The purpose of a landing page is to present visitors with a clear and focused path — from presentation of page’s marketing message to a successful conversion of the visitor into an identified prospect.
Because the focus of a landing page is this clear, it’s easy to understand why most marketing professionals strongly advise against putting navigation links on a landing page. But in the real world, and very likely on your own website’s landing pages, this rigid rule may be impossible to follow, and that’s OK.
Finding the Right Balance for Navigation on Your Landing Pages
While the goal of a landing page is to support a singular Call to Action as part of your marketing funnel flow from sources like Social Media sites and marketing emails, it doesn’t mean that the most effective landing page design to maximize conversions on your website must do without navigation links. But even at best, it is tricky to implement navigation effectively on a landing page, so you will want to think carefully of when and how to use landing page navigation to best support your visitor conversion goals.
A general rule to follow is that ‘a little goes a long way’ when it comes to navigation on landing pages, since you don’t want to lose focus (or have your visitors lose focus!) on the primary message of your landing page — to address a need your visitor has and to offer a possible solution — but it is possible to find a good balance between the two.
In this post, we’ll look at three landing page navigation tips that help find the right balance between navigation and conversion that you can use on your landing pages to maximize results.
Top Tips for Effective Landing Page Navigation
- Avoid Primary Navigation Unless Absolutely Necessary
- Provide 2-way Navigation for Complex Subjects
- Use A/B Testing to Measure and Fine Tune Navigation Links
Let’s take a closer look at each of these tips.
Avoid Primary Navigation Unless Absolutely Necessary
Most pages on a website feature a primary navigation bar at the top. In fact, providing such a navigation bar is pretty much the number one best practice of web design! But in the case of a landing page, where the goal is to keep the visitor focused on the message of the page and the conversion form that will take them towards the goal their journey to the page started for in the first place, a full-site navigation bar is the last thing you want to be presenting as the first thing a visitor sees.
So, for the best results and the most success of conversion on your landing pages, the answer is clear — eliminate the primary navigation bar entirely.
But while it is impossible to argue that links that take the visitor off of a landing page totally defeat its main purpose, the fact remains that a huge percentage of landing pages on the web continue to include them. Why is that?
In some cases, it’s because company branding policies don’t allow any site pages to be without primary navigation, or because priorities such as ADA compliance tend to support the fullest possible pathway for site navigation flexibility.
What to do When You Can’t Remove the Primary Navigation Bar
If you find yourself in a situation, where removing the primary navigation bar is not an option, then consider amplifying the message to diminish the impact of those prominent links away from your landing page.
To do this, you might want to use a larger font size for your headlines than you normally would (not too large though!) to more effectively draw the visitor’s attention to your marketing message. Or try to place an eye-catching image at the top of your landing page. In short, try whatever may work to grab the visitor’s attention before they’re tempted to navigate off the page.
Ways to Minimize the Impact of Off Page Navigation Links
If it’s the case that you’re simply uncomfortable with eliminating site-wide navigation on your landing pages entirely, consider alternatives to presenting the full primary navigation bar that appears on the rest of your site at the top of your landing pages.
One alternative is to provide a limited set of links that are directly related to the marketing/conversion message that is the focus of each individual landing page. This can provide the visitor with the opportunity to access supplementary information that can support the conversion or make them aware of related offerings that may be a better fit for what they are looking for. After all, a motivated visitor who navigates off of the landing page for this sort of information is likely to use the Back button to return to the page if they are convinced by the information they review on closely related linked site content.
Another alternative to including a top navigation bar is to place those links in the footer of the landing page. By doing that, visitors who truly want to see other areas of our website will be able to find those links, but the presentation of your main landing page message won’t be diluted.
Provide Flexible On-page Navigation for Complex Subjects
Not all landing pages are alike, and there are some situations where adding navigation links are a clear net-positive to increased conversions.
One of the main differences between which landing pages will benefit from the addition of navigation has to do with the complexity of the content the page is presenting.
If your landing page is relatively simple in its purpose and conversion goal, as might be the case for a page that serves as a simple destination for a downloadable or emailed resource that’s accessible after the page visitor provides basic information such as their name and email address, then the need for any sort of navigation that stays within the page is minimal.
But if your marketing message is about a product or service with multiple facets or a range of choices, then the implementation of internal page navigation can definitely play an important role in increasing visitor interest and interaction on the page, and can ultimately lead to increased conversions.
Thinking about how a visitor moves through the information on the page, supporting both the visitor’s experience and answering their questions, while also providing a clear path to conversion is key for this kind of landing page, and creating an internal navigation menu can be a great solution.
If you do see the need for an internal navigation menu, it can be placed within the body of your content to deliver usability without impacting the normal flow of your marketing and conversion message. Creating such a ‘mini map’ of the sections that address the individual components of the landing page’s marketing pitch can be done by creating a simple list of clickable links near the top of the page, each of which goes to a specific section of the landing page.
To complete the internal navigation menu system, add a link back to the top of the landing page at the end of each section of the page that is linked to in the internal navigation menu.
Creating this kind of internal navigation menu makes use of HTML code called Anchors, which does require some degree of HTML coding ability. If you would like to learn more, HTML.COM provides a detailed Guide to creating HTML Anchor Links.
One last thing to consider when creating an internal navigation menu for content-heavy landing pages is to also include a call to action that links to the page’s conversion form at the end of each section. The call to action can be placed in the same location as the Back to Top link, providing the visitor with an easy path to continuing to access landing page content or to move directly to the next step in getting information.
Use A/B Testing to Measure and Fine Tune Navigation Links
A/B testing is a process where you place similar but not identical versions of a web page (and in this case, more specifically a landing page) and measure the conversion results to see what impact the differences on each test page are having.
You can start by keeping it simple and measuring the results between your landing page with the primary navigation bar in place and a version of the page without the navigation bar.
In this case, it’s very likely that you will find your conversions are consistently lower for the version of the page with the primary navigation bar, simply because there is the addition of the opportunity for each page visitor to click a link that takes them away from the landing page. While it’s true that some visitors will want to review more information before returning to the landing page and eventually becoming a lead, the additional steps involved are still more likely to result in fewer conversions if other aspects of your landing page are performing effectively.
Using some of the alternatives we explored above, you can also test to see how a landing page with the navigation links appearing in the footer perform versus the landing page without links to other locations on your website. And you can also A/B test to see if an internal navigation section helps to increase conversions on more complex landing pages with a lot of content, or if the addition doesn’t end up having much impact on the rate of conversions.
Of course, A/B testing is valuable for much more than determining how having navigation on your landing pages affects conversions, but it is a powerful tool for finding the right balance of how much and what kind of navigation you should have on your landing pages if you choose to use it or have some flexibility in how you structure it if you are required to provide some level of navigation on your pages.
Some Final Thoughts on Landing Page Navigation
Beyond a situation where you have no choice and have to provide navigation links to other pages of your website on you landing pages, the best way to think about adding navigation is to think of it as an available tool for the process of optimizing your landing pages for the best possible rate of conversion.
It’s true that not having navigation on your landing pages is generally considered a best practice, but the very nature of best practices are to serve as a guide in developing your own set of best practices, to use them for information and inspiration to make the best possible landing pages you can. The use of landing page navigation is definitely not a ‘one size fits all’ situation, so allow yourself to have an open mind about how to best use it. And having said that, the third tip above, A/B testing, will give you ability to test out, refine and improve the use of landing page navigation to reach your conversion goals.