What makes a landing page engaging? Endless blog posts—handwaving over marketing crystal balls—have attempted to answer this question. At CGI Interactive, we have three rules of thumb we measure against when planning and implementing your perfect landing page:
Rule #1: Stand Out from the Crowd
This first rule should go without saying: you have to stand out if you want to be noticed. Custom web design and development may require more planning and budget, but it more than pays off in terms of attention and buzz. Grabbing a canned theme off the shelf will inevitably result in a mediocre page that looks like so many corporate sites out there: drab and dull.
Rule #2: Motion Attracts, Keeps, and Directs Attention
There’s a reason you’re seeing more video and animations on the web: motion grabs attention. Subtle movement can intrigue, prompt exploration and scrolling, encourage interaction, and draw in your viewer. Emphasis on subtle, though; make everything on the page dance around and you’ll lose some of your audience to motion sickness!
Rule #3: Faster Website = More Conversion
This is one race where the rabbit beats the turtle! If your page is slow off the starting mark and takes too long to load, a good portion of your visitors will give up and look elsewhere. Keep your website snappy and you’re leading more potential happy customers to your conversion funnel—especially those on mobile devices.
Stats or it Didn’t Happen
How do these three rules play out in the real world? CGI Interactive recently reimagined the Xtropolis landing page for LiveWorx 18, a digital transformation conference held annually in Boston. We compared the analytics for the three months leading up to the show for both the original 2017 page and our 2018 update, and here are the results:
- Xtropolis pageviews went up 310%
- The average time a visitor spent on the page went up 73%
- Most importantly, clicks on the Xtropolis page Register button increased a whopping 3,766% from 2017 to 2018!
Conclusion
You don’t see pageview improvements this drastic without a team of people working tirelessly to promote the landing page on all channels—social, email, pay-per-click, paid placement—and LiveWorx did just that with Xtropolis. So where do our “3 Rules” come into play? To keep people sharing the page, you must stand out from the crowd. To keep people on the page and drive them to the call-to-action, motion is a powerful tool. And of course no one will tap a call-to-action if they don’t even wait for the page to load.
What rules of thumb do you use, and what results have you seen? Reach out to us on the platform of your choice and let’s keep the conversation going.
