Search Engine Marketing Blog

Dedicated landing pages are often used by internet marketers when they’re promoting a specific campaign. I’m sure you’ve all seen one; they usually take the form of either an extremely long sales letter with an “eye catching” benefit dripping headline, or a short, sharp sales page with some benefits and a lead capture form.

Traffic to landing pages is mostly delivered via paid search, through banners and AdWords, or email marketing campaigns etc.

The other thing they normally have in common is little or no navigation. If you end up on a Landing page, there are usually just two ways to leave it, exit completely or respond as you’ve been instructed!

The irony is that they often have very high bounce rates – many people recoil and get the hell out of there – fast! But for marketers, it’s all about the valuable few who do stick around and convert.

And landing pages done properly convert much better than normal pages. In some cases up to 55% higher than normal website pages.

They’re usually incentivised by some kind of value-exchange for your email address like a whitepaper, free trial or similar.

Campaign landing pages are mainly used by marketers to build their lists, so they have an opportunity to continue selling through email marketing later on.

A couple of days ago, an interesting new website launched called http://Unbounce.com. The initial reaction by many online commentators is that this thing could be worth keeping an eye on.

The people behind Unbounce have really done their homework and productised landing page development online. If you’re working in a larger business this means no more waiting for IT departments to get your campaigns going as you can create build and test your own campaign landing pages without having to wait around for anyone else.

They offer “best practice” landing page templates which can customise to your needs as well as some basic A/B split testing which works really well if you’re collecting email addresses from forms or if you want to test which Call To Action (CTA) generates the best click through rate etc.

At this stage it doesn’t support full A/B split testing, it really only seems to show you how one page variation performs against another from a “Total click throughs to your goal URL” perspective.

What this means for example is if the pages in your split test are product information pages, and you want someone to click through and buy your product on your own site, the only thing you can measure is which variation in your test drove the most amount clicks to your site.

You can’t install conversion tracking code on your site to see which variation is the best one to drive real world conversions.

Just as an aside, to support Google’s Website Optimiser they would need to add another script field placement (see script field placement options in the image below) so GWO script could be added to the top (above the
tag) of each page in the test. To be fair, the problem as I see it though is that both Google’s own A/B testing script and Unbounce’s split testing software would probably trip themselves up!

Anyway, let’s move on…

It’s all hosted on their servers but can be configured to make your pages to appear as if they were on your website using easy to configure cname records. You’ll need to have access to your server to set this up, but the instructions are easy to understand and the process itself rather straight forward.

Pretty smart stuff!

You can also pop in our own Google Analytics script to get reporting on landing page performance metrics within your own analytics account (again, refer screenshot above).

Finally, their customer support is superb with prompt responses to questions and suggestions. They use an awesome customer support product called get satisfaction. I’d never seen it before, but I love it now!

At this stage unbounce is a free service, so if you’re into building lists or have a requirement for landing pages, I reckon you should give this a try before it switches to an anticipated paid plan model.

You’ve got nothing to lose. Highly recommended.

No related posts.