How well are you doing in adopting a Long Tail strategy in your online marketing? A new metric called your Landing Page Ratio (LPR) can give you a quick snapshot of how deeply you're engaging your niche audiences.

Start with these two questions:

1. How many different online ads do you have, search or display?

2. How many different landing pages do you have?

When counting the number of ads, be as granular as possible. In search marketing, you'd count individual ad creatives as well as groups of tightly clustered keywords. With display advertising, you'd count each different banner and each different set of placement parameters. Essentially, you want both the creative and the context in which the user sees that creative to be taken into consideration. For most companies, this quickly becomes a large number.

When counting the number of landing pages, count the number of distinct destinations -- distinct from a respondent's point of view -- that have their own layout, flow, and message. Minor variations of individual elements in the page, e.g. trying 5 different tweaked headlines, only counts as one page. This isn't about optimizing one page; this is about deploying different pages for different ads.

Now divide the number of ads by the number of landing pages. This is your Landing Page Ratio.


For example, if you have 170 ads running, but you only have 5 distinct landing pages, then your Landing Page Ratio = (170 / 5) = 34. For every 34 ads, you have one landing page. Your LPR is 34-to-1.

What should your LPR be? It depends. A 1-to-1 ratio would be a "perfect match" between a Long Tail of online advertising and a Long Tail of landing pages, giving you the maximum specificity for each niche audience and the greatest synergy with each individual ad. But you may not need to go that far to achieve your sweet spot.

Generally, I'd say a 10-to-1 ratio represents "closely matched" ads and landing pages. In contrast, a 100-to-1 ratio probably suggests that your landing pages are too generic, and you may have the opportunity to improve your conversion rate by tightening your pre-click/post-click synergy.

The answer for what's best for you is to calculate your LPR on a regular basis -- it's an easy enough metric to keep track of -- and see how it aligns with your conversion rate, ROAS, and CPA metrics. You can experiment with smaller ratios to determine your most effective zone.

-- Scott Brinker