Landing page: important factors?

Hi MZ,

There are many, many things that can effect the conversion rates of landing pages. Since you asked a very general question I will tell you some factors that are important. Some should be obvious, yet many folks do not follow them, while some things are less obvious.

First and foremost, let me say that choosing the right landing page is important. If you are selling multiple products, you should segment your advertising and target individual products and use the most specific product landing page as possible. Don't just land folks on your homepage, where they have to study your navigation options to figure out where on your website they need to go to find the product they seek.

The next important factor is the layout of the page. Is it laid out in a way that it is obvious and easy to follow the intended optimal sequence of presenting your offer, or is it cluttered with many elements competing for attention? Leading to random sequences with varying conversion results.

There are many more considerations, but let me leave you with one gem. Remove navigation menu options from landing pages. This seems to have the most impact of nearly anything tested. The principle at play here is that fewer distractions leads to higher conversions. This may not be practical for every situation, but where it does make sense, it will have a very significant influence on conversions.

After designing a clean, uncluttered layout, that uses prominence and location to guide the user through a properly sequenced presentation of your offer, the 2 elements that often have the most significant influence is the page Headline, and the call-to-action.

There are lots of factors, as Don has already said.
Clarity is a vital key to any landing page. You have a couple of seconds to attract and keep people's interest or you lose them forever so ensure your message is clear and easy to understand.

One that I've found through trial and error is don't try to hide too much.

I know it's important to not give your product away as you're trying to get leads or sales, but if you leave the customer completely confused about what they're getting or buying into, they won't risk it.

Also, if you're writing lots of text, try low size JPEGs with graphics in. Its more appealing to the eye, and unless they NEED to read it (such as a wiki page), they typically get overwhelmed whilst flicking through, and will simply close the page.