If you're a digital marketer, you already know the importance of having a dedicated thank you page-also known as a confirmation page-tied to your lead forms or eCommerce shopping carts.
But if you're just dipping your toe into PPC, you may not realize the importance of having a dedicated thank you page for your PPC campaigns.
With that said, here are the three core reasons why you need a thank you page.
User Expectations
How many times have you submitted a form or purchased something online and have been sent back to the same page you were just on? You're confused, right? Did your form inquiry submit, or did your online purchase go through?
What I'm getting at here is that users expect to be taken to a thank you page after submitting a form or checkout online. Online users today are savvy, and even your average person understands the repetition and norm of being taken to a thank you page after taking an action online, and you don't want to disrupt that.
Without using one, you may lose the confidence, trust, and most importantly, return business of your users.
Upsell Opportunities
Out of all of the reasons to use a thank you page, I think this is the reason that's most overlooked, and it's the opportunity to upsell your website visitors.
If you're an eCommerce business, it's pretty straight forward: show them relevant products on the thank you page to encourage further purchases.
You can get creative, too. What about providing purchasers with a promo code for a discount on their next purchase, or putting a remarketing code on the thank you page to retarget past purchasers and put unique discounts in front of them to reward them? These are all things you can-and should-be doing.
If you're a lead generation company, you should be thrilled you got the lead through your website form, but what if you provided users with a free eBook/whitepaper, free demo, or newsletter sign up on the thank you page?
The point is that you should never be satisfied with just that purchase or lead. The thank you page provides you with a lot of opportunities to upsell.
Conversion Tracking
If you use your thank you page for one thing and one thing only, let it be conversion tracking.
You're spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars each month in paid search-and that could be across multiple channels like Google, Facebook, and Bing-and you need to be properly tracking conversions so you can attribute ROI to your PPC campaigns.
Conversion tracking is simple. Just create the conversion within the PPC channel-Google AdWords, for example-and then paste the conversion code into the <body> tags of the thank you page. Then, make sure you have your reporting columns setup to show you the number of conversions you're garnering from your campaigns. Conversions can be seen at all levels: campaign, ad group, keyword, ad, etc.
Additionally, make sure you're looking at more than just the number of conversions, but also the cost per conversion as well as the conversion rate. You should be optimizing your campaigns based on conversion data and what's driving the most return for you.
Conversion tracking is the reason why thank you pages were developed-everything else is just an added incentive.
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