TrueInsight Newsletter

It’s no longer breaking news: as you probably know by now, search marketing is far and away one of the most effective ways to drive traffic and generate leads to your website. You may even have your own search marketing campaign in the works. The keywords are in place, the search engine optimization is almost complete, the paid search ads are ready to go live. Trouble is, where do users go when they click your listing?

Too often, advertisers say, “Just point them to our homepage.” Well, that’s great—if your homepage makes it easy to convert the visitor into a lead or customer. Unfortunately, most homepages do not.

The solution is a landing page. A landing page is a single page that a user “lands on” after clicking a link or an advertisement. By creating a specialized page or pages, you can quickly test different offers or campaigns and track each one effectively, without having to alter your main corporate web site.

There are basically two types of landing pages that are commonly used: transactional and reference landing pages.

Transactional pages have one mission: convert the user into a customer. This is done by promoting a single, prominent offer and making it as easy as possible for the user to sign up, buy, or obtain that offer directly.

Reference landing pages work slightly differently. The goal here can be multifaceted. Typically, the objective is to simply provide information that is relevant to the target audience. Often, reference landing pages are also used as a means to create a revenue stream by selling ads on the page. Useful content brings traffic and eyeballs which naturally leads to revenue.

Let’s look at a real world example of each. TruePresence’s very own VP/Creative Director, Joel Fisher, recently installed laminate floors in his home office, and was searching for tips and tricks on how to finish the project.

Going to trusty Google, he typed in “Laminate floor installation.” He was instantly presented with many different results, both natural search results and paid search ads. One listing that caught his eye was a link to the hardware superstore, Lowe’s. He clicked.

His click took him to this page:
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productList&Ne=6000&category
=Laminate+Flooring&N=0+5000373&gcid=S17474x001-lamfl_gen&keyword=laminate+floor

That link takes us right into the Laminate Flooring section of the Lowe’s site—a perfect example of a transactional landing page. This one happens to be within their corporate site, but relevant to what Joel was looking for (for the most part) and saved him the four clicks he would have had to make if he just went to Lowes.com

His search also turned up a link to About.com:
http://interiordec.about.com/od/laminateinstall/Laminate_Flooring_Installation_Tips.htm

That link takes you to a page of, well, more links. Some of those links take us to documents containing installation tips, and other relevant resources. The other links, however, are directly generating Pay Per Click (PPC) revenue for About.com from advertisers who are relevant to Joel’s search. A reference landing page at its finest.

Because the landing pages he found were so effective, Joel was able to pick up some great installation and cleaning tips. He even discovered that laminate flooring isn’t wood at all. It’s a wood by-product with an embedded “picture” of real wood on the surface.

But back to those landing pages! The best way to learn more is to do your own searches and click around. You will see a wide range of different landing pages, and you’ll start to understand what they are and how companies are using them to convert their visitors into customers.

When you’re ready begin building your own landing pages—or optimize your existing ones—there are a number of best practices to keep in mind:

• Give the user what they want. The information should be compelling and relevant to the search terms that brought the user there.
• Keep forms on your transactional landing pages as short as possible. The fewer fields there are, the more likely someone will fill them out.
• If you need visitors to respond in ways beyond the form—say, by calling or emailing you—make the contact information and calls to action prominent.
• Remember to “close exit doors by opening windows.” In other words, all external links should open in a new browser window. The goal is to keep the user on the page and make it as painless as possible for visitors to take action.

As for the laminate wood floors, just read the instructions on the box. In 8 hours, you will be able to enjoy the beauty and smell of fresh wood by-product for yourselves.

Until next time, we give your landing a 10.