In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page", "squeeze page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page are what determine an advertiser's conversion rate. A landing page may be part of a microsite or a single page within an organization's main web site. Landing pages are often linked to social media, e-mail campaigns, search engine marketing campaigns, high-quality articles or "affiliate account" in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads. If the goal is to obtain a lead, the landing page will include some method for the visitor to get into contact with the company, usually a phone number or an inquiry form. If a sale is required, the landing page will usually have a link for the visitor to click, which will then send them to a shopping cart or a checkout area. By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.
Types There are two types of landing pages: reference and transactional.
References A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links or other elements. The idea is to isolate the visitor in this landing page from any other distractions, like full website menu or "similar products", and surround the visitor with all available information about the targeted product to convince them to take action and get captured. The "References" landing page type should be a transitional stage before the second type which is the "Transactional" Type.
Transactional The purpose of the transactional landing page is to persuade a visitor to take action by completing a transaction. This is accomplished by providing a form that needs to be filled out. The visitor information is obtained in order to add the visitor's email address to a mailing list as a prospect. An email campaign can then be developed based on responses to transactional landing pages. The goal is to capture as much information about the visitor as possible. The ultimate goal is to convert the visitor into a customer.
Origin and evolution Landing pages originated with the IT departments of Microsoft in late 2003 in response to poor online sales of Office. The process was tedious and time-consuming. The rise of cloud computing and e-commerce around 2009 provided ideal conditions for these startups to flourish. Since then the customer requirements changed, requesting integrations with other solutions such as email marketing, lead nurturing and customer relationship management systems.
Typical format Landing pages typically feature clear, concise, action-oriented headlines. An effective landing page explains the product or offering in a straightforward way, while placing visual emphasis on its key value and benefits. Marketing experts recommend websites remove the navigation menu and limit internal and external links on the page. Any signup forms on the landing page should reflect the value of the offer. For example, a free offer or newsletter sign up form may only request an email address, whereas high value offers may have longer forms with more details required. They may also include a relevant image, animation or short video. These pages also tend to contain small icons (i.e. of Facebook or Twitter) to facilitate social media sharing.
Smart links With the proliferation of competing social media and music distribution platforms a minimal landing page referred to as a smart link has appeared. These are a short url, typically shared to existing fans, which leads to a landing page which only has links to the same content on multiple different platforms – enabling customers to choose where they complete their transaction.
Optimization Landing page optimization (LPO) is one part of a broader Internet marketing process called conversion optimization or conversion rate optimization (CRO), with the goal of improving the percentage of visitors to the website that becomes sales leads and customers. A landing page is a webpage that is displayed when a potential customer clicks an advertisement or a search engine result link. This webpage typically displays content that is a relevant extension of the advertisement or link. LPO aims to provide page content and appearance that makes the webpage more appealing to target audiences. There are three major types of LPO based on targeting:
Associative content targeting (also called rule-based optimization or passive targeting). The page content is modified based on information obtained about the visitor's search criteria, geographic information of source traffic or other known generic parameters that can be used for explicit non-research-based consumer segmentation. Predictive content targeting (also called active targeting). The page content is adjusted by correlating any known information about the visitor (e.g., prior purchase behavior, personal demographic information, browsing patterns, etc.) to anticipate (desired) future actions based on predictive analytics. Consumer directed targeting (also called social targeting). The page content is created using the relevance of publicly available information through a mechanism based on reviews, ratings, tagging, referrals, etc. There are two major types of LPO based on experimentation:
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