One page, one decision, built to be measured

What this actually solves

The person buying this page usually has a number in front of them that is going the wrong way. They are paying for clicks — on search, on social, from an email list they spent years building — and the cost per click is rising while the enquiries are not. Somewhere between the advert and the enquiry, most of what they paid for is disappearing.

Very often the leak is in one place. The advert makes a specific promise, someone clicks it, and they land on a general homepage carrying a full navigation menu, four other services, a blog, an about section and three different buttons. The visitor now has to find the thing the advert promised. They do not know the site, they have no patience for it, and the back button is free. The money was already spent at the moment of the click.

A landing page treats that visitor as someone mid-decision rather than someone browsing. There is no menu. There are no links to elsewhere. There are exactly two things a person can do — take the action or leave — and the page is arranged so that every scroll answers whatever objection would have stopped them at that point. It is one of the few pieces of web work where the effect is directly countable, because the same traffic at the same cost produces a different number of enquiries. That measurability is also why it is an easy thing to justify buying, and why it tends to be the first project in a longer relationship.

What we do, and in what order

Most of the value here is decided before anything is designed. The build is genuinely the short part.

1. Pin down the offer. What someone gets, what they give up, what it costs, who precisely it is for, and where the traffic is coming from — a cold advert audience and a warm email list need different pages. We also ask what proof exists: reviews, ratings, results, client logos you have permission to use. If a claim has no evidence, it comes out of the page rather than getting softened into vagueness. Half a day to a day.
2. Write the page as a structure, before design. Headline and sub-headline, the problem stated in the visitor's own language, how the thing works in three steps, the proof, exactly what is included, the objections answered as a short FAQ — price, time, and whether it will work for someone like them — and one call to action, repeated three or four times down the page rather than three different actions competing. One to two days.
3. Build it. This is usually the fastest stage, because the decisions are already made. The page is built for speed and assembled mobile-first, since paid social traffic is overwhelmingly on phones and a hero image that takes four seconds on mobile data has already lost most of the visitors you paid for. One to two days.
4. Wire up the form, the notification and the thank-you page. A real submission is sent end to end and confirmed in your actual inbox, with the spam folder checked. Then the thank-you page — a separate URL, reachable only after submitting — which is what makes the conversion countable and is where you set expectations about what happens next. Half a day.
5. Install and verify tracking. The conversion event is fired, then confirmed by completing the form ourselves and watching the event actually arrive in your analytics or tag manager. Tracking that was installed but never verified is the normal state of affairs and it is worthless — you find out a month and several thousand dollars into a campaign that nothing was recorded. Half a day.
6. Hand over with a before-and-after record. Screenshots of the finished page, the tracking confirmed working, the logins, and a note on which parts you can safely edit yourself without breaking the measurement. A few hours.

What moves the price

The range is $250–$1,200 and the schedule is 3–7 days. Three things move both.

Who writes the copy. If you supply finished, approved copy, the job sits at the bottom of the range. Developing the offer, the objections and the proof with you is the largest single block of time on this project and it is priced as such.

Custom design against an adapted template. A page built on a proven template with your brand applied is fast and often converts perfectly well. A bespoke design with custom illustration, motion and a distinctive layout is a different job, and worth it mainly when the page is representing a launch or a premium price point.

How much sits around the page. A single page with a form is the small version. A page plus a thank-you page plus conversion tracking plus a booking integration plus a follow-up email sequence is a funnel, not a page, and once you are building the whole sequence the work sits at the top of the range or above it.

What usually goes wrong

Three equal calls to action. Buy now, learn more, and contact us, all styled the same weight, all sitting near each other. Every one of them is individually reasonable and together they are fatal — the visitor has been handed a decision about which decision to make, and the most common resolution is to make none. One page, one action. Anything else that must be on the page is deliberately made to look secondary.

Nothing happens after the form is submitted. The form posts, the page reloads with a small grey line of text, and that is the end of it. Two things break at once. The visitor gets no confirmation of what happens next and starts to doubt the submission worked, and you have no conversion event, which means your advertising platform cannot learn which clicks were worth buying. The thank-you page is not decoration; it is the measurement.

The page is fast on a desktop and slow on the traffic that matters. Landing pages are frequently signed off on a laptop over office broadband, while the audience arrives from a social feed on a mid-range phone and a mobile connection. An uncompressed hero image and a handful of fonts are enough to add several seconds there. Every one of those seconds is paid for at your cost per click, so this page is built and judged on a phone first.