What is a landing page?
A landing page is a page with a job. Unlike a homepage, which has to serve everyone, a landing page serves the people who arrived from one place with one intention: the ad they clicked, the email they opened, the search they ran. It picks up where that click left off, makes one offer and asks for one thing: a sign-up, a download, a booking, a purchase, a brief. Navigation is stripped back or removed, because every other link is a way to leave.
There are two broad kinds. Campaign landing pages are built for paid traffic and live for as long as the campaign does. Evergreen landing pages are built for search and sit permanently in the site, one per service or audience, catching people who look for exactly that thing. Both are judged the same way: by the share of visitors who do what the page asks.
Why it matters
Why a landing page matters
Sending paid traffic to a homepage is paying for a click and then asking the visitor to find their own way. A landing page keeps the promise of the ad: same message, same image, same offer, so the visitor never has to wonder whether they are in the right place. That continuity is most of why landing pages convert at multiples of a general page. For search, an evergreen landing page is how a brand owns a term: one page, one topic, deep enough to rank and specific enough to convert.
In practice
How a landing page works in practice
- 01
We start with the source. Who is arriving, from what, expecting what? The headline answers that expectation in the visitor's words. Below it: the offer, the proof (work, numbers, names, reviews), the answers to the objections the sales team hears, and the one call to action, repeated at the top and the bottom. Film does a lot of the lifting on ours, because a thirty-second reel proves more than three paragraphs.
- 02
Then it is built fast and measured honestly. The page loads in a blink on a phone, the form is as short as it can be, the tracking records the conversion, and variants of the headline or the hero are tested when the traffic allows. A landing page is never a one-off design: it is a hypothesis, and the numbers say whether it was right.
At RIOT
Landing pages at RIOT
riot.nyc carries a landing page for each industry we work in, from fashion and luxury to sport and beauty, each one built for the brand that searches for an agency in its own world. They show the work for that industry, say how we approach it and end with the brief. Our sizzle reels page works the same way for the people searching for exactly that.
Watch out
What people get wrong about landing pages
Linking the landing page to the full site navigation, which is a polite way of letting the visitor wander off. Second, asking for too much: a form with nine fields converts a fraction of a form with three. Third, breaking the promise, so the ad says one thing and the page opens on something else. And a strategic one: building a landing page for every campaign and never one for search, so the brand rents its traffic forever and owns none of it.
