Landing conversions In the world of marketing, the conversion rate is the golden goose. It is the final goal by which the bulk of our efforts are measured. Conversion rate can be the number of white papers downloaded, the number of videos watched, the number of widgets purchased, or even the number of meetings set. Targeted landing pages are web pages that contain detailed information about a marketing offer or message and that attempt to make a convincing argument for why the recipient should join the ranks of the converted. In pursuit of your own golden goose, your landing page should first and foremost: Provide your lead or prospect with a clear, concise path to becoming a customer. Enable your lead or prospect to become a customer. Resolve any concerns they may have about becoming a customer. As a marketer, you are likely on an endless search for tricks, tips, and best practices that will improve your conversion rate in both online and offline marketing campaigns. Savvy marketers know that few efforts return results better than those gained through the implementation of targeted or dedicated landing pages. If you’ve yet to put this great tool to the test, it’s time you did, and for good reason.

2. TARGETED LANDING PAGES
Using web pages to improve marketing conversion rates.
by Cyndie Shaffstall
C SHAFFSTALL & SON, LLC DBA SPIDER TRAINERS
PO Box 280487
Lakewood CO 80228
303 468 8713
303 865 7774 Fax
http://www.spidertrainers.com
To report errors, please send an email to spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com
NOTICE OF RIGHTS AND WARRANTIES:
All rights reserved. This eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in whole and in any form by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise. For information on branded reprints and excerpts, contact
spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com. The information in this book is distributed on an as-is basis without any warranty. While
every precaution has been taken to ensure accuracy, neither the author nor publisher shall have any liability to any person or
entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or allegedly caused, directly or indirectly, by the instructions contained in
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All companies with products, services, or websites mentioned in this eBook are listed in the references and credits section of
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regretted and is not intended as an infringement on such trademarks.

3. You want to improve the conversion rate of your
marketing campaigns.
You want to learn about design tips for creating
your landing pages.
You want to learn about testing, tracking, and
tweaking your landing pages.
You wan to learn about campaign source tracking.
You need creative services help in developing
targeted landing pages.
Spider Trainers
If Marketing automation has been shown to increase
qualified leads for businesses by as much as 451%. As
experts in drip and nurture marketing, Spider Trainers
is chosen by companies to amplify lead and demand
generation while setting standards for design,
development, and deployment.
Our eBooks are designed to help you get started, and
while we may be guilty of giving too much
information, we know that the empowered and
informed client is the successful client. We hope this
eBook does that for you.
We look foward to learning more about your needs.
Please contact us at 651 702 3793 or
cmeyer@spidertrainers.com.
You should read this book if:
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

4. Landing conversions.........................................1
Design...............................................................3
Headline and page title .........................................3
Content...................................................................4
Test, track, and tweak.......................................6
Duplicate content...................................................6
Campaign source tracking.....................................7
Conclusion........................................................8
About Spider Trainers ......................................9
Specialties...............................................................9
Spider Trainers contact...........................................9
References and credits...................................10
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE i
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

5. We want everyone to understand how to improve
coversion rates through the use of targeted landing
pages. To that end, we encourage you to share this
document.
BRANDING IS AVAILABLE
If you would like to share this document with your
clients, please ask about branding. We will produce a
version branded with your logo and contact
information, which you may distribute freely. (All other
content and copyright information must remain intact.)
PLEASE SHARE
PAGE ii
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

