How to boost landing page response

Ask any experienced marketer and they will tell you - a landing page can make or break an online business. However, even though marketers know how important the landing page is, many still aren't sure how to optimize their landing pages and are therefore missing out on conversions.

by Kristina Knight

The key, according to a new report from Marketing Sherpa, is to know when to break those Landing Page Rules touted at every turn.

First, the advertising response forms. Many marketers are missing out because their response forms are simply too long. Consumers will not stick around to fill out line after line after line of miscellaneous information. Make those response forms as short as possible. Ask for only relevant information rather than pages and pages of user preferences. Once a consumer has filled out that initial form, offer them a more in-depth version of preferences to customize their user account with your site.

By offering a quick form to get started and immediately following that up with a detailed list to create a personalized area, marketers can better appeal to consumers.

Second, create more than one landing page. Sound like too much work? Consider this: you purchase 5,000 keywords during a paid search campaign. Some of those keywords are for Brand A, and some for Brand C but if you are only taking consumers to one landing page (say for Brand A) they will be turned off. Consumers are brand loyal so if they click on a keyword for Brand C but are taken to a landing page for Brand A, they won't search your site for the correct product. They will simply leave and not return.

Third, consider changing the information given to a consumer based on the time of day that consumer clicked through to a landing page. Most consumers clicking through to a landing page during normal business hours are clicking through from work; they don't have time to read several paragraphs of content. Consumers clicking through during evening hours are likely at home and may have more time. During the business day, consider serving larger image based ads and an easy way to buy the product. During the off-hours (evenings and weekends) consider giving them a little bit more: more content, more choices because the consumer likely has more time to engage with the site.

Tags: ecommerce, landing pages, paid search, search marketing

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take a look at what http://www.pagealizer.com do. they track your landing page and point you to it's weak parts.

Posted by: somemo on August 12, 2008 11:17

Hi Kristina - Nice post, very thoughtful and helpful too! I’d like to add that it’s important for web marketers, when breaking the landing page rules, to know the difference between transactional and lead generation websites. As your post so wonderfully notes, with lead gen sites, it is important to adjust media and content to the keywords that bring visitors to the website, as well as shorten forms and have page three the optional questions for better visitor targeting toward sales. With transactional websites, they are typically more involved in nature than lead generation sites. Often visitors simply are shopping for products or services and haven’t yet reached the stage in the buying cycle where they’re ready to actually buy. This is where online marketers get in trouble; they treat a landing page as if it were a homepage. The goal of the homepage is to engage visitors, regardless of which stage they’re at in the buying cycle. A transactional site is where a marketer will “message” a potential buyer with such targeted content as buyers’ guides, reviews, cross-sell items, promotions, etc. All this data is gathered, again, from the keywords that brought the visitor to the website. Anyway, I just wanted to point out the difference between optimizing a lead gen site and transactional website. Thanks, and great post! Jason O’Keefe, of SiteSpect (www.sitespect.com)

Posted by: Jason O'Keefe on August 12, 2008 21:59