Many landing page best practices dictate that you trap your visitors inside your landing page and not allow navigation to other pages within your website. The logic here is that you are after a conversion, so keep the visitor focused on converting rather than letting them wander around and forget to provide you with their info before they leave your site.

While the trapping technique can be quite effective for some advertisers, we’ve seen it result in complete failure for others. How to know what to do? Here are some simple criteria you can use to determine whether or not trapping your visitor will bring you the highest conversion results.

When trapping is not likely to work:

Your product offering or market space is not well-known. Do you have a new type of product or service that you are trying to sell? In this case visitors need to learn more about your offering before they will be ready to fork over their contact details or make a purchase. Your website should serve as an educational vehicle to help them understand what you do and how it will help them. Guide them through this educational process through your site with a strong emphasis on conversion along the way.

Your brand is not a known. Are you the new kid on the block? Are you the smaller, local guy trying to compete with bigger well-known national brands? In this case your website needs to be a credibility building vehicle. People are not likely to give you any information until they know they can trust you. Help them get to know you and why you are reputable throughout your website pages. Comparisons, testimonials, awards, as seen ins can all be helpful here.

Multiple offerings or conversions are available. Sometimes it’s good for you to have your visitors wander around. The more they wander, the more they are likely to buy or the more conversion opportunities that exist. Also, if you have multiple standard offerings for them to sign up for, it’s good to let them gather this information and choose the package that’s right for them. So use your website as an up-selling vehicle and let them wander and spend.

Your website facilitates the full conversion process. If you have an e-commerce site, or your website is built to facilitate the purchase of what you are offering, let the user wander around to gather all the information they need, select what they would like and complete their transaction. Some examples here include e-commerce sites and hotels.

When trapping is effective:

You have a commonly known product. If people know what they want and are familiar with your product or service, they are likely just looking for the best provider for them. In this case they don’t need to comb through your website to figure out what you have to offer. It’s more important to focus on the conversion when they first land.

You are a known, trusted brand. If visitors already know who you are, they don’t need the rest of your site to find out if they like you or you are trustworthy. In this case too it’s worthwhile to keep the visitor focused on converting right there on the landing page.

Your best sales are done via phone. If your website isn’t your best sales vehicle, but is rather focused on lead generation, it’s best to focus on capturing your visitors contact information so you can follow-up with your more successful sales tactic of direct contact.

Your conversion doesn’t capture sensitive information. If you aren’t asking for any sensitive information, but are just seeking an email or phone number maybe with some form of free information provided in return, you can be very successful trapping your visitors and keeping them focused on providing this info before they move on.

What Makes a Successful Page Trap?

You’ve got one page to engage, convince and capture. Your visitor can’t be longing for more or unsure after viewing the page, so what do you need to include here to be successful?

Engage visitors and highlight your most prominent value in large font. Show them that you understand them and have the answer for them.
Short / Concise Info Capture. Only ask for the pieces of data that you absolutely need. The shorter the form, the more likely visitors are to complete it.

Testimonials and Awards. Provide as much credibility as possible in this small space – testimonials and awards can go a long way on the trust factor.

High-Level Comparisons. Providing quick info around why you are the best can go along way to help solve the question of what provider the visitor should use. It will also help you to frame how the visitor examines your competitors.Samples of your work, or results they are likely to expect, or what they will experience can go a long way in providing the visitor with some comfort and some excitement about working with you. The more visual, the better here.

Always offer an out from a page trap through your company logo. Even on a technically trapped page, there should always be a way to get to your website if the visitor really feels the need to. The most common way to handle this is for your company logo to be a link to your website.

One last piece of advice: always test. Test, test, test. If you think one strategy might be good, test it against a control and carefully track the results.  Subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite can easily use our Landing Page Optimizer to do A/B split tests as well as multivariate tests of landing pages that are fast and easy to implement.  Use this tool liberally to your advantage.  Only through consistent, rigorous testing can you be assured that you’ve got the right landing page strategy at work for your business.

Transactional landing pages have one purpose only: to get people to take one specific action, whether it’s filling out a form for a white paper, purchasing a product, or even subscribing to an e-newsletter.

Yet many companies lower landing page conversion rates by providing opportunities to browse for related goods and services or offering all kinds of back-up information to support their offer.

In other words, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your Webinar and on your landing page you have links to your Website, YouTube video, and white papers, you’re encouraging people to click away from your landing page – perhaps never to return.

I call this “Distraction Interaction.” Think about what happens when you go online to do something:

Initially… you open your email client to send someone an important email, but first you read your new messages and find an interesting newsletter, which you click open to read.

Then… within the newsletter are a few links to blogs and articles, which you read. An industry guru wrote one of the blog posts and you see her Twitter handle, so you open TweetDeck in order to follow her and then get sucked into Twitter . . . .

