04Landing Pages
One message.One audience.One action.
If you are paying for traffic and sending it to your homepage, you are paying twice — once for the click, and again in the visitors who arrive somewhere that does not match what they were promised.
01The problem
Paid traffic deserves its own page
A homepage has to serve everyone: the existing customer, the job applicant, the curious competitor, the person ready to buy. That breadth is exactly what makes it a poor destination for a campaign, where the visitor arrived from one specific promise and will judge the page in about three seconds against it.
There is a second cost that goes unnoticed. Paid traffic is the most expensive traffic you have, and a slow page loses a measurable share of it before anything renders. A landing page that takes four seconds on mobile data is throwing away budget you already committed.
02What it involves
What the work actually is
- Offer & audience definition
- Who this page is for and what it is asking of them, decided before anything is designed. Vagueness here is fatal downstream.
- Message match
- The page continues the sentence the advert started. Same promise, same language, no reorientation required.
- Conversion structure
- Proof, objection handling and call to action sequenced in the order the visitor actually needs them.
- Copy
- Written, not filled in. The words are the conversion mechanism and cannot be handed off to a placeholder.
- Speed
- Built light, because you are paying for every visitor who bounces before the hero renders.
- Measurement
- Conversion tracking and event instrumentation set up so you can tell what happened rather than infer it.
03How it runs
How the work runs
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01
Define the one thing
One audience, one offer, one action. If the page needs two calls to action it is usually two pages.
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02
Write it first
Copy before layout. A landing page is an argument, and you cannot design the shape of an argument you have not made.
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03
Design & build
Designed around the argument, built light, and tested at the connection speeds your paid audience actually has.
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04
Instrument & launch
Conversion tracking verified before spend starts, so the first week of data is usable rather than wasted.
04What you get
What you end up with
- A single-purpose page, designed and built
- Written copy, message-matched to the campaign
- Conversion tracking, verified before launch
- Fast on mobile data, measured not assumed
- Variants for testing where the spend justifies it
05Related work
Where this shows up
06Honestly
When this is the wrong service
If you are not driving traffic to it, a landing page has no job — organic visitors arrive at a site, not at a campaign. And if the offer itself is the problem, a better page will only help you find that out faster.
Probably better: Web DesignSEO
07Questions
Landing Pages — common questions
01 How is this different from a page on my website?
Intent. A site page serves several audiences and several purposes; a landing page serves one visitor arriving from one promise, and everything that does not move them towards the action gets removed — including navigation, often.
02 Do I need more than one?
If you are running distinct campaigns to distinct audiences, usually yes. Message match is most of the value, and one page cannot match three different promises.
03 Can you write the copy?
Yes, and we would rather. On a landing page the copy is the mechanism, not a layer applied afterwards.
04 What counts as a good conversion rate?
It depends entirely on the offer, the traffic source and the price point, and any number quoted without those is marketing. What matters is the rate before against the rate after, measured on the same traffic.
08Also relevant