Landing Pages 2.0

By now, “landing pages” have become almost de rigueur for search engine marketers, particularly in the context of PPC campaigns. But the plain old landing page (POLP) format — one page, headline, image, body copy, form, button, done — is getting pretty tired. Seth Godin claims to have been talking about them since 1991. That’s a little early, but certainly over the past 4-5 years, standard landing pages have become nearly ubiquitous in web marketing. Who hasn’t built at least one by now?

But now it’s 2008, and while the rest of the web continues to innovate at an exhilarating pace — subscribe to TechCrunch for your daily dose of web-tech speed — we continue to be surprised by how little innovation happens with landing pages. Go ahead, see for yourself: pick any term in Google that you want to search on and click through on the PPC ads. I’d bet that almost every one you click on will either take you to (a) a plain old landing page or (b) just drop you in the undirected corporate web site. If you find (c) something different, you’ve found the exception, not the rule.

You might think, “perhaps this plain old landing page format is so pervasive because it works best”. I’d buy that hypothesis if the results validated it, but even with these universal landing pages as we know them, the average conversion rate hovers around 3%.

Meanwhile, enormous energy continues to go into improving the advertising that generates the click. Microsoft’s recent announcement about an engagement mapping platform is the latest example of this, enabling advertisers to map and assign value to various touch points in a campaign. But it appears to be woefully absent of any mechanism for tracking post-click activity. This is ironic, because while there is certainly much potential to be leveraged in the pre-click space, it’s a tiny fraction of the possibilities for “engagement” after the click.

However, although landing page inertia is puzzling, it represents an excellent opportunity for marketers such as yourself — and vendors such as ourselves — to stand out from the crowd.

Think of this opportunity as Landing Pages 2.0, the next generation of landing pages that:

• are not limited to one page, with more paths and microsite-like experiences;
• contain more rich media, including interactive Flash, video, avatars;
• segment respondents in an open, transparent way (“respondent tagging”);
• have more creative structure and content, are more substantive and engaging;
• treat the landing experience as a valuable branding platform;
• employ more sophisticated behavioral rules to personalize the experience;
• match more tightly — and more deeply — with specific advertisements;
• are measured on multiple dimensions, particularly by audience characteristics;
• test to reveal useful properties of the market (not just “best headline”);
• become the best mechanism for identifying click fraud;
• are deployed with greater frequency with more ease by more people in an organization;

…and I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface here. There’s a lot of uncharted, open country out there in the post-click frontier. For marketers, 2008 could be the year of Manifest Destiny in this space. Good time to stake your claims.

Comments

[dave]

Let's see before and after examples with metrics please.

[Scott Brinker]

Hi, Dave.

Here's a link to some of the published case studies. The "before" examples were pretty much standard 1-page landing pages, the "usual format":

http://www.ioninteractive.com/global/resources/dynamic/Media/ion_CaseStudies.pdf

Of course, part of what I'm rallying for is to have more "after" examples out there! This post-click space is a much bigger canvas than Landing Pages 1.0 would imply. Let's bring more creativity and innovation to the world of "click fulfillment"! And to the degree that you or anyone else would be willing to share the outcome of those experiments -- good, bad, surprising -- that would be of benefit to everyone.

[luxury guy]

Landing page in your example - well designed !
It's seems to me that this 2.0 LP design is more friendly for users eyes.

[Scott Brinker]

Design is very much elevated in the concept of Landing Pages 2.0. Landing pages are brand building moments -- and given the homogeneity of search engine marketing in particular -- it's often the critical "first impression" brand building moment. One of the tenets of the Landing Pages 2.0 philosophy is to consciously focus on that dimension of the experience.

I'd add that this is also a renewal of the appreciation of good "creative", which has sometimes been lost in the techno-centric nature of most Internet marketing.

[Jaxworks]

My thoughts on the web 2.0 landing page is that it should appeal on the long tail level (see point one of httphttp://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=12 ).

Hence the web 2.0 landing page should reflect a very specific need or desire for a few people over many topics (in reality we are probably talking about many landing pages built off a theme or template within a particular topic).