5-Part Creating Effective Landing Pages Blog Series

In this five-part blog series on creating effective landing pages, we look at how to incorporate concepts like online testing, user experience (ux), social media and SEO into your landing pages to put together a high-converting program. 

Part 1: Why conversion rates are more important than click-thru rates

Are you still using click-thru rates as your core metric? Learn how you can correlate your online marketing activities to ROI much easier by tracking conversion rates.

Part 2: How to get your landing pages ready for testing 

It’s not uncommon to hear conversion-oriented marketers say test, test, test but before you start testing, you might consider making sure these four UX (user experience) items are taken care of. Not doing so can throw off your true conversion rate.

Part 3: Developing long-term relationships with landing page visitors

Don’t let your relationship with a visitor end once they’ve converted. Continue the relationship by using these tips for getting social with your landing page visitors!

Part 4: When should your landing pages be SEO-friendly?

Not all landing pages should be optimized for the search engines, but many of them can be. Check out this post for more on when to create SEO-driven landing pages.

Part 5: How many landing pages do you need?

This number will be ever evolving. Check out this post to see why!

For more easily digestible advice on landing pages, flip through our presentations. And please let us know what you think. Send us a tweet @ioninteractive! 

How many landing pages do you need?

How many landing pages do you need? To conclude the Creating Effective Landing Pages blog series, we’ll wrap up with a commonly asked question, “how many landing pages should I have?”

That’s near impossible to answer because it’s an ever-evolving number. To take a stab at it: if you’re a global brand running lots of ads, I’m guessing it should be up there in the hundreds or even thousands. Seriously.

You should have at least one landing page per ad campaign you’re running. On top of that you’ll need “challenger” pages that you test against your “champion” pages.

A champion page is your current landing page, and the challenger is a second (third or fourth) page that you test against the champion. The winner is the higher converting page. In many cases your challenger will beat the current champion and become the new champion. When this happens, testing isn’t over; you simply start again by either testing elements within the new champion (multivariate testing) or by creating a new challenger to test against it (A/B testing).

Because testing is a never-ending process and because your ad campaigns are ever-changing, the number of landing pages you need will vary all the time. This is why landing page software is so important – landing pages are disposal — your champion today may be outdone by a new challenger tomorrow. Marketers must have a tool that helps create, launch and test landing pages on the fly without a ton of investment in time or money. With landing page software you can create as many landing pages as you need without spending a boatload of time on the creation process. You just don’t want to get caught up in the design or coding of a landing page, when the important stuff doesn’t happen until after the page is launched. At the same time, you don’t want to launch a half-baked (read: ugly) page that will likely be low converting. With landing page software you’ll work off of a branded and templated system that gets you going in minutes or hours, not days or weeks.  The focus won’t be on getting the page launched, but rather catching conversions and analyzing why the non-converters walked away.

And that concludes the Creating Effective Landing Pages blog series. Looking forward to your feedback in the comments and on Twitter @ioninteractive.

When should landing pages be SEO friendly?

Do you know when to optimize your landing pages for search?In Part 3 of the Creating Effective Landing Pages blog series we discussed creating social landing pages, but social media shouldn’t get to have all the conversion fun. Now we get to discuss how SEO can get in on the game.

There are two ways SEO and CRO should work together. The first is easily explained in one line by Tim Eschenauer of Austin & Williams in his most recent SEO blog post, “I say stop focusing on rankings and start focusing on conversions.” Basically, you can rank first for all of your most relevant terms, but if you can’t get the conversion it doesn’t matter.  This is a perfect example of how SEO and CRO must work together; SEO gets you the traffic and CRO converts the traffic into business.

The second way SEO and CRO should work together involves landing pages.

In most cases you’re going to be setting up landing pages for your ad campaigns; however, that doesn’t mean relevant organic traffic should be kept out. Your main business objective is to get as many conversions as possible, and if you’re doing SEO on your landing pages correctly, this traffic should be just as relevant as your campaign traffic. Just be sure to keep data on the two separate in your analytics as they may behave differently once they land.

The only times when it wouldn’t be a good idea to send organic traffic to your landing pages is when you’re promoting “limited-time offers—or offers applicable only to a specific segment of your audience” says Scott Brinker, ion’s president and CTO. Otherwise, get your long-term landing pages indexed as quickly as possible.

So, how do you make SEO-driven landing pages? Much like you would create any SEO web page. Christine Laudebnstein, a marketing copywriter at Wordstream says making sure your landing pages are keyword rich is important:

This is also crucial for ranking high in natural search engine results. When your keywords appear in key fields like the page’s headline, subheads, and main content, it’s more likely that the landing page will show up when those keywords are searched. You can also put keywords in picture captions, calls to action, and meta tags. Of course, it’s important not to overstuff your page with keywords, as the repetition could annoy readers and appear spammy, undermining your SEO efforts.

While CRO and SEO have developed into two separate industries, they have the same purpose in mind: connect traffic with relevant content.

In the next (and last) part of our Creating Effective Landing Pages series we’ll answer the question, “just how many landing pages should I have?” 

Developing long-term relationships with landing page visitors

When visitors convert on your landing page, it’s important to remember they are doing you a favor (not the other way around). Of course, they’re receiving something in return, which is nice – but you should go one step farther to thank them.  You should get social with them.

Adding social widgets to your landing page kills two birds with one stone:

1. It extends the good will towards your brand, and puts you in front of a new group of potential customers. Think about it: your respondents just received something that will help them in some way, and they’re feeling pretty good. Now they can publically thank you and share their good experience with their social networks. Just remember to make the sharing a no-brainer. Include one-click options like a Twitter button or Facebook Like button.
2. Second, adding social widgets to the landing page allows you to become part of their social network, thus extending your relationship with them. What could have ended with the purchase, has now become an opportunity to stay engaged and cultivate a long-term relationship with repeat conversions.

For more information on why and how to get social with your landing pages, check out this presentation we put together:

View more presentations from ion interactive, inc..

How to get your landing pages ready for testing

Are your landing pages ready for testing? In the first part of the Creating Effecting Landing Pages series we talked about the difference between tracking click-thru rates and conversion rates, and why tracking conversion rates is more important. In part 2 we’re going to talk about how to get your landing pages ready for testing and optimization.

While “best practices” are often shunned, and rightly so, there are some “best practices” that should be adhered to, particularly when it comes to the user experience (UX) of your landing pages.

I’m not suggesting you usability test your landing pages because seeing what a test group does won’t tell you how your landing pages are going to perform with a variety of different visitors once the page is live. However, I am saying there are fundamental UX principles that should be considered before you even begin testing.

Here are four things to consider before you begin testing your landing pages:

• Load time of your page
• Messy, multi-layered navigation
• Browser optimized
• User-forgiveness

Once you have these basic elements nailed down, now it’s time to start testing.

Here are 5 quick ways to start testing your landing pages:

1. Behavioral targeting – keep this simple: give second time visitors different information than you gave them the first time (obviously they’re interested if the returned, now give them something new to convert them).
2. Copy – change your messaging, headline and body copy, and experiment with bullets and paragraph lengths.
3. Images – experiment with people (male vs. female, group vs. individual, looking left vs. looking right), product shots, animals, charts, etc.
4. Geolocation – test providing local content such as mentioning specific city names and showing images that reflect the location the visitor is in.
5. Content – experiment with different content elements (tabs vs. no tabs, still image vs. video, bullets or no bullets, etc.