Landing pages are often built as the place that an ad, video, or email points to. These are often referred to as “Squeeze Pages” or “Lead Capture Pages”. The purpose of a landing page is to gather personal data from the visitor, usually beginning with their name and email address. A true squeeze page has absolutely no exit path from the page, no links or navigation – only a button to submit your details. An incentive is typically offered in exchange for this personal data.

Even if you already have a website, you should create specific landing pages for all of your advertisements as it will give you a much bigger return on investment. The reason a company would use a lead capture landing page is to build an email list of relevant potential customers. This list will then be used to market to these people in the future.

Another type of landing page is a product detail page. This is just a page on the main website that houses all of the information related to the product for sale. However, if it’s part of the compete website it is full of  of distractions: navigation, links, banners etc. all of which can take the customer way from the intended action, making it more complex to track the success of your campaigns. They could wander off and buy something else, which is all good and well, but it creates mixed messages for tracking purposes as it could show up as a non-converting customer – assuming that your success metric is the purchase of the original landing page item. If you are advertising a partcular product or servicee, you should consideer creating a landing page just for the product or service you are advertising.

The key elements of a good landing page include:

• Attention grabbing headline
• Supporting headline or sub-title
• A “hero-shot” or video of the product.
• A call to action (form with name and email address and a submit button that appears “above the fold” (you don’t have to scroll down to see it.
• Social Proof: 3 Testimonials from real people
• Bullet points listing benefits
• Closing argument