Blog

What is a landing page?

Landing pages are simply websites, to which a person who clicks on your ad / link in the search results/ newsletter will be sent. Both the appearance and operation of landing pages greatly increases the effectiveness of the campaign.

What makes a good landing page?

Is your landing page perfect? Try to analyse it in terms of the following issues:

Accuracy

Does the site respond to the user’s query and elaborate on advertising? Do not force the user to search for information he needs – many of them would prefer to rather close the page. Example: If you are offering the promotion of refrigerators, advertising should refer to the details of this promotion, or to the fridge, not to the main page showing all Home equipment. This is important also for Google. The algorithm checks whether the content of landing pages contains the same words and phrases, as in the text search ads. If not, it drops the quality score and thus you have to pay more per click.

Text

Is the text actually text?

The question isn’t weird at all. It happens often that a landing page includes only a picture or Flash animations. Even if it contains valuable content, Google is not able to read them. Text should be in this case presented in the HTML code.

Formatting

Is the content well-formatted?

Users rarely read text from top to bottom. It is rather a “scan” where they capture the most important highlighted information. It is therefore important to ensure proper formatting: use of headings, paragraphs, bold text, legible font.

Call to action

Do you clearly communicate what you expect from the user?

What is the purpose of your landing page? Maybe you want your visitors to register, fill in a form or purchase a product? In each case it must be seen immediately after entering the landing page. Buttons and forms should be exposed, other elements can be distracting and detract the reader from the main message. The call to action button should be particularly eye-catching. One page should include only one call to action. If there are more, we can get the opposite effect from the one intended – in the sheer volume of information, the most important message will get lost and the user won’t perform any action.

Links

Can the user easily leave the page?

Have you placed a lot of links to other pages on your website? If so, can the user easily find their way back? If the landing page is not a simple subpage of the main website and one can get there only through a link, it is best to remove the navigation and links. The user who will use it, may never return and thus won’t ever follow the call to action.

Steps

Is the final destination easy to reach?

Sometimes the process of reaching the target consists of many steps. Placing an order in the store usually requires passage through several steps. Is this process easy and doesn’t frustrate the user? You may not be able to evaluate this objectively, because you are probably familiar with your website and the mechanisms that govern it. Therefore, it is worth asking for the opinion of people who have not yet had to deal with it or opt for a professional usability testing. It may be that certain elements are unclear or require the user to provide too much information. Studies show that as much as 96% of visitors leave the site without doing what is expected from them, and 70% of people abandon the shopping cart before finalising the transaction. It is worth trying to improve these statistics.

Conversions

Is it possible to easily measure conversions?

It will be difficult to optimise your website and advertising campaigns, if you do not collect information about conversions or you will not know their source. In Ad words you can generate codes that are pasted on the last stage of the process (e.g.,. ‘Thank you for the purchase or subscribe to a newsletter). This will tell you which campaigns / ads / keywords convert best.

Responsiveness

Does the site work on mobile devices?

More and more users use the internet on smart phones and tablets with different screen resolutions. Adapting to such devices is a necessary part of the design process.

Why investing in the landing page?

If your site does not meet most of the requirements listed here, you may wonder if it really pays to invest in the optimisation or creating something new for the campaign. The answer is: Definitely yes! If you regularly spend money on online marketing, advertising, SEO or newsletters, users will come to an ill-suited landing page. This will surely cost you some potential conversions. Well run advertising campaign for your website will direct potential customers, but what happens to them next depends on the site. You can increase the number of conversions spending more to acquire traffic, but you can also optimise your landing page and make the majority of the users follow the intended objective. In the long run optimising landing pages will bring you savings.

Now, you perhaps want to promote your landing page.

Landing page case study

Here is a good example of a landing page, which we recently finalised for T-Systems Austria. The aim is to promote the unified communications & collaboration tools that they offer to their customers. The landing page includes simple explanation of the services, visible contact details, further information available in PDF, which in order to access requires email sign up. It is clean and clear, without distracting, irrelevant information and outgoing links.