Regardless of the medium, the goal of most advertising is to drive customer demand. When you click on any of the different types of online advertisements or organic search results, you will be directed to a landing page. A landing page is the first page a visitor sees after clicking on or entering a specific link or web address. Figure 1-4 shows a banner ad for American Express. When you click on the banner ad, you will arrive at the landing page displayed in Figure 1-5.

In the offline world, as customers see your different ads, they might at some point get in their car and drive to your store. The entrance point and the first thing customers see when they walk into a physical store mirror the online landing page. That physical “landing page” is the first chance for a brick-and-mortar retailer to make a positive impression on a customer.

In the overall process of marketing, most of a company’s time and resources are spent on creative, production, media placement, and similar tasks. Often, without the proper attention, a landing page is marginalized, giving the impression that the strength of the overall campaign is all that is needed to attract customers. However, getting a prospect to the landing page does not mean success; it is just the start of the road to success.

Although you might get away with paying little attention to a customer’s entrance point (landing page) in the physical world, data shows that consumers are not very tolerant of poorly designed online landing pages. There is a large difference between how customers react to an online landing page and how they react to a physical store’s equivalent. Our analysis of hundreds of online advertising campaigns shows that more than 50% of online visitors leave landing pages in fewer than five seconds without continuing to the rest of the website.