How To Create Effective Landing Pages: Part II
SEO, internet February 13th, 2007In the first part of this two part series I covered the first five elements in an effective landing page.
6. Call to Actions - These are not only important on your ad copies, but they are even more important on your landing page. You’ve successfully convinced a visitor to click on your ad but now that they are reading your landing page you need to tell them to do something else. Even if you are not selling something, you need to tell the visitor to the landing page what to do. Again, just think of them as sheep. Herd them somewhere that you want them to go. You can tell them to sign-up for your newsletter, download your product, register for a seminar, or even to pick up a phone and call you (people still use phones?). This is the single most common area that I have seen where landing pages fail.
7. Avoid Choice Overload - Now, while it is important to tell your visitors where to go, it is equally important that you don’t tell them to go in every direction possible. I suggest ONE very clear call to action, and up to 2 alternative actions. It is important to provide a choice to maximize landing page conversions. You will have to see what works with your landing page. One thing that you should never put onto your landing page is your website navigation links or footer navigation links. Navigation links will provide your visitors with endless opportunity to navigate AWAY from your landing page. The landing page should be a stand-alone page that is separate from the rest of your site. It is to act like a funnel, not a distribution platform.
8. Repeat After Me! - Now that you’ve covered all the important elements of an effective landing page you need to drill it into the head of the visitors. Repeat your offer multiple times. I have seen landing pages with the same “Buy Now” link repeated after every major feature. Its small enough not to be distracting, but yet shows up just enough that after seeing 5 or 6 features that I like, the Buy Now link is handy and within a flick of the mouse. You are supposed to repeat the message to the visitor, but that does not necessarily mean you should cut and paste the same line over and over again. Try different ways to word the same general message. If it sounds the same each time, it will lose its effectiveness. Don’t go overboard with this, but you must reinforce what you are saying by repeating it.
9. Layout - Now, slapping all these elements together obviously wont work. There is no magical trick here. The key message and call to action should be above the fold and at the very bottom. The alternate calls to actions should be in the middle or middle-left and the rest of the landing page will contain the rest of the elements listed previously. A fancy design is not necessary; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I have seen some extremely ugly landing pages where I have been tempted to redo them but after testing, they are proven to be effective. The visitors that will be hitting your landing pages are usually looking for something and they wont stop until they find it (within reason). The image you see here is a sample eye-tracking heat map of a sample landing page. The red areas are where a visitors eyes tend to concentrate on the most. This is where you need to put your main headline or offer, and any call to actions.
10. Testing, testing and even more Testing - This is the most important thing to do if you want an effective landing page. Split testing is vital. Design multiple landing pages and see what works best. Experiment with color, layout, headline text, different screenshots, different icons, and different call to action placement. There are many tools out there to help with testing and analyzing results when it comes to testing landing pages. Google released the Website Optimizer for Adwords last year. You don’t always need fancy testing software to go through results. Simply split the traffic to different landing pages and monitor the results of each landing page. Ditch the lowest converting landing pages and then make more variations based on the better landing page. After a few iterations you’ll have a highly optimized landing page. This form of testing is known as multi-variate testing and works very well in this situation.
It is during this crucial testing phase where you will realize there is a huge human element when it comes to designing an effective landing page. The audience that will ultimately interact with your landing page may be very different than what you had in mind. I am guilty of this myself but it is usually corrected during the testing phase. If you were a little over-zealous with your optimization in an attempt to get a higher quality score you will find through testing that your landing page is not effective as you may have thought. This is what happens when you design a landing page for Google, or any other search engine for that matter, and not for humans.
Examples of Effective Landing Pages
In Part I, I promised to highlight several effective landing pages so you can get a good idea of what each of these elements look like when implemented on a landing page. Some of these may be so good you’ll end up clicking through to where the author of the pages wanted you to go! These sites are not affiliated with me in any way.
http://getharvest.com/ - A company providing a hosted time tracking solution. Rather than just sending traffic to a landing page, the entire website is designed just like a landing page. Everything that you do read on the page is relevant. There is no filler material to distract you, and no exit links for you to click to wander away. At the top of the page is a clear product shot, and a clear call to action “Try HARVEST for Free”. An alternative call to action is the text link right above the big button. For visitors that are not converted, there is additional supportive material that will attempt to convert the visitor. A simple testimonial is right below the initial information, right above the additional screenshots. For credibility, Harvest opted to simply provide a link to the privacy policy. At the very bottom of the page are the alternative calls to actions. They want you to try their product for free, but if you don’t then they want you to read about it, and then hopefully you’ll try it out after that.
http://www.webgallerywizard.com/go/g01-pas-01a.htm - Here is another effective landing page. Product visuals are up at the top, above the fold. The call to action is nice and clear highlighted with the blue arrow. If you have already gone to the landing page, chances are your eyes panned across the top image, and then it naturally followed the blue arrow to the download button. If not, then you will have skimmed the rest of the page for more information (credibility and/or more product info) then at the bottom, the call to action is repeated. Credibility on this landing page is created with the huge list of awards the software has won. Most users will see that this isn’t your run of the mill application and will more than likely download if the features match what they are looking for.
Keep This Guide Handy
Hopefully you have picked up something new from this How-To article. Landing pages can drastically improve the performance of your website conversions whether they are used with banner ads you are running, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, or if you are using it as a pre-sell page for an affiliate advertising program such as Agloco.
Good luck with your landing pages if you ever need to make one. I highly recommend book marking this article as a reference for when you do need to create your own effective landing pages. Stay tuned for more articles to help improve the performance of your website. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section and I will try to answer them either in the comments or in the form of a new post if it is warranted. If you wish, you can even subscribe to my RSS feed to stay updated.
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