Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a sandwich board sign out on the sidewalk that says “Widgets on Sale! 20% Off!” You think to yourself, “Great! I always need new widgets. I’ll get some.” You want to buy widgets. You’re already convinced. Now, it’s just a small matter of buying them and leaving the store.
But when you enter the store, you see everything but widgets. You see no further signage in the store directing you where to find the widgets. You ask the clerk, and, amazingly, the clerk says no widgets are found. Disgusted, you leave the store without making a purchase. And you tell all your friends about what a negative experience you had.
The same thing happens online in ecommerce, promotions, and campaigns all the time. An advertisement or link promises the goods, but when the visitor arrives at the site’s home page there is nothing to be seen that relates to the ad or link. Remember, this person wants to buy! But they can’t find what they came for!
What they need is a landing page. A landing page is a special place designed to receive clickthroughs from specific links such as advertisements, like from your Google AdWords campaign. Landing pages serve such a specific purpose, because each one is associated with one campaign or even one ad, that it’s easy to track their hits, referrer pages, and exit pages. The purpose of the landing page is conversion, or, getting the customer to do what you want, like buy a product or sign up for a newsletter. Good landing pages make this as easy for the customer as possible by making the next action obvious and by removing all other distractions from the page.
To learn more about what goes into a good landing page, check out 11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages, an article from Digital Web Magazine for some excellent further informations and advice on landing pages and conversion.