6. In the world of marketing, the conversion rate is the
golden goose. It is the final goal by which the bulk of
our efforts are measured. Conversion rate can be the
number of white papers downloaded, the number of
videos watched, the number of widgets purchased, or
even the number of meetings set. The formula for
measuring your conversion rate is simple:
Targeted landing pages are web pages that contain
detailed information about a marketing offer or
message and that attempt to make a convincing
argument for why the recipient should join the ranks of
the converted.
In pursuit of your own golden goose, your landing
page should first and foremost:
Provide your lead or prospect with a clear, concise
path to becoming a customer.
Enable your lead or prospect to become a
customer.
Resolve any concerns they may have about
becoming a customer.
As a marketer, you are likely on an endless search for
tricks, tips, and best practices that will improve your
conversion rate in both online and offline marketing
campaigns. Savvy marketers know that few efforts
return results better than those gained through the
implementation of targeted or dedicated landing
pages. If you’ve yet to put this great tool to the test,
it’s time you did, and for good reason.
LANDING CONVERSIONS
PAGE 1
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
CONVERSION RATE
# achievements ÷ # visits (or # sent)
465 widgets bought
÷ 6,000 visitors
= 7.75% conversion rate
?! Conversion rate. The proportion of visitors to a
website who take action to go beyond a casual
content view or website visit, as a result of subtle or
direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and
content creators.
— Wikipedia
?! A single-page landing page can increase
conversion rates by 55%.
— Interactive Marketing Inc.
?! The average conversion rate when companies
used their home page as the destination for an
advertisement or link was only 6%. Companies that
used targeted landing pages achieved a 12%
conversion rate.
— Atlas OnePoint

7. PAGE 2
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
Figure 1 At the left, the front and back of a tri-fold direct mail are shown, the matching email is top-center, and to the right, the
matching landing page. This campaign was designed to re-engage customers and introduce them to new digital-print services with
various offers and/or to engage online using a white paper download offer. With the deployment of nearly 70 custom landing
pages, we tested the effectiveness of multiple calls to action, differently valued calls to action, QR codes, moving the call-to-action
buttons, and lastly, whether or not an odd-shaped email and landing page would affect conversions. (It did. The odd-shaped duo
outperformed the square version 2:1.)
You should use targeted landing pages because
tracking and sifting through analytics for the source of
home-page traffic and the engagement level of the
visitor can be challenging or impossible. Given that,
campaign traffic should never [ever] be sent to your
home page and thus a dedicated page to receive
campaign recipients makes sense. If your marketing
campaign contains multiple vehicles (as is the case
with a multi-touch campaign), you will find that
multiple targeted landing pages work very well when
you need to compare multiple traffic sources and even
better when you need to find your best-converting
content or design components.
Targeted landing pages have many advantages, such
as:
Improving the conversion rate of marketing
campaigns.
Provides you the ability to test individual and
global design elements and isolate the most-
effective conversion objects.
Provides you with high visibility and tracking of
visitor engagement and behavior.
Provides you the ability to display messaging
specific to the source or to the list segment.
Contributes to your website’s optimized content.
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8. Design is the most-important consideration when
implementing targeted landing pages. A well-
designed page will easily and positively impact your
conversion rate. Heatmaps and other research
shows us exactly how visitors are engaging with our
pages and this information can be used to lead our
design efforts.
When asked, the primary reason people have given for
not buying from a site was because the site had an
unprofessional look that caused the visitor to question
the credibility of the site owner. Trust in the vendor is
critical — especially so if your page has a form and you
are attempting to collect information from the visitor.
An effective and professional design will go far in
establishing your credibility and trustworthiness.
HEADLINE AND PAGE TITLE
You have about two seconds to convince your visitor
to stay on the page and this makes your headline
crucial. Make sure you get it right, even if you have to
get it wrong first. Using targeted landing pages, you
can easily test several headlines through the use of
duplicate landing pages or by making changes to your
primary page over a span of time.
This headline should be the largest text on the page
and, under the hood, appropriately tagged as H1 in
the HTML source of your page. This is an indicator to
the search robots that this is the most important text
on your page and an indicator of the basic focus of the
text that follows. In addition to being relevant and
clear, your headline or opening text should welcome
the visitor and specifically mention the source from
which they came. You might also recognize their
source by including a graphic, as shown for Facebook
visitors in figure 2.
The page title is the text that displays in the browser
bar when the visitor is on the page. Page titles, like
DESIGN
PAGE 3
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
Figure 2 Use targeted landing pages to test the effectiveness of your headline in capturing the reader’s attention quickly.

