How to have a really bad landing page
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Jan 12, 2010
In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.
Most blogs and articles cover top tips and best practices for landing paging to convert your visitor's into leads. But what if you do not want leads and look to have the lowest conversation rate as possible.
1 Make it Big
Slow loading pages can lose potential customers. Research shows that more than 80% of customers click away from a page that takes too long to display. Google says that page loading time will be considered in determining the "Quality Score". Keywords that lead to landing URLs that are slow loading pages will get lower quality score than those which load faster. This means the minimum bids for a keyword that leads to a slow loading page will be higher. The web page header has to be downloaded fully before any content is displayed to the user. Therefore, a page header that has to make too many calls to the server to download all the CSS and JS files will slow down the page loading considerably. So make sure it is big and as complicated as possible.
2 Ask for everything
Apparently no one likes to give away too much information when they want to download a free report, get a demo of your product or sign up for a free trial. If you want the visitors to try your product without any obligation, you should ask for as minimal information as possible. Initially, you may just take their name and email address for a way to contact them in future to build a relationship. Gradually over a period of time, you may slowly get more information & feedback from them. Every extra field in your landing page will reduce your conversion rate, so ask from as much details as possible. You never know when you might need their pet's name.
3 Confuse them
Plain and simple, consumers will not take the desired action on a website unless the information, instructions, and path to a conversion point are laid out neatly before them. For lower conversion rates try not to optimize landing pages by controlling the conversion path to achieve higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates. Providing users with too much information can delay conversion time and bog consumers down to where it might actually prevent a conversion. To avoid having that happen, keep in mind that people like to consume information in chunks. Utilizing bullet points that feature product details, testimonials, or contact info is an efficient way to communicate information. Keeping information short and to the point will allow for quick consumption, and not pull the consumer away from your conversion path.
What are you views, what other tips to do have?
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