What is a landing page - Reviewing best practices in landing page design

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a technical term in inbound marketing referring to the web pages of a website that are first touch-points of the visitors.

Here you can find the most popular landing pages:

  • Pages that are accessed directly by the returning users (the blog part of the website)
  • Pages used in online advertising and promotion (e.g. emails, banners, social media)
  • Pages that are reached via search engines

What’s the goal of designing a landing page?

There are three distinct types of landing pages:

  • Reference landing pages

  • Lead pages

  • Transactional landing pages

 The purpose of a reference page is  nothing more than theĀ visit and the traffic. Most of the reference pages are used in highly click-thirsty sites looking for a high traffic to convince potential advertisers to buy advertising spaces.

 A lead page is designed to  convert visitors to leads. It means persuading the visitor to subscribe to a newsletter or enter personal information or register as a user of the website services.

 Transactional landing pages are  more serious and ask users to make some transaction. Most of the times this transaction means paying money in exchange for a specific product or service.

Landing Page Optimsation - What is a landing page

Excluding IT companies and content providing firms, most of the companies don’t take enough care of their landing pages.

They spend lots of money in digital and physical space pushing people to visit their pages and then forget to invest in designing, analyzing and improving their landing pages.

Thus, excluding the reference pages, which are so close to the standard SEO concept, the main target of the other types of landing pages is conversion, either to a lead or to a transaction.

Here are some of the topics I’m going to discuss in future articles about the landing pages. Most of them are just based on my personal experiences gain working on my various websites:

  • Landing Page Experience (what is it and how to improve it)
  • Importance of copywriting
  • How can we minimize the bounce rate of landing pages?
  • Call to action
  • A/B testing: hype or help?
  • Links or Buttons? Do they have a similar effect?
  • Not every link links: the cost of distracting navigational link
  • Mobile-friendly pages: It’s something more than distance between touching points and responsiveness
  • The second scroll goes to hell, but the last scroll might go somewhere
  • Images and Videos? Shall we use it? The costs and benefits of multimedia in landing pages
  • How to design and propose better payment options in landing pages?
  • Landing page audit checklist