9. headlines, are indexed by search spiders and should
incorporate important keywords from your campaign.
Further, taking a cue from what heatmaps have taught
us, consider first positioning your headline at the top
left of the page.
CONTENT
In checklist format, your landing page’s design and
content should:
Have a clear, concise page title. Use one or more
of your campaign’s keywords. Think about your
search-engine optimization efforts as well as your
visitor’s needs.
Have a clear, concise headline. Use one or more
of your campaign’s keywords.
Be professionally designed. A beautiful, clean
design builds credibility and trust.
Be presented in a single column.
Use limited images.
Be design-consistent with the campaign vehicle.
A matching design makes the visitor confident
they have come to the right place. It’s easy to be
consistent when you use the same fonts, images,
colors, and basic structure.
Eliminate distractions. If you attempt to match
your site design, you will create far too many
distractions.
Display important content above the fold. If your
content does extend below the fold, be sure to
include a second call-to-action button so that the
visitor is not required to scroll to the top in order to
engage. If you feel you need more real estate than
a single page can provide, create a small series of
pages (microsite) linked together with a simple
menu. Do not link the menu items to pages
outside this microsite.
Tell the visitor how they will benefit. Stay focused
on them and not you. This is not the time to try to
tell the visitor how great you and your product are.
Use clear, concise language. Avoid marketing
speak and complex industry phrases. Deliver the
message concisely and so that people of skill sets
will understand.
Stay focused. Think about what exactly you want
the visitor to do and what it will take to get them
to do that. Don’t distract the visitor with lots of
options, offers, buttons, or links. Your landing page
should provide the visitor all of the information
PAGE 4
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
?! 46% of web sales are lost on sites lacking the
critical elements to build trust.
— Stanford
Figure 3 Make sure your pages load quickly. Three to four
seconds is good, and no more than five seconds.

10. that they need without having to search your site
further or other sources in order to continue the
engagement or purchasing process.
Provide a single call to action. Use easy-to-
understand text or buttons that ask specifically for
the desired action. Don’t mince words. Try adding
an arrow to button graphics to improve click-thru
rates.
Only ask for what you need. If your landing page
has a form or survey, keep it short. Do not ask for
information that is not critical. You’re much better
off to ask for additional information in subsequent
campaigns than ask your visitor to fill in 20 form
fields and have them abandon right away. If you’re
using email automation, you may have the option
of a prefilled form. That means you don’t need to
ask for information that already exists in your list. If
you’re having trouble getting completed forms,
tell your visitor how the information will be used,
briefly state your privacy policy, and include a link
to the full policy.
Load quickly. If you keep it simple, you won’t
need to worry, but time it anyway. Make sure your
page is not so complex that it takes more than
three to four seconds to load.
Landing pages can also improve your search-engine
optimization because they are filled with keywords
about your business or product. Search engines strive
to provide the timely, relevant, and helpful results.
Landing pages that attract visitors, engage them for
extended periods, and that are keyword-rich can have
a noticeable impact on your search-engine ranking.
PAGE 5
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
Figure 4 We’ve found that in many cases adding an arrow to the
button improves click-thru rates.

11. To get the best conversion rates from your landing
page, you must test, track, and tweak. These tweaks
— in the form of page updates — will also contribute
to your search-engine optimization efforts.
The following examples — and much of our live work
— may not always follow the best practices we have
listed in the previous section. This is because best
practices are simply guidelines to help you develop
your landing pages. Only through tracking your offer
with your design to your customers will you come to
know what combination produces the best results.
DUPLICATE CONTENT
If you spend much time working toward search-engine
optimization for your website, you undoubtedly have
concerns about duplicating landing pages for your
testing or using similar landing pages for multiple
vehicles.
Search engines are on the alert for instances where
large amounts of content are used at multiple sites or
on multiple pages within a site in order to artificially
boost SEO. With your targeted landing pages you will
be using custom headlines for each page (with H1
tags), and a welcoming paragraph. This customization
minimizes the amount of content that is an exact
duplicate and with less text than a standard web page,
presents little cause for concern. What’s more, your
targeted landing pages are not static. As you test,
track, and tweak, you are implementing updates that
renew content and renew the search engine’s interest
in your page.
Multiple landing pages that receive engaged traffic
with extended visits and that drive click-thrus are such
a substantially different scenario, than intentional
propagation and search engines recognize this.
TEST, TRACK, AND TWEAK
PAGE 6
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
Figure 5 These targeted landing pages use graphics and an opening welcome paragraph specific to visitors who have clicked
through from our Twitter followers and Facebook fans.

