Landing page design - long or short?

Status
Not open for further replies.
E

envision

New member
Jun 5, 2008
210
6
0
I come across a lot of landing pages that are really long-winded, scroll down forever, with endless "endorsements", sales pitches etc. Usually have the price and order button all the way on bottom and IMHO look simply horrendous with lots of different fonts, styles, highlights, lists, pictures etc., like designed by a 12-year old. Here are a few examples:

(I don't endorse these and they're not aff links. Just meant as example for page design.)
Attract Women And Seduce Them With GuyGetsGirl's Pickup, Dating And Seduction Guide
Online Casino Gambling Winner
Wu Yi Source - Home

Then, there's the other extreme - clean, simple, above-the-fold landing pages:
HiConversion.com
Yahoo! Toolbar - Find what you're looking for wherever you are on the Web

I'm trying to set up my own landing / sales pitch page. Intuitively, I'd lean towards the second group. But there are a lot of the first group out there, and I'd like to know what the reasoning behind them is. Is it simply that all these authors don't know better, or is there something more to it? Most of those pages seem for ebooks and such and maybe that kind of products needs more explanation than, say, the Yahoo toolbar. I would think that at least some of those guys know what they're doing though and MAY have deliberately chosen to go with such a design. Any thoughts, experience?
 


nice and clean with key, relevant points for the presell works. Ive tested. and tested. and tested.

Dave
 
I've had luck with both styles, it just depends on the offer and how much preselling you have to do. I know that's not the answer you were going for, but the only way to know for each individual case is to split test. I doubt there's any definitive answer.

If it's something like a toolbar download, I'd say everything above the fold. If you're selling a more high ticket item, a more in-depth presale page would probably work better.

A nice, uncluttered LP with a clear call to action is what you're going for - whether the page itself be long or short.
 
something like dating you would want to keep as short as possible...something like bizop which surfers are suspicious of to begin with and need to get their credit card out has to be much longer to convince the surfer it's not a scam.
 
When testing the length of long pages, I've found something like CrazyEgg (Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors) to be valuable. Using their analytics, you can monitor the number of clicks each call-to-action on the page receives. Comparing the same CTA as it repeats down the page can tell you how far your audience is reading/staying focused.
 
It all comes down to what demographic your offer is for. What sort of people are looking for this product? Are they airheads or rocket surgeons? Is the niche mostly for the young or for the more mature? Are they spontaneous shoppers or methodical minds?

Always determine your target demographic and get a sense of who the majority of your visitors are before choosing a landing page style.

You can also do what I usually do - get the best of both worlds: Set up the page with a javascript that allows for the page to expand - giving the visitor a choice if he/she wants to expand the page and read more or not.

So, the page on first glance will be short with the most important bulletpoints and call to action. But then also include links on the page that read "Click here to see some testimonials" or "Click here to read the specifications".

Those links do not take the reader off the page, but rather expands the page on the fly, revealing more content. So the user has a choice to see a short version or a long version. Works quite well ;)
 
My observation (and I'm *really* inexperienced at this) is that the more of a scam the offer is, the longer the landing page needs to be.
 
ImagesAndWords said:
It all comes down to what demographic your offer is for. What sort of people are looking for this product? Are they airheads or rocket surgeons? Is the niche mostly for the young or for the more mature? Are they spontaneous shoppers or methodical minds?

Always determine your target demographic and get a sense of who the majority of your visitors are before choosing a landing page style.

You can also do what I usually do - get the best of both worlds: Set up the page with a javascript that allows for the page to expand - giving the visitor a choice if he/she wants to expand the page and read more or not.

So, the page on first glance will be short with the most important bulletpoints and call to action. But then also include links on the page that read "Click here to see some testimonials" or "Click here to read the specifications".

Those links do not take the reader off the page, but rather expands the page on the fly, revealing more content. So the user has a choice to see a short version or a long version. Works quite well ;)
Click to expand...
Have any graceful code for that?
Any frontend that's supposed to look good that I touch turns to shit. I'm more of a backend/command line coder :(
 
Thats a good idea with the dynamic content expansion; I'll look into this more. xmcp123, you can probably find something for that at one of these places:
JavaScript Script and Programs :: Hot Scripts
JavaScript Scripts

OK, so besides the length itself, is there ever a reason to use "bad" design? I've dabbled around with typography and design and some of the rules I've come to follow: One, max 2 different fonts, use whitespace, complementing colors, be sparse with emphases...

Now looking at the above examples, esp the first two, they're a mess of bold, underlines, italics, all-caps, garish highlights, call-out boxes and any combination thereof. Can't imagine that that converts better than a clean design, but has anyone tested that before? I'm seeing so many of those (recently even got a mailing from AmEx for a credit card in a similar design), that I think maybe some of them are done on purpose like that...
 
Taking this from what I remember after reading the MarketingSherpa LP Handbook, but if I remember correctly most men don't read ad copy, however most women do. So if you're targeting men a short LP is fine, if you're targeting women a long LP is the way to go.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom
Back