Understanding the landing page experience...

In today’s article, you will learn about landing page and the characteristics of an effective landing page. I will also provide an explanation on the landing page optimization process, the role the landing page itself plays in the overall experience and the factors that influence the landing page experience.

What is a landing page?

 A lot of us have different ideas of what a landing page is, and different analytics setups have different ideas of what a landing page is.

Michael Aagaard in his lecture on “Landing Page Optimization” explains that a landing page is page that a user lands on, basically an entrance page. It's the first page that the user sees after having clicked some kind of an ad source. In most cases, it could be a PPC ad, a banner, an email, social media, etc. It's a page that works independently of the rest of the site or the app, and is focused on a clear conversion goal. By conversion goal, this means, something like getting leads to fill out a form, getting them to buy something, or whatever thing that you're very focused on getting them to do

Characteristics of a landing page

You can use some of these characteristics to do a very quick and dirty analysis of a landing page. If it fails on these points, it's not a good landing page.

Some of the characteristics an effective landing page include:

-         It shortens the journey from click to conversion. For example, instead of sending people to the homepage of your website so they have to go through eight layers of navigation to find what you were you talking about in the ad, it makes it very apparent right away.

-         It basically follows up on the promise or the promises made in the ad source.

-         It speaks to user motivation and addresses barriers. So what we're looking at here is building momentum. You know what the motivation is and that's what is included in the ad that they clicked, this means that there's a motivation there. You try to build that up, and try to address/ remove barriers that people could have. These could be objections, it could be questions, and so on.

-         It answers important question creates clarity. Because a landing page is focused on a specific goal, and it's focused on getting you there as quickly and also effortlessly as possible, you create a clear path to the conversion goal.

Michael narrated an experience he had with a landing page he tagged as probably the worst landing page experience of his life. Compared to the characteristics of an effective landing page, the landing page he experienced failed on every single point. It did not shorten the click, the journey from to click to conversion. It did not follow up on the promise made in the ad. It did not speak to his motivation neither did it address barriers. If anything, it introduced a whole new range of barriers that he'd never even expected. It didn't answer any of his questions nor created clarity. It made things even more convoluted and weird, and certainly did not create a clear path to conversion. Everything listed here makes a terrible landing page.

The role of the landing page in the landing page experience:

For many people, it seems logical that when they want to optimize a landing page, they just look at the landing page and just go what's wrong with the page. However, it doesn’t make a lot of meaning because it's not enough to look at the landing page isolated. The landing page is part of a bigger experience. Let’s take a look at an example: let's say it's an email campaign for an e-commerce site. It starts with the subject line, that subject line has to get you to open the email, and then in the email, there's going to be some content that has to motivate you to click from there to the website. You probably get to a Product Overview and then, the Product Overview has to get you to the Product page. The Product page has to get you to the Cart, the Cart has to gets you to the Checkout where there's probably multiple steps, and then, you are at the confirmation step. At this point, a conversion has been facilitated.

It is important to understand that for every single step here, there's the opportunity for friction, there's the opportunity for your brain to hurt from things that don't make sense, and there's an opportunity for people to leave the landing experience at any step here.

One important point to note is that if you assume that you need to optimize the landing page itself, you could be completely off. This is because too often, there might be a bug or something going on in the funnel and this impacts on the whole experience. For example, if you have a bug on the funnel, you could keep optimizing and testing the landing page forever, and measuring on conversion but you will not get anywhere because you failed to understand that the problem is actually after the landing page, and it’s affecting the whole experience negatively.

Landing page optimization is not just about fixing a landing page and making it look pretty, it is much more profound than that.

The role of research is also very critical. You can conduct a quantitative versus qualitative research before jumping into conclusion. You can start with a rough research process outline.

Heuristic Walkthrough

Also known as funnel walkthrough. Through looking at analytics, you might identify that users are leaving the landing page without filling out the form, but then to better understand the problem and solve it, you need to ask some why questions and get some answers. An example could be that other users distrust the landing page because it doesn't look legit.

A full-funnel walkthrough or heuristic review is all about identifying the weakest points in the landing page experience, familiarizing yourself with the landing page experience, and creating a bit of empathy and understanding for the users and what they're experiencing or going through in the landing page, funnel experience.

When you do this as one of the things you do very early on in the research process, it gives you a lot of understanding – you understand first impression, emotional reaction. You can do a bit of critique on credibility and trust elements, clarity, information hierarchy critique, copy, content critique, trying to find some bugs, UX issue. All of these together gives you a very good and strong starting point for further analysis.

This week’s learning at CXL Institute was great, as usual. If you would love to learn more, you can visit the CXL website to enrol for a course.