An hour later… you come up for air, completely forgetting you were supposed to send your customer that important email.

This exact process is what happens when you include links to additional information on your landing page!

To significantly decrease Distraction Interaction and increase conversions for various types of landing pages, consider the following tips:

Eliminate ALL links to your Website, blog, etc. – Eliminating links discourages people from clicking off your landing page and falling into a rabbit hole on your Website. If you want people to visit your site, give them a link on the “thank you” page once the transaction is complete.

Keep forms simple – A MarketingSherpa report on white papers revealed that people do not want to fill out long, complicated forms. On another note, have people outside your company test your forms before they’re live; you want to ensure they work smoothly and that your spam filter isn’t gobbling up the response emails.

Focus on one objective – The objective of the landing page is to get people to do one thing. Whatever your objective, ensure all landing page components support that objective, from the headline and body copy to the design and graphics.

Don’t “bait and switch” – If you’re using PPC, SEO, or other “inbound” methods to get people to the landing page, make sure the headline and the offer match what people are expecting to get. Nothing is worse than getting to a landing page that’s offering something completely different then what the ad copy proclaimed.

Include a “hero shot” – If you’re offering a product, white paper or other tangible item, include a graphic of the cover, a headshot of the Webinar presenter, or a photo of the item.

Once you have these elements in place, you can then begin testing headlines, images, form and copy to see what increases or decreases conversions, some of which we’ll cover in subsequent posts to this one.  And remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a landing page optimization module that enables real-time multivariate tests of landing pages. Our wizard takes you step-by-step through a process of creating test pages from your original; serves different versions as people click on links to your landing page; and automatically begins to favors the page that converts best overtime, improving your conversion rates in real time.

Do you have other suggestions for improving landing page conversions? Send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.

K.I.S.S.

Landing pages – the places on your site where people land after clicking on one of your sites links in the search engines – are often your first formal introduction to a new visitor to your website.  Landing pages can also have a huge impact on where you show up in natural and sponsored results on search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Live Search.

Landing pages can include your site’s homepage, but are usually pages within your website that are created specifically for people who click on links for your site that appear in sponsored or natural search results, and pertain to a specific offer, promotion or campaign.

Here at Yield Software, we often hear from our small and medium size business clients that they want better landing pages, but just don’t know what they can do given limited time and resources.  So, in an effort to be helpful, I’ve come up with a short list of six recommendations that will enable you to create simple, easy-to-implement landing pages for your small or growing business.

Step One: Ask the question “Who am I / what is my business?” One of the major mistakes small businesses make is that it is not crystal clear what product or service they provide.  These folks cloud their offerings in fancy acronyms meaningful to their employees but not their prospects.  Or they are overly general, saying things like “Leading provider of value added solutions.”  Find clarity about who you are and work on describing what you offer in the clearest language possible.  Avoid jargon, “inside the beltway” chatter and acronyms not universally known or understood.

Step Two: Establish the goal for your landing page. Are you trying to generate sales? Do you want to increase the uptake of a free trial?  Or is your landing page a lead generation tool?  Be sure you’re clear what you want from your landing page.  According to statistics, you only have about three seconds before the visitor hits the “back” button.  Having a clear goal will ensure you make the most of those precious seconds.

Step Three: Reinforce your keywords. If you don’t already have a keyword list – that is, a list of words or phrases people might naturally type into a search engine that most closely pertain to your own goods or services – make one now.  Make sure that the keywords you bid on are contained in your PPC ads and also in your natural search engine listings.  Then, be sure your keywords are naturally incorporated into the headlines and body copy of your landing page.  In other words, don’t just stuff a bunch of keywords randomly on the page – it’s got to make sense to any normal person who reads it.

Step Four:  Present an obvious call-to-action. When people do a search on Google or other leading search engines, they are almost always declaring an intention.  They’re looking for something.  If that something happens to be YOUR something, it’s best to give them an immediate next step to take when they arrive on your site.  So be sure there is a clear, obvious call-to-action that helps your visitor get what they’re looking for. Be sure it’s the first thing any normal person would notice when first scanning your landing page.

Step Five: Remember the old “K.I.S.S.” lesson (keep it simple, stupid!). You’ve heard it a thousand times before so don’t forget it now: less is more.  Keep your pages uncluttered and free from too many options.  This means one or two (smallish) graphics; no more than three bullets in a list; and avoiding dense copy blocks (for instance, line spacing at 1.5 or double).  When your visitors click on your links it is likely because they are looking for something very specific.  So address that need – and that need only.  If you must present options (small, medium, large, etc.), keep the presentation of those options very basic and easy-to-understand.

Step Six: Measure as much as you can. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics on your site to measure all sorts of user behaviors while folks are visiting your site.  You can also look at how many people click on your links, how many hit the “back” button, how many heed your call-to-action, and how many of those convert to a sale.  Why is this important?  This is information you can use to make your landing pages better and better over time.

