Microsite or landing page: which structure fits your campaign

A new offer to launch, a dedicated budget, an agency that suggests "a microsite" without being asked twice. The word sounds reassuring — more serious, more complete than a plain landing page — but it also means more pages, more navigation, more production time. Before signing off on the brief, it's worth knowing what each structure actually buys you, and what it costs in clicks before conversion.

What a microsite actually is

A microsite is a small, self-contained site separate from the main one, usually built for a campaign, an event, a sub-brand, or a specific product line. It has several pages tied together by its own navigation: a home page, an overview, offers or speakers, sometimes a dedicated blog, a contact form separate from the main site's. It often lives on its own subdomain or domain, with a visual identity that can diverge from the parent brand. It's a full site, just smaller in scope — not a single page.

The landing page, by comparison

A landing page works the opposite way: one page, one offer, one action expected from the visitor — sign up, buy, book a call. No menu to scatter attention, no separate "about" page: everything needed to decide fits on that single scrolling screen. We cover this anatomy in our guide to what makes a landing page convert, and the distinction with other page formats in landing page vs destination page: getting the terminology right.

Microsite and landing page, side by side

Why every extra page costs you conversions

This isn't only a budget question: navigation depth has a measured cost on visitor behavior. In a landmark web ergonomics study presented at CHI in 1998, Kevin Larson and Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research) compared several site architectures, varying the number of navigation levels needed to reach the same piece of information (Larson & Czerwinski, 1998, Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval, CHI '98). The result: moving from a two-level hierarchy to a three-level one noticeably slowed down information retrieval and increased "lostness" — the feeling of being lost within the site. A structure that's too flat isn't optimal either for exploring a content-rich site, but the lesson for a single-goal campaign is clear: every extra navigation click before reaching the form or the buy button is friction — exactly what a landing page is built to remove.

When a microsite earns its place

• An event with several tracks to present separately: agenda, speakers, ticketing, venue details — see our guide on the landing page for a B2B trade show, for when one page still does the job.
• A range of distinct products or services grouped under one campaign, each deserving its own page and its own call to action.
• Long-lived brand content — a case study library, a resource hub — that needs to stay browsable and indexable over time, not just during a campaign.
• A temporary visual identity strong enough to justify stepping outside the main site: a rebrand, a joint venture, an event-specific brand.

When a single landing page is enough — most of the time

For a single offer aimed at a defined audience — a discovery call, a free trial, an ebook, a webinar signup — the landing page stays the most cost-effective format: it's built fast, it's tested fast, and it never dilutes the visitor into a menu. That's also the logic behind one landing page per ad group rather than a generic page shared across several campaigns, and behind multi-city landing pages for local SEO rather than a microsite per location: it's better to multiply targeted pages than to multiply the navigation levels of a single structure.

The trap of defaulting to a microsite

The habit of proposing a microsite for every new campaign carries a hidden cost: more pages to maintain, more content to keep current, more surface to secure and evolve once the campaign wraps up — topics we cover in the cost of maintaining a landing page and the full budget of a landing page. If the goal boils down to a single conversion, a microsite often delivers nothing more than a well-written landing page — it just costs more to build and to keep alive.

The middle ground: several landing pages instead of one unified microsite

Between a single page and a microsite with shared navigation, there's a third option, often the most effective one for a business selling several distinct offers: several independent landing pages, each built around one single action, linked to each other through internal linking rather than a shared menu. That's the principle covered in internal linking between landing pages: SEO and conversion. It's also, very concretely, the model behind our own catalog of 10 templates (€89 each, €229 for the full pack): each template is a self-contained landing page built for one specific offer and audience, not a sub-page of a shared microsite — a visitor who lands on the webinar template doesn't need to cross a menu to understand the offer and sign up.