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 Having the right landing page is incredibly important in getting conversions. It’s one thing to get traffic, but if it doesn’t convert what’s the point?

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo at PubCon recently. She shared some thoughts on creating effective landing pages. "I think that there are a lot of great tools out there you can use, but there’s also some creative ways that you can implement what you already know about people," she tells us.

You need to focus on more than just the click. It’s what happens after the click that really matters. "That’s your entire return-on-investment," she says. "It’s your ROI, so what good does it do if people just click and cost you money, and they’re not actually converting for you obviously, so we’re finding that conversion rate optimization as a practice and a discipline is really growing. You’re seeing more and more people discuss it…there’s so many great tools out there…those test really accurately and really get the best information they can, and to make the right decisions about how to design their pages – what kind of information to put on them to get the most conversions."

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for landing pages. It’s going to differ depending on your goals, and what you’re trying to sell. 

"There’s a lot of other challenges with things like…with Google AdWords specifically or any search engine marketing, where you’re trying to target for your particular product, but you might have many different audiences who might search on the same term that need many different types or variations of your product," says Driscoll Miller. "I have a client, as an example, who serves home users as well as business users, but they’re two different products."

"So we use segmentation for that, where you have buttons on a page to try and segment those people down a path to get them to the right product very quickly," she adds. "And those types of things can really help your conversion rate."

"I think a lot of people put things below the fold, which is a mistake, and certainly not putting a form right there on your landing page is a problem," she says. "I’m seeing less people actually land people directly on their home page, which is good, because you know…a home page has a lot of stuff going on…I am seeing people try to create their own landing pages, which is a real positive."

Forms can be critical for landing pages, but you don’t want to go overboard, or you’ll lose the conversion. 

"We’ve done some experimentation where we’ve done like tiered forms where you ask for the absolute essential only on that first form, and then once you get to the thank you page, you might ask them for a couple different optional fields, and surprisingly in the tests that we’ve run a lot of our clients see anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people who fill out the first form fill out the second form with optional information," Driscoll Miller tells us. "What the beauty of that is, more people fill out the form when it’s shorter, so you get initially more people signing up, but then a lot of the go and fill out the secondary information."

"So the initial form can’t be intimidating," she adds. "It can’t be too many fields – everything but the kitchen sink. Try and make it as small as you can."

The same thing applies to the checkout process. 

"Things that e-commerce companies too can be focusing on are things like even the words on the button," says Driscoll Miller. "Sometimes something like ‘buy now’ is a little more intimidating, and seems like something that you have to do versus ‘add to cart’. It’s a little gentler. So experimenting with words and buttons and colors, and all sorts of things. There’s many, many options."

She also had some advice for landing pages on Facebook and Twitter. Read here for that. 

WebProNews recently sat down with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo, who spoke a little about this and using landing pages within the social network. 

"If you’re advertising in Facebook, you might want to try having a landing page within a Facebook tab because you can put forms in Facebook tabs today," she said. "Facebook’s going to be launching a new way to do tabs where you can use iFrames instead of the current FBML, and it’s going to make it a lot easier to do testing of the Facebook tabs as landing pages."

There are limitations that come along with Facebook landing pages, but the good probably outweighs the bad. 

"One of the drawbacks being (of landing pages in Facebook) they’re only 520 pixels wide, which is real narrow, but it’s going to give you a lot more opportunity to do some testing there," said Driscoll Miller. "But a lot of companies aren’t doing that today."

"We’re finding that when you land people on pages within Facebook when you advertise in Facebook, you tend to have a higher conversion rate," she added. "They’re staying within that application. So I think that’s an important thing for people to start considering and testing with their Facebook ads."

What About Twitter?

Facebook and Twitter might be similar in some ways, but they are still very different animals, particularly when it comes to advertising. 

"I think that the jury is still out on whether or not you want to have a specific landing page for Twitter or any other type of social media," Driscoll Miller told WebProNews. "But I think Facebook probably is the leader right now, just because of their advertising platform, and finding that you can do a little more testing in there now, especially with iFrames coming, and that you can land people directly in Facebook, and still have them do things."

