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Your customers are not a nameless, faceless mass, and it’s important to treat them as individuals. Online marketing presents a unique advantage to webmasters: based on the specific ad that directed them to your website, you have an idea of what they’re looking for even before they arrive. But to take advantage of this, you need to make sure you’re showing these customers the information they want without making them jump through hoops. This is where landing pages come in.

Many sites direct every customer to the same page, often times the home page. But this doesn’t make sense! If the customer has discovered your site in the first place by searching for “boys’ clothes,” there is little advantage in making them wade through shoes, ties, and princess dresses before they get to the item they want. It’s sad but true: the longer you make them search, the greater the chance that you’ll lose that sale.

Instead of risking this, wise marketers will link their ads to a page that deals specifically with the topic of the original ad. Therefore, a customer who clicks on a link for boys’ clothing will not be sent to GenericClothingCompany.com, but rather sent straight to GenericClothingCompany.com/boysclothes. You’ve helped them jump ahead to the topic that’s really important to them as an individual.

Having a landing page is the first step to retaining your customers, but these pages have to be optimized in order to have any real effect. Luckily, this can easily be carried out with A/B testing, similar to the type conducted in email marketing. To do this, two different landing pages are created. The exact same ad directs 50% of the traffic to one landing page and 50% to the other. The landing pages can then be tweaked to your liking, with different combinations of layouts, images, headlines, and other website elements.

This kind of testing has become easier and easier to do. In conjunction with Google Analytics, Google also offers a service called Google Website Optimizer, which serves as a testing ground for any webmaster to run ‘experiments’ on their web pages. The program allow you to try out different combinations of website elements, and to then analyze the results in a quantitative way, helping you realize which combination is a winner.

If you’re not yet ready to jump into another marketing service, you can always fall back on your tried and true Google Analytics knowledge. After you’ve created two different landing pages for the same ad, and given it some time to get visits, you can pull up your “Top Content” under the Content tab in Google Analytics and see for yourself which site is achieving your goals more effectively. Does it have a lower bounce rate, a higher ROI, more time on site? Making two new pages may seem laborious during the process, but the long-term payoff is clear: show your customers what they’re looking for, and they’ll remember your brand when they come back to look for more. And that, after all, is the shortest path to a long-term stream of revenue.