A surrogate from the suggestions for the optimal structure of a landing page in the digital products sector.

2024-11-19 by Alexander Reetz

Introduction

When I recently had to develop a new landing page for a digital product - a mobile app in the B2C entertainment and sports sector - I intensively researched current best practices and expert opinions on the structure and content of landing pages. I went through blog posts and tweets such as these:

• https://x.com/oliverkenyon/status/1836315728426725829
• https://x.com/vickAlmondo/status/1834505819800408484
• https://x.com/namyakhann/status/1823681367198085428
• https://x.com/HamzaAhrbil/status/1820183991548571701
• https://medium.com/@urlaunched/how-to-make-a-lead-generation-landing-page-for-startup-3cb5147b0462
• https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/7-key-elements-of-a-high-converting-landing-page-for-your-newsletter-7eadd47e9fb2
• https://unbounce.com/conversion-benchmark-report/#about_this_report

All of them contained very good information, but I always had additions or changes based on my own experience. This gave rise to the idea of developing an ideal target structure, which I would like to present in this article. But let’s first explore some fundamental concepts about landing pages.

As development cycles for digital products become shorter and the market becomes more and more dynamic and innovative, landing pages for a specific product or for product features have become increasingly popular. So what is a landing page, how does it differ from a website and how should it be structured? The latter is all the more important as the landing page is often the first contact point for a potential customer. The better the landing page “works”, i.e. leads to an action by a prospective customer in the sense of a further step on the conversion roadmap to a customer, the more it fulfills its purpose.

Studies show that optimally set up landing pages see an average of 30% increase of conversion rate than their counterparts. There are often just simple and avoidable issues that lead to poorer conversion rates and leave behind lost opportunities and frustrated visitors, considering that users often decide after just a few seconds whether they want to look at the page for longer or leave it. Looking at these issues, to name a few:

1. Too much and poorly structured information: What is the USP of the product and what should be sold?
2. Unclear value proposition: What are the benefits of the product, what does the customer get out of it?
3. Lack of trust: There is a lack of evidence of the trustworthiness of the company, the brand or the product (keyword “social proof”)
4. Unclear or poorly structured user journey
5. Content not mobile optimized, poor loading times or site performance
6. Multiple or dissatisfying calls-to-action

It therefore makes sense to define a template and a kind of roadmap or checklist for the landing page, which helps to avoid the potential issues mentioned above. This article should therefore provide answers to the following questions on the topic of landing page structure: • What are landing pages and how do they differ from classic websites? • What does an exemplary landing page structure look like? • What effect do the individual elements of the landing page structure have? • What other points need to be considered in addition to the structure of the page? Landing pages and how they differ from classic websites A landing page differs fundamentally from a traditional website in several key aspects. In contrast to classic websites, which usually represent a company’s interface to the web and are created for use by different stakeholders and groups of interested parties, landing pages only have one goal: conversion with regard to a single action: This can be the subscription to a newsletter, the ordering of a service, a purchase or the download of a product.

In addition to the product focus, landing pages are often also geared towards specific target groups, which is reflected, for example, by specifically addressing the respective target group on the landing page.

The goal of the landing page, the conversion action, is referred to as a “call-to-action”, or CTA for short. The CTA, which represents the goal of the landing page, can usually be reached via a button at various points on the page and always leads to the same action. Ideally, the landing page should only consist of one page, possibly supplemented by a few support pages (e.g. for Terms & Conditions or Data Protection Policies) and, despite its very limited character, offer the full scope of SEO visibility and page analytics in order to closely track success metrics and conversion rates.

Let’s summarize the characteristics of landing pages that set them apart from websites:

• Single conversion purpose: Pursuing a single purpose in the context of customer conversion
• Targeted messaging: Specific addressing of the respective target group
• Call-to-action (CTA): A CTA that can be offered in several places and leads to the same action in each case
• Single page or simplified navigation: Very few pages with very simple navigation and a large vertical extension, especially on the central page
• SEO and analytics optimized: Success metrics tracking, SEO keyword optimization

Read the full article here: https://beautifulsystems.substack.com/p/guide-for-the-optimal-structure-of