Ecommerce Tip #3 - Plan Out Your Landing Pages
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Alright, we’ve talked about copy and the dreaded registration page. In my 3rd post of my 15 Days to More Profitable Ecommerce series, I want to talk about… landing pages. Don’t forget to subscribe and check back every Tuesday for the next 12 weeks for another ecommerce tip.
Ecommerce Tip #3 - Plan Out Your Landing Pages
Just to level set: I’m specifically talking about the pages visitors will landing on from some sort of promotion–paid search, email campaign, etc. These pages exist to shuttle your visitors from interest toward their objective and yours (i.e. conversion).
Most people are familiar with the 2 types of landing pages that come “out of the box”:
- Home pages
- Product pages
In some cases, these pages make sense. When you promote a product, you take people right to that page. If you’re pushing your brand in a more generic way, the homepage is a good place to start.
The problem is that you’re likely running all manner of promotions and being limited to these 2 types of pages might not cut it. Instead, as you map out your promotions for the year, think about where you’re going to send those people. Your goal is to target the right people and present a page that:
- Has continuity from the promotion (don’t take them to the homepage if you only email to women talking about skirts)
- Matches their intent (if they click on a particular skirt, take them to that product page).
As Jamie Roche started to lay out, there are several other types of landing pages you can use:
- Category Pages - In some cases, you’re going to highlight a class of products together–thing men’s wool sweaters or newly released horror books. You want to present groups of similar items. Make it easy for people to see the breadth and depth of your offerings. Present ways to drill down. These pages are often an extension of what’s already on your site, or should be.
- Theme Pages - A theme page is like a category page, only it tends not to fit inside the regular structure of your site. Where you might have a women’s winter boots category, a theme page might be better suited for a Mother’s Day promotion. There is some unifying message that ties your grouping of products together, but it isn’t necessarily one that has a permanent place in your information architecture.
- Offer Pages - In addition to your product pages, these pages are the most conversion oriented. If you’re using direct marketing, or linking from a main site to the key call-to-action, it often makes sense to have a landing page that’s focused entirely on that goal without distractions.
Bonus Page: If you’re resource strapped, there is one last ditch way you can cobble together that’s slightly more relevant than the homepage: site search results. Simply present the results of a site search for a relevant term that relates to the promotion, say “jeans” for a denim sale.
This is usually not a good user experience and you’re often leaving money on the table, but it’s worth testing vs. links to the homepage.
Don’t forget to subscribe and check back every Tuesday for the next 12 weeks for another ecommerce tip.
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Comments
Hey Eran,
Phew, I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate on exactly what you’re proposing?
Cheers,
-Alex
Hi Alex,
I am sorry about that. I’ll try explaining myself.
From my experience, companies have a tendency to overlook search result pages tagging. Although they tag the landing pages, offer pages they ignore the search result page. (Your bonus page)
Websites sometimes do tag the search results pages but without tagging some other important variable of that session (i.e. depth of search)
Consider the following example:
A visitor is searching for “red widgets” using your new cool onsite search mechanism. You can easily perform click path analysis and see that he found what he was looking for.
Do you really know where he found the information he was looking for? Do you know that it was on the 3rd page of the search result?
Take this scenario with 1000 visitors searching for the same thing. Not everyone will go deep down (more than 1 page in the search result set) and look for that information. I bet that the majority of the visitors will scan the first page, and if they don’t find it there they will bounce.
To sum things up, I recommend tagging everything with regards to your onsite search since any SEO is relevant to onsite as well as for offsite.
I hope it makes more sense now.
Eran
Hi Eran,
Thanks. I think what you’re saying is: if a person navigates through pages of site search results, make sure your analytics package can track this activity.
That’s good advice all around.
-Alex
I found the explanation of different types of landing pages very informative. “Without distraction” sounded like confirmation for a small, but hopefully good, change I just made to a page today. Thanks!
Alex,
With regards to the “Bonus Page”, I would like to add that it is always wise to tag the search result pages (to identify the depth of the search i.e. page number etc. ). That will allow you to analyse if what you considered to be relevant to the visitors was indeed relevant for them or you might want to look at your “Best Bet” mechanism.