"But I know there’s been a lot of discussion about should you land people from Twitter on a landing page specific to a particular campaign," she added. "I think what I’ve been hearing from people is mostly that you don’t want to try and sell to people directly through Twitter. Nor do you with Facebook, but a Facebook ad…that’s a different story."

You probably know by now that it’s in bad taste to just post updates with your marketing message all the time. Like Brandon Eley of Kelsey said in an interview, you have to know the rules of the community, and Facebook and Twitter have "unspoken rules" that just make you look bad if you engage in this kind of activity. 

"So you wouldn’t want to be spamming people with a bunch of status updates and say, ’20% off,’ ‘by now,’ and that sort of thing,’ said Driscoll Miller. "But you want to be a little gentler for using a status update versus using a Facebook ad."

You may consider having a special section of your site dedicated to social, and it’s possible that this could lead to a more sales-driven Twitter account. 

"Maybe it’s deals that you get through Twitter," explained Driscoll Miller. "’Here’s my deals page and I’m tweeting the deals of the week’ or something like that, but you have to be real careful that you don’t offend the people who are following you. And they’re not necessarily following you just because they want deals or that they want to be spammed with your deals."

In other words, if you have this kind of Twitter account, it should probably be clear that this is the intention of said account, and maybe you should have a separate one for your main account.

Why Landing Page Optimization is Critical

"Landing page optimization – it is critical," he says. "If you have an account that has several thousand clicks and no conversions, it’s the landing page. That’s always the issue."

"A lot of people don’t really get some of the high-level landing page testing," he continues. "Step one is where do you send the traffic, whether it’s…rarely the home page, but it’s a category page, a product page, an about page, so forth. And then it really comes to laying out the page itself."

Think about it from the user perspective. How much of a page do you take in before you leave or convert? The whole thing? I doubt it. 

"The most missed element is that whole concept of ‘above the fold’ – what’s displayed in the browser when the page first loads," says Geddes. "80% of [the] time, 76% of clicks occur in that above the fold section, so if that call to action isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how good your page is."

"Every page really has a goal to it – what you want someone to do," he continues. "So certain pages you’ll have actually won’t be conversion-based pages. They’ll be more segmentation-based pages or so forth. But every page you send traffic to, you should have a primary goal, which you want someone to do."

"So, if you’re a lead gen site, you obviously want a form on the landing page," Geddes adds. "If it’s an e-commerce site, you want a buy button. It sort of depends on what kind of site you are. If it’s a local business, you want a phone number and driving directions, but your conversion action has to be on that landing page. It should be above the fold, clearly visible, easy to understand contents. Minimize distractions."

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Why Less Conversions Can Mean Greater Revenue

"We have a blog that has a huge amount of traffic on it, but had horrible conversion rates, so we essentially moved more conversion elements to the blog, and what happened is, the site’s overall conversion rates dropped significantly, but our revenue went up a lot, because all of a sudden we’re bringing more people into the funnel," Geddes explains.

"So that’s where conversion rates are interesting, because you kind of measure it from the point of the user – where they entered your funnel, so…it dropped our conversion rates…a thirty or forty percent drop in conversion rates," he says. "Probably a 20% increase in revenue. We just essentially brought more people into the funnel to buy."

Everyone wants traffic, and there’s no question. If the traffic’s not there, you can’t convert it. That said, it doesn’t end with getting a lot of traffic. You can’t just get people to your landing page. That page has to make them want to perform the action you are trying to get them to perform. 

"It’s not about the traffic. Traffic gets someone to your site," says Geddes. "The page then has to pick up the traffic to actually convert it."

You might want to worry about that before you start worrying about how to get people to your site.

Microsite Effectiveness

I wondered if that particular finding couldn’t be construed as a call to improve a campaign’s message overall, if its message isn’t clear before the customer views the microsite. 

"I think the finding speaks more to the strength of microsites than to a weakness in the campaign’s ads—that 7.8% can be compared to the average impact of display and video ads, which typically drive an additional 2.3% of people to become aware of a campaign’s message," Eule tells WebProNews. "Consumers who enter a microsite are generally more open to hearing what the brand has to say, and tend to spend more time engaging with the brand than someone simply served a display ad while performing other activities on a webpage."

