A landing page is a webpage on which your visitors should land (be redirected to) after clicking your offer, which is generally an ad. I say should land is because most of the times businesses are making the very costly mistake of not redirecting the visitors to the landing page.
But, why should we direct the ad traffic to a landing page?
I want to take a very simple example to illustrate this further. Imagine you have a fruit shop and want to sell lemons, watermelons and strawberries online.
You set up PPC ads on Google Adwords, craft beautiful, clickable ad copy for the purpose, and eventually people looking for fruits see your ads and start clicking on them.
For Example: Someone searches for “watermelons.” Your ad shows up
Now when this ad is clicked, which of the following pages should you show him?
The landing page, of course. If I am looking for watermelons, then the first option would entice me more. It clearly shows what I am looking for.
That is why landing page beats homepage any day, at least when we are talking about ads, because there every click costs you money. A promotion or an ad should always be accompanied by a landing page. That brings us to the two most important questions about landing pages:
Why does a landing page convert more than a homepage?
1. It’s more relevant to the search query
It is highly relevant to the search query (watermelon, in this case). You can optimize your landing page completely for a specific keyword, but you cannot change the message on the entire website (homepage) for every promotion you run.
2. It’s more focused
A landing page is highly focused on conversion, as it is always accompanied by a single call-to-action. There are no other distractions (like navigation menu) on the page, and there is just one action to take which is conversion.
Read more on why a landing page converts more than a homepage on our blog.
Why should you use landing pages?
1. You get more leads
You get more leads with the same number of clicks. In marketing terms, that is called a conversion. Conversion happens when a visitor acts on your offer by filling up the form, subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase or taking any other action you want them to take. The offer can be on your website, blog, an email or in this case, the landing page.
Conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by total number of visits. For example – if 100 people visit your landing page and 4 people fill it, it means it has a conversion rate of 4%.
2. You get more flexibility
Now imagine you want to sell blueberries too (seasonal offer). It’s much easier and cost effective to create a specific landing page, than remodeling the entire website for a new offer every single time.
So now that you know what a landing page is, let’s understand the secret to create high converting landing pages.
