Common Landing Page Mistakes

In this guide

• What is a landing page
• Common landing page mistakes
  • Focusing on the home page
  • No clear call to action
  • No tracking on the page
  • Bad page loading time

Related pages

• Cheap web design agency advice
• Common web design mistakes
• Web design costs
• Different types of web agencies
• Graphic design mistakes
• Common usability mistakes
• Common analytics mistakes

What is a landing page?

A landing page is the first page that visitors see after clicking on your PPC ad, or any promotional offering. It can be a specific page on your website or a separate page created exclusively for search engines. It isn’t your home page.

A landing page is designed to direct visitors to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, completing a registration, or subscribing to your mailing list.

The most common landing page mistakes

Before you hire an agency or a freelancer to build your landing page then there are certain things that you need to be aware of.  Have a look at our most common landing page mistakes to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap.

1

An agency that sees your home page as your landing page

If you are using a company to run your PPC or indeed any promotion and they want to send your traffic to your home page, then this is a red flag.

If you are paying to advertise your product, service or offering then ‘best practice ‘ is to send your visitor to a uniquely mastered page that is specific to that particular product, service or offering and not some generic page.

Home pages are normally full of all-purpose information so you could be wasting your valuable marketing budget by confusing your visitor on what their call-to-action should be.

2

There is NO clear and distinct call to action (CTA)

One of the greatest signs that your agency is not performing the way that they should is the lack of interest they have in creating a very clear and distinct call-to-action on your landing page.

The main purpose of the landing page is to entice your customer to perform the next action, so if your call to action is not clearly visible, does not have a bright and distinct colour and does not have a generic piece of text like “click here”, “submit” or “buy now”, then you know that your agency is not doing everything correctly.

3

No tracking on the page

Gone are the days where you just stick your finger in the air and hope for the best.  Good agencies should understand the benefit of tracking how your landing pages are performing and be able to tell if they need to make certain changes to either the ‘call-to-action ‘, the ‘headline ‘ or the ‘content ‘.

Agencies can run a number of different tests, rather easily in fact, through amazing software such as http://unbounce.com/ which provides the ability to test multiple pages each with slight differences to the other, to gauge the customer ‘s reactions (otherwise known as A/B split testing).

High-end agencies tend to use google analytics with something called “tag manager” but ultimately there are a number of ways to track how effective your landing page is at promoting your visitors to take an action.

The key is to make sure that your agency is using tracking tools, if not that red flag is at full mast.

4

The page loading time stinks

If your landing page does not load within 5 seconds then 74% of people will leave that page.  Scary statistic!  What ‘s even worse for ecommerce websites is that up to 50% will leave if the loading time is less than 3 seconds.

When your agency has built your landing page, ask them to test the loading speed for that page.  It can be done quite simply by going onto https://tools.pingdom.com and adding the URL of the page you want to test.

If your agency skips this process all together then you know that they are a bad agency – deep red flag.

Please note the loading time can have something to do with your hosting company as well.  If you are using “cheap hosting” or “shared hosting” then you may need to improve your hosting package to speed up the loading time. For the best loading speed consider splashing out on a dedicated server hosting contract.