Landing Page Best Practices

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June 7, 2012

Landing pages are a critical success factor for any online campaign, PPC, email, media buy or another. Landing pages should be as accurate as possible, closely matching the theme of your target audience. Here you can find some tips and best practices for the design and construction of landing pages.

Content

  • Headlines are critical in a landing page. Keep them descriptive, concise, with a clear value proposition.
  • If your landing page is product-centric, provide some basic information and credentials about your company
  • Provide trust signs and signals (certification logos, trust-e, verisign, testimonials, partners,…etc.)

Load Time

  • Quick load time is critical. Maximum of 3-4 seconds is required on average connections. (up to 150 KB page overall size is recommended, including all its additional files)
  • Consider using external CSS and optimized images to save load time
  • It is recommended to use a load time monitoring service that pings that landing pages every time interval, reports on load time from different geographical servers, and alerts when load time is too high. You can test your landing page here

Layout

  • Include a prominent Call to action, or lead form, above the fold, in all popular screen resolutions.
  • Do not use long text paragraphs, use concise bullets to convey main points / benefits.

Navigation

  • Don’t include large navigation menus on your landing page. In general it is not recommended to use the same navigation of your main site
  • Don’t lock visitors within your page, at the minimum make your logo clickable to the site homepage

URL Consistency

  • Use your primary domain as the host of the landing pages
  • Always keep the content of your URL the same. Improvements to the same landing page, or new variations should always be carried out on a new URL, leaving the old url untouched for benchmark.
  • Even if the page is not used anymore, for tracking consistency don’t re-use its URL.

Coding Practices

  • Apply SEO on-page best practices to your landing page: title/description, some textual content, meaningful URL, headers …etc.
  • If the page is mainly graphical (flash, images) use alternative elements to provide some textual content (swf object, noscript)

Collection Of Information

For pages collecting personal information from users, in order to comply with Google and Facebook advertising policies provide links to the company’s privacy policy and terms of service. This is the stated requirement by Google:
– If your website collects personal information, a link to your privacy policy must be included on your site and be easily accessible before entering personal information. Sites collecting personal information through a pop-up or interstitial should contain a link to the privacy policy on the pop-up or interstitial.
– Your privacy policy should cover the following aspects:

  • What personal information is collected from the user
  • How this information will be used by the company
  • How the company transfers data to third-party companies
  • How to modify or delete this personal information or opt-out

– Unless necessary for the product or service that you’re offering, it’s best to not request personal information. Clearly explain what the information will be used for, and what a user can expect after entering their information.

– Provide as much content as possible without asking users to sign up.
It’s best to allow users to access your site’s content without requiring them to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

 

More about the type of information covered by this policy.