What is a landing page ?

A landing page is any page a visitor lands on after clicking an advertisement or call to action button / link online. It is generally a dedicated, promotion oriented page which focuses on the product / service in question. At the their core they are stand alone pages designed for specific advertising campaign. Among other things it can contain the product or service you wish to market.

The main purpose of a landing page is to capture a lead or generate interest when a visitor arrives and eventually send him further down the sales funnel where the chances of conversion are better.

The above actions are all directed towards incentivizing a customer to do an action that might be add to cart, registration, signups just about anything. The basic idealogy is the same, that is drive a customer one step down a sales funnel.

An example will illustrate this point well. Lets say there is a website that sells furniture. There are hundreds of categories and products on the website. Now lets say you are running an ad campaign for selling sofas online. Your landing page will be sofa category page where there will be different categories of sofas listed for example round sofas, L shaped sofas, foldeable sofas. So you see in this case the home page is different from the landing page. Your ad campaign will redirect users to category page which will be used as a landing page.

But if you are running a campaign for buy furniture online- what should be your landing page ? you guessed it right it should be the home page because the homepage would be the most apt page to redirect the visitor. This is because you do not know the intention of the visitor whether he intends to buy sofas, chairs or cabinets. In this case your homepage is your landing page.

So you see, landing page can be any page that can lead to a conversion. It can be your homepage, your category page, product page any thing that brings your customer one step close to conversion.