An Introduction to Landing Pages and Landing Page Optimization

What is a Landing Page?

The world has changed a lot over the last 10-15 years with now with all of us depending on the internet search results for anything and everything. The Internet has changed the lifestyles of people tremendously. Like in every area, it has brought it significant changes to the way of running businesses as well. Twenty years ago, if a person wanted to start a new business, perhaps he would have set up a storefront, put some ads in local newspapers and so on. But now, things have changed. The Internet offers you a variety of ways to reach your customers and allows you to expand your visibility to a larger population. Today, to have a successful business, having a strong and online presence plays a key role. Websites are one of the key elements to create your online presence and online marketing. Apart from your website, these days you have multiple other options like Social media profiles, mobile apps and so on. This article, we introduce you to another key component of online marketing campaigns- Landing Pages.
So, what is this landing page all about? Is it the same as your website home page? To put it simply, a landing page is a specially designed page whose main goal is to generate sales or lead generation. A landing page is where a user lands when they click on a Google AdWords ad or similar links and is designed for the purpose of marketing or advertising campaigns. A landing page may be linked to social media, e-mail campaigns, search engine marketing campaigns, Guest blog posts, Webinar links and so on.
Landing pages are usually designed for paid traffic like Google AdWords. The organic search results in a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) are the links to your website that Google has chosen to show in response to the user’s search query. But the Paid Search results in the SERP, which usually appears at the top or right side of the SERP, are different and for these paid advertising you get to choose where the link takes your visitors – You could choose to take them to your website’s homepage or a specially designed page for the ad campaign.
So how does your landing page differ from other pages or the home page of your website? As I already mentioned it is specifically designed for marketing. While your home page may have most of the information about your business and have many links, the landing page design would be more focused and will have a strong Call to Action with least distractions to the user. Landing pages are used commonly for purposes like:

Creating awareness or even a buzz about an upcoming product launch or sale.
Let customers know of offers according to a specific audience or their preferences.
As a lead capture page which asks for customer’s contact information and thus converts prospective customers into leads and build your email list.

What is meant by Landing Page Optimization?

Now that we have seen, what exactly a landing page is, let’s understand Landing Page Optimization (LPO) and why do you need it. As we discussed in the previous section, the landing page is often the main destination of paid online marketing campaigns and organizations usually spend a lot of money and resources for driving the traffic to these pages. So your landing page design matters a lot a directly impacts your conversion rates. Conversion rates are nothing but the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal out of the total number of visitors. A high conversion rate indicates that your web design and marketing is successful.
So, the ultimate aim of landing pages is higher conversions. Improving the performance and design of the landing pages could thus make significant improvements in your business performance by acquiring more customers and have an impact on your results. That’s what Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is all about. It is the process of improving the elements on your webpage to improve the conversion goals. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is another term commonly used in the internet marketing field which deals with improving your website’s conversion rates. Landing Page Optimization is considered to be a subset of CRO and focuses on the different elements of a given landing page to increase conversion rates of your website.

How to go about with Landing Page Optimization?

There are multiple things you need to take care of in Landing Page Optimization. It definitely is a task which requires detailed analysis and making the right decisions. There are mainly two dimensions you need to focus on for Landing Page Optimization – Optimizing your Landing Page design and Optimizing the traffic sources to your landing page.
Optimizing Landing Page Design:
Landing page design optimization involves playing around with the various elements on your landing page. This would include the look and feel of your landing page, its content, optimizing the landing page forms, etc. Given below are some of the important elements for a landing page design that could help you increase your conversion rates:

Clear and Concise heading
Provide important details of your product
Ensure your Call to Action stands out
Reduce navigation and links on your landing page
Include an image or video for better conversions
You may include testimonials, benefits of your product, third-party verifications, etc which would increase the confidence of the prospects in your product.
Decrease page load time.

These are just a few points related to landing page design. A landing page design that attracts customers is one of the key things for increasing the conversions.
Optimizing traffic Sources:
However, the best-designed landing page might end up doing no good if you don’t get the targeted visitors to use it. So it is highly important to identify and reach the target users. For reaching out to your customers there are a wide variety of traffic methods out there like Pay Per Click(PPC) Ads like Google Adwords, Search Engine Optimization (Organic or not paid traffic), Native Ads, Facebook or LinkedIn ads, etc. It’s important to identify which traffic channel which you want to use to acquire potential customers and which traffic sources convert best for you.
Once you have created a landing page, you need to find if the page works for you. For this, get real-life feedback. There are a lot of tools available in the market now you could use to do live user testing and analytics tools which could help you analyze your customer response for your landing page. Based on the feedback, you could work on improving or optimizing your landing page design to increase your conversions. This is where A/B testing or split testing comes in. From the feedback you have got, you may end up with several ideas for changes. But before you make these changes final wouldn’t it be a good idea to test the changes you wish to make. For this, you can design identical versions of the landing page, but change the details you think could be improved. Then, split your traffic to each page and see which one produces a better conversion rate. This is called A/B testing or split testing. You could repeat this process over and over to identify the most optimized landing page.
The aim of the article was just to give an idea of landing pages and optimizing them for increasing conversion rates. It definitely does not cover everything you need to know about the optimization techniques. But hope it has helped you give an idea of the overall process and some of the common terms related to landing pages.