A landing page is a section of your website where you can direct visitors from outside media (print, television, radio, or other websites). Landing pages are specifically tailored to be the first place targeted visitors “land” when they visit your website. Rather than sending all visitors to the home page of your website, you can send targeted audiences to individual landing pages with information created specifically for that target audience.

Landing pages are a great way to test the effectiveness of certain marketing materials. If you have an advertisement in an industry publication, you’ll want to see how many leads you get from that ad. Though there are less effective ways to get the information (asking callers how they heard about you, or setting up a separate phone line), one of the easiest ways to find out who followed your call to action is to use a landing page.

Do we really need a separate page for each advertising and marketing campaign we run? If you want to know what pieces of your marketing plan are working the best, then the answer is yes. A landing page is part of your website that is accessible by those who want to learn more about your business after seeing a specific marketing or advertising piece.

Each landing page should have:

1. Company branding

2. Concise writing

3. A space to gather names and contact information

4. A link to your actual website so people can learn more about your business.

For example, you own a property management business and want to track the effectiveness of a letter you sent out which asks property owners to learn more about your business. Though your website might be www.buniness.com, a landing page could be created at www.business.com/research that is only accessible from those who read the advertisement and wanted to learn more about your company. You should tailor the wording/copy on that page to talk more about some of the topics you discussed in the letter, as well as ask for simple contact information for those who want to learn more about your company.

The two main benefits of landing pages are tracking and targeting. Businesses can track the number if visitors to each landing page using a service like Google Analytics. If each marketing piece has a different landing page, you gauge the effectiveness of each aspect of your marketing plan by the number of visitors that go to the landing page.

The second benefit, targeting, allows you to use text that is specific to each marketing piece to get the visitor to sign up for additional information or a consultation. Rather than sending them to the home page and hoping that they'll find their way to the right page, send them to the right page of your website (the landing page) first before they can surf around the site to learn more.

The key to testing the effectiveness of a landing page is make sure it isn’t linked from your website – that way people can’t accidentally find the page from your website and throw off the tracking process from Google Analytics.

Have questions about landing pages, feel free to post a comment below and I’d be happy to help you address any of your questions or concerns.