Marketing Research Chart: 67% of medium-size companies implement unique landing pages

by Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content

The ways you can improve your website are almost as endless as the pages on your website itself. So where should you get started? To give you a few areas to focus on, we asked your peers …

Q. Which of the following website optimization tactics does your organization currently use?

Click here to see a printable version of this chart

As you can see, unique landing pages is the most used tactic by marketers at large and medium-sized companies. While it can be resource intensive as your campaigns and brands multiply, it makes a lot of sense to have a dedicated landing page that ties directly to yours offers, instead of sending traffic to a more general page where the promised offer isn't as clearly represented.

Now here's where it gets interesting. For marketers at small companies, optimizing design and content for conversions is the most commonly used tactic.

On the one hand, why don't more small-business marketers employ dedicated landing pages? They may have less resources, but also likely have less offers and brands to contend with.

On the other hand, do marketers at small businesses have a leg up over their large and medium-sized business counterparts? After all, what could be more important than conversion rate optimization? If you're creating a lot of unique landing pages without optimizing those pages for conversion, are you just spinning your wheels?

A few other points that jumped out at me. SEO is not as common a tactic as one would presume from reading industry press releases and blogs. While the tactic seems dominant and ever-present, only about half of marketers regularly optimize their website for search engine optimization purposes.

And while we all know relevancy rules, cookie-based personalization of website content is still a laggard.

Points to consider

Use this data, and the following questions, to help your marketing department evaluate its efforts.

Do you create unique landing pages for your campaigns and offers? If not, how do you ensure your PPC ads, email marketing, print ads and other marketing materials drive potential customers to a webpage that clearly delivers on the call to action?

Are you engaged in conversion rate optimization? If so, how? Do you simply make changes based on best practices? Do you conduct one-off A/B tests? Or do you conduct, and capture discoveries from, a series of A/B tests to power all of your marketing messaging?

Do you personalize the website experience for your visitors? If you don't use a cookie to create personalization, do you send different segments of your customers to different webpages? For example, new versus returning visitors?

Share your experiences with the MarketingSherpa community

Use the above questions internally with your own team to help improve your website optimization efforts, and also share your actionable advice and inspirational stories on the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group discussion about this chart for a chance to be featured in a future blog post.

For more information about website optimization, read the free excerpt of the MarketingSherpa 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this research

Marketing Research Chart: What are the most prevalent website optimization priorities?

Website Optimization: Testing program leads to 638% increase in new accounts

Website Optimization: Simple A/B test adds 'thousands and thousands of dollars' to Cars.com's bottom line

Web Presence Optimization: Evolving the view of online success