MarketingProfs put together an excellent list of the “5 best and worst things about landing pages”. In fact, this seems to be more of a dos and don’ts list but overall it is well done. Below are a few of my favorite excerpts.
Landing Pages Can Be Matched With Advertisements essentially means in my mind must be matched with advertisements. If you are building a landing page and it is not tied to a specific ad, then it is likely a waste of time or at the least will not produce the results you want. The fact is that for every ad you run and every search term, your landing page must match that if you want it to convert to what you need it to convert.
- Landing pages are quick and cheap. <snip> 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.
And those are the good things!
The top 5 worst things about landing pages (and tips for how to fix them):
- Sagging Page Syndrome (SPS), also known as “the kitchen sink.”
Trying to cram as much as possible onto one page puts the burden on the respondent to sift through it. Unfortunately, most of the time, they’re just not that into you yet.
If you’ve got that much to say, and it’s valuable, then break it into digestible chunks across a multi-page path, ideally in a way that lets respondents choose which chunks are most relevant to them.- Giving bad brand. Collectively, all of the problems above contribute to making landing pages bad branding experiences. As noted earlier, landing pages are quick and cheap—which is good—but they often look quick and cheap, which is not good. Not good at all. Because it signals quick and cheap for your brand, and unless you’re the Dollar Store, that’s not a good image to put in people’s minds.
There are a lot of good tips in the piece they were just put into a strange package in terms of the 5 worst and best things about landing pages, when in fact it is really 10 tips for optimizing your landing pages and making them more effective and thus increasing the value of your advertising dollars.
