When I wrote my post last week about the Landing Page Ratio (LPR) metric, I realized that when discussing "scaling up" your landing pages, there are three very different meanings:

• test scaling -- number of tests run;
• horizontal scaling -- number of distinct landing pages;
• vertical scaling -- the "depth" of landing experiences;

As you look to improve the post-click marketing effectiveness of your organization, all three of these dimensions are important to consider.

Test Scaling
When you scale up the number of tests you're running on a specific landing page -- a specific destination that you're driving traffic to -- it means that you try more alternatives. This is probably the most common way people talk about scaling up their number of landing pages.

Instead of two alternatives, a classic A/B split test, you could double your test space by going to a 4-way A/B/C/D test. You could also iterate, taking the winner from that pack -- say it's B -- and refining with a B1/B2/B3/B4 test. In this example, you've scaled up to test 8 landing pages instead of just 1.

This is the type of scaling that multivariate testing (MVT) seeks to enhance by enabling you to test hundreds or thousands of different variations of content on the same page. However, for most landing page scenarios, the complexity and traffic requirements of MVT are overkill. MVT also runs the risk of the Russian roulette caveat.

Although test scaling is important, it may be the least valuable way of scaling your landing pages, primarily because it doesn't get you any further down The Long Tail. From a respondent's point of view, it's still just one page -- which particular page is simply a random function of the test. It doesn't reach people with new niche messages, nor does it expand the extent of your engagement with respondents by giving them bigger, deeper experiences.

Don't get me wrong: testing is critical and a reasonable amount of test scaling is good. But in many cases, test scaling suffers from a fairly steep curve of diminishing returns: after you've beat the same page to death a certain number of ways, you're less likely to see a major increase in conversions than if you moved on to new virgin territory elsewhere in The Long Tail.

The most important challenges with test scaling are making it easy to set up a new test and intuitive to immediately understand the outcome and act upon it.

Horizontal Scaling
This is what we mean by The Long Tail of Landing Pages. With horizontal scaling, you increase the number of distinct landing page destinations that are matched to specific niche campaigns: individual ad groups in Google AdWords, follow-through pages coordinated with email marketing, even organic and socially-distributed links on specific topics. Each one of these gets their own landing page destination.

In horizontal scaling, you can start to shift your very philosophy of landing pages, by tying them much more closely with your Long Tail advertising -- the landing pages actually become more a part of the advertising execution, rather than a separate marketing function. These "advertising landing pages" can have greater synergy between the respondent's pre-click experience and their post-click experience.

Horizontal scaling is what you measure with the Landing Page Ratio (LPR) metric: the number of distinct landing page destinations you have relative to the number of distinct advertisements you're running.

Of course, for any one landing page destination, you should also engage in sensible test scaling, trying alternative incarnations of the page to see which works best in that context.

The challenges with horizontal scaling are a little different than test scaling:

• being able to quickly generate new, distinct landing pages;
• enable unlimited creativity of page designs at a designer level, but organize "templates" so that front-line marketers don't have to reinvent the design framework each time;
• organizing dozens or hundreds of distinct landing pages in a way that's manageable;
• divvying up responsibility for "portfolios" of campaigns to different front-line groups to enable parallel landing page management;
• arranging for old landing pages to gracefully and automatically expire;
• viewing aggregate performance across portfolios and campaigns, while also being able to drill down into individual pages and elements on pages;

Luckily, these challenges are ideal for being solved by landing page management software. (Insert my shameless plug for LiveBall here.)

Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling is about producing deeper and more engaging landing pages that go beyond a single page -- they grow into multi-page "landing experiences", things such as conversion paths and microsites. The depth of any one landing experience increases.

This is exciting because it breaks the mold of "plain old landing pages" (POLP) -- you know, the boring pages with the usual headline, image, body copy, form, and button -- that typically have a low conversion rate and offer little pop or differentiation. With vertical scaling, you move on to Landing Pages 2.0, more creative and advanced experiences.

With multi-page landing experiences, you no longer have to cram everything into a single screen. You can pace the flow of content in a way that becomes more of a dialogue with the respondent rather than a long-winded greeting on your answering machine. You can create little interactive applications -- a great example is Bronto's 11-page email marketing IQ landing experience that converted at 19.6%. You can do things like iPhone-optimized landing pages.

One of the best advantages of multi-page landing experiences, however, is that you can provide a mechanism for respondents to behaviorally segment themselves in a very transparent manner. The first page they land on can provide 2-5 segmentation choices that let the respondent self-identify a particular aspect of the topic or campaign that is most relevant to them. You then follow-through on that promise by providing content that is most specific to their interests. This delivers a big boost to your conversion rate and also gives you more insight into the people who convert but don't segment.

Vertical scaling can also be accomplished by making your landing pages more "intelligent", by incorporating business rules that dynamically adapt the experience based on the respondent's choices, the context from which they arrived, history of their previous visits, their geolocation data, etc.

The challenges with vertical scaling are a little different as well:

• make it easy to wire together multiple pages into a "path" or microsite;
• enable easy behavioral segmentation using mechanisms such as respondent tagging;
• let business rules be configured on pages sort of like how you  configure message handling rules in your email program -- simple but powerful;
• be able to test different types of landing experiences against each other (i.e., test scaling in this context);
• keep tabs of all links so that there are no 404's in these larger paths and microsites -- everything is internally consistent;

When you combine test scaling, horizontal scaling, and vertical scaling together, you're able to take your landing page game to a whole new level.

Are you ready to scale your landing pages on all three dimensions?

-- Scott Brinker