Lately I have had a lot of enquires around landing pages. So I felt it time to address, what they are and their purpose.
In short in the land of online marketing, a landing page is a stand alone web page, created solely to meet the needs of a specific marketing or advertising campaign. Usually from an advertisement driven by google adwords, facebook or instagram.
I read once an analogy on the reason for a landing page that stuck with me….
Imagine it was raining and you needed an umbrella. You head into your local k-mart and try to find one. Unfortunately since its k-mart, you end up walking around the store for an hour, unable to find said umbrella. By this time the rain outside has actually stopped, so you leave in frustration without an umbrella. Did k-mart have what you were looking for? Yes. But you couldn’t find it, so it didn’t matter.
Similar can be said to your online traffic. People click on a google adwords link or a facebook campaign because they think you can solve their problem.
However if you send them to a generic page (homepage) that doesn’t solve their problem, they’ll leave. Even if you have the perfect solution for them, people don’t have the time nor patience to figure that out.
In contrast, what if in our k-mart scenario, a conscientious manager had seen that outside it was raining so set up a pop up umbrella stand at the front of the store to capitalise on an obvious customer need? Would you have bought an umbrella then? I’m guessing “Yes, Sir Ree!”
This is what a landing page is like for your traffic. A good landing page is designed with a single focused objective – a call to action (CTA). Would the customer buy something? Fill out a form? Sign up for a newsletter? Download an ebook?
Whatever the objective, you need to have your goal clear and once you’ve got them in your grips, you need to make sure they don’t escape – remove the navigation, write clear copy, make sure your landing page is well optimised and fast loading.
Consider the following diagram, which shows a homepage and a landing page.
Homepage vs Landing page
The red highlights the links on each page. The homepage (on the left) is a standard homepage and has 40 links, in contrast the landing page (on the right) has only 1.
In this particular diagram the goal is for the user to fill out a form.
Having fewer links on your landing page has been proven to increase conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising, as there are fewer available distractions. Which is why expert marketers doing paid advertising always use a dedicated standalone landing page as the destination of their ad traffic.
Whether it’s k-mart or your website, people buy when you make it easy to buy. For a store like k-mart, there’s no practical way to predict what every customer will want.
For online advertisers, however, it’s a very different story.
With all of the control that Pay Per Click (PPC) gives you over your traffic, there’s no good reason not to create a landing page.
It’s the simplicity of a landing page that makes them the BEST option for increasing the conversion rates of your advertising campaigns and lowering the cost of acquiring a lead or sale.