Marketing FAIL – 7 Newbie Landing Page Mistakes

In our free marketing eBook “101 Landing Page Optimization Tips“, I discussed building good habits by creating a best practices checklist for your landing pages. It can be a great way to ensure you don’t repeat your mistakes.

However, best practices are only as good as your understanding of them, and sometimes the way to become a better marketer or designer is simply to learn what not to do.

Our list of classic landing page blunders will help you avoid stepping in what can be considered the advertising equivalent of doggy doo.

Or – 7 ways you can step in landing page poop and come out smelling of conversions (that’s supposed to sound like a flower – nasturtiums perhaps).

FAIL #1 – Message Mismatch

If you’re going to do only 1 thing wrong to screw up a marketing campaign this would be it. It’s so fundamental that it blows my mind how frequently this fail occurs. Message match is when the offer/copy/messaging in your advertisement maintains momentum throughout the conversion funnel. In other words, there is consistency from AdWords/banner ad, through to the landing page, and on to the confirmation page or destination website (depending on the purpose of your campaign).

Whenever you break the conversion momentum you are giving your visitor a slap in the face and telling them they may as well go elsewhere. If you can’t maintain your message across every campaign touch-point you are failing in a big way.

The problem can often arise when different departments handle different aspects of a campaign (the email guy doesn’t speak to the campaign manager who doesn’t even know about the PPC team). If this is the case, get everyone in the room – or ask the marketing manager to do it – and open a can of conversion marketing whoop-ass on them. Then sketch the campaign flow on a whiteboard to ensure the message transfers without changing direction.

Warning – if you failed #1, proceeding past this point could be painful…

FAIL #2 – Broken Lead Generation Forms

You spent 3 days designing and creating the perfect landing page, your software guy put a form in it for lead generation and you’re good to go. You’re daydreaming about all the great leads that will come flooding into your inbox or Salesforce.com account. Then you head out for beers on Friday after work.

Monday rolls around and your boss asks for a report. Sweet, time to blow his head off with the super low cost-per-lead you got from your $2,000 PPC spend over the weekend.

But wait, there’s not a single lead or email, and the PPC funds have been drained.

“WTF happened?
You tested it right?
Umm, well no, it worked on Dave’s computer so I just figured…”

The lesson: always test your landing pages to ensure anything interactive works perfectly. Try out the form on different browsers and make sure it’s bulletproof before you spend money driving traffic to it.

FAIL #3 – Advertising Something Other than your Primary Objective

I’ve seen genuine landing pages that had a single objective, such as taking advantage of a 50% coupon or a lead gen form. And then at the top and right-hand side of the page there are… wait for it… Google AdSense advertisements. Seriously? Think about it. You just paid $2 to get someone to your landing page via PPC, and you’re serving up more of the same to take them away from your page.

Ok, so that’s the worst case scenario. What else shouldn’t you do?

It’s been proven time and again that landing pages with a singular focus are more effective than a homepage. The reason being that you are providing a targeted message for targeted traffic and your visitors can focus their attention on the task at hand.

On a homepage there are too many distractions and multiple pathways that can lead people away from the all-important shiny button.

With this in mind, try to avoid the following things on your landing pages:

• Global navigation to your entire website
• Banners for other offers you are running
• Google AdSense – we already covered why it doesn’t make fiscal sense, but it also makes most pages seem cheap and spammy

FAIL #4 – Leaving Watermarks on Stolen Stock Photos

Tsk, tsk, tsk. My finger is wagging in your face right now. For starters you shouldn’t be ripping off photos. There are plenty of good alternatives such as wiki commons and cheap stock agencies where you can get a picture for a couple of bucks. There are also a ton of freely available icons and social media illustrations that you can use (this blog uses a fair number) so you can get decent design assets quite easily. For the record, I designed the FAIL stamp myself (thanks to this technique).

Nothing screams cheap and untrustworthy like a 5 dollar photo you didn’t pay for.

FAIL #5 – Asking if I Really Want to Leave this Page

You know what I’m talking about right? A spammy page that throws up a dialog box “confirming” whether or not I am “sure” that I want to leave the page. Usually presented in complicated double negatives that make it hard to know if OK will make you stay or leave, and if Cancel will make you stay or leave.

Do you not understand why it’s totally not un-bad practice to generally or falsely re-ask for confirmation about whether or not you don’t want to not be elsewhere? OK or CANCEL? Hurry up and answer?

Hard to read right? Don’t do it. Ever.

FAIL #6 – Playing Hide & Seek with the Call To Action (CTA)

You want to avoid eliciting the “What am I supposed to do here?” response at all costs. In the first 5 seconds of arriving on your landing page the visitor should be able to discern the purpose of the page and the method by which they interact with it. Typically this is a big shiny button. Put it above the fold so that they can get their bearings as soon as they show up.

A good way to think of this can be illustrated by catching a plane. When passengers get through the ticket area in an airport – especially if they are late – they need to know 3 things:

1. Where am I?
2. Where do I need to go?
3. Do I have time for a beer before I get on the plane?

To resolve this momentary period of panic they look around for information. The “Departures TV” to see what time the plane leaves and from which gate, and the map that shows the “You are Here” dot and the departure gate. Having established where they are, where and how they are going to get there, they relax into shopping mode. This is what you want on your landing page. Explain in a succinct manner what the page is about, and show them how to complete the transaction. Then they can sit back and explore your page with no fear of confusion.

FAIL #7 – Recreating War And Peace

You’re not trying to make people fall asleep are you? With too much copy on the page you risk a couple of reactions:

1. Your visitor sees reams and reams of text, balks at the prospect of being asked to work (we had enough of that in school) and clicks the back button.
2. They literally fall asleep from boredom and hit the backspace key with their head (you never know).

Either way, you’ve lost them.

Steve Krug (author of the classic web usability gem – Don’t Make Me Think) coined a phrase which holds especially true for landing pages. To paraphrase what he says in the book regarding web page copy, you should “cut it in half, then throw away 50% of what’s left”. Great advice.

So, now that we’ve made you poop-proof, you can get started on your next epic landing page. You might find some inspiration from our landing page templates.

Good luck and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

— Oli Gardner