A landing page is most commonly seen in online marketing although sometimes it is known as a lead capture page. It is a web page that will come into view when a potential customer will click on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.

The landing page contains a logical extension of the advertisement or link. This page is used to highlight the contents of your website because it includes specific keywords or phrases that will help your page to be recognized and be indexed by search engines.

Landing pages are commonly found in pay per click (PPC) campaigns. These landing pages can also be tailored to measure the success of different advertisements. Most landing pages have a parameter to the linking URL this is then used by marketers to measure the advertisement’s effectiveness based on relative click-through rates (CTR).

Landing pages can be classified as reference or transactional. A reference landing page presents information that is significant to the site’s visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. They are considered effective if they meet the goals of their publishers.

A transactional landing page tries to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page. The goal is to eventually sell of a product or service to the visitor. The visitor taking the needed action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The effectiveness or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate.

Either it’s a reference or transactional landing page, its ultimate goal is to provide a customized sales pitch for the visitor. A well crafted landing page almost always sport better conversion rates than simply throwing away visitors into the home page of your site.