The goal of the landing page is to move the visitor to take the primary desired action. Whether that action be signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, completing a survey—it needs to be a business decision driven by an online business strategy.

Business goals will differ from website to website, and landing pages will vary accordingly.

If your business goal is to:

1. Capture leads. Your landing page would contain a form that captures information from potential customers qualified by showing interest in your offer (free newsletter, free white paper, free tips via email, etc.). The desired action is to click on the “submit” button.

2. Sell online. Your landing page would contain all of the specific information a visitor would need to have to make a purchasing decision. The desired action is to click on the “add to cart” button.

3. Branding/Marketing. Your landing page would engage and even entertain visitors possibly through a video. The desired action is to click on a “tell a friend” link.

These are just some samples; your landing pages may have different goals and desired actions. The point is that you have to define the business goal first in order to know what the desired action should be and the type of information a visitor will need to be moved to make that action.

Once you have defined the goal and specified the desired action, you want to make sure you measure the success of your landing page. What you want to measure is the conversion rate. What percentage of the visitors that came to the landing page actually clicked on the desired action link or button?

You may even want to try developing more than one landing page for the same product or service. You can use these multiple pages to track and measure what makes visitors respond the most. You want to vary just one variable in each so you know exactly what’s triggering this difference in response.

There are 3 components to this tracking. First, you need to give your landing page a unique URL so you can track its unique traffic (via Google Analytics, for example). Second, you need to track the actual clicks to the call to action. Finally, you want to follow who actually became a customer.