Most everyone I speak with says they have at least one landing page. Most every one of them really do not have a landing page - they have an entry page. In addition to only having an entry page that page is often cluttered, offers little in the way of information to directly address the visitor's search and at best has a tiny call to action with a way to interact with the visitor.
Let's start here by addressing the increase possibility I stated in the title. If you're like me you are skeptical, and well should be, of numbers and statistics you read in blog articles. I know I have heard people make statements I knew to be contrary to scientific studies and, unfortunately for you, most of them have been made by supposedly tech savvy real estate people. But I digress.
Here are some landing page specific or highly relevant facts:
- An experiement by Jason Thompson of EmptyMind showed that using a real photo over a well designed icon increased conversion from 3.7% to 5.5%
- An A/B study performed by Visual Website Optimization showed that removing content from your landing page (or even blog) increases interaction by up to 62%
- "The result was a 62% improvement by simply removing the FAQ section, or a 56% improvement by removing the screenshot section."
- "Less is more, up to a point. It’s surprising how you can spend so much time deliberating over the content of a sales page when in fact that section of content actually puts people off and you’re better without it."
- Another A/B test by VWO showed simply removing a "secure" logo from a page increased orders of an item by 400% (there ya go, not just pull numbers out of my little gray book here ;)
The normal "landing page" people show me is generally either the stock home page that comes with their blog or website. While some of them have an amazing amount of functionality, and I am certain cost the owner a nice bit of coin, they are generally over loaded with information and inundate the visitor with choices indirectly relevant or completely irrelevant to their search. We can define the three major types of entry pages succinctly:
- Home page (homepage) is the index page of your site. For this site it would be http://activerain.com which is easy to navigate, probably does weird things in the SEO realm and offers no explanation for what the page is about. Sorry guys, as a marketing and conversion tool your home page stinks (not saying mine don't, just saying yours does ;)
- Entry page is quite literally any page on your website. If you came straight to this post from your email, a link on another site or from Google you may have "landed" here but this is not designed as a landing page.
- Landing page is a page which not only offers information very specific to an event, a call to action, a search result, an offer for transactional engagement, or something more valuable (to me) than simply giving away information like in this article.
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