Technology Tip

Tracking Small Business Marketing With Landing Pages

Tracking Small Business Marketing With Landing Pages

Developing customized landing pages to support specific marketing campaigns or ads can provide important sales and tracking benefits for your small business.

A lot of companies make the mistake of directing traffic generated by their marketing campaigns to their company homepage. While this can help a general branding campaign, creating customize landing pages for each specific ad, offer or target audience produces more effective results.

A landing page is simply a website that is designed to accomplish one goal by having someone take a desired action. The term refers to your goal of having a prospect or customer "land" on a specific page after seeing your ad or offer. The goal of a landing page can vary according to the campaign, but its singular focus makes it easier to determine how well your ad is performing in reaching your intended audience and generating results you’re hoping for.

If, for example, you are running the same promotion on Facebook and Instagram, custom landing pages will indicate which network generated the most traffic.

Common goals for landing pages include:

  • Making a purchase
  • Registering for an event
  • Filling out a contact information form
  • Registering for your email newsletter
  • Downloading a white paper or other lead magnet
  • Scheduling a strategy or consultation call

Streamlined Design

One of the reasons landing pages are effective is a basic design that focuses on the desired action you’re hoping the reader takes. This will usually include:

  • A headline that spells out the benefits you’re offering
  • Short marketing copy that reinforces those benefits
  • A simple call to action, such as filling out a form or clicking a button to purchase or register

If you’re asking for contact information on a simple form, it’s important to have fewer than three boxes on that form. The more information you ask for, the less likely it is that they will fill out the form.

Landing Page Tools

Although landing pages have simple designs, a lot of companies take advantage of easily customizable, prebuilt templates that make it easy to guide the reader to the call to action. Templates are easy to customize to match your company site or ecommerce platform, and give you the ability to launch a variety of landing pages without having to code them yourself. Popular choices include Unbounce, Leadpages and others.

Tracking Your Results

By adding Google Analytics tracking to your landing pages, you can easily monitor whether they are performing effectively. The following metrics will give you powerful insights into how effective your landing page is:

  • Pageviews. This simply indicates how many visitors are reaching your landing pages. If this number is lower than you expect, your promotion may not be effective in generating interest.
  • Conversion rate. How many of the viewers who reach your landing page take the desired action? Marketing professionals expect an effective landing page to have a conversion rate between 2% and 5%. Although this seems low, it’s more effective than you would see with other forms of direct marketing.
  • Bounce rate. This indicates how many visitors leave the page in less than 30 seconds. A high bounce rate would suggest the design of the page is not appealing to visitors.

By reviewing these metrics, you can start to identify potential problems and reasons that your marketing promotion may not be reaching the right audience or making an effective offer.

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