Landing pages are a special kind of web page with unique design and content requirements. Critically, landing pages live in a parallel universe and should be designed to maximize the behavior you want. Site navigation should not be included. Either/or choices should be avoided. Instead, focus on the one behavior you want. A best practice is to develop one landing page for every search term or phrase that makes up your SEM campaign. In our own testing, we’ve found that developing unique landing pages for each search engine phrase will significantly conversions.
Dos and Don’ts When Building Landing Pages
| Don’t | Do |
| Use a generic headline. Why? Potential customers land on a page with no apparent relevance to their search, and then leave. | Build your headline off the precise keyword or search phrase that your prospect used to reach that particular landing page. |
| Use a generic offer. | Make your offer compelling by testing various offers with your target. |
| Waste the prospect’s time with extraneous information. | Focus body copy on quickly explain how the product or offer benefits the customer. |
| Ask the prospect to fill out tedious and invasive forms. | Capture only the minimum amount of information you need. |
| Design your landing page without a clear call to action. | Make offers bold and easy to accept. |
| Design your page to meet multiple goals and objectives. | Design your page focus on conversion and only on conversion. |
| Forget about page performance. Slow load times turn away potential customers. | Optimize the page performance for your audience. |
| Forget about eye tracking studies and what they tell us about what elements on the page will be read first, second, and third. | Use real estate on the page appropriately when placing critical design elements and page copy. |
| Include site-wide navigation on the page. | Use landing pages as the entry point into a highly focused behavioral path. Remove all distractions that arent pertinent to conversion goal. |
| Design your landing page so it doesn’t “match” the site. | Your landing page should resemble your site (albeit in a stripped-down way) to reassure your prospect they’ve landed at the right place. |
Relevant Links
Marketing Sherpa
See especially this report on landing-page optimization from February 2005 available for purchase1
Marketing Experiments
See especially this research note that summarizes much of the work done at this site on optimization of landing pages. Includes a list of vendors such as Offermatica who specialize in developing and hosting of A/B and multivariate testing of landing pages2
Notes
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