Promotional campaign landing pages are getting ever more refined and sophisticated. While most of us don’t have the luxury of thousands of responders to test out ideas with, we can copy general principles from businesses who do. But is it worth it? Can’t we just send people who click on our adverts to a product page?
We can, but it requires supreme confidence that our product pages can get the message over efficiently and effectively. For all sorts of reasons, most don’t.
One approach to a landing page is to have a minimal number of outcomes – perhaps just one – and to focus on getting every visitor to take that action. A general product page is unlikely to be designed in that way. It will have all the normal site navigation and perhaps other distractions too.
So do we need a dedicated landing page for a promotional campaign? I think that if the promotion aims to get responders to take a specific action, it’s a very good idea. If it’s simply saying: “We’ve got blue widgets, come and take a look”, then maybe a standard product page will do the job fine. So we need to consider why we’re advertising something, and whether the advert is simply an introduction to our company’s world, or if it’s a targeted call to action. If it’s the latter, a landing page integrated with the advertising may be a good investment.