Landing Page Goals
The goal of a landing page is to move the visitor to take the primary desired action. The selection of that action, whether it’s a purchase, a newsletter subscription, or a brochure download, is a business decision driven by an online business strategy. For instance, if the business goal for a web site is lead generation, the landing page goal will be to motivate visitors to make contact or share their contact data. If the business goal is sales, the landing page goal will be to move the visitor forward in the sales cycle.
Since defining the right online strategy to achieve a business goal is a complex task beyond the scope of this book, we’re going to assume you already know what you want your landing pages to accomplish. However, here are a few examples of specific landing page conversion goals and how they might map to a business goal:
Business Goal |
Landing Page Goal |
Desired Visitor Action |
Lead generation |
Collect contact information from potential customers qualified by showing interest in a white paper topic |
Visitor registers for a free white paper |
Lead generation |
Collect e-mail addresses to use as a marketing outreach for new products |
Visitor requests free Tips Sheet via e-mail |
E-commerce |
Sell a product |
Visitor clicks the Add to Cart button |
Viral marketing |
Spread the word about your organization, site, products, or services |
Visitor sends link to a friend |
Branding |
Entertain visitors who in turn encourage more visitors, enabling higher sales of on-site advertising and eventual sale of company to Google |
Visitor views a funny video |
It’s important to keep business goals firmly in mind while designing landing pages and thinking through the conversion process. If you have a clear vision of the desired result, the difficult design decisions and tradeoffs needed to achieve it are easier to make.