You've likely heard of a "Landing Page" before, but do you know what it is? At its most generic level, it simply means the first page that people "land on" when they visit your site. This is most often the home page, but not always. If your site is fully indexed in a search engine, people may click from the search engine to one of your lower-level pages (not the top-level home page). This is why it's so important to have a navigation menu on all pages of your site, in case someone lands on a lower-level page, you want to make it easy to find out more information about your organization.

Unique Landing Pages are often used in marketing plans to measure ROI (return on investment). If you have an ad in a magazine, the yellow pages, on the radio, or even on another website, you can create a unique landing page as the call to action. Thus, when someone sees, hears or clicks from your ad, they go to yoursite.com/landing-page, giving you the ability to measure the visits to that particular page. For instance, let's say I place an ad in the Yellow Pages of the phone book. I can include in the ad, "For a special discount coupon, visit http://www.reevesdigital.com/yellow-pages." On my site, I create that landing page, but I don't put in any links to it from anywhere else on the site. I don't want anyone to accidentally stumble on to that page, I want them to get there only because they saw the ad in the phone book. Then I can measure the statistics on this one page alone, seeing just how effective it was of the course of the year. Then this tells me whether I should invest in another yellow pages ad the next year, or if I should spend my advertisting budget elsewhere. Furthermore, by including a coupon on this page, I can see not only how effective my yellow pages ad was in getting people to my site, but also how effective my web page was in converting them into a customer by how many people redeem the coupon. Over time you can tweak the message and design on your website to see what it takes to draw in more customers.

Google Analytics makes it easy to evaluate your top landing pages. If you have a unique landing page you want to evaluate, you can create an advanced segment to analyze. If you're just interested in seeing which pages are landed on first the most frequently, you can look under Content >> Top Landing Pages. This is useful in understanding which pages your customers find most useful because they either bookmark them (add them to their favorites) or it's what they're searching for and finding in the search engines.