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The 3 Main Types of Landing Pages and How To Use Them Effectively

how to design fans And welcome back in this lecture, we're gonna talk about the three main types of landing pages. Why? Because the most common question that I get at the agency is what landing page should I send my traffic too? I'm running a PPC campaign and SEO campaign, a social media campaign, content, marketing campaign and inbound campaign. Should I build a dedicated landing page? Should I be sending my traffic to a separate micro site? Should I be sending people to my home page? Oh my God, my homepage, terrible idea. Not such a bad idea after all. In many cases. So just relax. Should I send it to a product category page? A product page? Contact page. My maps page. Alright. There's no answer. Depending on what the goal of the marketing campaign is. Will determine the right type of page for you to send the traffic too. What's important and what I want to cover in this lecture are just the defining characteristics of the three different types of three different primary types of lan...

ding pages. We're not talking about squeeze pages here or gimmicky marketing sort of things like that. Three substantial types of landing pages that their defining characteristics when they might be helpful. And I also want to talk to you about this concept called the attention ratio. Let's just define the three main types of landing pages first. Right, so you have your primary site. What defines the primary site is that it contains everything about your business. Right, so you have your typical navigation, you might have a hero section with a call to action. You might have a section that goes through multiple different potential services based on different personas. So if this is a bank, you might have people who are looking for a loan, people who are looking for a checking account, people are looking for private services. If you're if you're Zappos or if you're a clothing company, you might have men's shoes, different product categories, women's shoes, so on and so forth. But you you have everything, you might have some testimonials here. You have additional copy, right? It's it's your main website that that that deals with and that promotes your entire business and the entire range and scope of your services. And obviously there's gonna be a lot of differences as as it relates to e commerce versus non e commerce versus legion or versus a blog site. But that's the basic idea. A micro site is a truncated modified version of your main site. Okay. It kind of focuses on a limited amount of your products. It's typically going to have a e a kind of a simpler version of your main navigation, they're still going to be a specific call out for a specific service or a specific category of products or even for a specific experience, if you're running a contest or something like that for your visitors and you might have a call to action with a form, it might be navigating users down to to purchase a specific product. But the idea of a micro site is that it it funnels users more strongly with a greater emphasis on one specific conversion action, which might be a newsletter sign up but it's but it's typically going to be the form, submission or specific sale. That's where micro sites usually are most effectively used. You also have micro sites being used for brand experiences. So domino's pizza has a famous micro site where they're showing off their new pizza delivery car, that's really meant for brand lift brand engagement. But but with regards to what you and I are talking about here, we're talking about former submission sales but a subset of your products, it could be micro sites. I'm gonna show you a couple examples in a few minutes. Hopefully in a couple of minutes there could be a single page long scroll version of a single page but it could also have multiple pages. Right? That it could be, it could be um a micro site whether or not it's a single page site or its or its multiple pages, it still provides context to the user. Right? You have information on the landing on the micro site. You have multiple supporting pages supporting information. The main site provides the most context and the most information and the most options the micro site less. And then you have your famous dedicated landing page and you guys all know with the dedicated landing pages and we're gonna actually go and build some landing pages and I'm gonna show you examples of dedicated landing pages. The defining the clear defining characteristics of the landing page are one no navigation, right? Successful landing pages don't have navigation where they have the contact and you know, big navigations with dropdowns and sub menus and different levels and F A Q. S. It's really just usually the brand logo up here, right? You want to have some context with the company? Is there are some dedicated landing pages that might have a couple of links, but typically very few links and we're gonna and that's important when we talk, when we talk about the attention ratio and you're always on a dedicated landing page, you're gonna have a call to action. A clear call to action on that page. This is a primitive drawing of a form submission of a contact form, but it might be a single product you want to sell on a dedicated landing page, it might be a newsletter sign up, but it's one conversion action, dedicated landing pages typically do not even have secondary or supporting conversion actions. It's really, I want my users to do this and I want to just provide the information so they can do it. You might have some kind of bullet points. Why should submit the form, what this product is all about, what the service is all about, what you get. You might have a testimonial, you might have an about us blurb or section towards the bottom, whatever it might be. The idea is that it offers a sense of, of immediacy and urgency to the visitor. Right? This is what we sell. This is what it is. This is where we are. This is what you're looking for. This is gonna be typically effective for sales cycles that are not that long and we're gonna talk about the length of the sales cycle soon in a different lecture coming up, it's most popularly used for PPC campaigns. SeO campaigns that are that are targeting bottom of the funnel, high commercial intent keywords. So, I don't know if you if you're selling whiteboard fluid. Right? And this is what you sell and this is what you want to sell in this campaign. And you have, you might have a few different bottle sizes. You might have very, very potent or, or the extra strength version of your whiteboard fluid. But the idea is that you're going to have a dedicated landing page to sell that product. If you sell expensive white boards that are custom sizes and they have different weights and different glossy nous, that might be a longer sales cycle. You're targeting universities, corporations, then you might have a form submission. Right? But you might not want to show lots and lots of your other products alongside the specific product that's being targeted for one specific campaign. That's where dedicated landing pages are most popularly used. So let's just talk a second about attention ratio. You you want to have as few distractions from your primary conversion action, whatever button or link or form submission that primary conversion action is you want to have as few distractions as possible away from that On the rest of your page. So ideally your attention ratio is 1-1 meaning your conversion action has one click or there's one thing I could do, there's one action I could take that would signify completing this conversion action. This number represents other links on the page or the total amount of links on the page. So you want to have as few links on the page that are not links or direct supporting actions towards that primary conversion action. So of course if we were to draw a a timeline here across the three main three primary types of landing pages and we have on here would be high and this is our, this is our attention ratio chart and over here is low. Okay, so on the main page There might be 120 potential clicks to my one primary conversion action on a micro site fewer. Right, so let's say there's 30 potential links because we still have a navigation, there's still other links on the page But on a dedicated landing page you want to get as close 1-1 as possible and on a dedicated landing page you want to have the opportunity And the ability with design to get as close 1-1 as possible As you see your, your attention ratio getting closer 1-1 you're going to see your conversion rates increase. That's something which I can almost guarantee you. I've seen it hundreds of times. The more distractions that you have on a page, the more likely that person is to get distracted. That the the lower your statistical chance of your conversion action being the action that the user takes is that's not to say that you have to cut out every other link on the page. First of all, just as a caveat privacy links. Um, you know, legal links, things like that terms of use. Those are not considered distractions because those are kind of known and their conventions to be links that a typical website visitor is not going to explore. But when you have a navigation, that's that's the reason the reason why I dedicated landing pages typically don't have a landing page. When you're gonna go into unbound and build a landing page, you don't have a navigation option. It's not, it's not a tool that you could build into the landing page because landing pages will convert better when there's no distracting navigation. That's not to say that you don't need supporting information. You still have to give the user enough content enough information about what's going to happen, what they should expect. Once I submit the form, what's gonna, what should they expect once I purchased the product, what should they expect once I sign up for the list, what am I gonna get? What's the value to me? What are the benefits? What are the features? All those things are still important on whatever page you send your traffic to. The main idea to realize is you always want to aim for fewer distracting links or fewer distracting elements that don't directly support the primary conversion action that you're attempting visitors to take on your landing page, I'm gonna show you a couple different examples of primary sites. Micro sized, dedicated landing pages that I have prepared in slides. So let's just jump and then I'm gonna have an exercise for you. So let's just jump into the slides real quick and we'll take a look at some real life examples. So, I did a search on google for by women's shoes online and I clicked this ad, Right, This was a Macy's ad, women's Shoes at Macy's 20% off Thanksgiving sales. And this is the landing page that I'm that I've got dropped on. So this is obviously a primary category page on Macy's main website. Right? So this would fall under the category of our primary site landing page. And if you see here there's An incredibly disproportionate attention ratio. This. If we go through, I would say there's over 300 individual links. If we go through all the links in the navigation. If we go through all the different links on specific products three, I would say maybe even more 500 links on this page. Right. That's because in this campaign, Macy's doesn't have a particular conversion action in mind. Of course they want to sail. But what they really want is engagement. They want people in their Funnel. Macy's is not a one product company. Right. Macy's is a massive company that sells an incredibly diverse range of products and services. So what they want is they want people landing on the most relevant page and they want people to engage and become aware with who they are, their pricing and what they have to offer. So this is a great example of a good landing page from PPC from Macy's, you might say, oh, it's, it's, it's going to a primary site that should be dedicated. No, everything has its place. And you have to understand from your campaigns and your conversion actions what's gonna be the right thing for you. Again, the search for by women's shoes online. So this was an ad for Zappos, Right? Free Shipping & Returns. Fantastic Call to Action. And interestingly enough, I went to their homepage, you might think that I would go to the women's shoe category page. But no, I went to their homepage, which I'm sure I'm not criticizing Zappos. They're a big company. They definitely know what they're doing. I'm sure they're running different types of tests to see if this homepage lander creates more engagement. Once again, hundreds and hundreds of links, hundreds of options, lots of information. But yet again, a primary site um going to the homepage when you're talking about what's the right landing page for a marketing campaign. One thing that's always important to understand is that your organic results are very hard to control. You want to try to rank in the search engines like google and being for your the keywords that you have potential to rank for, but you can't always control which landing page google is gonna send that traffic to so by women's Boots online, that's the search that I did. And I clicked this organic result for shoe dazzle and I brought to the shoe dazzle homepage. Once again, if you look at this page, it's through the imagery is very clear what you offer. Once again, I did click that link. So we should, we should assume that the user knows where they're going. But this is probably not the best page in terms of conversion rate for this particular company for this particular search by women's boots online. I would probably have been better off going to a page that specifically talks just about women's boots. But the point is to show that you can't always control that organic traffic and you have to do the best with what you have. Alright, I wanted to show you a couple live versions of micro sites real quick just to get a sense of what they are looking at my screen. Now. This is a micro site that we built for one of our clients and what categorize this as a micro site over landing pages that there's a lot of context. Right. So you have step one, step two. This is not your typical just form submission major um phone number call out sort of landing page. It's a micro site because we don't have all their original navigational elements. And we're just promoting a specific subset of their services. Credit repair. Right? And we have a lot of supporting information we have here testimonials at the bottom. We have the contact, get in touch and the form submission. So this is an example of a micro site. It's it's kind of built out. It's well designed. It's it's it's a long single scroll page but it has a lot of these traditional elements that your typical micro micro site has. This is another famous micro site that deals with feminine products and feminine lifestyle which is part of Procter and Gamble. But it develops an experience and it caters to a specific audience segment promoting specific types of products and specific types of living habits for females. It's a very cool concept where you have this um, simplified navigation even though it looks like a lot but it's obviously much less than the overall Procter and Gamble service offerings and product offerings and they have a lot of these different sections where women can come and hang out and talk about different issues and, and and join that sort of community. So this is another good example of a micro site. Let's quickly go through some dedicated landing page examples and of course you've seen these lots of time. So we don't need to spend too much time on this. Fresh books. Fresh books is a big competitor to Quickbooks. So that offers cloud accounting. We use fresh books, fantastic software. So when you click on their ad, you have a very classic, well designed landing page, right? No navigation as you hear, as you see here, no navigation. I can log in. I can try it for free or I can call toll free, clear headline sub headline and very clear big green call to action. There's if you, if you, if you talk about attention ratio, look how little else there is on this page other than the big, the big green button that they want me to click, I do have a try it free button but that's, it's, it's sneaky because that's really the same button. So the only thing I have that's competing is logging it but they want to offer that to customers if they navigated to this page and as we go down, we have again the same call to action Some very clear benefits and features and again at the bottom of the page. Another this is a very, very common for landing page is a very clear action block, but again, that same call to action. So this is this fresh books page is a fantastic example of a very, very good attention ratio. It's basically 1-1 with the desired Conversion action, which is to sign up for a free 30 day trial. Here's a landing page that we've built for one of our clients caress negotiating once again as you can see very clear, limited time free offer, download the free e book and here's the form submission. This is your classic, dedicated and bounced landing page again towards the bottom of the page. Another big called action, here's another landing page that we created for one of our clients that runs a successful surf camp. As you can see here, there's a clear call to action in the hero section book now and you can also watch the video which is, which is supporting the main call to action. This is why I wanted to show you this page. It's well designed, there's no navigation, we have a video, some supporting information, some of the basic packages, some of the basic pricing and then again, a big call to action block book. Now request more info today. The watch the video button over here is supporting the book now because what we know from analytics is that people are more likely to submit a form to get in touch with the company If they first watched the video and they got a sense of what the surf camp is all about so that although the attention ratio is not a perfect 1-1, the other potential things that a person could click support users toward finally converting. So those are a few examples of micro sites and landing pages. So let me just leave you guys off with a quick exercise that I think is gonna be important to understand these different types of landing pages. Think about your products and services, think about your business based on what you learned about primary sites, micro sized, dedicated landing pages and the different defining characteristics of each one. What type of landing page do you feel would be best for your marketing campaigns, write that down on a piece of paper and explain why why would a dedicated landing page work best or why would a primary site or homepage work best for your specific campaigns? The second part of that exercise is very simple. I want you, I want you to perform two or three searches on google for any random product that could be shoes, lightbulbs, vacation package, whatever it is. Click on a couple organic results, click click on a couple ads and try to determine in your opinion based on what you've learned. Now, if that company sent you to the right type of landing page, don't be so worried about the clarity of the headline and the clarity of the sub headline. But figure out if it was the right type of landing page, if it's if it was the right type, explain why if it wasn't the right type, explain why it was the wrong type and what would have been a better type. I think that exercise those two different parts will help really concretize and solidify this information and all this knowledge in your head. This took a little bit longer than I thought it would, but it is very important still laying that groundwork, still learning a lot of the really, really valuable fundamental aspects of good landing page design. And we're really on our way to becoming consummate experts in conversion optimization and effective and clear design. So I look forward to seeing you guys very soon in the very next life.