Your website is a minivan, designed to do many things well.  Dedicated landing pages, however, are the race cars you need when traffic is expensive and conversions are essential.

I had a long meeting with one of my favorite clients Friday and we talked landing pages. We reviewed dozens of other PPC landing pages during our brainstorm. 95% of them didn’t even pass Landing Page 101. I’m not saying they were not attractive. Some were gorgeous, with pixel-perfect navigation and well-executed branding. But they were not proper landing pages. They tried to do everything well, and ended up doing pay per click rather poorly.

Here’s a way to think of this.

A minivan is a car that must do a lot of things fairly well. It must get up to freeway speeds. It must stop in a reasonable distance, perform well on a variety of road surfaces and get sensible mileage. The build quality and reliability are essential – fit and finish matter when you spend so much time sitting outside your kids’ high school waiting for them to finally come out from band practice (digress, sorry.)

Your company home page is a minivan.

But when it comes to pay-per-click, you have to think differently. Think about a Formula 1 Ferrari.  When they unpack these things at a racetrack – they set up the suspension, engine, shift points, tire pressure, aerodynamics and more FOR THAT TRACK. The cockpit of a Ferrari F1 car is as special purpose as you get. All of the controls are on the steering wheel so they can be operated at 150mph without thinking. The car does one thing well – take the driver around the track as fast as possible. No minivan, this.

Your landing pages must be the Formula 1 Ferrari.

You want to win… in this case to get the lead, subscription or sale amongst a well-funded and savvy crowd of competitors. At $2, $5, or even $15 per click, any distraction from that is going to cost you money. Big time.

So focus. Think about the user experience at 100mph, and you’ll see the checkered flag much more often.