Landing Pages

What is a landing page?

Landing Pages, simply put, are where your website traffic “lands” upon visiting the site. They are most normally referred to as part of PPC campaigns, where you buy clicks and direct traffic to a certain page. However, a “landing page” can also be a homepage if this is the first page that a viewer sees after visting your website.

Why do landing pages matter?

Landing page matters because they direct the overall user experience. They also can greatly impact your sales. For example, if your landing page is your homepage, and your homepage has a high bounce rate, then you are losing a lot of your website traffic before even getting them down the funnel.

Types of Landing Pages

There are several types of landing pages:

• Lead Pages: These are pages intended to capture someone’s contact information. For example, if your search term is “attorney in san francisco”, then your landing page text may display something like “top attorney in san francisco”, along with a contact form. An example of a typical lead page is below. On this page, your #1 goal is to capture contact information for a ‘lead’ you can follow up on:

• E-commerce Pages: E-commerce landing pages are also called “click through” pages, as your goal with these pages is to get a user to click through to another page. This includes the homepage, product pages, cart page, and checkout page. The process of getting from one page to the other is called the “funnel” in e-commerce optimization, and it’s extremely important to get people down the funnel as quickly as possible in order to maximize sales. Here’s an example of an e-commerce shopping cart page:

• SaaS Pages: SaaS landing pages normally have a strict flow, similar to e-commerce. This covers the main homepage, sign up page, as well as the purchase page. Again, the name of the game is to get the user from one page to the other as quickly as possible. Below is an example of a SaaS landing page:

Examples of Great Landing Pages

While there are literally hundreds of landing pages out there, there are a few that really stand out in terms of quality:

Shopify

Shopify runs so many AB tests, it’s no wonder why they are some of the best performing e-commerce platform companies, nearly doubling their revenue last year. Their funnel is simply beautiful. Here’s an example of their homepage:

Note here how little information is needed before starting a trial. You simply need to enter your email address. How easy is that!

From there, the user registration page is also dead simple:

The smoothness of this process is not an accident. The simpler Shopify can make the process, the easier they make it for people to come on board, and the more money that they make.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is another example of great UX design to maximize conversion rate. Their homepage, similar to Shopify’s, is dead simple:

Again, we see a clean design here, with few distractions, that makes it easy for a user to take action. Removing a one of the buttons may even boost conversion more rather than giving a user two options.

How to Get Started

To begin optimizing your landing page, start by following best practices in CRO (such as those mentioned above), and then slowly create a testing plan, including time to get feedback from the tests that you’re running.