Landing page types and why they work

Depending on personal experience or background, people often have different concepts in mind when it comes to landing pages. I have seen many different types of landing pages used by clients, and thought I’d try to clarify the differences between them. They typically fall into one of three categories:

• Landing Pages for organic traffic (keyword stuffed, sometimes tightly themed pages, aimed at capturing search engine traffic from a narrow set of keywords)
• Landing Pages for Offline advertising. These often use unique domain-names, both to facilitate tracking and to ensure continuity of ‘scent’. For tighter budgets or schedules these can be set to forward the visitor straight to a landing page on the main domain.
• Landing Pages for PPC traffic. These are pages customized for a PPC campaign and/or ad group or ad. These are normally not accessible through site navigation, although one-way navigational access to the main site can in some cases be warranted. The performance of these categories is often markedly different.

Organic landing pages tend to have relatively high bounce rates, and lower conversion rates. This is possibly due to the difficulty in matching the expectations of the visitor. The only things we can be sure they see in the SERPs are the title tag and URL. The snippet can be taken from the Meta-description or any section of copy Google deems worthy, and is not necessarily copy you would choose for an advertisement.

Landing pages for Offline advertising generally have high conversion rates (CR), sometimes as high as 30- 50%. This is not surprising, considering that visitors already made the effort to go online, and typed in your domain address. In addition, if the offline advertising campaign was properly managed, the landing pages will repeat the message/promise which drove the visitors there in the first place, giving reassurance. The only concern is to avoid putting any hurdles in the way of conversion.

PPC Landing pages tend to fall somewhere in between the other two. They perform better than organic landing pages, partly for the following reasons:

• They can use landing page headlines that match the message in the ad, thus instantly confirming the ‘scent’ to the visitor (reducing bounce rates)
• If the message is relevant, the PPC ad can help 'pre-qualify' visitors, leading to higher conversion rates. The trick is to use accurate representation of your services in the ad copy, then making it compelling (for higher CTR) without losing the accuracy.
• Whenever you find a winning ad (CTR) through continuous testing, you can drive up CR by tweaking the landing page headline, copy, images, etc., to match. You can do this without affecting traffic volume and quality the way tweaking an organic page would.
• PPC Landing pages are quick and easy to tweak, with no negative affect on the overall user experience—whereas tweaking an organic page can make the overall site experience disharmonious.

Pay-per-click landing pages can under-perform landing pages for offline advertising, likely due to the offline visitor being more self-qualified and committed.
The advantage of PPC landing pages over organic and offline landing pages is simply that you can:

• retain full control of the message served to the prospect in the SERP’s
• control the message at the keyword level
• ensure continuity of ‘scent’ by matching your landing page to your ad.

Bottom line—if you are driving all of your traffic to your main site without using dedicated landing pages for your different advertising campaigns, you are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table. Ask yourself: "Where is my high volume, high quality traffic coming from?" The answer directs you to begin work where you can have the biggest impact.

Revisit converting keywords and ads to help guide landing page design and production. And continually test your ads and landers to let your visitors determine what works best to attract and then convert them.