ProTip Tuesday #3: What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is any page that visitors (aka “traffic”) go to directly. For example, apple.com/trailers is not a home page, but I regularly go there without going through apple.com. I land there. Hence the name, “landing page”. Think of it like a guest entrance to your site.
If a banner or campaign links directly to a page on your site that isn’t the start page, guess what? Now it’s a landing page. Even if it is 3 levels deep in your site.
However, a page is not a landing page just because it is the home of important information. It might just be an important piece of content.
Whatever people do after the landing page is irrelevant for the purpose of this protip (but it’s not irrelevant in general), as long as they’re still on our site.
Our main goal with a landing page is to minimize “Bounce Rate”, which is the % of visitors that click nothing. All you really have to know is: bouncing is bad.
If someone doesn’t bounce, it means the landing page succeeded and the visitor entered the site. Succeeding is good.
The first click is the deepest. ;)
A landing page needs to accomplish two main things:
1) Demonstrate why the visitor is there.
2) Show them how to get what they want.
Explain why the user is there: A landing page is not the place to sell everything the site does. Give them a big headline, get to the point, and get there quickly. Use visuals! If you expect them to read more than one sentence before they understand, you may have already failed. Think comic strip, not novel.
Show them how to get what they want: Have a clear goal for the user and show it to them. A call-to-action button that is impossible to miss is the first thing to consider. If you don’t have a good goal, why does this page exist? Create clear, obvious paths to high-value, relevant content. Then stop. More is not better on a landing page, I promise. One message, one goal, one obvious button.
If your pages are not optimized to receive direct traffic, don’t send direct traffic there.This might sound obvious now, but millions of dollars are being wasted doing exactly that, right now, through banner campaigns.
And that is your crash course on Landing Pages. To learn learn more about common problems on landing pages, check out this article:
Have a great week!
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If you liked this ProTip, try ProTip Tuesday #4: Fingers are not a Mouse