Landing pages - what are they?
If you read articles on online marketing, it won't be long before you meet the term "landing page." So what does it mean? And why is it so important?

When a visitor first arrives at your site, he or she sees a web page. That first page is the landing page. It's where the visitor initially "landed" on your website.

Consider how people visit your website. They don't all start at your main page. Instead, they may come in through a bookmark they set on an earlier visit. Or a link from another site. Or a link in some search results at Google.

Those bookmarks and links might take them anywhere inside your site. So potentially, just about any page at your website can be a landing page. (Something to bear in mind when you design your site.)

The concept has plenty of applications and implications, but it's particularly important in marketing and advertising. Why? Because you can often dictate exactly where people enter your website: you can control the identity of the landing page.

Imagine you send out an email to a thousand customers telling them they can get 20% off your newest product. You naturally provide a link to your website in that email. Any recipient interested in that offer is likely to use that link to visit your website. So the destination page becomes the landing page for that email promotion.

Now you can start to see the potential.

If we can dictate the landing page, then we can put specific content on this page that encourages the visitor to do what we want them to do. We can custom-design the landing page to fit with the goals of whatever advertising or marketing effort got the visitor to land there in the first place.

So the link in that email might go to a product page where the visitor can buy the item in question. If we just sent readers to the main website address, perhaps they'd never find the product or offer on their own before pursuing some other task or interest.

Custom landing pages for different promotions or communications can make an astonishing difference to results. So they're a critical tool for marketers: choosing and designing a suitable landing page simply gets more people to take the desired action.

Of course, the big issue is how you actually use and design landing pages to elicit that desired action, whether it be a click, a purchase, a download, a read, or whatever.

That task -- which falls into the field of "conversion rate marketing" -- is both an art and science, and numerous books and articles tackle the subject in depth.