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Feb 16, 2012

What is a landing page?

A landing page is simply the page your visitors land on after they type in or click a link. The link can be on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or from an article or often from an advertisement. The purpose of any landing page on your website is specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind.

Let’s assume the traffic comes from an ad campaign. The campaign can drive traffic from online, print, television, or radio ads. Your landing page can have any address using a domain name or URL you own, for instance www.marketing-partners.info/TV if we were running a TV ad. You want your landing page URL to be relevant to your campaign and as short as possible. A landing page address of www.marketing-partners.info/tv/campaign/winter/2012/television_test/index.html?reference=source_blog_Feb18 isn’t very friendly, and certainly not memorable if someone has to type it from a print ad or remember it from radio or television.

Good Landing Pages

Good landing pages have:

• A clear headline
• A short description of the offer or activity with benefits to your customer
• A main image or video related to the ad or ads that drive the traffic
• A clear call to action – usually a form to collect contact information, but it could also be a link to purchase something or make a reservation.

What Landing Pages Should Not Have

• Your website home page should not be your landing page
• Eliminate extraneous navigation and links that do not directly relate to your call to action
• Large overhead or long load times

Make your landing page reflect your ad while providing an easy and direct call-to-action for the user to complete. A few other items to consider are having a link to your home page – usually your logo; privacy policy or statement if you are collecting personal information, and when you will end your campaign. If you have your server set correctly, any invalid page address will either present a custom page offering to contact the web master, or you could have the landing page redirect to your website home page when the campaign is done.

Lastly, test your page. Try asking a few people to review it before your campaign starts. Ideally, you can develop two different landing pages and test them against each other to see which page converts more traffic into action. But that’s a subject for a future post….

Nov 24, 2011

If you were still wondering whether or not you needed a mobile website after we last discussed the subject earlier this year, we have some new information for you. Although we have to assume the mobile share of overall web consumption is still quite small until the stats come out early next year, its incredible growth rate and consumer behavior changes mean you need to revisit your mobile website needs regularly.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

New Stats

• One new nugget of information that may help tip the scales comes from Efficient Frontier. They claim that by the end of 2012, 22% of of all search advertising spending will be for mobile devices, including tablets. That’s up from 8% projected at the end of 2011, and roughly 4% at the close of 2010.

Here are a few more stats from Mobi Thinking:

• Many mobile Web users are mobile-only, i.e., they do not use, or very rarely use a desktop, laptop or tablet to access the Web. Even in the U.S., 25 percent of mobile Web users are mobile-only.
• Over half of U.S. mobile ad spending is local.
• Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year, for many items one in seven searches are now mobile.

Local business?

So now that you have a few more facts to consider, let’s put them into context. Chances are, your business is one that is locally oriented. Whether you have a brick and mortar store front, or you provide services either on-site or on location, you need to target your local audience. You can see from the facts above that your competition is aware of this and they are targeting their search advertising locally. A good mix of SEO and SEM will make sure your customers see you in the mobile SERPs, but if they click on your link and your website comes up as a microscopic version of what they would see on a desktop monitor, they will be checking out your competition before you can say “lost opportunity.”

Consumer products?

Your strategy for targeting mobile users may vary if you’re in the business of selling physical products, as opposed to services. Users are now able to compare products while in the act of shopping, so having your information available in a mobile friendly format and available across different product directory websites is key to getting or staying ahead of your competition. This kind of optimization can be very extensive and needs to be carefully considered to ensure a decent return on the investment of time and money.

Service business?

If you’re in the service business, you should still have a mobile-formatted presence —— one where a user can learn what you do for any given aspect of your offerings without having to zoom in or pan over your site to navigate or read the content. Mobile users want their information quick and clean, more so than somebody who is sitting in front of a laptop and way more than somebody sitting at desktop computer.

When is the right time?

The number and percentage of mobile users keeps going up, and will for quite a few years before it levels off. You might need to jump in to reach your customers before the pool is too crowded and all the good spots are taken.