Is Your Message Match Missing the Mark?

The best way to show that you are truly interested in your visitors and want them to have the best possible experience with your company is to tailor your landing experience to their interests and needs. We call this message match, and its a basic requirement for relevant landing pages. You can try testing targeted landing pages to measure the impact of message match.

Let’s run through a quick scenario to help you understand the potential of testing messaging targeting.

Searching for “car insurance” on Google, I was presented with ads from three of the top car insurance providers in Florida — Progressive, Esurance and State Farm.

Progressive promises “car insurance made easy” and a quote in 6 minutes. Awesome. Esurance is not only easy, but fast. Esurance offers potential savings of 28% and a quote in minutes. State Farm, touts 40 million drivers, but unfortunately, doesn’t offer “ease” or a quick quoting process like the others.

Message Match Evaluation #1

Let’s take a look at Progressive first. The headline says “Compare rates in three easy steps.” They got the “easy” down, but what happened to 6 minutes? I’d give Progressive a solid “C”.

Message Match Evaluation #2

Now Esurance gets the headline right, with reiterating the 28% savings. For me, this is big. However, again, they’ve lost the promise — “free quote in minutes.” I’d give Esurance a “B” for strong message match in the headline.

Message Match Evaluation #3

Now a finger wag at State Farm for a couple of reasons. Discounts up to 40%? Why wasn’t that in the ad? Better potential savings compared to Esurance would be a strong driver of clicks. Secondly, State Farm is missing the social proof, “40 million drivers trust us.” I do, however, like the simplicity of the landing page. With a little work on the PPC side, this landing page could be an A. But, as for current message match, its well below average.

An ad is not complete without it’s matching landing page, and vice versa. Think of the two as peanut butter and jelly; one wouldn’t be right without the other. Whatever promise you make in an ad should be directly fulfilled in the landing page. Visitors will abandon if your page doesn’t fulfill the promise. While none of these landing pages are particularly bad on their own, improved message match between the ad and landing page would likely increase conversions.