Web Site Measurement Hacks

Use Unique Landing Pages

Many marketers make one critical mistake when attempting to lure visitors to their web sites—they use specific language, offers, and messages to drive visitors to the most generic landing page of all: the site’s home page. The use of unique landing pages, while slightly more difficult to maintain, can dramatically improve key performance indicators like stickiness and conversion rates.

Did you ever wonder why marketing folks would spend so much money crafting banner ads, carefully writing emails and keyword ads at Google and Overture, and then simply dump all of the resulting clicks on the site’s home page? The home page, by design, is a generic “catch all” for people stumbling on the site, a page designed to provide a shallow but broad view into what a company does. But visitors who are clicking on an ad, email, or search keyword have already expressed interest in a specific idea or goal—whatever the offer or message is in the advertisement they clicked upon. You should avoid this simple mistake and get in the habit of building unique landing pages for your marketing campaigns.

Unique Landing Pages Are Focused

Contrasted with your site’s home page, unique landing pages should be designed to be about the very specific thing you were advertising or that your visitor was searching for. If people are searching on Google or Overture for “Arc’Teryx jackets” and they click on your ad, you already know something critical about them—they are looking for jackets and ...