Exploring Landing Pages

Some simple questions marketing managers interested in web metrics might ask:

By looking at overall statistics for my website, how would I know if a specific campaign is successful or not? 

How can I make sure that driving traffic to my website will lead to good conversion rates for my business objectives?

One possible answer to both of these questions: create good landing pages.

Pamela Vaughn, in an article titled Why Landing Pages are an Indispensable Part of Marketing wrote that “A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor's information through a lead-capture form (AKA a conversion form)…A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular ebook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or redeem other marketing offers such as free trials, demos, or coupons for your product. Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they've converted on.”

Let’s look at how creating a landing page could be used as part of an overall SEM strategy:

To illustrate how a landing page can be used effectively in part of a digital marketing campaign, let’s take the example of a fictitious company that sells investment advice to personal investors.

One of the organizational objectives of the site is to capture leads (names and email addresses) in order to promote their various investment services to buyers through their email list. One of the company’s strategies to accomplish this is to offer free analyst reports of popular stocks.

For this case, let’s say the company has created an in-depth report looking at the high-volume stock of Apple Computers, ticker symbol AAPL.

The company decides to run PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns on popular search site Google for keywords related to AAPL (e.g. “is AAPL a buy,” “should I sell AAPL,” “AAPL analysis,” etc.). The PPC ad copy reads “Should you buy or sell AAPL?” FREE In-Depth Analyst Report on AAPL.

When visitor click on the ad, they are taken to a landing page that has a summary of the report and a bio of the analyst. The visitor can then use a form to sign up to have the report digitally delivered to his or her email.

It is easy to see how by then using additional web metrics tools on the landing page the company can see of the effectiveness of this specific campaign. For example, the company can run various PPC keyword ads and then see which ones are the most effective and optimize around them. Additionally, once viewers are on the site, they can adjust the copy and format to test which content and format results in the highest conversions.

In short, having very specific landing pages tied to PPC campaigns and other marketing efforts can help create communications efforts that, coupled with web metrics, are easy to measure and control. This is at the heart of what digital marketing is good at: highly targeted communication efforts that can be tested, measured, and optimized.