Review: Landing Page System

Over the last couple of days I've been bombarded with offers for the new Landing Page System product. Oddly enough, I was thinking of coding something similar for my own use, because I was finding that landing page creation was getting too tedious. My solution was just going to be a simple set of PHP functions that would examine the parameters passed from an ad (AdWords can dynamically insert the keyword that triggered the ad into the destination URL so that you know where your traffic is coming from exactly) and/or the referring URL and then change some of the words on the landing page appropriately. But that's basically what the Landing Page System (LPS) is all about, though they use a different way of triggering the keywords. Since time is money, I shelled out the $47 for the product and am in the process of testing it out. Because the price of LPS is increasing in a couple of days, I figured I should put together a mini-review for my readers, in case any of you want to buy the product before the price increase.

One important thing to note about this product: there are no refunds offered. Once you pay your money, that's it. Since you get the complete source code to their system, this kind of policy is somewhat understandable, although to be honest there are other software products out there like Build A Niche Store that still offer refunds despite giving away their source code. Be sure you want LPS before you pay for it!

Landing Page System Contents

Here's what you get when you buy Landing Page System:

• A set of PHP scripts that you install on your web server.
• Installation and configuration instructions.
• Two video tutorials, one on installing LPS and one on using LPS.
• A couple of bonuses:
  • Landing Page Brain Dump, a 2.5-hour audio recording (with a PDF transcript, thankfully) about building effective landing pages.
  • Site Page Tracker, software to track how well your sites are doing in terms of links, search engine indexing, etc.

  (Note that a third advertised bonus, AdWords Rumors Crushed, doesn't seem to be included yet.)

The bonuses look interesting enough, but I haven't looked at them yet and can't comment on their quality. You should buy LPS on the strength of the software itself, not the bonuses. (That's a general rule that applies to any product you're considering buying. If the bonuses are what you want, not the product itself, look elsewhere — those same bonuses are probably available separately, or in combination with a lower-priced product.)

Landing Page System Installation

Before purchasing LPS, make sure you meet the minimum requirements for its use. You need a web hosting service that supports both the PHP programming language and the MySQL database server. Pretty much all hosting services support both these days, but make sure that's the case. Otherwise you'll have to find yourself a hosting service that does (for stingy types, I recommend ResellerZoom, which lets you host up to 50 domains for only $4.95/month, all with PHP and MySQL support and plenty of other standard features). Make sure in particular that you can create a new database (you'll need it as part of the install) and that you know how to upload and run the necessary installation scripts. (The video tutorial walks you through all the necessary steps and will help a lot if you've never done this kind of thing before.) Note that the LPS creators can install the system for you if you're willing to pay an extra fee.

How Landing Page System Works

Once LPS is installed on your server you get access to a web-based administration console that you use to configure and manage the system.

The basic idea behind LPS is that you create a landing page template in HTML with variables in place of keywords. For example, you might define a title like this:

<title>{{keyword_caps}} Information</title>

When the landing page gets loaded, the “{{keyword_caps}}” part of the title is replaced with the appropriate keyword/keyphrase, in this case with the first letter of each word capitalized. The system currently supports four variables:

{{keyword}} — the keyword as-is
• {{keyword_caps}} — the keyword with first letters capitalized
• {{display_keyword}} — the alternate “display” form of the keyword (useful when using keywords that are misspellings, lets you show the “real” keyword instead of the misspelled keyword)
• {{tracking_no}} — the tracking number for the keyword, usually inserted into affiliate links

It seems to me that there should also be a {{display_keyword_caps}} variable, but maybe that will be added later.

LPS comes with three pre-defined templates that you can use as the starting point for your own landing pages. One for a signup (or “squeeze” page) using the AWeber autoresponder (it's the one I use for my lists) and two for the ClickBank and Commission Junction affiliate programs (if you're promoting products). You're free to build your own pages, of course, all you have to do is insert the variables above as required.

After you've created the template and told LPS about it, you load the keywords into the system, optionally defining alternative display versions for misspelled keywords. All the information gets stored in the database.

Now the system is ready to run. There's an index.php file that gets installed in the root folder — the assumption here is that you're going to have the landing page at the root of a domain or subdomain. (If you're installing it on an existing site, you'll want to install it in a separate subfolder in order to not overwrite your existing index.php!) This is one area where the documentation needs serious improvement.

Let's say your domain is mysillydomain.com. For each keyword you enter into LPS a tracking number gets assigned. When you refer to the landing page in your ad campaigns, you include the tracking number for the keyword you're targeting as a query parameter:

http://www.mysillydomain.com/?t=3

When the browser requests this page, the index.php runs, extracts the value 3 from the URL and looks it up in the database to find the keyword that matches that parameter. It then takes the landing page template you supplied, replaces the variables with the appropriate values, and returns the modified page to the browser. So the user sees the landing page with the keyword that matches the tracking number.

My Opinion of Landing Page System

I was a bit disappointed at first with LPS. I was hoping you could simply pass in the keyword as part of the URL. This would let you create landing pages from AdWords destination URLs that automatically included the appropriate keyword. But that's not what this system was designed for. Their explanation is that you don't want to expose what keywords you're actually using in your campaigns, and so by using a generated tracking number the link between keyword and landing page is harder for observers to figure out.

Well, there's nothing stopping you from including the actual keyword used in the AdWords campaign along with the tracking number, so a few modifications to the index.php would make that information accessible to the landing page itself. (If the landing page is going to display AdSense ads — say you're doing AdSense arbitrage — then you'll definitely want to include a keyword in the URL in order to further ensure that the ads are properly targeted.) So I think I can address my initial objection with a bit of noodling of the PHP.

I like the fact that tracking information can be passed through quite easily to AWeber, ClickBank and Commission Junction — this lets you see which keywords are actually getting you subscribers and commissions. And the template system is simple enough that anyone with a bit of HTML experience can use it. And if you have PHP experience you can even add other features on top of that.

If you're looking to build keyword-specific landing pages and you don't want to do any programming yourself, I think Landing Page System is a decent and easy-to-use solution, at least at the initial launch price. If you're doing anything at all with landing pages and would like a simple templating system to customize those pages, I'd suggest you buy it now, before the price goes up. If you're adept with PHP, however, you can probably create a similar system (though not as elegant — I doubt you'd build an admin console, for example) without too much trouble.

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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