So what makes a good landing page? Before answering that we should probably answer the question “what even is a landing page”.
A landing page is a web page to which you send visitors from marketing campaigns, be that CPC like AdWords, ads in Facebook but also newsletters etc.
People usually ask me why they shouldn’t just send people to their homepage and let the visitors find what they want as everything is “on the homepage”. And that is precisely the problem, everything is on the homepage and that’s a terrible thing. Visitors from a marketing campaign need a specific goal, you tell them something specific in your marketing campaign like “Get 10% of XXX” and then on the page you need to deliver on your promise. The homepage almost never fits that very specific goal!
A good landing page should not only use the same text as your ad or newsletter but also avoid all other distractions. A perfect landing page gives information on one thing only and allows visitors to do only one thing, meaning there should only be one call to action (CTA). This also means no navigation away from the page, not even to your homepage.
Your website and homepage are for organic traffic, aka visitors from search engines and a landing page is catered with a specific marketing campaign in mind and each marketing campaign should have its own landing page.
There are two types of landing pages: lead-generation and click-through.
- A lead-generation page usually features a form to get some information from visitors (email being the most important) and giving the visitors a freebie (a pdf to download, a discount or something similar).
- A click-through page is a page that warms your visitors for a specific product without selling to them directly, there rarely is a “buy” button on a click-through page but testimonials and a quick list of benefits of the product. The CTA is usually a page taking them further in the marketing funnel. This will let you analyze how well your ad and landing page work if the percentage of visitors clicking on the CTA is low there is probably a mismatch between your ad text or targeting and the landing page text.
Check out my other post about web-development and how you can make your website better.