Lay out a landing page

1. The job the page does

The advertisement got them to act. This page collects their contact information, which is what turns a click into an engaged lead you can contact again.

The favored method is a simple landing page, and the standing instruction is not to overthink it. Everything else on this page follows from that instruction.

Put more precisely, this page answers the fourth of the four problems paid advertising creates, listed on SOP 35: once somebody has taken action, how do you get their permission to contact them again in future? Everything before this point rented you a moment of somebody's attention. The landing page is where you convert that rented moment into something you own and can use again.

2. The three layouts

Across a portfolio of companies, three layouts are used most commonly. They are variations on one another rather than three different ideas.

Layout	What is on it
1	Headline, sub-headline, contact-information field, submit
2	The same, with an image
3	The same, with an image and three bullets

Pick one. Which one does not really matter — all three have been used — and then test it. The choice is not the lever; the testing is.

3. Why simple wins twice

Simplicity pays on both sides of the page, and both reasons are worth having in front of you when somebody proposes adding a section.

For you: fewer variables to test. The simpler the page, the fewer things there are to vary, so you can improve it quickly. A complicated page takes longer to learn from because every test has more moving parts in it.

For them: fewer things to do. The person clicked because they said they wanted the thing. The page says, here is the thing you said you wanted. They recognize that they did want it, and they submit. That is the whole sequence, and shortening it is what produces very high conversion rates.

4. Match the page to the advertisement

The landing page must match the advertisement that sent them there. If the advertisement is a certain color, features a certain person and uses certain words, the landing page uses the same words, the same colors and the same person.

This is probably one of the most underrated things in the whole discipline, and the reason it is underrated is not that it is hard to understand. It is that it takes work: every new advertisement implies a matching page, and matching them is unglamorous.

5. The push and pull: how many steps to ask for

There is a trade here and it does not have a single right answer, so it is run as a dial rather than a decision.

The more steps you ask somebody to go through, the fewer of them will do it — and the more qualified the ones who finish will be.

What you are seeing	What to do
Too many leads, and too few of them worth talking to	Add qualification steps
Too few leads	Remove some steps

That is the push and pull of marketing in general, and the balance is found by moving the dial and watching, not by predicting where it sits.

6. Build the first one now

The action step is to build your first landing page.

The account attached to it is a warning rather than an instruction. Four years passed without a landing page being built, on the strength of a self-description — being bad with technology, being slow with it. When the attempt was finally made, the page was finished before lunch, in four or five hours.

Four years of the benefits of knowing how to build landing pages were lost to avoid four or five hours of work.

The build time, carried rather than resolved. The same episode also appears as four years reversed by four hours of concentrated effort. The figures that appear for this are four or five hours, and four. Nothing turns on the difference except the credibility of the figure. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The general rule attached to it: if you say you are bad at something, you will probably go on being bad at it. Saying "I am not technical" or "I hate this kind of tool" is a statement that costs money. What broke the four years was not a decision to learn; it was finding the person doing the work more irritating than the work itself. The tools are easy enough now that people who do not speak English can use them, and anybody can work them out.

7. Where this page sits in the cost arithmetic

Improving and split-testing landing pages appears on the list of things that lower what a customer costs you to get. It sits alongside making better advertisements, targeting better, eliminating steps in the process, getting better at selling, finding cheaper platforms, and finding media types that distribute more widely.

That list is where this page hands off. This page gives no figure for what a customer should cost to get.

8. The paid sequence, closed

Element	What it does	Where it is
The call-out	Gets them to notice	SOP 32 and SOP 33
The value	Gives them a reason to do something	SOP 39
The call to action	Gives them a way to do it	SOP 31
The landing page	Collects the contact information	This page

Once the page is live and collecting, you have engaged leads from paid advertising, and the only question left about the whole machine is how efficient it was.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You
What the page does	Collects contact information from somebody who just acted
How many layouts	Three, all variations of one another
Which layout	Any of them; test the one you pick
What must match	The words, the colors and the person in the advertisement
Why simple	Fewer variables for you, fewer things to do for them
Too many unqualified leads	Add qualification steps
Too few leads	Remove steps
How long the first one takes to build	Four or five hours, or four; not settled
What a good conversion rate is	Not established on this page
How many fields to ask for	Not established on this page

10. What this page does not cover

The advertisement that sends people here is on SOP 32, SOP 33 and SOP 34. Choosing the platform is on SOP 35 and targeting is on SOP 36. The clarity rules for the call to action that points at this page are on SOP 31. Turning content that already performed into the advertisement is on SOP 38. Making first contact with the lead once you have their details is SOP 91.

Page-building tools, hosting, tracking setup and the cost-per-customer arithmetic are not covered on this page.