What if 2017 finally marked the take-off of landing pages?

2017, the year of mobile? Déjà vu. 2017, the year of conversion? Maybe. In any case, if I had to give you my wish for this year, it would be this: 2017, year of the landing page . Only 10% of Quebec companies are now equipped with landing pages dedicated to their web marketing campaigns . We can therefore conclude that 90% of Quebec companies could greatly improve the performance of their marketing campaigns by working on their landing pages .

Where does this stat come from? A "highly scientific" analysis based on the observation of almost 200 landing pages currently used by our clients or for Adwords campaigns (156 ads clicked all the same). So even if this figure is not statistically significant, it gives us an idea of the state of things at the dawn of 2017.

Here is what emerges from this quick analysis: 10.4% of the ads lead to a well-built landing page , 12.1% direct to a pseudo-landing page and 77.5% to generic pages of the website . Such a waste !

However, there is no shortage of tools to design them quickly : Unbounce, Leadpages or even Instapages are very accessible and easy to access; they allow you to create landing pages without writing a single line of code. The main CMS also allow the creation of landing pages without complexity.

But why are we here? Maybe we are in too much of a rush to get our campaigns online? Maybe we believe that putting 100% of our budget in our web media will bring better results? Perhaps we have not analyzed the financial benefits that an optimization of these landing pages could entail? Ok maybe… But maybe we don't understand precisely all the advantages of a well-designed landing page, nor what it is about in the “conversion” sense of the term.

WHAT IS A LANDING PAGE ?

Oli Gardner and the Unbounce team have done an amazing job of popularizing their Academy . Rather than rephrase or plagiarize, here is their definition translated into French:

In a basic sense, a landing page can be any web page that the user can land on after clicking on a call to action within a marketing message.

As a marketer , you seek to obtain the best return on your investments, and therefore to convert the traffic generated by your online campaigns as much as possible. With this goal in mind, we could define a landing page as a dedicated, specific web page that leads visitors to complete a single conversion goal or call-to-action .

A dedicated page means that the page has (virtually) no connection to your website and has only one purpose: to get your visitors to convert through a unique call to action. This page has no navigation and can only be accessed from the link provided within your marketing content [and sometimes from Google, but this is rarely relevant].

A specific page means that for each marketing initiative or campaign, you must have one [or more] landing pages designed just for that campaign. An e-book? A landing page . Two promotions? Two landing pages .

I really like this definition. However, I would make two observations:

In the primary sense, a landing page is any web page that can be reached by the user, whether by clicking on a call to action within a marketing message, but also by clicking on a link organic in a search engine.
Talking about both a landing page for any page that can be reached by the user AND a dedicated landing page for a campaign brings a significant dose of confusion. For example, if someone talks about a landing page in a meeting, is he talking about a landing page dedicated to a campaign or a landing page aimed at improving navigation or even a generic page of the website ?

Also, it seems relevant to me to introduce a new term in our already provided marketing jargon, that of Campaign Landing Page , which would therefore be a landing page dedicated to a specific campaign aimed at a single goal: conversion .

The Growth Marketer's Guide to Landing Page Optimization