What is a landing page?

The definition of a landing page - Put on your marketer and web designer hat

Marketers and web designers usually define landing pages as individual pages on a website that are often hidden from the normal user journey and are most often used as part of advertisements, newsletters, etc.

The pages are focused on one type of action, such as signing up for a newsletter, webinar, downloading a PDF or something as simple as getting in touch or requesting a quote.

These are often separated from the website to keep them simple and avoid noise from other elements on the page that can either confuse or distract the user. Often there isn't even a menu on landing pages, because you're not supposed to navigate further.

Alternative terms that are also used in this context are: campaign page, squeeze page, conversion page or opt-in page.

The definition of a landing page - Put on your web analytics hat

Google Analytics has to take some of the blame for this being a term, and even though it is quite correct in terms of language, it is confusing.

In the world of web analytics, the first page you enter as a user is considered the landing page. If you enter vg.no, the front page will be the landing page for your visit. If you see an article from vg.no on Facebook, this article will be your landing page, etc.

This way of using landing page is useful in terms of knowing which pages are the first pages users see compared to which pages are important on a website. Personally, we prefer entry page, but we must also be guilty of calling it landing page in this context.

Alternatively, this can also be called an entrance page.

The definition of a landing page - Seen with the people hat

Most people who don't work with the web or marketing can easily refer to either the front page of a website or another single subpage as a landing page when talking about it.

This is probably practically wrong, but don't worry, we understand what you mean and try our best not to be horrible people and point this out.

What makes a good landing page with a marketer's hat on?

Because we believe that the marketer and web designer context is the "most correct" context in which to view the landing page definition, it's only fair to mention what the key points of a good landing page are. We may be a little biased given that we deliver web design and work with landing pages in this way, but never mind.

A good landing page consists of a few simple points:

• It has one main action the user can perform.
• There is a clear key message that highlights why the user should perform this action.
• There is little noise and alternative actions the user can perform on the landing page.
• The landing page often needs to focus on building trust, showing the value/benefit of taking the action.

There are hundreds of small things that a good landing page should have! If you remember trust, benefits and a good user experience, you're almost there.

Landing page examples

Depending on which hat you're wearing, what you're looking at can vary. Some might argue that what you're on now is a landing page. We could go so far as to say that this is a search engine optimized landing page, because you found this page via Google, didn't you?

If you need inspiration or just want to see some great examples of landing pages, we recommend you take a look at e.g. lapa.ninja or onepagelove.com, you can also find great landing page examples on Behance and Awwwards, but it requires a bit more filtering.

How does one-pager and one-page design come into the mix?

Well, here it gets a little confusing again. Sometimes it is correct to call this a landing page, other times not. A one-pager, or a website where all the content is placed on one page, without subpages, can in many cases be a landing page, but often breaks the "rule" that there should only be one action that is possible to perform on a landing page.

Every good website should have a good amount of landing pages

Landing pages should be part of the strategy of almost any website that wants the user to perform a specific action.

According to HubSpot, businesses with 30 or more landing pages receive up to 7 times more inquiries from potential customers than those with less than 10 landing pages.

To put it into perspective, and you should take the statistics 100% at their word. So if you have less than 10 landing pages today and receive 10 enquiries a month, focusing on landing pages will allow you to increase this to 70 enquiries per month.

Conclusion - A landing page can be many things, depending on who you ask

You may have gained some more information, but whether you've become any wiser is another question entirely. We know that landing pages can be confusing and many people use the terms interchangeably and mix them up based on when they are being talked about.

We can always conclude by saying that regardless of whether you need a landing page to drive advertising against search engine traffic or whether what you're really looking for is a website with all the content on one page... So, not surprisingly, we can help you - landing pages are what we're good at!