What’s A Landing Page?

It’s basically the FIRST page a visitor sees…

There are two types of landing pages:

• Reference - These provide information relevant to the user, and proven effective if they meet the publisher’s (television, movies, public service) objective.
• Transactional - These encourage users to complete a form or interact with something on the page, with the ultimate goal of “converting” the user to either a sales lead for a service, or by directing them to an immediate purchase. Once a lead divulges information, according to agreed terms, the business may pursue them directly to finalize the sale or up-sell.

A landing page will cause one of five actions (according to Seth):

• Get a visitor to click (to continue to another page on your site or another)
• Get a visitor to buy, making an immediate transaction (mobile, paypal, credit card)
• Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.) after completing a registration form.
• Get a visitor to tell a friend (viral marketing purposes)
• Get a visitor to learn something, and possibly leave some feedback

Learn (Steal) From The Competition

Don’t start from scratch with your creative design, Web layout or overall messaging. Find out what your competitors have already learned through any search engine (Google). Search with keywords you believe someone would use to find your own product, service or information. Click (and charge the competition) on any relevant right-hand advertisements to find some relevant landing pages, and follow their examples. Learn from these, and then improve upon what they’ve begun.

Landing Page Optimization

The process of improving a visitor’s perception of a website by optimizing its content and appearance in order to make them more appealing to the target audiences, as measured by target goals such as conversion rate. Wikipedia…

Companies like Optimost provide multivariate testing services (and cost thousands per month). Google’s Website Optimizer is a free service, where you can do everything yourself. However, the key to any A/B or multivariate testing is traffic. It won’t help you much if your landing pages track a few hundred hits per week, because there isn’t enough data from this traffic to quantify results. So before attempting to try this for yourself, make sure you have a campaign drawing traffic to get the results you want with enough visitors to test.

Web Analytics

It’s essential to know where (referring sites & search engines) your users are coming from, the keywords they used to find you, and how they interact with your Web site once they get there. Web hosts will often provide free Web analytics tools for you. Urchin is often the choice of hosting companies, and if you can’t afford Omniture, there’s Google Analytics, which is free. I personally use Google Analytics. it’s great because your AdWords campaigns integrate nicely.

Now, Get Started!

Essentially, every page on your Web site is a landing page. You never know whether Google will rank a certain page higher than the rest, or if one page experiences the “Digg effect,” and this page will bring in the first-time visitors. Do all your pages say something about your product or service clearly and quickly enough?

Be methodical with your landing page production, and don’t get distracted with creative you think may work. Don’t think too much, and follow the numbers. Stick with a format that works, and carefully test that for further improvement. Take your time. Everyone wants to be creative, and it’s difficult not to try something new that looks good, or that your Designer mocks-up. But then again, try something new while keeping other campaigns running. It’s common for even small companies to have hundreds of landing pages running at once, as long as they are producing data that’s quantifiable. Scrap the ones that die, and redirect traffic to successful landing pages instead. Build your business machine!