Landing Pages 101 – Why Are They So Important?

Curious about what landing pages are and whether you should be using them for your business?

You’ve come to the right place!

Simply put, landing pages are pages are “conversion focused” pages that are separate from your home page, with the goal of getting a visitor to do one specific action like buying a specific product or signing up for more information about your products or services (and becoming a lead).

Let’s look at the W5 (who, what, when, where, why) of landing pages.

Who Should Be Using Landing Pages?

If you are actively promoting a very specific product or service, you can generally get better results by using a landing page in your external promotions.

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a streamlined, strategic page that removes all other distractions that might be on your home page or product pages and focuses very specifically on getting your visitor to take the action you want them to as it relates to your promotion (sign up, purchase, request more info).

When Should I Use a Landing Page?

Any time you are promoting something that is not 100% the focus of your home page, you should consider a landing page. From a return on investment perspective, you should consider a landing page strategy any time that a 20-40% boost in results would more than pay for the work or money that goes into creating the page. Also, you likely need to be advertising or promoting your offer at scale – a landing page strategy works best if you are driving lots of traffic to your pages.

Where Do I Put My Landing Page?

Your landing pages can be created on your main domain or may be created on a separately branded domain if you are using a third party service. Generally, they are NOT included in your navigation or linked to from your website. You’ll also want to include a “noindex” tag with them so they don’t show up in Google Search. The big reason for this is that they are generally transient pages. They often get put up and then taken down and you may have multiple similar pages (for different target audiences or for testing purposes). You don’t want to confuse Google and you don’t want to confuse your regular website visitors by having them prominent on your website.

Why Should I Use a Landing Page Strategy?

If you are promoting something at scale, you can get better results! As well, you can test different versions of the landing page to identify which version works best. Landing pages are generally used with either digital advertising or with high volume email marketing. In a past life, I managed customer email databases with millions of people in them. In promotions I typically tested 5 different landing page variations to some tens of thousands of customers prior to rolling out the “winner” to the rest of the audience. It was not uncommon to see the best performing landing page in a test perform at double the effectiveness of the worst performer.

The above point raises the question of whether it makes sense for smaller companies to use a landing page strategy and the answer is a definite “maybe!”

If your company doesn’t drive hundreds or thousands of visitors per page, you won’t get enough traffic to achieve statistically significant results with testing. That said, even if you can’t test your pages you will still profit from landing pages if you follow the general best practices.

Curious about learning about these best practices for landing pages? Watch for next month’s newsletter and blog post where we dig into the critical elements of landing pages as they relate to various types of products and services!

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