Once upon a time, I got tasked with a project that got me REALLY excited.

There was a client in our company that needed a page.

A very special page.

And you know what page it was?

A landing page. 🎉

I was over the MOON, and for a few reasons:

1. I love landing pages (this whole thing you’re reading is proof)
2. I don’t actively tell everybody I do landing pages, so this was a little chance at work as a developer to flex some marketing knowledge 💪
3. This would be an awesome learning opportunity to see exactly how a professional marketing team handles a landing page!

So hell yeah! Let’s see what we got to build!

Then I saw the page design given by the client.

And I was left a little confused because uhh…

How do I say this…

It didn’t… have a call to action?

Which… Huh?

Like, okay??

I mean, it was offering a buyable physical product.

But no phone numbers were mentioned…

Or… Anything?

Just talking about how great the product is, the benefits, yada yada.

And then it just ended?!?!??

This was for a google ads campaign too, which left me dumb-founded.

Why are you paying to show people a page that won’t lead them anywhere later?

Where’s the funnel my dudes!? Where’s the CTAs, the forms, the buy-in page!?

Sooo I had to ask what the heck.

What am I missing here?!

Could pages like these work?

So I waited for the project to start to grab an opportunity to ask during a call with the client.

And we waited.

And waited..

And…

…

Weeeelp, turned out that the project kind of fell flat on it face 😅

The short version is — we couldn’t get access to the right permissions for the site due to some internal bureaucracy issue on their end. And so we weren’t the team who got to tackle it.

It left me devastated

I mean, I get it. We were an Argentinian team who was asking permission to modify something from one of the main, bigger sites.

But to do that, you needed to go through some annoying hoops to get the right access accounts and what not.

Hoops that, ehh, might be worth more trouble than they’re worth if you already have a team who does have the permissions.

So alas, no landing page implementation for this guy. 😔

Although it got me thinking…

Can landing pages not have CTAs?

Let’s use best landing page practices and find out what a page with no CTA means.

First things first…

How do you consider a page with no CTA to be working?

Usually in the world of landing page theory, you want to have 1 main goal set in your landing page that you can track.

Usually the most important metrics are conversion rate, user retention, bounce rates and final sale numbers.

This is how A/B tests are formed.

You create variations of the same page and test it out to different people in your audience.

Once you have enough views, you judge to see which one did better in service of your main goal.

When you don’t have a CTA, the only metrics you can track are amount of time leads have spent on your page. (Which while helpful, don’t tell you exactly if people buy or not)

So how in the heck could you know if your page is working or not? How do you know it’s a success?

There’s only one way I could think of that made sense…

Through Sale numbers.

Which made me think…

Could you treat landing pages like billboards?

With billboards, you put them up in areas where you believe people are more likely to buy your product. (You can decide this by location, demographics, Yada Yada)

And you can test the success of your billboards by their ROI (return on investment) by grabbing the sales you’ve had before putting it up and comparing it with the sales after putting it up.

Did sales go up? 

Then hot golly, it’s working.

If it’s not, then you either put it in the wrong place (wrong targeting) or your billboard’s message isn’t good (bad design, not memorable, etc)

Landing pages with no CTA seem to work in the same way.

You track sales by comparing your numbers before and after the campaign.

And you A/B test by campaign. The landing page is only one factor.

This really gives you quite a bit more flexibility than your standard billboard though, since you can target different audiences with just a few clicks.

Could there be another way to use these types of landing pages though?

I mean… maybe if you’re savvy enough to use retargeting campaigns. 

The only downside to this is, depending where you’re doing this, I’m not sure how viable they are nowadays with the new privacy laws pushing the decision to be targeted to the consumer now. (Those popups when you enter a site for the first time that ask you if you want to be cookied or not)

So who knows! It may just be an interesting way to tackle marketing in that specific industry.

What do you think?

This article was an issue of In One Snap

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