Microsites normally utilize online ad formats such as display and video to drive traffic to them, of course. 

"A display ad can also say only so much within a 300×250 or 728×90 unit compared to a microsite which has a full page or multiple pages of real estate to leverage," she adds. "It’s worth noting, however, that a media plan can potentially reach 100s of times as many people as a microsite, so while the percent impacted favors microsites, the number of people impacted may still be higher with display or video ads."

Dynamic Logic says that data from 182 of its studies (conducted globally), reveal that microsites have a substantial impact on consumer awareness and perception of a brand. According to the firm, microsite visitation leads to significant increases in all standard brand metrics.

Encouraging User Engagement and Driving Purchase Intent

The firm finds that the site attribute that determines the largest branding impact varies by the campaign goal.

"We’ve seen lots of creative content on microsites," says Euele. "This can include originally produced videos, games, contests, or forums that generate discussion between consumers. While those activities certainly incorporate the brand in some way, I think the best microsites are ones that don’t focus on the brand directly, but on a topic that consumers feel passionate about."

"This approach is riskier because the connection between the brand and the topic needs to be obvious to consumers, but if the linkage makes sense, more consumers will come to the site and spend more time with it when they feel that the brand is relevant to their interests and values," she adds. "That connection can be extremely influential at the time of purchase."

The firm says that in terms of costs, an effective microsite requires a decent investment towards production of the site as well as media for traffic drivers.

Amazon, probably the most successful online retailer there is, knows this, and that is one reason why it has prepared for an influx of holiday shoppers by creating its own Holiday Toy List. Amazon knows what people are going to be looking for, and it has put together this list to make finding these things as easy as possible. It’s not just a list, but a page that points to these items.

“The Holiday Toy List is a helpful tool for parents, friends and family members who are searching for the perfect toys for the kids on their list,” says Sarah Wood, director of the Toy Store for Amazon.com. “With navigation that’s simple, convenient and fun to use, it’s easier than ever to find great gifts at Amazon’s everyday low prices.”

Not only has Amazon created the page, but they have promoted it. They have issued a press release for news organizations and bloggers to pick up, which should give the list plenty of coverage. It will likely lead to increased sales on popular items.

Now, granted, not everyone can put out a press release and expect to get the kind of coverage Amazon does. Amazon’s huge. Your online business is probably not quite so big. That doesn’t mean you can’t put special focus on the items you expect to sell the most during the holiday season and promote them in other ways.  You may still issue a press release, but you can simply use social media marketing, search marketing, email marketing, etc., but have a focused landing page where customers can easily find what they want, or what you expect them to want.

This may seem like common sense, and perhaps it is, but there is a lot of competition online, and if you are not focused on promoting what has the best chance of bringing you business, you may not be getting the sales you’re after.

Related Articles:

> Online Retailers To Focus On Facebook And Twitter During Holidays

> Amazon Launches Same-Day Delivery Option

> Good Chunk of Holiday Spending Will Be Online

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> Test Landing Pages for Big Impact on Bottom Line

While the concept behind testing and optimizing is simple in theory, the results that can come with enough attention to these things, can have a tremendous impact on a business’s success.

Take for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is a well-known encyclopedia company that relies on its e-commerce site for its direct-to-consumer business. Naturally, this makes the site a very important portal for business and revenue for the company.

"By using multivariable testing, Britannica’s marketing team was able to optimize its landing page for visitors coming from sites such as Dictionary.com in order to better target key consumer audiences," says a spokesperson for Omniture, the company behind the testing tool Britannica uses.

"After honing in on its ‘best recipe’, Encyclopaedia Britannica saw a 48% lift in revenue via increased subscriptions and a net revenue increase of 28% over a 4-week period," the spokesperson says.

Those are some impressive numbers for a month.

Multivariate tests are good for when you get a substantial amount of traffic, the layout and overall design of your landing page is basically staying the same, and you want to change specific parts of your page, like a headline, or an image.

