Landing Pages - Home vs Aisle vs Product

[Jmez]

Does anyone have any insight on landing pages vs homepages? Let’s say your site sells just "widgets" at widgets.com and you sell a lot different brands and variations of this "widget".

On a broad term like "widgets" – you should send them to the home page (widgets.com) but on a narrower term like "electronic widgets" would you send them to an aisle/landing page (widgets.com/electronic.html) consisting of your product listings of “electronic widgets”… or would you still send them to the homepage?

What I am looking for is your opinions on where to send people who have typed in a specific search term (into the search engine) that includes the brand make and model (more specific terms that I am bidding on)? Do you take them to the aisle that the product is included in or do you take them right to the product itself? Any case-in-points?

[your_store]

Always send the traffic to the most targeted page. For your examples:

widgets -> home page
fuzzy widgets -> fuzzy widgets section page
fuzzy widget model 8515 - > individual product page

If you're not currenlty doing this, you will see a *dramatic* increase in conversion.

[Jmez]

Thanks your_store

Currently in a case where someone searches "fuzzy widget model 8515" we are sending them to the product page but we are considering sending them to an aisle page instead for numerous reasons.

1) Our site widgets.com is not a ‘known quantity’ such as Amazon.com or Ebay so we fear the customer has no clue how to ground themselves by being sent directly into a deep-level webpage or a product dump.

2) Limited ability for upsell/crossell

3) We also minimize the amount of information we can present to the customer that is otherwise on the homepage that we believe improves buying ability including guarantees and benefits.

What are your opinions on these points? This change would effect thousands of our keywords. Are we risking certain lower conversion and revenue?

[mattyv]

My only concern with a specific landing page over a aisle landing page, is a human factors and navigation issue...

My opinion is, if landed on a specific page, a lot of the time, the user will only view that 1 page....and then wont bother to try and navigate to the aisle...

whereas landing them on an aisle page, gives them the scope to browse multiple products, as they have been exposed to these other products in the aisle....and in turn hopefully increase the conversion rate....

My suggestion to you, is to test both methods with a handful of keywords, and measure the effectiveness of each method in terms on ROI...

Good luck!

[veroxii]

Do both. Land them on a specific product page for widget #1042. And have in a side-bar some thumbnails with "similar products" or "people who bought this, also bought:"...

That way they can buy immediately if it is what they want, or see there are other similar stuff available.

Just my 2c,
-V