Lander Guide

The following guide takes you through the process of preparing and improving a landing page that can be used in your campaign funnels later.

To sum up and reiterate all arguments for using a landing page in your funnel, here's a list of the most important potential benefits:

• Displaying several offers to a user. Other offers might be more attractive to the user than the one that originally interested the user.
• Testing different offers. Using several offers on a landing page allows you to find out which offer is most attractive to your users.
• Including additional information. You can include some additional text or creatives to make your offer more appealing.
• Personalizing your advertisement. With Voluum, you can display a personalized message based on users' characteristics, like a phone model or an OS version. Messages such as "Hello, iPhone user" might be more relevant to a visitor.

In the ideal scenario, you have both the capacity and skills to create the perfect landing page. But the truth is you don't need one. A 'good enough' landing page often will suffice. Don't waste your resources into polishing a landing page for an offer that might not be attractive to your customers.

Having said that, here are some other opportunities to get a landing page if you do not know how to build one:

Use landing page builders:

There are plenty of landing page building platforms on the market. They give you tools to quickly build a landing page without writing a single line of code. They supply you also with images and other visual elements to use on your page. Of course, they are a paid option. Here's a selection of landing page builders:

• Unbounce
• Instapage
• Launcaco
• New Google Sites

Download publicly available landing pages:

Apart from building a landing page from scratch, you can download a complete landing page from various sources. There are templates designed and stylized with a concrete vertical in mind or with a certain theme. Some of them are available for free and some are paid. Once downloaded, such a web page can be customized later.

Download landing pages from an affiliate network platform:

Many affiliate network platforms have their own landing pages designed specifically for the offer that you are promoting. You can download a whole landing page to publish it on your own. Additionally, you can use the following tool to check what your competitors are doing and what landing pages they are using.

• Adplexity

Pay someone to make the landing page for you:

You can always hire someone directly to design a landing page especially for you or use a service where such people can be found:

Get to know your competition's landing pages:

Find what landing pages your competitors are using and get inspired by them.

It's all about loading speed. When building a landing page, lightness of design should be one of your main focuses. In today's marketing world, two-second loading time is forever. Those two seconds can cost you a customer. This is even truer if you are advertising an offer in a country with poor Internet service and/or on mobile devices.

Clean your landing page template:

This step applies mainly to landing pages templates that you have downloaded from the Internet. Such landing pages can contain a lot of unnecessary scripts that may slow this page down. If you know a bit of HTML or JavaScript, you can delete everything not deemed necessary and test if your landing page works. Things to look for:

• Unnecessary tracking codes.
• Hidden links that may cause traffic leaks.
• Code for displaying tracking parameters in your landing page's content. Delete this or adjust it to match with Voluum parameters. Learn more by reading the Dynamic Call-Outs article.

Optimize images:

There are image optimizing services that can reduce the size of your images without sacrificing quality. Smaller image sizes mean faster loading times. Also, consider using newer image formats (such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) that can offer better compression than older formats (JPEG, PNG). You can use the following tools:

• Kraken.io

You can also use media queries in CSS to adapt your images to the conditions of specific devices.

Host video on a fast server

If you want to show a video to your visitors, do not host it on your rented server. Host your video on a fast CDN network.

Minimize the number of plugins

This is applicable for landing pages built in WordPress. Each plugin enhances your landing page functionality but adds to its loading time. Find the right balance between functionality and speed.

Minimize the number of tracking scripts

If you use tracking scripts on your landing pages, such as for Google Analytics or Hotjar, review them and lose unnecessary scripts. Each active script means more server requests. You can use Google Tag Manager to manage your tracking scripts, define specific conditions when they should be fired or stop unused ones.

Translate your landing page

In most cases, landing pages work best when they are displayed in a visitor's native language. Even in countries like India where English is an official language, it is worth adapting your content based on regional differences. Translate your landing page for better conversion rates.

Readability and error checkers

Readability is the measure of how difficult (or easy) it is to read your content: how many difficult words you have used, how long your average sentence is. There are many readability indexes on the market, unfortunately most of them can be applied to English language only:

• Hemingway Editor
• Grammarly

Mobile page testers

You always need to have in mind the specifics of mobile devices when designing a landing page. Smaller screens and touch user interface should be taken into consideration. Use the tools provided below to see if your web page will look good on a mobile device:

• Mobile Friendly Test
• Responsive Design Testing

Now that you've improved your website load time, you should check if anything is left that adds significant time. There are many factors that influence how quickly a complete web page is displayed to a visitor. While you have some control over certain factors (like the size and design of your landing page), you have no control over others (visitors connection quality).

In order to learn more about your landing page load times, you can use one of the tools listed below:

• Pingdom
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Google Mobile Speed Test
• GTmetrix

Use these tools to see what aspects of your landing page can be improved.

When it comes to publishing your web page, the general rule is: "The closer, the better". Not closer to you, but to your potential customers. Having a server physically near your visitor has a great effect on load speed and reduce load time. Also, you need to consider the volume of traffic that will come to your landing page. More traffic means that you will require better hosting. With this in mind, these are the following hosting options for you to consider:

Shared hosting

The cheapest and easiest option. With shared hosting, you share your server resources with other users, so the performance might not be good. And your content is physically in one place, meaning that if you launch a campaign in various GEOs, page load time might be slower.

VPS hosting

A virtual private server, with a dedicated and guaranteed share of resources. This is a virtual machine, one of many on a web server. Performance in this scenario is higher than in shared hosting, but the price goes higher as well. And again, your content is in one physical location.

Dedicated server

A whole server dedicated just for you, so you do not have to share its resources with others. The cons are the high level of technical knowledge required for setting up a server, the price, and it will also be in one physical location only.

Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting uses a Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to cache your content on servers spread across multiple GEOs. In this case, you are not limited to one physical location. The CDN selects a server with faster response time for a visitor. The amount of technical knowledge required is minimal, pricing plans are scalable and suited to various needs.

Domain name and TLD

Apart from hosting, you may also consider using a domain name that is related to your landing page's content. The landing page domain name of "best_car_deals.com" looks better to a visitor that randomly generated names, such as "trk65345dmn.com".

You can also consider using less popular top-level domains (TLD), as they are cheaper and easier to get. So, instead of going for ".com" or ".net" TLDs, you can select less popular ones, such as ".bargain" or ".mobi".

Once you have your landing page designed, improved and published, the last thing to do is to add a lander element that will drive traffic towards this page. In order to do so, perform the following steps:

1. Add a lander element:

First, create a lander element in Voluum, so Voluum will know where to direct visitors that have clicked your advertisement.

1. In Voluum, go to Landers.

2. Click the Create button.

   

3. Provide the name of your lander in the Lander name text field.
4. Provide the URL of your lander in the Lander URL text field.
5. Select the number of offers you want to link from your landing page. Note that selecting more that one will require having a corresponding number of CTA buttons with a corresponding number of multi-offer click URLs under them. In order to learn more, read the Adding Click URLs to a Lander article.

6. Click the Save button.

   

2. Get a click URL from Voluum

Second, you need to get a click URL. The click URL is a link provided by Voluum that will allow a visitor to be directed from a landing page to an offer page through Voluum.

1. In Voluum, click the button. The Setting view will appear.
2. Go to the Tracking URLs tab.

3. Click the Copy button next to the click URL.

   

3. Add a click URL to your landing page:

Once you have got your click URL, you can implement it to your landing page. Remember all those CTA buttons that you have designed on your landing page? They have to direct somewhere. The click URL sends the visitor through Voluum and to the final offer page. If you use the URL of the offer page, the performance of your landing page can't be tracked