Are you optimizing your landing pages for a herd of wild horses?
Anna Talerico on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 11:17AM Many online marketers I meet don’t yet differentiate between their organic and campaign traffic. But this differentiation is so critical to help you achieve your conversion goals—actually, I think it’s the most important first step you can take.
Put your web traffic into two different buckets—organic and campaign—and keep it there.
Here is your organic traffic—it comes to your from natural search, direct, viral, and inbound links that are not marketer managed. And it is truly organic. Just as you cannot control a herd of wild horses, as a marketer, you have limited control over where this organic traffic comes from and what it does when it arrives at your site. You can optimize for it, but you can’t fully control it. When you test & optimize these organic pages you should be testing for the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD). That is to say, you should be optimizing the most effective page you can for anyone & everyone who might land on it.
Campaign traffic is entirely different. Campaign traffic can be marketer controlled (in case my visual analogy isn’t 100% clear, that’s you - the marketer - sitting there controlling the 900-pound animal). Paid search, display, email, social marketing—these ads & messages are entirely in your control. You craft the ad, you place the ad and you control where the ad goes if someone clicks it (plus, you pay for it too!). What total power. You can optimize not for the lowest common denominator, but for the Ad, the Message and the Context of the click (ADC). In other words, you can optimize for specificity. You can capitalize on the ad, the message and the context and craft a corresponding experience that is highly likely to convert the traffic. You don’t have to make a campaign landing page that is right for ‘anyone and everyone’ who might land on it. You just need to make the page right for the people who click the ad.
Why you would want to do this is obvious, I hope. It’s so you can make your online marketing as effective as possible.
So, start thinking of your organic and your campaign traffic separately, and out of that will come a new way of thinking about your landing pages. Just as you have organic & campaign traffic you should have organic & campaign landing pages. Because every click has to land somewhere and it’s your job to make sure it lands in the most effective place it can.
Landing Pages, PPC, optimization in Strategy 
Reader Comments (4)
Love the horses analogy. Very appropriate.
In a similar vein, I often get the question "Why not send paid traffic to the homepage? Is that bad?" I tell them that it isn't necessarily bad, but that with paid search you know so much more about the visitor that you should always be able to send them to a better page.
Great article, totally read my mind with this post. As a marketer, you leave so much money on the table when you don't optimize/customize specific landing page(s) for your ad campaigns.
This is a great article!
Aeli,
Thanks for the feedback -- we really appreciate it!