I’ve seen some terrible landing pages lately. Remember that your landing page only has a few seconds to make an impression before someone decides whether or not they want to spend time on your site. Is the page relevant? Did they arrive where they were expecting to go after clicking a link? Or was it deceptive?
You can buy banners and send loads of traffic to your site but the hard part is actually getting that traffic to then convert.
When you’re advertising or promoting your website online, take some serious time to look at the landing page you’re sending them to.
- Make it uber clear what you want the person to do when they arrive on the page. A hundred different links, pictures & buttons competing for a visitors attention are only going to dilute your response rates. The desired action should be completely obvious within a few seconds of looking at the page.
- Keep registration processes as short as possible (and I mean short!). As a user I don’t care that it’s useful for you to know my gender and date of birth. I just want to get to the content or reason for the sign up process as soon as possible. Once you’ve gained the trust of your site user you can collect ‘nice to have’ information later. And heck aren’t we in the economy of free? Why should I have to give you my email address if you promised me a ‘free download’?
Here’s an example. I searched for ‘Travel Insurance’ in Google and got an ad for House of Travel that directed me to this page which happens to be the home page for their site. Not really the best landing page for someone looking for travel insurance. In fact insurance isn’t mentioned anywhere on the page at all… I imagine they would have a pretty high bounce rate off that search term.
House of Travel landing page example.
By contrast, an ad for Air New Zealand took me to the following page. Nice and clear, three easy to follow options, the images are obviously buttons and it was clear to me what they wanted me to do.
Air New Zealand - travel insurance landing page example
A quick look around at who’s advertising online at the moment brings up a few other examples.
Briscoes
It’s great to see a retail brand like Briscoes advertising online. I saw this banner on the Herald for their ‘Under Wraps’ promotion.
Briscoes Under Wraps Island ad
Clicking on the ad took me to the following page which explains the promotion in further detail. Pretty good.
Briscoes Under Wraps landing page
What I was concerned about though was the Briscoes Better Buy Club, what exactly is it? Looking at the form and because they’re asking for sign ups online I’m going to assume it’s an email that gets sent out with special offers and sales information. The problem I see here really is the length of the form. Why do you need my full address and post code to send me an e-newsletter?
Briscoes Better Buys Club sign up form
This type of information request may have been OK a few years ago and I know your CRM software would love to have all the boxes filled but the reality is that the length of this form is going to directly affect the number of people who join. If you solely asked for a name and email address (which if you’re honest is really all you actually need to complete the e-newsletter send) you would likely achieve a much higher sign up rate.
It’s easy to pick out the bad ones so to finish off let’s see if we can find a few decent landing page examples. I’m not saying these are perfect but from looking at them I can see someone has thought through the user’s process.
2 Degrees Mobile
A 2 degrees ad promoting ‘click here for a free sim card’ is sending me to a nice short form that promises the goods. I don’t see a lot of lengthy marketing speak here, right down to action. Looks pretty good to me:
2degrees mobile landing page example
Sky TV
An ad for getting Sky installed for free is sending me to this landing page. The easy to see ’sign up now’ buttons are pretty clear and there a couple of options to choose from. Overall it’s not a bad example.
I really don’t understand why they would have an animated banner promoting one of their TV shows to the right of this page though. This will clearly compete with visitors who are about to enter into a transaction with the business. The less distraction on this page the better.
Sky TV landing page example
The Great Kiwi Invite
Here’s a nice short, easy to understand form. They want your first name, last name and email address. Pretty easy!
Great Kiwi Invite sign up page
As you can see from these examples, it’s really easy to over complicate landing pages. The most important thing is to try to make the offer simple and clear without providing too much information or too many distractions. First impressions are sometimes also your last. Make the most of them!
