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The Importance of Landing Pages

By JJ Galvez | September 28, 2008

I’ve been working with PPC campaigns lately, it’s been fun actually. I found that when working on these campagins I’ve spent most of my time working on two things: campagin optimization (managing cost and keywords and analyzing traffic) and the creation and optimization of landing pages.

In this post I’ll be discussing the importance of a well optimized landing page, especially in regards to it’s use in PPC campaigns. I’ll be talking about optimization of PPC Campagin Management in a future post.

So first off, what is a landing page?

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia – Landing Pages

So now we know what the general idea of a landing page is. Like the advertisement that brought them to your page, it is a call to action – you’re telling the visitor:

Okay, well you can think that last one, but that’s basically the idea. Simple right? Kinda… not really. It’s easy to throw up a landing page and buy some traffic for it, you’ll get people going to the page, but will they perform the action that is going to earn you some greenbacks?

Creating a Landing Page

From reading, creating, and experimenting with landing pages I’ve learned that there are basically two major schools of thought.

A page promotes multiple offers and gives access to related products

I can see the first of these being very useful when you have access to a product catalog and are not promoting a single product. For example, when promoting for a jewelry store you might want to create a landing page for high quality diamond rings. In this situation you might not want to feature a single ring, instead you might be much more interested in featuring the top 5 selling diamond rings, maybe even a section for the company’s current specials. Another good way of doing this is making a very visually attractive page link to the different related sections of your site. Blue Nile has a great landing page setup for engagement rings.

Personally I would get a little crazy on this, create a small system capable of pulling in the jeweler’s catalog, creating a database that is queried based on keywords, then create PPC campaigns with dynamic keyword inserts, and BOOM you could have a dynamic landing page whose content is generated based on what the user is searching for, oh targeting is indeed quite sweet.

Create a page that promotes a single offer

I like this one, it’s so much faster! As far as I’ve seen in my own results these type of landing pages are also more effective; this of course conversions will depend on many different variables – anything from the type of product you’re selling to the type of customer the company targets. Anyhow, pages like these are quite common and am example of a landing page I setup for a hosting advertisement (dreamhost promo) can be found by clicking that link.

These type of pages are quick and easy to get up and running. Optimizing these pages is the real trick you’ll need to learn.

Optimizing the Page – What I’ve Learned So Far

  1. Make sure the page loads quickly – they just clicked an add and expect to see what they are looking for… NOW!
  2. Keep the graphics to a minimum – don’t flood their browser with a ton of images! Brings down load time and it can quickly turn away some people
  3. Don’t be too minimalist! The page needs to look clean but NOT EMPTY! I can not stress this enough – if the page looks empty you’re going to have the visitor leave right away.
  4. Use some color! It helps, I went through various versions of my dreamhost coupon code page, turns out the color pages had longer overall visits and a higher click through rate, up to over 20% on the one I’ve been linking.
  5. Give them a way to get to the product without too much fuss! You’ll notice from the blue nile link – they offer various links to their products all about, they don’t hide it or make you scroll about. On my own landing page for DH I added a banner as a call to action! CLICK HERE! SIGNUP!

A Final Tip

When it comes to creating and editing these pages I recommend having some sort of CMS. If you have any sort of CMS, you’ll be able to integrate your site, landing pages, stat systems, and pretty much anything you’d like through the system – or even through blogging systems like WordPress if you set it up properly. In the case of this blog and my landing pages I use WordPress. I do recommend having something that is capable of tracking changes, easily linking in your stat systems, and keeps everything organized – find something you like and can work with – it’s worth the time to setup and learn.

If anyone is interested and needs someone to install and setup WordPress for the creation of landing pages let me know I’m happy to help out for a reasonable fee. Also, if you made it all the way down here, leave me a comment and let me know what you think, if you have any questions do the same!

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