What is landing page?
A landing page is whichever page a visitor arrives on from a link, ad or search result, and it carries the job of continuing the promise that brought them there.
Worked example, not a result
Sending expensive clicks to the wrong page
Say a campaign sends 2,900 clicks in a month to a store's homepage and produces 84 orders, a conversion rate of about 2.9 percent.
The homepage is almost always the wrong destination for a paid click. Someone who clicked an ad for a specific product in a specific colour has been asked to find it again from scratch, through a menu, on a phone, having already paid for the click. Every extra step is a chance to leave.
Sending the same traffic to the exact product, or to a collection filtered to the thing the ad showed, removes that work. The page has the price the ad quoted, the image the ad used, the delivery information the buyer wants next, and a way to buy without navigating anywhere.
The test that matters is simple to apply. Look at the ad, look at the page, and ask whether the first screen of the page answers the promise in the ad. The figures above are an example.
Why it matters
The landing page is where paid traffic becomes revenue or does not, which puts it at the junction of the visitors lever and the conversion lever. Improving it raises the value of every click you have already bought, which means you can afford to bid more and reach traffic that was previously out of range.
It also protects order value. A page that shows a bundle, a size range or a related item at the point of interest lifts the basket in a way that a homepage arrival never will.
For a store owner the useful discipline is to review destinations regularly rather than once. Campaigns get duplicated, products get renamed, collections change, and a link that was right six months ago now points at a page with nothing on it. That is one of the most expensive quiet failures in ecommerce advertising.
Common mistakes
- Sending every campaign to the homepage. It is the page least able to answer a specific promise, and it makes the visitor do the work.
- Letting the ad and the page disagree. A price, a discount or an image that changes between the two loses the visitor immediately and wastes the click.
- Ignoring how the page loads on a phone. Most paid clicks arrive on mobile, and a slow first screen loses people before any of the persuasion is read.
- Never checking links after a catalogue change. Renamed products and removed collections turn working campaigns into paid traffic to a dead end.
Related terms and answers
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