By Gregory Smyth
Why Landing Pages Matter
Landing pages are typically the first point of interaction for customers who click on ads, social ads, or search ads. They’re designed with only one thing in mind, which is to direct visitors towards a desired action with minimal distraction. Unlike your site’s home pages, landing pages do not have to be linked from the home page. They may instead be designed for different campaigns—paid ads, email campaigns, or influencer campaigns. Specifying landing pages that are also aligned with the creative and intent of each source of traffic improves relevance and conversions.
Testing and Optimization
Very few of your landing pages will be perfect. Low costs and tight deadlines tend to generate technical or design problems. Highly effective landing pages are usually extensively A/B and multivariate tested. Google Optimize (once substituted by heritage substitutes for third-party A/B testing programs), Hotjar, VWO, or GA4-integrated experiments are used by marketers in 2025 to A/B test headlines, layouts, and calls-to-action. Creating a body of tested landing pages allows you, over time, to understand what works best for your products as well as your publics.
Avoiding Bad Design Pitfalls
Poorly designed landing pages will do your campaign more harm than good. Friction areas include asking for too much personal information, making users retype their information, or subjecting users to legalese disclaimers. To ensure users’ attention stays focused on your call-to-action:
- Shorten forms as much as possible.
- Offer autofill or single sign-on functionality.
- Assure users of data privacy with trust badges and copy.
- Put essential information above the fold for rapid scanning.
What a Landing Page Is (and Isn’t)
A landing page is not a splash page, nor a pop-up advertisement, nor an unrelated microsite. It’s actually a single-minded page that’s specifically designed to exactly match the ad or campaign that directs the visitor there. Clarity, consistency, action, and no distraction are the goals.
Copy and Call-to-Actions Best Practices
The strength of copy remains the foundation of a profitable landing page. Keep paragraphs short—three sentences at tops. Make use of bullet lists, bold terms, and subheads for scannability. Most importantly, ensure that your landing page copy is consistent with the ad that brought visitors there. Divergent copy is frequently the cause of an immediate drop-off. Finally, your call-to-action needs to be short and imperative: tell people exactly what you want them to do, and ask them to do it now.