The first video is actually a full webinar on landing pages, and is a bit lengthy. It is an important topic though, and if landing pages are a weakness for your business, it would probably be wise to view it. It runs about an hour and fifteen minutes, and talks about the "7 deadly sins of landing page design."

The second video asks a very important question: How will your customers know you really have what they want? As the video’s narrator says, potential customers only see your ad when they type in a search query. They don’t see your keywords, your ad groups, your campaigns, etc. You have to grab their attention.

The following video, which is much shorter than the previous one (this one comes in at a minute and a half), provides tips for using compelling ad copy that attracts clicks.

The click and the landing page are two of the most important elements of the conversion. Google wants you to improve your conversions, because it’s better for their service that way. The more successful you are, the more successful they are. It stands to reason that they would offer you tips that they truly believe will help your AdWords performance.

Some of it is common sense, but in this industry, that is a trait that is often overlooked. In the heat of competition, sometimes the basics are overlooked.

Landing pages, for uninitiated, are where customers end up after clicking on a search ad or search result. Ideally, they serve as a sort of sign on the window, or an important step on the way toward a sales conversion. Remarkably, big companies are still getting this part of the process wrong.

Last summer, using a particular digital camera as an example, we explored how companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Circuit City, and other retailers embarrassingly blew their chance at selling that particular camera. Clicking on their ads (because they ranked incredibly poorly in the organic results for the products they carry) appearing with the very specific search term led to pages that were either unrelated promotions, lists of every camera but that one, or to pages that were so irrelevant that they weren’t even in the electronics category.

(The most ridiculous was from now out of business Circuit City, whose digital camera keyword ad led to a listing for a pet odor removal product.)

If you’re like me, you find it very annoying to search for a product, believe you’ve found a link to information on that product, follow it, and then have to search again at the destination website. That, my friends, is dropping the e-commerce ball.

What they lack, obviously, is specificity, a very important element of the landing page.

Robert Rose
VP CrownPeak

Content management company CrownPeak contacted me in advance of the launch of their new Landing Page Management tool, which they’ve debuted with a free 30 day trial. The company’s VP of marketing and strategy, Robert Rose, described the landing page as a kind of brochure for what a business is selling. That makes it a content issue, but historically landing pages and websites have been viewed (incorrectly, in his opinion), as an IT issue.

“Content changed from being driven by IT to being driven by marketers, and that has led to the resurrection of the brochure site,” he said. “The brochure idea is about content marketing. It really enables marketers to do more with their websites and create a hub for their marketing.”

Nissan, for example, hit up CrownPeak about better ways to pump content out to regional dealership landing pages. With seven regions and fifteen or so models of car, delivering that type of specificity to searchers was no doubt difficult. In addition, Zimmerman, Nissan’s agency, wanted to be able to track the response to various campaigns by model and region. The Landing Page Manager is designed to do just those types of things.

It’s that simple specificity, says Rose, that gives CrownPeak’s new tool an advantage over free tools like Google Analytics. “What Analytics doesn’t show is which people were actually great leads and filled out forms, which were visitors and which were customers. “A lot of people are just tire-kickers,” he said.

Michael Weiss
CEO Imagistic

So, besides specificity, what makes a great landing page? “Simplicity is best,” says Michael Weiss, CEO of web-marketing firm Imagistic. “Be as simple as possible. A blurb, a form, a submit button, and you’re done. It should be a short form, with an explanation of what you’re going to get for that form.”

For example, referring to my digital camera example, Weiss quipped, “name and address and we’ll knock $20 off the camera.”

Weiss also recommends big, clean images, and not a lot of text. “I think that’s where a lot of people fail. You go to Google AdWords, and when you click it, it takes you to a site.”

Naturally, being a CrownPeak partner, Weiss recommends the Landing Page Management tool. “What’s great about this system, you just copy the URL for the right page and put that right into AdWords.”

Regardless of methods and tools, the lesson is the same. Small and medium sized businesses can get an edge on bigger competition via great landing pages that are specific to the searcher’s needs and simple to understand and use.

