Building a landing page

Take a landing page from first brief to a published, tracked, registered page. Every paid campaign process points here when no existing page fits, so this is where a campaign’s destination gets produced.

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What you’ll end up with

Three things that point at each other:

• A completed landing page brief recording the job, the offer, the customer profile, the objections, and the proof.
• A published page with a working conversion action that matches a row in the event tracking plan.
• A row in the landing page library with the URL, owner, offer, customer profile, conversion action, and review date.

One person, the owner, is accountable for all three, and stays accountable after publication. A landing page is not finished when it ships; the library row is what carries the ongoing commitment, in the same way the article register does.

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Before you start

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The process at a glance

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1. Check the library first

Open the landing page library and look for a page serving the same offer and the same customer profile. Two near-identical pages split the traffic between them, which means both take twice as long to produce a reliable read, and neither accumulates the performance history that would let you improve it. Where a close page exists, adapting it is almost always the better move.

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2. Fill in the landing page brief

Copy the landing page brief and work down the core sections: owner and team, URL, goal and conversion action, offer and key message, and customer profile. Start with the job and the single conversion action. A page asked to serve two primary goals equally tends to help neither, and the brief is built to catch that before anyone designs around it. See the landing page brief concepts for the reasoning behind each section.

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3. Gather the proof

Collect the testimonials, statistics, logos, and certifications the brief names, before drafting starts. Proof gathered after a draft exists is proof found to fit sentences that already exist. Gathering first shapes what the page can honestly claim, and occasionally changes the claim. Clear permissions now. A testimonial without sign-off and a statistic nobody can source are both much cheaper to discover at this stage than during a final review.

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4. Brief the copy and the creative

Run both in parallel.

• Copy goes through the copywriting process, against a copy brief that inherits the message from the campaign brief rather than reinventing it.
• Creative goes through the creative brief process: hero image or video, product shots, diagrams, and any illustration. Check the creative drive first.

Starting creative after the copy is finished is one of the more common reasons a page sits unbuilt while everything else in the campaign is ready.

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5. Build the skeleton

Fill in the page skeleton: the section order and the final copy in each section. Agree the structure before the page is built. At skeleton stage a disagreement about what leads is a rearrangement. After the build it is a rebuild. The message priorities in the brief decide the order: what leads, what supports, and what gets cut if the page runs long.

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6. Set up the conversion action

The page’s conversion action has to exist in the event tracking plan before the page goes live, not after.

1. Find or add the event in the tracking plan, named per the event naming conventions.
2. Implement it on the page.
3. Fire a test conversion and confirm it arrives in analytics and in every ad platform that will optimize toward it.

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7. Build the page

Build from the skeleton and the approved assets. The structure and copy are already decided, so this step should not be generating new copy. Confirm the URL matches what the brief recorded, since ads and emails may already reference it.

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8. Check it

Check the page against the brief and against the campaigns that will point at it:

• The conversion action fires on a real submission, confirmed end to end.
• The page loads and reads correctly on mobile.
• Page speed is acceptable on a mobile connection, not just on desk.
• Every link works, and no link points at staging.
• The offer and call-to-action wording match the ads and emails driving traffic. A mismatch between the ad and the page wastes the click.
• Form fields match what the lead qualification section of the brief called for.
• Legal and privacy requirements are met: consent, privacy policy link, and any claims review the page needed.

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9. Publish and link back

Publish, then:

• Paste the live URL into the landing page brief.
• Paste it into the marketing campaign brief and any platform campaign brief pointing at it.
• Confirm the UTM parameters arriving from each campaign are being recorded.

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10. Add it to the library

Add the page to the landing page library with its URL, owner, offer, customer profile, conversion action, published date, and next review date. The library row is what makes the page reusable. A page with no row will not be found by the next person building a campaign, who will brief a near-duplicate instead.

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Exceptions

• The page is a small variant of an existing page. It does not need a new brief. Update the existing library row, note what changed, and keep the same conversion action unless the offer changed.
• The page is a temporary event or seasonal page. It still gets a brief and a library row, with a planned retirement date so it can be taken down rather than left to age.
• The build is abandoned. File the brief with a note on why it stopped. The proof and objections research is usually reusable.

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Related resources

• Landing page brief The workbook this process runs on.
• Landing page brief concepts The reasoning behind each section.
• Page skeleton Where structure and final copy get filled in.
• Landing page library Where the published page is registered.
• Event tracking plan Where the conversion action is defined.
• Copywriting process and creative brief process