In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.
Landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns or pay per click (PPC) campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads. By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and Conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.
Types of landing pages
There are two types of landing pages: reference and transactional.
A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.
A special type of ‘reference landing page’ is the ‘webvert’, the marketing goal focuses on lead generation and interaction with the visitor. A webvert is not ‘transactional’ in nature. A webvert is a reference based, ethical landing page.The webverts consists of an advert, designed on the AIDA principle. The traffic is driven from Google Adwords and is designed for two specific marketing tactics:
* To attain high Google Adwords landing page quality scores, the benefit being any Adwords campaign costs are minimized.
* The webvert has a clear call to action, always with a reply form or clear way to engage.
The visitor traffic is immediate as the Adword relies on Google advertising to drive visitors to the webvert.
A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to «capture the lead» and add the prospect to a mailing list.
A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Since the economics of many online marketing programs are determined by the conversion rate, marketers constantly test alternatives and improvements to their landing pages. Some of the testing methods used are A/B testing and multivariate testing.