Google wants a faster experience for the people who click through an ad to the destination page. A slow landing page stuffed with other ads and third party content may not be what the typical Internet users wants when clicking through what looks like a useful ad.

The Inside AdWords blog announced the arrival of landing page speed as a regular factor in determining ad Quality Scores. Provide a fast page, and a better Quality Score should lead to lower minimum bids for keywords.

Provide a slow, stuffed-up experience, and Google will make those bids a pricier prospect. “Users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load,” said Google.

Bad experiences may mean less conversions for advertisers, but worse for Google, they could mean a reluctance by people to click on other ads. Unclicked ads mean no revenue for Google, leading to their attempts in recent months to aggressively root out what it sees as lower quality ad practices.

Landing page load time information for AdWords clients joined the management interface in May. Webmasters with slow pages have their work cut out for them, and will need to do some cost analysis to determine if higher bids charged by Google would be offset by whatever factors contribute to the slow landing page speed.

 Google Search Results For Polaroid T730 Compact 7mp Digital Camera

Two things I learned: 1. When writing a review, don’t be an ass; 2. If you’re going to spend a lot of money on competitive keyword advertisements, it’s likely a best practice to give the searcher what they are actually searching for.

The top organic spot for those keywords doesn’t belong to Polaroid, as one might expect. Actually, Polaroid is nowhere to be found on the first page, organic or paid. Way to be in charge of your brand, there Polaroid.

Had the company been more proactive about SEO – yes, they actually have a website, and even a product page for the T730—interested customers would not have to suffer through number-one-spot squatter Woot.com’s excruciating review by "WOOTBOT," which earned the number one ranking as of midnight this morning. Despite the stupidity of it, I was still miraculously interested in learning more about the camera*, mainly because WOOTBOT didn’t mention a price.

Back to the search results, then. Not willing to brave another organic, non-Polaroid page on the product, I turned to the retailers who popped up for the keywords, who surely would have detailed (unbloviated) product information that included pricing, especially since I had to spend their money to find it.

Top result: Circuit City. Of course they’ll have all that. No, they don’t. In fact, clicking on the top paid search result directed me to a listing for Bissell Pet Odor & Removal Formula with Scotchguard, which retails for $12.99, in case, unlike me, you actually have a pet or find yourself in need of that information on The Price Is Right.

 Circuit City’s Paid Search Destination

Good job capitalizing on that ad spend, Circuit City. I’ll bet Office Depot knows how much it costs. Nope. Their paid link takes me to a landing page advertising 10% off, well, anything I guess. So if I ever actually find the camera and learn the price of it, I can save some unknown quantity of money.

Shopping.com? Close. Polaroid T730 memory cards, but no camera.

Amazon? Blank white screen. Service unavailable.

BizRate? Everything but that particular product.

Target? Enter your zip code to see the Target Weekly Ad. No thanks, and go screw yourself.

 Target’s Sign Up For The Weekly Ad

Wal-Mart? Polaroid TVs, cameras that perhaps are similar, but no trace of the T730.
 
Back to the organic results, then. Byrev.net had a much less BS-ified review, but still no price. DealsPlus: jackpot. $74.99, $5 shipping. Too cheap for me to be proud of as an expectant father, and I’m way too invested now to be disappointed with general affordability. I’ll dream about that $850 Canon listed below, and eventually buy something in between.

But here’s the point: Every one of the major, corporate retailers failed the search marketing test. None of them SEO’d their sites well enough to pop up in the top 10 organic rankings where searchers automatically associate credibility—until they read something written by WOOTBOT—and none of them actually capitalized on an interested buyer via great, relevant, and/or useful landing pages.

Lesson: Shoppers, especially during the discovery process, will give you, maximum, ten seconds (more like four) to earn their visit and/or business. They need information, not fluff, redirection, malfunction, or similar/related product pitches. Give them the right landing page and you’ll not only not waste your daily ad spend, but you may just earn a loyal customer who’s very tired of the BS.

_{*My best guess was that the review overall was positive, after sifting through stories of fat men and vacuums, and obscure Latin and German phrases nobody searching for camera information on the English version of the Internet needs to ever, EVER know.}