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By Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute

Many companies spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire customers, but ignore what happens next. Paying attention to your landing pages — whether it’s for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, email campaigns, or banner ads — is one of the most-neglected online marketing tactics. But creating custom landing pages, then testing and optimizing them, holds a lot of potential for increasing conversions, and therefore revenue.

“People don’t fundamentally believe that conversion optimization will work. If they did, they’d jump all over it,” said Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and co-author of Web Design for ROI. “The truth is, it can have a game-changing impact on revenue and profitability.”

Most marketers have heard the buzz around landing page optimization (LPO), a part of the larger discipline of conversion optimization. Many marketers have also heard hyped-up claims of two- or three-fold jumps in conversions, and are not convinced that small changes can have a big impact on their conversion rates.

While those kinds of returns are possible, in extreme circumstances, such drastic increases are not necessary to make conversion optimization worthwhile, Loveday said.

“You don’t need to hit a home run, and double or triple your conversion rate, to have a measurable effect on the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve seen cases where increasing conversion rate from 2.0 to 2.1 percent has had a big impact on revenue.”

Others have dipped their toes in the water and tried it out. Unfortunately, many of those that did so went in without a real plan, and ended up with lackluster results.

First, a marketer needs to determine where to focus his or her efforts. In many cases, people think starting with the home page is best, since that seems like it would have a big impact. But Loveday advises keeping away from the home page, and focusing instead on a single product page or a custom landing page for a specific PPC campaign.

“More and more users are arriving at a site on a page other than the home page, but that’s still where many companies spend most of their design resources,” Loveday said. Besides that, the home page is burdened by politics, with turf wars over who gets what real estate, and is more scrutinized by executives, he said.

So not only will it be more effective to choose a lower-level page, such as a PPC landing page, to begin testing, it will be easier to do without interference from other departments or from higher-ups. Once you’ve demonstrated that you can have success, it will be easier to get buy-in to apply the same landing page optimization techniques to a page higher up in the site architecture, such as a category page, he said.

With the availability of free or low-cost landing page testing applications, marketers can also limit IT involvement, while maintaining more control over their tests and pages. But knowing which elements of a page to test can be tricky, Loveday said.

“It’s not just about throwing things against the wall and seeing what will stick,” he said. “You need to take a more structured approach, and test among good options.”

That means knowing which elements are most likely to create a change in conversion rate, and then testing out elements that are different enough to have a measurable difference between them. Using minor variations of a headline or image may not be enough to cause a change in user behavior.

To learn more about conversion optimization and other online marketing strategies, check out the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search Marketing and Social Media Success, coming to Los Angeles in September 2010.