More sophisticated Web marketers will go to the extra effort to personalize the landing page for each individual visitor to the extent possible.  Amazon.com and several other e-tailers are masters at this, and paying attention to how they do it can be very instructive.

But there’s time to get to the harder stuff a little later on.  Landing pages don’t have to be highly designed or super-sophisticated destinations that suck all your time and resources.  But they do have to be simple, focused, efficient and effective.  Following these six easy steps can help you toward these ends.

Small Plug: I would also like you to know that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes powerful landing page optimization (LPO) tools that, when used in concert with a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign on the major search engines, can automatically test and optimize your landing pages so only the right pages are at work for you.  We’ve got a free 30-day trial, so there’s no cost to you to give it a try.

Go here for more information.

To see our blog post on LPO, go here.

To see our entire Web Marketing 101 blog series, go here.

When people do searches on Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft and click on links inside the search engine results page, they’re clicking on one of two kinds of links: Sponsored or Natural (also called organic).

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is concerned with ensuring that once someone has landed on your site, they do what you hope they will do (i.e., buy your products!).

Simply put, LPO is the process by which owners of websites improve the landing page experience to maximize the chance a visitor will either (i) extensively browse the site; (ii) return to the site for multiple visits, perhaps even bookmarking it; (iii) recommend the site to others through one of a variety of means; and / or (iv) become a paying customer of the goods or services offered on the site.

So, to summarize, most web marketers use LPO to profitably engage a visitor while keeping the sales cycle short.  The degree to which a landing page is optimized to reach these goals can often mean the difference between sales success and failure.

A first and key rule for landing page optimization is to ensure that the content of the landing page is consistent with the sponsored or natural search link copy that generated the click to your site in the first place.

For instance, say you sell organic sunflower seeds to home gardeners from your website. If a person doing a search on “world peace” clicks on a link to your website that says “Prescriptions for World Peace” and then lands on a page that says “Grow flowers and spread happiness – buy the world’s best organic sunflowers seeds here”, those visitors will likely be disappointed at not finding what they were looking for.  And they’ll immediately click off your page (which is called a “bounce”).

There are two consequences for bounces. First, if you paid for that click through a PPC campaign, you’ve lost any hope of converting those marketing dollars into revenue.  Second, the major search engines pay attention to bounce-offs.  They count them. (Heck, they count everything!)  And those bounce-offs are dings against your natural search placement on search pages.

By ensuring that your landing page is consistent with your link copy, you increase the likelihood that you’ll meet the expectations of all those who arrive on your site.  In fact, the degree to which you’re able to customize landing pages to speak directly to each individual visitor will have enormous impacts on conversion-to-sale metrics.

For instance, more sophisticated web marketers will build landing page experiences that dynamically adjust based on the information they have about the visitor.  This is called LPO targeting.  There are three types of LPO-based targeting (adapted from Wikipedia):

Passive Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on information about the visitor’s search criteria, geographic information, or other data points that can be used to effectively segment your customers.

Active Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on known information about the customer (e.g., prior purchases, demographic/psychographic/geographic information, etc.) to anticipate future purchase intentions based on predictive analytics (for instance, Amazon does this very well by looking at your past searches and purchases to suggest books or other products you might like.)

Social Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes by drawing upon publicly available information using a system based on reviews, ratings, tagging, referrals, etc.

Many web marketers will opt to test just a few versions of landing pages to determine which perform best – that is, to see which page coverts the highest number of visitors into paying customers.  This is called LPO experimentation.  According to Wikipedia, there are two types of LPO based on experimentation:

Closed-ended Experimentation. Consumers are exposed to several variations of landing pages while their behavior is observed. At the conclusion of the experiment, an optimal page is selected based on the outcome of the experiment.

Open-ended Experimentation. This approach is similar to closed-ended experimentation, except that the experimentation is ongoing, meaning that the landing page is adjusted dynamically as the experiment results change.

By doing this kind of experimentation, you are able to maximize the profit potential of every single new and returning visitor to your site.  By constantly optimizing – that is, by running open-ended experiments – you can ensure that landing pages are always updated to reflect the dynamics of any given moment in time, keeping landing pages fresh and relevant.

Small Plug: For most small business owners and web marketing novices, LPO can sound extremely difficult and tough to manage.  But it doesn’t have to be.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes useful and easy-to-use LPO module that does the work of both closed-ended and open-ended experiments for you.  You get simple to-do lists that give you quick tasks before the system takes over the heavy lifting for you.  Because the system never sleeps, you can rest assured that only ideally-performing pages are favored over time to get you the best outcomes for your web marketing investments.

For more information on the Yield Web Marketing Suite LPO Module, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.