Ion Interactive held a landing page optimization webinar in August, where they highlighted the differences between organic landing pages and campaign landing pages. These differences are important to keep in mind when creating and optimization your own landing pages.

Organic Landing Pages:

• Are pages on your site.
• Need to appeal and work for everyone.
• Should be focused on the lowest-common denominator.
• Should be optimized for global, organic traffic.
• You have little control over the message.
• Work with closed-ended experimentation.

Campaign Landing Pages

• Are pages that are created for a specific purpose.
• Have a specific message and receive specific traffic.
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• You have total control over the message, placement and the link behind the message.
• Should be optimized for your highly targeted, campaign-specific traffic.
• Need open-ended experimentation to get better conversion rate and quality. You need to test, learn, and adapt.

Campaign landing pages need to be hyper-local. You should be developing different, context-specific landing pages for different campaigns, different groups, different search engines, and different traffic sources.

For example, if you were advertising for a French language-learning series you would need to have a different message for your three different audience groups:

Students who are learning French because they’re required to: “Ace your French exams”
Travelers who want to learn French for a fuller travel experience: “Experience France as only a French speaker can”
Business People who are short on time: “Business French in 10 minutes a day”

Because your different audience groups would all buy the product for different reasons, the landing page that you direct them to should reflect their different needs.

For more on landing page optimization watch the webinar.