Metadata for Landing Pages

As a term, Metadata is simply data about data. In this instance, Metadata can be used in your Landing Page to provide information such as a title, description, and image to browsers and social media sites. You can add metadata to the Basic Search section which targets browsers, to the Facebook and Twitter sections to help streamline your posts on these sites or include code snippets for more detailed analytics.

You can add or update metadata in the Landing Page designer by clicking on the Details section.

Basic Search Metadata

Title: This is the title of your landing page, and you can see it when you hover over the browser tab when you are viewing your landing page.

Description: This simply describes what the page you’re linking to is about. This is the default description you can set for your landing page. It is best practice to keep this to around 160 characters, otherwise, the description may be truncated by different sites. And remember, this is for your patients and/or potential patients- what type of link or language would inspire them to click on that link?

Social Media Metadata for Facebook and Twitter

Have you ever tried to paste a link to share into Facebook or Twitter, but the image and title don’t seem to be related to what you actually wanted to share? In the Metadata sections of your landing page, you can decide what the title, description, and image will display when you share your landing page link to these social sites.

Title: How do you want this landing page to display in the post? If you want the title to display differently than the default title on your landing page(to hopefully get greater engagement), you can create unique titles for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Keep this short- approximately 5 to 6 words is a good start, otherwise this title could be cut off.

Description: Descriptions refer to the text that appears below the bolded title of your post. You can customize your descriptions to be different from the default you set in the basic search metadata. Remember, keep it short (fewer than 75 characters) and direct—something that will prompt people to click!

Image: A picture related to the landing page or offer would be ideal. Images with wider aspect ratios (more horizontally rectangular) are usually better fits for this type of sharing.

Example

If you only fill out the Basic Search Metadata field:

And then try to share your landing page link on Facebook, it would look like this:

By only optimizing the basic search metadata, when we attempted to share this link, it automatically chose the logo from the top of the landing page to display, and it doesn’t quite fit. Also, the description here is a bit too long and gets cut off.

But, if you fill out your Facebook Metadata sections for Title, Description, and Image, it would override the fields you filled out in the Basic Search Metadata section, and look like this:

As you create your Facebook post to share your landing page, it should now look like the image below to reflect the Facebook Metadata you included.

Notice that this is the exact link we tried to share earlier, the only difference is that the Metadata fields for Facebook are filled out now:

Code Snippets

If you have internal marketing or development resources and you want to include Google Analytics or a third party tracking code to measure performance with more granularity, that code can be pasted into either the header or footer of your landing page.