Every landing page in your website should reflect of what you know about your customers and provide what they need to know in order to make a buying decision. Landing pages are often created as companion pages to your pay per click advertising campaign and they are valuable little tools that can make or break your online advertising success. This post suggests the 6 ‘golden rules’ of creating powerful landing pages

1. Determine your customer goal – Determine the final action that you want your visitor to take and make that action the goal of the landing page. When you achieve this result your landing page design can be deemed a success! Unless you set a clear goal and create the landing page to achieve that goal it is likely that visitors to your landing page will leave the site without taking the desired action.
2. Make it consistent with the ad– Consistency will ensure that the customer knows they have found what they are looking for. You need to make sure that the ad and the landing page go together to create a cohesive message. If there is any ‘disconnect’ between your ad and your landing page, the path to your goal will be lost.
3. Present a professional design – Your landing page must equal or exceed the quality of your website. The fact that a landing page is often created to serve a single advert doesn’t mean that visitors won’t expect a well designed page with good quality graphic design.
4. Don’t include unnecessary links – with landing pages you need to carefully lay out the path that you want your visitors to take. Don’t throw everything on the page in the ‘hope’ that you will hit on something that interests them.
5. Calls to action – With PPC advertising you know that anyone who visits your landing page is already interested in your products or services, because they had to click on your ad to get there!  Make sure your Landing page lets visitors know what to do when they get on your website.
6. Track your results – To determine if your pay per click campaign is cost effective, you will want to measure your results. There are two most important statistics to track; the conversion rate & the marketing cost per sale.

WSI has recently produced a ‘whitepaper’ on Landing Page Design – for your complimentary copy please visit WSIIMS