If We Have a Website, Why Do We Need Landing Pages?

By Rachel Adams

Your website serves as your organization’s online home, tackling a wide variety of digital needs, from e-commerce to organic search. Using a search engine like Google, visitors land on your website where they can find information about your organization, navigate your offerings and services and, once armed with the information they need, take any number of actions available on your site.

With so many audiences and needs to address, websites are not designed to drive the specific conversions a paid marketing campaign requires. That’s the domain of landing pages.

Landing pages are strategic components of digital marketing campaigns. As standalone pages, separate from the distractions of your main site, they unite with your paid advertising, email marketing, Google Adwords and other efforts to create a digital destination that echoes the call to action that inspired the visitor’s click in the first place. Once a visitor arrives on your landing page, they’re met with messaging they’re expecting to see, and can move more efficiently towards the action you’re encouraging them to take.

If you’re looking to launch an effective digital marketing campaign, here’s why a well-executed landing page is a better destination than your website for users who click your ad.

Landing pages are driven by intent.

When a visitor navigates to your website, they have a reason for being there. Perhaps they’re looking for a service or item. Maybe they’re in search of specific information or resources. Whether they take an action you’d like them to take, however, depends on an important distinction: Do the goals of your website match the goals of your visitor?

Highly focused landing pages ensure that the first messaging the consumer encounters is tailored to them — and to their goals. Here’s why that matters: By using tools like email, content and ads, your campaign attracted them based on a specific intention. If after they click on that call to action they’re greeted with a generality, they’ll likely bounce. However, if they arrive and find precisely what was promised to them, it’s far more likely they’ll engage and take the action you want them to take.

Landing pages are focused on a goal.

Your campaign has a specific goal — maybe it’s to encourage patients to make an appointment or to get potential visitors to download a travel guide. But if your marketing campaign is directing users to your homepage, you risk distracting them before they can take the desired action of your campaign.

That’s because your homepage offers users many options. From the navigation bar to the footer and the various options in-between, websites guide visitors to information, resources and actions. That makes it more difficult to direct users to take the desired action of the campaign and, therefore, decreases the likelihood of a conversion — by as much as 266%.

Unlike a website, a landing page has one strategic goal that aligns with the goal of your digital marketing campaign. Each action and every piece of copy on your landing page aligns with that goal to create a streamlined path to a conversion.

Landing pages are nimble.

In most cases, a landing page isn’t a permanent webpage — it’s designed to align with a marketing campaign, which means it can be removed when the campaign ends. And because landing pages are all about to-the-point performance, they don’t need the flashy design elements that may be a priority on your homepage.

But keep in mind, simple design doesn’t lack strategy — landing pages should strategically guide visitors to take desired actions on the page. Fortunately, landing pages are primed to gather information that can help you more easily track and analyze visitors’ actions and help you identify how you can improve conversions.

Using Google Analytics, you can track bounce rate, how long visitors are on the page, how they got there and other metrics that can inform the success of the page. Plus, split testing — also called A/B testing — your landing page helps you determine how visitors respond to page variants so you can effectively optimize your landing page according to performance.