Geo-Targeted Landing Pages (or”…To Target Or Not To Target…”)

Jason 12.01.2009

I’d like to cover some landing page tests, and speak to how important they are.

One of our clients’ most commonly asked questions is: “What page do we send our users to?”  “Is more-targeted  better?”  “Should we consider the user’s geographical location?”

We live and breath these questions, and the answer is simple: “Yes we need to send our users to a targeted landing page, and yes their location matters!”

Let’s consider a high-ticket item, a car.

Everyone agrees that if our users search for an Infinity G37, that we shouldn’t send them to a page that sells Toyotas. Of course we would send to the page that sells the car they are looking for.  But what if we have two sites that both sell G37s?  Price being equal, which site would stand out more?

In my experience, we need to find another way to connect with the user.  If a user from New York landed on page that mentions the word New York, that user would more likely purchase from this page.  And so we think one easy way to connect, is to create geo-targeted landing pages.

But it makes sense for smaller-ticket items, too.

I have a client who has a diet meal delivery service, and he services the Continental US. This is a very competitive market, and we need to spend our advertising budget wisely. One strategy was to target 2 major cities that A) has money to spend, and B) is health conscious, and the two cities that came to mind NYC and Los Angeles. Great – we have a plan in place, and we will sell lots of meals to people in these two cities. Life can’t be any easier.

Now the fun begins!  We started driving traffic from New York and L.A to our default landing page, and let the conversion roll in. Day after day, we spend our advertising dollars, and day after day our sales remained average. Finally we decided we are generating enough traffic, we just need to add a little spice to the picture, let us target their location. We created two more landing pages, geo-targeted landing pages, one for New York and one for Los Angeles.

The results from the new landing pages were incredible, the conversion rate for our Los Angeles users increased by 388% and the users for New York increased by 21.8% which was great. Our cost per order in L.A decreased by 86% and in NY by 42% which is also phenomenal. These two data sets show us how important the landing page really is.

So targeted landing pages do work.  If one wants to fly to NY… we better land them in NY!