You could have the best campaign that brings you the traffic you want. However, if the page people land on from your advert does not
relate to your advert, your conversion rate will suffer badly. You will not get the results you had planned for. All because your landing page for your PPC campaign is bad. Well, don’t worry. Here are some types of landing pages you can use for your PPC campaign to improve your conversion rate.
The Different Types of Landing Pages
MicrositeÂ
Microsites are an add on to a website where they may have their own URL but still will only be one page. For this reason, they usually adopt flash so more information can fit in one page. In simple, a microsite is a page that has a separate design to the main website. Here are some examples of a microsite:
Microsites are most commonly used for car companies to promote each car on a separate microsite. Therefore, if you are going to use a microsite, make sure your microsite is about one thing and one thing only.
Microsites gain a high conversion rate from the way they can relate to the advert so well. If you have an advert on rubber bands and then have your landing page as a microsite to rubber bands, it will perform a lot better than landing your adverts to your main homepage of rubber.
HomepageÂ
These type of landing pages take you to the homepage of your website or blog you want to promote. These types of landing pages should only be used if you are trying to promote the whole of your website. However, because advertisers rarely want to promote a whole website, this type of landing page is rarely used. It is only used by inexperienced PPC advertisers who don’t know how important the landing pages are to a PPC campaign.
Click Through Pages
These types of pages require an action from the individual with this action mostly being a click. Â Therefore, if you want to promote a purchase or a sign up, you will want a click through page: you want the individual to purchase or sign up (you want them to perform an action). The conversion rates for click through pages are just as/if not higher than microsites for the simple layouts they adopt. A click through page is another advert. It wants you to do something and because the individual has already gone through the time and effort to click through one advert, they will have the urge to do another action. Here are some examples of some click through pages:
This is the most common form of landing page because of the high success they produce. Try it yourself. Go onto a website with advertisement and click on an advert that is of interest to you. Around seven times out of ten the landing page will be a click through page. Therefore, if your unsure with what type of landing page your campaign needs, go with the flow of the internet!
Lead Capture Page
The purpose of these landing pages is to gain and gather as much information out of you as possible. They usually only have one button: a submit button to submit all your information. There are no other links and information, just the incentive to want to give your details. The reason advertisers use lead capture pages to gain a good email base of potential customers to offer their products or services to. It also is a good form of market research, finding out where people are, their age and more. I don’t particularly like these types of pages as it feels a lot like spam. Yet, if it works for you, don’t let my opinion change your landing page strategy.
Product/Service Page
This is your bog-standard page on your main website which holds information towards your product or service or a plain simple article. The only real positive towards a product/service page is that the landing page doesn’t have to be created like in the other examples saving you a lot of time. Other than that, aim to try and not use this page as the conversion rate is not nearly as high as the other more custom designed landing pages. Apple’s iPad page, if they choose to use it as a landing page, is an example of a product/service page although there are hints of it being a microsite too:
Informerical
Just like a commercial, an infomerical landing page works to give you as much information as possible. The aim is to keep you on the page for as long as possible. This is done by using techniques used in TV ads to make the product/service have the ‘wow’ factor.  Infomerical also uses the commitment from the reader to keep them reading, ‘if you run 51% of a marathon, there is no point turning back’. I’m not going to give any examples as I’m sure you don’t want to be that runner running 51%. I mean that reader who readings over half the page and then decides to carry on reading…
So there you go. The most used landing pages that advertisers use with their campaigns. It goes to show that there is a lot more to a landing page. In fact, I would say its one of the most important aspects to your campaign. Without a good campaign, all that hard worker getting the internet user to your landing page will be for nothing. For this reason, make sure your landing page is good!
