Hack46.Use Unique Landing Pages

Hack 46. Use Unique Landing Pages

Many marketers make one critical mistake when attempting to lure visitors to their web sitesthey use specific language, offers, and messages to drive visitors to the most generic landing page of all: the site's home page. The use of unique landing pages, while slightly more difficult to maintain, can dramatically improve key performance indicators like stickiness and conversion rates.

Did you ever wonder why marketing folks would spend so much money crafting banner ads, carefully writing emails and keyword ads at Google and Overture, and then simply dump all of the resulting clicks on the site's home page? The home page, by design, is a generic "catch all" for people stumbling on the site, a page designed to provide a shallow but broad view into what a company does. But visitors who are clicking on an ad, email, or search keyword have already expressed interest in a specific idea or goalwhatever the offer or message is in the advertisement they clicked upon. You should avoid this simple mistake and get in the habit of building unique landing pages for your marketing campaigns.

3.11.1. Unique Landing Pages Are Focused

Contrasted with your site's home page, unique landing pages should be designed to be about the very specific thing you were advertising or that your visitor was searching for. If people are searching on Google or Overture for "Arc'Teryx jackets" and they click on your ad, you already know something critical about themthey are looking for jackets and are specifically interested in the Arc'Teryx brand. If you sell jackets and just happen to sell the particular brand, why not deliver visitors to a page like the one seen in Figure 3-10?

Figure 3-10. Unique landing page

As you can see, this entire page is about the Arc'Teryx brand. Backcountry.com is doing a very smart thing by presenting a complete picture of what they have to offer a visitor looking for Arc'Teryx, dramatically improving the visitor's chances of finding the specific product he's looking for.

3.11.2. Unique Landing Pages Are Not Always Unique

Funny as it may sound, you don't necessarily need to create a completely new page to take advantage of the idea of unique landing pages. As you can see in Figure 3-10, Backcountry.com is dropping searchers right on the Arc'Teryx brand page based on their search query. This page is not necessarily unique, and you can navigate to the exact same page by going to the site's home page and clicking on the appropriate links.

The reason some marketers make completely new pages for marketing campaigns is to better track the efficacy of the campaign, something easily done using the measurement strategies described throughout this chapter. In general, when using this hack, you want to ask yourself three questions:

• Do I have a way to track clicks to the landing page using some kind of tracking URL [Hack #43]?

• If people navigate to this page, rather than clicking on an advertising link, will I be able to differentiate "navigators" from "ad responders"?

• Do I have a content management system in place that will allow me to easily create and manage truly unique pages?

If you answer "yes," "yes," and "no" to these questions, you're much better off repurposing existing pages on your site rather than building new pages. The most important things you need to be able to do are measure and differentiate visitors to the page, identifying people who respond to ads and those who simply click around the site.

The exception to repurposing pages is when you're trying to drive people to your web site from some kind of offline advertisementa television or radio ad, a billboard, or a print ad in a magazine or newspaper. In cases like this, you're almost always better off creating a unique page that can be managed as necessary, and that will ensure the most accurate count of visitors.

3.11.3. Hacking Unique Landings Pages: The Mini-Site Model

Some marketers take the concept of the unique landing page one step further and build complete mini-sites around marketing campaigns. Mini-sites usually present content that is very specifically focused around the marketing campaign or concept (Figure 3-11).

Mini-sites typically do not have all of the normal navigation elements you would find on the rest of the site, opting to present visitors with few choices that are all designed to focus their attention on the specific product, idea, or theme. While it isn't a bad idea to focus the navigation elements, you do want to provide visitors an out if they need one, allowing them to leave the mini-site without having to back up completely (the top line navigation elements in Figure 3-11 have links to Home, Products, Club, etc.).

3.11.4. Measuring Unique Landing Page Activity

Unique landing pages are measured just like any other type of campaign and are usually already captured as part of your reporting on email, banner advertising, or RSS. The most important measurements you can make using unique landing pages are their "stickiness" [Hack #58] and how likely visitors are to click through to another page on the site once they arrive. You may want to use a browser overlay [Hack #62] to track clicks, especially if you build a mini-site.

Figure 3-11. The Star Wars mini-site at LEGO Shop at Home