As a handful of Anvil’s clients already know – we offer a landing page service that begins with an audit of existing landing pages and a plan for how to improve user experience and ongoing testing. From there, a client may take our plan and build pages themselves, or they can further utilize Anvil and our partner Ion Interactive to develop landing pages in an environment that is user-friendly (i.e. you don’t need to know how to code) and allows for easy testing and reporting.

I have had the opportunity to develop and manage landing page tests for several clients and have a few words of encouragement for clients on the fence about taking on a landing page project, and why it may make financial sense to invest in a tool like Ion Interactive.*

Pros:

• So Easy, Your Grandma could build a website. While it does greatly benefit you to know a little bit of code – you could probably scrape by without any HTML knowledge. You’ll also need someone with CSS experience to get you started, but once that is in place – the rest of the page building is all done through a WYSIWYG interface (with the option to view in HTML). Upload images, videos, change content, build forms – its all relatively simple to get a basic page up and running. However, the tool does have enough flexibility that you can get pretty complex if you so choose.
• Integrated Reporting & Testing. Set up an A/B test between two pages within the platform, or vs. a page that already existed on your site with the click of a button. Multivariate testing is also built in and you can even set experiments to optimize automatically as the test runs to ensure you’re showing the version that is most likely to drive conversions. Then easily pull this data into reports to show your boss how much better your new pages are performing.
• Rule Functionality. I could probably go on for a day about how much you can do with “rules” in LiveBall. Basically, rules will save you from needing to build 100 different webpages for different geo-markets, keywords, products, etc. Within each page you can set up what are essentially If/Then statements – if my visitors are coming from Texas, change the headline to “Welcome Texas Visitors”. If they’re coming from my PPC campaign for diamond rings – use the diamond ring messaging and product image. You get the idea. You can go wild here.

Cons:

• Some Design Limitations: I say this with the caveat that I’m not a full designer but can hack some HTML and CSS with some help and Google searches. But I have run into problems where the layouts don’t allow me to do EXACTLY what I want with layout/positioning. In most cases, this is certainly not a deal-breaker, you just may have to sacrifice where everything fits on the page.
• Limited Support Documents. Fortunately, the Ion Interactive support team is great and very responsive, because their built-in support documents are sub-par. When you get to more complex tasks like building forms and exporting them into an existing data base – be prepared for some troubleshooting with the team. But once you can get your elements set up correctly, I’ve had no complaints about functionality.

So, in a short blog post that is why I love using software to build landing pages. With how overloaded web teams can get – you can move page development into the hands of your marketing team with some training.

If you have any additional questions from the Anvil team on using LiveBall on on Landing Pages – contact Anvil.

* Anvil Media uses Liveball from Ion Interactive – they did not give us anything to say such nice things about them. I just really like their product.