by Scott Brinker
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Landing pages have become the Omega-3's of Web marketing: If you're not using them and optimizing them ad infinitum, you're squandering your online ad dollars. Or so the landing page optimization crowd would have you believe.
Like most good ideas that get hyped into panaceas, landing pages have grown larger than life, overshadowing the real source of value—a respondent's holistic landing experience.
In the spirit of probing the pros and cons of this popular post-click marketing format—and, okay, doing a little tongue-in-cheek myth busting—we offer our take of the top 5 best and worst things about landing pages, in contrast to multi-page landing paths.
(Just to clarify terminology: Every landing experience obviously begins with a page, where respondents land after clicking an ad or email link. But the term "landing page" specifically refers to a one-page post-click marketing format, where the entirety of a campaign's pitch is squeezed onto that one page.)
The top 5 best things, real or imagined, about landing pages:
- Landing pages are quick and cheap. That's not a putdown—fast, inexpensive experimentation is very important in this landscape of a thousand niche marketing opportunities. But "cheap" should be measured by CPA (cost per acquisition), not absolute dollars. If you spend twice as much time on a three-page landing path, but it generates a 5-times factor in your conversion rate on the same ad dollars, that's a good investment.
- Landing pages can be "matched" with advertisements. Huge benefit! (Although not everyone using landing pages takes advantage of it.) Arguably the power of message match, where content a respondent sees post-click is tailored to the promise of the specific ad they clicked on, is the primary reason why landing pages have improved conversion rates. This principle is a keeper for any good landing experience.
- Landing pages can be tested and optimized. Absolutely: test, test, test. One of the problems with big Web sites is that they suffer from inertia. Online direct marketing campaigns thrive on rapid experimentation, and landing pages have enabled that... to a point. You can experiment only so much within the box of one page ("let's try every color in the Web palette as our background!").
- Landing pages are easy to manage. Maybe. One page may be easy to manage, but many, many different "one page" variations are not. You've no doubt run across a lot of outdated or link-broken landing pages. As you scale up to running dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of targeted landing experiences of any kind, the content management challenge is daunting. Good software and processes can make this manageable, but that's not an exclusive feature to the landing page format, and by no means a given.
- Landing pages are friendly for respondents. Well.... message match is friendly, to be sure. But there are three cases of how a one-page format can be used:
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