Landing Page Advice?

Aaron,

I don't know what is best practice. And I'm not sure that anyone else can tell you what it might be, as in my mind, whatever formula brings you the most success becomes your best practice. Having said that, here is what I would do.

I would keep the same landing pages in order to keep the incoming links in place, swap out the old design and content for your new page, set up your tracking and analytics to track what happens from this point forward and then begin testing as you have talked about.

Even though you won't have a long history in your tracking, in a few months you will begin to get an idea of how each separate landing page is working and you can then decide to scrap the non-performers or do your re-directs, or whatever.

This way, you will have some history (albeit a short history) on which to base your actions without destroying what's currently in place.

Good luck to you,

Steve

i would stay away from 301's long term

no need to overcomplicate the whole process. When you are referring to a landing page do you mean a single opt in page? Then you can create a blog if you want and go after organic and from there link to your landing page or direct link with different traffic strategies. unless your doing some other kind of marketing such as for adsense or something then all you need is a landing page, a thank you page and download page as well as your sales page or your affiliate link if your an affiliate.

You do need to know which landing pages are doing best and if you aren't sending an equal amount of traffic to each you won't know what does better. Usually people recommend split testing in this situation. Change all the links to one url, then have the url redirect an equal amount of traffic between 2 landing pages. There's software that does it but I don't remember any, you could also write a script to do it for you if you're familiar. Once you know which page does best, take down the other and replace it with a new version to test against the winner. RInse and repeat.

Aaron,
Joliaaclia is speaking more to what you should be thinking about here.

Keep in mind that a “landing page” is any page that a visitor lands on after clicking an ad or promotion or a link somewhere off of your site. It is the beginning of the piece of the conversion funnel that is on your website and under your control for the most part.

It doesn’t matter that your friend has several landing pages. What matters is that they all have a specific job as far as converting visitors (as joliaaclia mentions). If they are all for the same conversion process then yes you should ultimately only have one best performing page.

So if this is just a page linked to some menu item on your site and it isn’t a part of an advertising or other promotional campaign, technically it isn’t a landing page but just another page on the website.

If you do intend to use it as a part of a campaign, you could approach this in a few different ways.

If you have existing data on how the pages are performing in terms of conversions, pick the 2-3 best performing ones and set up an a/b test. How you set up the test will vary based on what you are using to advertise. For example if you are just using private PPC advertising you will have to code an a/b test yourself. If you are using something like AdWords, you can use Google’s built in features.

If you don’t have existing data, study up on landing page design and pick the pages that you think will perform the best and use those in the test (again probably 2-3 pages). The idea with the test is to funnel traffic equally among the pages to see which converts the best over time.

Once you have all that set up, let the test run for about two weeks to a month. That should give you enough data to make an more than informed decision about which page to use.

You mentioned 301 redirects. The only instance where you would implement these is if you were trying to preserve traffic flow from the old pages. For example if there were a decent number of links built to them or if they were ranking well in search or both. If neither of those conditions exists, delete the old pages after the test or any pages that you don’t plan on using for the test.

Best,

Shawn

Or you could just use a tool designed specifically for this purpose!