at home, goes blank in the test?" Another speaks to the second: "Saturday morning maths for P5, for parents who work weekdays."
If both ads lead to the same page with the same headline, at least one group lands on a headline that does not match what they clicked. There are two ways to fix this. The thorough way is a separate landing page for each audience, with the same offer and different words at the top. The quicker way is to keep one page and change only the headline and supporting line for each audience. Many website and landing page tools let you duplicate a page and change the top, which takes a few minutes.
Here is how Priya's two versions start.
For the exam-nerves ad, the page headline is "Knows it at home, goes blank in the test? Try one Saturday class free" and the supporting line is "Classes of six for P5 and P6, where the tutor checks every child's working."
For the working-parents ad, the headline is "Saturday morning maths for P5, try one class free" and the supporting line is "Classes of six, 9am or 11am, so weekday evenings stay free."
Everything below the top is the same. Each group sees its own promise first.
Most clicks from social media ads come from people on their phones. A page that looks fine on a laptop can bury its headline under a large image on a phone screen, or push the call to action several screens down. The visitor sees a photo and a logo, and nothing that matches the ad.
Before you send traffic to a page, open it on your own phone by clicking the ad or post itself, the way a customer would. Check that the headline that matches the ad is visible without scrolling, that the text is readable without zooming, and that the main button is easy to tap. If you have time, check on one other phone with a different screen size.
Priya found that on her phone the photo at the top of her page filled the whole screen. The matching headline was below it, out of sight. She moved the headline above the photo, and on a phone the visitor now sees "Try one Saturday class free" before anything else.
The activity asks you to write the ad text and matching page top for two different audiences for the same offer. Start by naming each audience and the phrase from your voice-of-customer file that would make them click, then write the ad and the page headline together so they match.
Write the ad text and the matching page headline and supporting line for two different audiences for the same offer.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).