Photo by tj scene. Modified by bizlift.
You love your website visitors. You experience “warm-fuzzies” every time you see your web stats climb up a notch. So prove your love and give your visitors what they all want: a targeted homepage.
Many websites feature multiple services or products for different audiences. With limited space on the homepage, a commonly used web design element is to rotate and highlight different offerings within a designated highlight area.
Customize their homepage view to help them find what they want
Examples of a rotating highlight area are the article slide-show panel at the top of AOL and the random featured phone at Sprint.
When you know where your visitor is coming from, there is a good chance you know what they’re looking for and can customize their homepage view to help them find what they want.
To see how this works, let’s take a look at law firm website www.longokura.com (a client of ours). They offer several different practice areas, each with different audiences. Their homepage has a highlight area that randomly displays one of three practice areas. There are buttons that users can click on to manually display the other highlights.
The targeting works when the visitor is coming from a specifically designed ad on another site that highlights a specific practice area. For example, a child-custody banner ad that runs on a local newspaper website has a special link that tells the homepage to display the family law highlight rather than randomly selecting one.
The law firm also advertises through Google AdWords and has different ad campaigns for each practice area with their own set of keywords. Each campaign has it’s own link that tells the homepage which highlight to display.
Use these links to see how it works:
Family Law
Estate Planning
Real Estate Law
Some of the benefits of targeted homepages are:
- Provides visitors with an easy linear path from ad to homepage to specific information to online sale.
- Allows you to treat multiple audiences as “special” instead of focusing on only one audience and neglecting the others.
- Lets visitors link to homepage to get full branding experience of your company rather than linking directly to a specific product or service page.
Next time you build or redesign your website make sure to discuss setting up a targeted homepage with your your web developer.
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