Landing pages are one of the most important elements of any marketing campaign. The campaign only converts customers if the landing page can grab their attention and convince them to move forward in their buying journey.
Designing a landing page to catch the attention of your audience will help make sure your marketing campaigns end well — and that the effort you put into your PPC ads, content and other forms of marketing will pay off.
Here’s how to know if your landing page is catching your audience’s attention — and simple strategies for designing landing pages that are impossible to ignore.
Metrics for Tracking Attention
If your current campaign isn’t going as well as you think it should be, you can use landing page metrics to tell if your landing pages are catching your audience’s attention.
These are some of the most useful metrics for measuring how attention-grabbing your landing pages are:
- Views: How many people total visited your landing page.
- Goal Completions/Conversions and Conversion Rate: How many visitors went on to convert. The fraction of visitors who converted is your conversion rate. A good conversion rate can vary significantly, but higher is always better.
- Average Time on Page: How much time the average visitors spend on your landing page. Longer is typically better, but not if few visitors convert. Extremely short page times can be a sign that something is wrong with your landing page.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who visit just one page then leave your site. If your bounce rate is high and your average time on a page is low, it’s a good sign that your landing page isn’t convincing visitors. It could also be a sign of design problems — like long loading times or broken mobile design — that may be steering potential customers away.
If your bounce rate is particularly high, or your average time on page and conversion rate are particularly low, you may need to change up your landing page to make it more attention-grabbing.
These three case studies show how different brands have designed landing pages to secure visitor attention.
1. Focus Your Design
The best landing pages have a singular goal in mind. Keeping the landing page as focused on that goal as possible will help you to both prioritize design elements that are attention-grabbing and guide visitors towards a sale.
For a great example of a simple but effective page with a clear design goal, check out this page from Illuminating Design, a Georgia-based lighting consultant and design company.
The page header “See What We Can Do For You” combined with a gallery of images from previous projects demonstrates what visitors can expect from the business. It’s simple, easy to understand and helps encourage visitors towards a sale.
2. Review Your Attention Ratio
The attention ratio is one strategy for optimizing landing page design. It represents that ratio of links on the landing page to the number of campaign conversion goals. Typically, the ideal attention ratio is 1:1 — for each conversion goal you have, your landing page should have exactly one link.
Unlike your main page or a blog page, where lots of links are necessary to move visitors around the website and provide the information they need, landing pages can get very simple.
You can dedicate landing pages to just one function, helping ensure that visitors know exactly where you want them to go. This makes it easy to move forward if they’re interested in what your campaign is offering.
This usually means removing all the links and distracting elements from your landing pages that don’t line up with your conversion goals.
For an example of a streamlined landing page with an optimized attention ratio, check out this landing page from Shopify:
Above the fold, there’s just one link — a one-field form with a clear CTA. It’s one of the largest elements on the page and is pretty easy to spot.
If your landing pages are busy or trying to do a lot of different things at once, trying simpler landing pages may help.
3. Consider Form Design
Once you’ve optimized your attention ratio, you can also tweak the design of your links. More effective anchor text and form design can help you upgrade your landing page if visitors seem to be getting stuck or confused.
For example, long forms can be intimidating — if a customer sees they have to fill out five or six or even more individual fields, they may choose to leave the site instead. Paring down long forms is a good way to streamline a landing page. If you can’t shorten your form, you can also try organizing your form so that not every field is visible at once.
See this landing page from Lyft. The company needs more information from a new driver than just their mobile phone number and whether or not they need a car. They’ll also need an address, car information, insurance info and more. Asking for all of this at once can be intimidating, however, so the business staggers the form over a few pages, instead.
If you need a lot of information from a customer, organizing your form like this may help you make your landing pages more effective and attention-grabbing.
Upgrading Your Landing Page to Grab Audience Attention
Good landing pages are necessary for good marketing campaigns. These design tips will help you build landing pages that can secure the attention of visitors who you steer to your site.
Focused design, an optimized attention ratio and strong form design will all help you avoid some of the common landing page pitfalls that businesses struggle with.
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
