What is a Landing Page?
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What is Landing Page?
A web page which serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website. A landing page refers to any Web page that a user arrives at after clicking a hyperlink. The definition of landing page has changed from being synonymous with a website’s home page to referring to any page within a website that is linked to from another location on the Web.
A landing page is usually a stable URL that is indexed by search engines, as opposed to a temporary splash or jump pages that are used to move traffic to a site for marketing purposes.
What’s the Form For?
A form on a landing page is an opportunity for someone to convert — what marketers often refer to as a conversion event. That conversion event could be filling out a form for an ebook, filling out their email address so they can subscribe to your blog, or filling out transactional information to purchase a product on your site. The landing page form, whether one field or multiple fields, is the time for a visitor to give you certain information about themselves so that you can give them something back in return.
What If There’s a Form on, Say, My Homepage?
It doesn’t make it a landing page. (To be clear, it’s not a bad thing, necessarily, to have a form on your homepage. But it’s still not a landing page.)
Why?
Because if you go back to the definition from earlier in this post, a landing page has to meet two criteria to be dubbed as such:
- It must have a form. (Check!)
- It must exist solely for the purpose of capturing a visitor’s information through that form.(Nope. Sorry. Try again next time.)
Your homepage, while it may have a form, exists to perform many other functions other than capturing visitor information via a form. You might want to introduce your founder, show examples of your content, talk about pricing and services, entertain people with a cool slideshow, or play a video on your homepage. These are all great things to do, but they would distract from getting a visitor to fill out a form.
And that’s why landing pages are so valuable.
If you need to deliver a certain number of leads a month to Sales, and you can have certain pages (landing pages!) on your website that exist solely to do just that, you’re much more likely to be successful. You can point your calls-to-action to those uncluttered, conversion optimized landing pages, instead of a more cluttered web page that might exist to serve multiple purposes.
