The Use of Landing Pages

Landing pages are a great way to not only get the most bang for your advertising buck, but also more accurately track the effectiveness of ads or ad copy. Landing pages are essentially a web page to which people click from an outside link. It is the page they land on when they arrive on your site. Obviously, your site homepage is probably your most popular landing page. However, you can create customized landing pages and then point external links to different landings in order to more accurately track where your visitors are coming from. By tracking page views on your different landing pages, you can tell where your traffic is coming from. So, let’s say you have active advertising on Google Adwords, Yahoo, and maybe you’re running a campaign with Tribal Fusion. You want to know which option is working the best and use that information to better balance your advertising dollars to get the most bang. You also want to know which specific keywords and banners with Google Adwords are producing the most results. Set up each banner to link to a different landing page.

There is more, however, to the use of a landing page than simply tracking who came from where. Being that these are customized pages, you can tailor them to specifically cater to the buttons of the ads which lead into them. For example, you are using Google Adwords with certain keywords to launch a certain banner. Depending on the keywords, you can link them to a particular landing page. After all, being that they entered those keywords themselves, they are obviously interested in those keywords. Provide a landing page which hits those keywords and tells them how you offer solutions for those keywords.

Let’s look at some things to keep in mind when creating landing pages:

• Make it Clear That They Arrived. Use a distinct headline to hit the marketing button (i.e. the keywords) and make it clear they arrived on the “right” site. The headline should, on glance, tell them if your site is applicable to them.
• Use Headings and Sub-headings. People like bullet points and headings. They like to be able to scan a page and hit the highlights. And they will use those highlights to decide if they want to read the smaller text. If you observe the practice of some effective landing pages, you will see that, even though they are quite long at times, there are headings and sub-headings throughout that carry the user’s attention through.
• Stay Focused. You don’t want your landing page to split the visitor’s attention onto multiple things. You may offer multiple products, but don’t inundate your visitor with them on your landing page. Focus on one goal and don’t provide distractions.
• Use Multiple Calls to Action. A call to action is simply that section of the page which gets them to do something - buy something, sign up, etc. Ask them to do it, and ask them multiple times.
• Don’t use full screen width designs. 100% screen width makes paragraphs that are too wide and therefore harder to read.
• Show a picture of what you are selling.

Make sure you combine web analytics with your landing pages so that you can track traffic. Set up funneling so that you can track people from your landing page through the checkout process. With this way, you can find out where they are leaving and track success of all changes to the page and to the landing.

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