Landing Pages: What are they and do you need one?

A landing page is a page that you expect visitors to your site to land on. It’s often the first page they see when they arrive at your site, either through searching for a particular term or by following a link from another site. Landing pages are commonly used in e-commerce to draw a number of different elements together, making it easy for customers to find the information or products they are looking for.

Advantages of Landing Pages

The main advantage of a landing page is that it lets you control what your customers see when they arrive at your site after following a particular path to get there. This lets you strip away distractions and remove barriers, giving customers exactly what they want from your site.

As an example, imagine that your company sells all kinds of rubber boots, from children’s wellies to fishing waders. If you’re running an advert in a parenting magazine, or on a parenting website, you expect that people who respond to the ad will primarily be looking for children’s wellies. You create a landing page for children’s wellies and link directly to it. Your customers can easily find what they’re looking for, but also have access to the rest of your site, in case they do want fishing waders after all.

Landing Pages in Action

Large e-commerce sites like Amazon make use of landing pages, particularly in conjunction with their advertising. If you search for a general product category, like books, jewellery or garden furniture, the ad that appears will often send you to a landing page for that category. It will be filled with deals, offers and products that match the search term you entered.

A landing page can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. E-commerce sites will often have dynamic landing pages, where the web design elements are automatically filled with the latest offers and products appropriate for that page. Smaller sites will often have static landing pages, perhaps with an introduction and links to the appropriate sections of the website.
Landing pages are a useful tool. They’re cheap and easy to set up, and can be invaluable as part of an online marketing strategy, particularly for e-commerce sites and new businesses. They’re often very effective ways to turn viewers into purchasers as they provide all the necessary information in one convenient place.

It’s much easier to expand a website than a bricks-and-mortar shop, so it’s easy to have multiple landing pages for customers who shop for the same products in different ways. In the example above, the rubber boot merchant might feature kid’s boots on a children’s footwear landing page, a family page and a camping page.

Do I need a landing page?

However, for a landing page to be effective, it needs to be clearly laid out and appropriately stocked. It also needs to be visited, so it’s best to create landing pages associated with core or growing areas of your business, as these will be the ones you’re promoting most actively.

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