What Is a Landing Page? Benefits and Drawbacks

Anyone working in web marketing will come across the term LP, or landing page.
A basic grasp of LPs is essential for anyone in web marketing.
This article explains what a landing page is and what it does for you.

“I want to know the basics of landing pages.”
“I want to know why landing pages are built.”
“I want to know the advantages and disadvantages of landing pages.”

This article is for you.

1. What is a landing page (LP)? How does it differ from a website?

First, what a landing page is.
LP covers two things: a broad sense and a narrow sense.
Without knowing the difference you can end up talking at cross purposes.
It is worth getting straight.

1.1 Landing page in the broad sense

In the broad sense, the first page a visitor opens is called the Landing Page (LP).
Landing means coming to ground, so it is the page they land on.
In other words: In the broad sense it means the first page opened, the entry page, and
it is most often reached from search results or an ad.

1.2 Landing page in the narrow sense

Next, the narrow sense.
This one is a single long page built specifically to drive the visitor to act.
It is usually run alongside web advertising such as search ads.
When people say LP in a web marketing conversation, they almost always mean this narrow sense.

From here on, this article deals with the landing page in the narrow sense.

1.3 What an LP is for

An LP exists to win conversions — enquiries and orders — efficiently.
On an ordinary website, visitors wander across all sorts of pages,
which can make conversions harder to come by.
Sending them instead to a page built around the service or product you want to sell lets you focus on that one thing and lift the conversion rate.

2. What makes an LP an LP

Unlike an ordinary website, an LP is built to be complete in a single page.
It is built for conversion rather than to convey a company philosophy or company details, so there are very few links — only the ones that serve that purpose, such as an enquiry button.

The whole thing is written to flow like a salesperson’s pitch, so it carries a lot of information and usually runs as one long page.
Eye-catching design is scattered throughout, more so than on an ordinary website, to keep the visitor reading to the end.
There are fewer design constraints than on a website, so you can lay it out freely.

3. Advantages of an LP

An LP is a web page that raises conversions efficiently.
Here are some of the concrete advantages of building one.

3.1 Fewer people drop off

Because an LP is complete in a single page, the drop-off rate is lower.
An ordinary website lines up all sorts of menus, so visitors jump about from page to page.
The information that fits them often fails to get through, or they land on a page they have no interest in and drop off, and no conversion follows.
Guiding them to behave the way you hoped is difficult.
An LP, on the other hand, is a single page built around the service or product the visitor wants to know about, carrying nothing surplus, so visitors do not move off to other pages and the drop-off rate stays low.

3.2 You can present information in the ideal order

To get someone to buy, you have to give them the information in the right order.
Visitors carry questions and worries of some kind and want them resolved.
A page that works through those questions and worries one by one is effective.

A typical flow runs like this.

“Do any of these sound familiar?”
→ They recognise themselves
“There is a way to solve that.”
→ They become interested
“Here is the service.”
→ They start to want it
“●% off right now!” “No pushy sales calls!”
→ Nudge them to press the sign-up button

A landing page lets you present your service or product in this kind of effective order.
It is rather like having the landing page stand in for a salesperson.

And once it is built it needs almost no staff time, so you can use it as a tool that sells for you automatically.

3.3 Conversions come more easily

As noted above, landing pages have a low drop-off rate and can deliver information in an order that matches what the user is interested in.
And because there is no extraneous information or menu buttons, the user has only two options: move on to an enquiry (or a purchase), or close the page.
Narrowing the choices makes conversions easier to win than on a conventional website.
A conversion rate of roughly 3% is good for a landing page, it is generally said.

3.4 Measurement and improvement are easier

On a conventional website, users enter through different pages and move around between them, which makes measuring results laborious.
A landing page, by contrast, is self-contained on a single page, so results are very easy to measure and ideas for improvement come readily.

4. Disadvantages of a landing page

4.1 It costs money

There are broadly three ways to build a landing page.
・Use a free tool
・Design and code it yourself
・Commission a production company

If you commission a production company, then depending on the volume and the design, the going rate is somewhere around 200,000 to 800,000 yen.
It is a sizeable sum, but once it is built there is no monthly fee for the landing page itself, so it is purely an upfront investment.
If you run ads to drive traffic to the landing page, the advertising spend comes on top of the production cost.

4.2 Not effective for SEO

Because a landing page has to be built with eye-catching design, text is not always entered as text.
Distinctive fonts and decorative treatments are often used to build the design, and the result is then turned into an image.
Text inside an image cannot be read by search engine crawlers, however, so a landing page with a lot of image-based text may be judged a thin page and put at a disadvantage for SEO.

Pages with many images also tend to load slowly and may be rated poorly, which is another reason they are ill-suited to SEO.
Traffic tends to come from advertising rather than from pure organic search.

4.3 Do not expect visitors to browse further

A landing page is dedicated to a single service or product and is built with unnecessary links stripped out, so you cannot expect visitors to move on to your website.
That tends to push the bounce rate up.

Since the aim is to raise conversions for one particular service or product, there is nothing to be done about the lack of onward browsing.
It is precisely by leaving out extraneous information and menus, so that people do not drop off, that you can keep the conversion rate high.

5. What to do once the landing page is built

Once the landing page is built, run web advertising.
Search advertising is the best place to start.
Landing pages and web advertising work very well together, and they are effective because you can reach the audience you are aiming at.
If you want to sell a product aimed at women in their twenties, for example, you write search ad copy for women in their twenties and use banner images aimed at them.
Then you raise the conversion rate by keeping the landing page itself consistent with the ads.

That said, building a landing page does not mean results arrive immediately.
However good the service or product is, conversions will be hard to come by if the points you make, and the order you make them in, are off.
And even if the landing page itself is well built, there will be no conversions if the ad copy and banner images get a poor response.
The people running the landing page and the ads need to talk it through and keep improving.

Related article:
What is search advertising? A plain explanation of how it works, how to set a budget and how to manage it

6. In closing

We hope that was useful.
Here is a recap of the main points.

■What a landing page is
・The page a visitor lands on.
・Usually a long, design-led page built specifically for conversion.

■Advantages of a landing page
・Fewer people drop off
・You can deliver information in the ideal order
・Conversions come more easily
・Measurement and improvement are easier

■Disadvantages of a landing page
・It costs money
・Not effective for SEO
・Do not expect visitors to browse further

One last point to watch: when you put a landing page behind web advertising, each platform sets its own rules (Google, Yahoo! and so on).
Here are a few examples.
・The landing page must state the advertiser’s details as text
・The wording must not breach the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations or the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act
・If you claim results, show the data behind them

There are rules for banner images and search ad copy as well.
Check each platform’s rules carefully before you build, so that you do not have to rebuild afterwards.

Building a perfect landing page first time is hard, but if you keep making small improvements you should be able to push the conversion rate up. Do give it a go.