How to build landing pages for ROI tracking software

Landing pages creation 101

[Lydia]

Good day to everyone...

This is such a basic question, but hopefully someone can find the goodness (and patience) in their heart to guide me the right way:

How do I build a landing page? I'm in the process of installing a ROI tracking software that requires me to build landing pages... and I really want to make sure that I don't miss anything...

I think I should have a robots.txt file so to make sure that the spiders don't catch on those pages, and I should probably delete some links that point to other pages? HELP...

Does anyone know of any Web pages that have instructions on building and loading landing pages onto the server... something like "Landing Pages for Dummies"?

Thank you in advance...

Lydia

[JamesR]

There are several ways to do this, it all depends on your tracking software.

1 method is to create mirrors of each page and rename them slightly different depending on where you are tracking from:

ie. MSN page - /page-m.htm
Google page - /page-g.htm

You can do the same thing but just rename the categories:

MSN page - /MSN/page.htm
Google page - /Google/page.htm

To keep the robots out, you can ban them via .htaccess or you can simply put a noindex metatag on each page

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Does your software give you any clues on how they want the landing pages configured? Anything on their website?

[Lydia]

JamesR,

Thank you for your feedback.

No, ConversionRuler (the software I'll be using) doesn't say much about how they would like me to configure the pages, except that they require a JavaScript snippet to go in the body of the HTML code of each page, and to have the URL reflect a query string.

So, other than doing what you've suggested, inserting the JavaScript and putting the query string on the URL, can I just then make copies of the homepage (which is really one big graphic with JavaScript links within) and use these copies as landing pages?

Thank you again and God bless you,

Lydia

[Lydia]

JamesR,

My apologies... huge boo-boo from my part! It turns out that ConversionRuler does not require brand-spanking-new landing pages to track campaigns.
It was enough to install JavaScript snippets in the landing page and the site's confirmation page, as well as to add a query string to each listing on AdWord and Overture that I wanted to track. That was very easy, but time consuming.

Thank you anyway for your insight!

Cheers,

Lydia

[Hawkgirl]

Don't forget that you now have an incredible opportunity to test different looks/feels/messages on your landing pages.

So not only can you track by search engine and keyword, but you can also set up multiple landing pages per keyword to test stuff!

This is where the fun begins.