In the initial phases of my 15 years of digital marketing career, I used to develop landing pages for each and every digital marketing campaign.
So, there were separate landing pages for all the campaigns I managed over Google, Facebook, Yahoo, affiliates other publisher sites for a single website or product. This model is being practiced even now by more than 90% of the digital marketers. The main purpose of doing so is to clearly track the no of leads produced by a particular agency. Through this way, we can derive conclusions on quality of a particular agency.
Product page as the landing page – I did a similar practice in the beginning. Later I realized that there are many hurdles in and around the usage of a separate landing page. I have generated 1 million leads for a higher education client without using separate landing pages. I used pages from my site itself as the landing page of that product. In other words, the product pages were designed as the landing pages itself. In addition, I myself developed a mechanism to track the source of the leads. This practice helped me to increase the no of leads as well as the no of conversions. The conversion rate increased at low cost without a landing page.
Separate landing page – If you create a separate landing page for a campaign, it gives information of a single product only. Transition from a landing page to the official website or home page for the sake of understanding of the complete set of products or other aspects of it is impossible. He is not visiting a landing page for the sake of an enquiry. Before buying the product, he needs to understand all aspects of the product or website.
- Another disadvantage is that, the URL’s of the landing pages are longer and not too easy to memorize. People become reluctant to share the long URL’s with someone else.
- Landing pages usually contain redundant information of an official website. As the information is duplicate it has reverse affects the SEO ranking.
- People try to convey a lot of information through the landing pages and it becomes messy. Also it takes time to load on the browser and the user just ignores it.
- The user sometimes bookmarks the landing pages thinking to revisit at a later point of time. However, the landing pages might be removed at the end of the campaign duration. When the user tries to visit the bookmarked the link, it will be unavailable.
From my point of view, don’t create separate landing pages for campaigns. If you want more enquiries, redirect the user to the official pages of the website/product.
