Great question.

For the most part, landing pages are all the same. They all serve the same purpose in a sense that they’re meant to inform, engage, and communicate effectively. However, depending on your intent and objective, landing pages will vary.

In my years as a marketer, I have come to rely on three different kinds of landing pages that have shown to be most effective for my intent. Through experience, I learned the subtle differences and nuances of each, their pros and cons, and how they work towards a specific objective.

Check it out below.

1. The click-through landing page

This is the simplest of all landing pages. Its main intent is to offer supplemental information about an offer.

Click-through landing pages are straightforward. It’s main goal is to familiarize the audience with the offer and help guide them towards completing a purchase or signing up for your offer. These types of landing pages are made to be brief and concise. It makes use of short bullet points that explain the benefits of the offer. It specifically brings attention to its main pitch—usually a discount or access to exclusive content—before presenting a CTA (call to action) button that drives you to the business’ main website.

Here’s a great example from the Google Cloud Platform:

2. The lead capture landing page

As the name implies, this type of landing page is meant to collect your visitor’s personal data—usually their name and email address. The objective is to generate leads.

In a lot of cases, lead capture landing pages don’t offer visitors the option to opt out. To exit from the page, a visitor has to submit their details that you need. To ensure its success, a business usually offers an incentive to compel their visitors to give them the information they want.

Check out this lead capture landing page from Microsoft’s Small Business Academy:

3. The microsite

This is essentially an independent website, albeit small, that is used to offer comprehensive information for larger campaigns. It will likely have its own URL that is specific to the business, timing, and relevance of the campaign.

Unlike regular landing pages, microsites are more than just a single page. However, similar to the typical landing page, a microsite will serve as a destination for visitors driven from paid ads or even traditional media such as print or TV advertising.

In addition to offering comprehensive information, microsites have more wiggle room to take a more creative approach. This is why creating a microsite is also typically more expensive than most landing pages, which is why you usually see this being used by major brands instead of smaller businesses.

Here’s a great example from luxury fashion house, Chanel which incorporates flash and video as a way to tell their brand story.

There are other landing page styles out there, but these three are by far the most commonly used among marketers. There are no hard and fast rules about which landing page is the best either. It will depend on factors such as what you need, your target audience, and your goals. So, keep that in mind if you plan to use landing pages for your marketing efforts.

If you want more guidance, I’m happy to discuss this with you. Just shoot me an email at Leadspanda or leave a comment below.