12. CAMPAIGN SOURCE TRACKING
In its broadest definition, campaign source tracking
refers to a method of identifying from what source a
visitor discovered your site, or in the case of targeted
landing pages, a specific page. Virtually all email-
automation software uses campaign source tracking to
measure clicks. Links that you have placed in your
email are replaced with unique URLs that when clicked
register the action to the tracking software. Clicks are
then counted and displayed in reports or dashboards.
Google Analytics is free software for tracking activity at
your site and that also provides campaign tracking of
Google AdWords or other campaigns. Further, Google
Analytics can track your campaign source URLs. The
challenge for me, and the reason I do not use
campaign source tracking, is that in addition to
wanting to know from which source a visitor arrived, I
also want to reap the benefits we’ve already discussed
when a custom landing page is used for each vehicle.
Campaign source tracking offers an alternative to
multiple targeted landing pages but it’s not an
exclusive relationship. You can combine the use of
campaign source tracking codes with targeted landing
pages and reduce the number of landing pages that
are needed. This works great, for instance, if you have
several Facebook posts and want to send them all to
the same landing page, but you still need to track
which of the posts was most effective at eliciting clicks.
You can create your own campaign source codes, but
it’s quite a bother. Instead, use Google Analytics’ free
URL builder tool.
To implement the code, simply use it as the href tag
for your call to action button. You could even generate
a different code for each call to action (if you have
more than one) and then you will know which CTA
generated the click. If you’re using campaign source
codes for an offline piece, be sure to use a URL
shortener, such as Bit.ly. As you can see in figure XX,
these codes can become quite long and much too
complex to try to type it out.
Targeted landing pages are not a new idea; they’ve
been around for quite some time. For marketers
without adequate creative and web-team resources,
campaign source tracking codes provide a suitable
alternative and one that can be far less time
consuming. If you’re resource ready, consider adding
targeted landing pages as a path to boosting your
conversion rates.
PAGE 7
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
?! Consistently updating and tweaking content
can increase traffic by 40%.
— Marketing Sherpa
Figure 6 You can see how a simple URL to www.jcpenney.com
has been converted to a complex string that tells the vendor
which email I received and clicked and various other bits of
information. The URL has been truncated in order to make it
short enough to use in this document.

13. PAGE 8
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
Figure 8 In this example we’ve moved the call to action nearer
to the top of the page.
Figure 7 Google’s URL builder tool will automatically create a
unique URL for each landing page of your campaign. The URL is
placed in the marketing vehicle and each vehicle will use a
different URL. This enables the tracking of individual
components.

14. Whether you choose targeted landing pages solely or
to add targeted landing pages to campaign source
tracking, your conversion rate will improve as you test
design, content, and structure. The lessons you learn
from one campaign will serve you well in subsequent
campaigns, even campaigns for different offers.
For more information on triggered marketing,
download Automated Email Marketing, for
information on multi-touch campaigns, download The
Power of Print (in Marketing), and for information on
measuring your campaign analytics, download
Marketing Metrics.
CONCLUSION
PAGE 9
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

15. Spider Trainers provides creative services to marketing
departments of 0 to 100. We are a network of more
than 80 experts in email development, web
development, graphic design, ad creation, multimedia
creation, social media postings, search-engine
optimization, writing, editing, and analytics. Founded
in 2009, Spider Trainers touts more than 30 years’
experience on their principal team specializing in
marketing, promotion, press relations, and SEO
disciplines.For more information about our company,
visit www.spidertrainers.com
Specialties
online and offline multi-touch marketing
multi-event drip and nurturing campaigns
search-engine optimization
web development (including mobile)
ad and campaign design and deployment
email campaign deployment
Spider Trainers contact
Phone: 651 702 3793
Email: spidertrainer@spidertrainers.com
Website: http://www.spidertrainers.com
Address: PO Box 280487
Lakewood, CO 80228 United States
ABOUT SPIDER TRAINERS
PAGE 10
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

16. Google URL building tool
http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
REFERENCES AND CREDITS
PAGE 11
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS