The Landing Page as a Multipurpose Tool

Landing pages are always worth a review because their use is often misunderstood. A landing page is any web page to which users are sent for a particular presentation, result, and/or measurement. Landing pages, in short, have uses beyond simply presenting information.

People sometimes talk about landing pages in one capacity only, paid search advertising. Certainly, landing pages are extremely important with regard to pay-per-click advertising because the search engines include the quality of the pages to which paid search ads point in their overall evaluation of when and where ads are displayed. In theory, the better a landing pages is with regard to focus and keywords, the better the placement of an ad will be.

But landing pages can be used for much more. Not only can they affect conversion, they also allow for traffic measurement via website analytics.

Email Marketing Campaigns

A landing page can be a great way to measure the effect of an email marketing campaign, especially if you use an entry-level email service that provides limited analytics. The page’s appearance has a definite effect on click-through rates. If it is well designed, it can prompt people to continue on to a purchase or perform another action within the website, while a bad design will likely prompt users to go away.

Social Media Outreach Campaigns

The most basic way to measure the effect of a social media outreach campaign is to create unique landing pages for each campaign combined with website analytics. A landing page focused to each campaign is the most plausible tool for conversion, and, again, good landing page design will usually improve conversion rates.

Banner Ads

A banner ad landing page shouldn’t be much different from a paid search landing page, except that there is no search engine policing its quality. You can police it yourself – the more focused the landing page is to your banner ad, the more likely it is to convert. Additionally, the page can offer secondary analytical information to augment ad server numbers.

Press Releases

Most online press release services offer some form of analytics, but they are rarely enough to fully measure the actual effect. Placing links to well-defined landing pages in press releases can, like banner ads, offer improved analytical information.

External Blog Links

Participation in the blogosphere can pay big dividends, whether through comments, guest blogging, or garnering mentions of your website on external blogs. Although analytics can track traffic from individual blog addresses, a landing page can augment this analytical information and offer content focused to the blog post, thus enhancing the likelihood of maintaining interest or converting a visit to a sale.

Offline Marketing

A landing page can also be a great tool for traditional, offline marketing. Print ads, postcards, promotional items, and other physical marketing entities can be hard to track. But a unique landing page for each item, tied-in with the specific offer, can help to define some representative numbers.

Summary

While landing pages are extremely important for pay-per-click ad campaigns, they can also be used to track your online and offline marketing tactics. In situations where a marketing campaign seems hard to track, use landing pages as a multipurpose tool for both tracking purposes and conversion.