Landing page

A landing page is a page built for one action. It is usually where somebody arrives after clicking an advert, and everything on it is arranged to make that one action easy: the headline repeats what the advert promised, the content answers the objections that stand between the visitor and the decision, and the form or the button is never far away. The word describes the job the page does, not the technology it is built with.

In short

• A landing page exists for one action, and everything else on it is removed.
• Paid traffic should land on a page about the thing that was advertised, never the homepage.
• The headline has to match the promise the advert made, or the visitor leaves.
• It is judged on what happens after the click, not on where it ranks.

How it differs from a homepage

A homepage has to serve everybody. Somebody checking whether you are real, somebody looking for your address, somebody comparing you against two competitors and somebody ready to book all arrive on it, so it offers many routes and commits to none of them. That is the correct design for a page whose visitors want different things.

A landing page assumes one thing about the visitor and builds around that assumption. If the assumption is right, removing every other route makes the page better, because nothing on it competes with the one thing the visitor came to do. This is why sending advert traffic to a homepage performs so poorly. The visitor clicked a specific promise and arrived somewhere general, and now has to find the promise again themselves.

When a business actually needs one

Not every campaign needs a page of its own. The signal is a mismatch between what the advert says and what any existing page says.

• The advert promises something specific that no page on the site is actually about, such as one treatment, one dish, one property type or one district.
• The offer has a deadline, and the ordinary service page cannot be rewritten around a date that will pass.
• The traffic is paid, so every visit has a cost attached and the ordinary page’s many exits are being paid for.
• The audience is narrow, and the page can safely assume things a general visitor would need explained.

Where none of that is true, a well written service page is usually the better destination, and it keeps working when the campaign stops.

What belongs on the page

The list is short, which is the point. Anything not on it is competing with the things that are.

• A headline that repeats the promise in words close to the ones in the advert, so the visitor knows within a second that they arrived correctly.
• The offer stated plainly, including what happens next and what it involves for them.
• Proof, which for most businesses means reviews, photographs of real work or the professional credentials that apply.
• The objections answered, meaning the four or five things somebody hesitates over, written out rather than avoided.
• One action, repeated. A form, a booking button or a message link, appearing more than once on a long page but never as a choice between two different things.

What to take off

Most landing pages fail by addition rather than by omission, so the removals matter as much as the contents.

The full navigation is the first thing to go, because every menu item is an exit and an exit is the opposite of what the page is for. Links to unrelated services do the same job more politely, inviting somebody who was nearly ready to go and browse instead. Company history can usually follow them, unless the number of years is itself the reason to trust the offer.

The one that causes the most argument is the second call to action. A page asking somebody to call and download and subscribe has asked for nothing clearly, and the instinct to add a softer option for people who are not ready is the instinct that dilutes the page for the people who are.

Matching the page to the advert

The single largest cause of a landing page underperforming is a break between what was promised and what the page says. The visitor rarely articulates it. They arrive, feel briefly that this is not what they clicked, and leave.

Matching is mostly mechanical. Use the words from the advert in the headline. If the advert named a district, name the district. If it named a service, the page should be about that service and not about the category it belongs to. A visitor who clicked an advert about aircon cleaning and arrives on a page about home services has been asked to do a translation nobody volunteers for.

This is also what Google Ads measures when it judges how relevant your page is to the search behind the click, so the match is worth getting right twice over.

Measuring whether it works

A landing page is one of the few things in marketing with a clean number attached, which is why it is worth building properly.

• The share of visitors who complete the action. This is the number the page exists to move, and it needs tracking set up before the campaign starts rather than afterwards.
• Where people stop. Scroll and form data will usually show one specific field or one specific section where visitors give up.
• The comparison against your ordinary page. Running the campaign to both for a period is the only way to know whether the landing page earned its existence.
• What happened after the form. A page can produce many inquiries and few customers, which is a page attracting the wrong people rather than a page performing well.

Where landing pages go wrong

• Sending every advert to the homepage, which is the default and the most expensive habit on this list.
• Writing the page about the company rather than about the thing the visitor came to do.
• Asking for too much, usually in the form of a form with nine fields where three would do.
• Leaving the navigation in place, so the page is a service page with a larger headline.
• Building it once and never looking at it again, when the whole advantage of a page with one job is that you can tell whether it is doing it.
• Making it slow. A page carrying a video, three tracking scripts and an uncompressed photograph will lose visitors before the headline appears.

None of these are difficult to avoid. They persist because a landing page is usually built in a hurry, at the end of a campaign setup, by somebody who has already spent their attention on the adverts. Building it first is the whole fix.