Landing pages are the cornerstone of performance marketing. They have many functions but one goal only – is to make the website visitors convert and engage.
Conversion translates into achieving a desired reaction, let it be clicking on the call to action (CTA) button, filling out a form, or redirecting to a shopping site. A good landing page should convenience the visitor that they simply need the advertised product or service, and leave a lasting impression. In many cases, landing pages are the main advert, and that’s exactly why they need to be good.
Landing page optimization allows you to get more from your landers. It’s actually fascinating how tweaking some seemingly inconsequential elements can increase conversions, tangibly boosting your sales.
Let’s take a closer look at the best landing page optimization tips, tricks & tools that can help increase your landing page conversion rates!
What is a landing page?
Landing pages are usually standalone websites with limited functionality. They are not intended to be explored but exist merely to provide information about something. Most often, the purpose of a lander is to encourage a sale and support the sales conversion funnel.
Depending on the funnel and the offer itself, a landing page might function as an advertisement. During a customer journey, it may be the very first interaction the consumer will have with the product or service, but it can also be its second or third step.
A good lander will provide the customer with exhaustive information about the product. If your strategy includes sparking the consumer’s curiosity with a rather cryptic initial message, the landing page is your chance to explain or elaborate on the idea. The point of that additional step between a catchy ad and the product page is to explain, inform, convince, and finally – to sell.
How can you design a great landing page?
A landing page may not be as complex as a website, but that doesn’t mean that you can skip out on its design and development. It might not have different tabs and sections, but it has a mighty purpose – to bring you conversions and sales.
When it comes to forms of landers, in modern performance marketing the possibilities are basically endless. Nowadays, the most effective way to induce a conversion is to capture the consumer during the key points of interaction, and given how chaotic their shopping behavior can be, it’s not an easy task. This is why within the commerce media sphere you can find a wide palette of ad formats and placements, including different kinds of landing pages.
Commerce content, for example, brings you the benefit of a high level of contextualization, blending seamlessly with the publisher’s site. Native content advertisement is both incredibly persuasive and safe for the brand, so it’s no wonder it quickly gains popularity. By nature, it is supposed to resemble the website it is hosted on, so its design will be dependent on the publisher’s side.
The simplest form of a landing page should include a value proposition and a clear CTA. In many cases, the simplicity will work in your favor. However, in formats where the lander isn’t the first point of contact for the consumer, the included information may noticeably expand. In such cases, you want to answer questions such as:
- What is it that you’re offering;
- What is so special about your offer;
- What is the price;
- What are the benefits;
- Why should the visitor trust you;
And, most importantly:
- Why does the purchase need to be made right now?
How can you optimize your landing page for conversions?
Now onto the most important part. No matter what landing page format you go for, if you want to boost your landing page conversion rate you need to optimize your landing page design and content. There are many ways to do that, though if you have a particularly simple design some tips might not apply to you.
Still, sooner or later you will run a campaign that needs a jaw-dropping lander to convert so it’s highly recommended that you don’t skip this part!
Audit your landing page
Audit for your lander should be a two-stage affair. The first stage should include analyzing the site from the inside – mainly for the purpose of optimizing the speed of your landing page. Changing image formats, deleting unused code, and upgrading your hosting are some of the improvements that you can make to decrease your landing page bounce rate and increase conversion rates.
The second stage is all about looking at your page from the perspective of the visitors. Is the page easy to navigate? Are there no spelling mistakes? If it includes a translation, does it sound native? Does the site look professional? Is the CTA button clearly visible? Check the site yourself, read through the text, and think about the needs of the target audience.
Once you walk through the user journey and check your code, it’s time to list what’s wrong.
Identify the problems
Most of the pain points of your landing page will not be difficult to spot. The code needs to reflect only the landing page elements necessary for its functioning and the content needs to be as simple as possible without skipping on the necessary parts.
Unfortunately, not all problems are easily spotted and some can only be identified through a/b testing or external tools. While you might not think about something as a problem, e.g. a certain design element or a color scheme, if you try a different option, it may turn out that the new one has a much higher conversion rate.
What landing page optimization tools should you use?
Optimizing landing pages gets much easier once you start using the proper tools. There is a wide variety of them available on the market, although it’s important to keep in mind that you do not necessarily need to use each and every type.
The tools mentioned below are suggestions based on community recommendations and they should not be taken as the only ones you need. There are plenty of performance marketing strategies, hence, the recommendations for tools will be different depending on who you ask. Nevertheless, they may prove very useful, so we encourage you to check them out.
Behavior analytics tools
Heatmaps are a great example of such a tool. Depending on your marketing strategy and the type and complexity of your landing page, getting insights into the behavior of your site visitors can be very beneficial. Sometimes, identifying what spot on the page gets the most attention from a user can bring immediate results. Just place the call to action there and your landing page conversion rate is bound to increase.
The point of tools such as Crazy Egg, Smartlook, or Hotjar, is to give you additional insights about the customer journey, and if you want to adopt the best practices for landing page optimization, a behavior analytics tool should definitely be in your arsenal.
SEO tools
When you are creating a landing page, SEO optimization is not always your biggest priority. It mostly depends on the type of the lander – in general, SEO tools are best for cases in which the effectiveness of your ads depends on how many visitors are coming to your site on a daily basis.
You can use tools such as Ubersuggest, SEMrush, or Answer the Public (or even simple SEO plugins) to improve your landing page by adding keywords or angles that are most commonly searched for. By using a CTA based on one of the most popular searches, you increase your chances of advertising the product in a way that is tailored perfectly for the kind of potential customers you’re trying to reach.
In short, the best practices and tips to use for landing page search engine optimization include:
- Researching keywords (niche-related, intent keywords, competition keywords)
- Implementing them on your website
- Optimizing featured snippets and meta descriptions
- Improving the page loading speed
- Adding internal and external links
Page speed tests
Focusing on the load speed of the site is a crucial part of landing page optimization. According to Tooltester’s Website Loading Time Statistics for 2023:
- Almost 70% of consumers declare that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer
- Website conversion rates drop by 4.42% with each second of load time that goes by
- On mobile devices, a page load time of 10 seconds increases the bounce rate by 123%
You can make sure your loading speed is up to par by using some of the freely available websites, such as Page Speed Insights. They will take a couple of seconds to run a check on your lander and tell you what’s wrong – including a few helpful tips for landing page optimization in the process.
Landing page builders
If you do not have an on-site development team that builds landing pages for you whenever necessary, landing page builders are the best option.
Builders such as PureLander or LanderLab give you unlimited options for adjusting and improving the customer experience. They provide both – ready-made templates and various conversion rate-improving scripts, but also the flexibility to design any landing page you want.
You can use the drag-and-drop editor to build a page from scratch, but also to make small adjustments and alternate versions for a/b testing and overall optimizing your landing pages.
What is a good landing page conversion rate?
Although it may sound strange, it’s basically impossible to provide a definite, one-sentence answer to this question, because a good landing page conversion rate is not that easy to measure. Every business is unique and running different campaigns will have different expected results depending on the niche, consumer attitude, and many other factors.
- According to WordStream, a good conversion rate is somewhere between 2% and 5%.
- The bottom 25% has a conversion rate lower than 1% while the top 10% reaches a landing page conversion rate of 11%.
- E-commerce has the lowest conversion rates of all industries, with a median of 1,84%. The top 25% reaches 3.71%, while the top 10% – 6.25%.
Now, it’s very important to have some additional context when looking at these statistics. At first glance, such low scores for e-commerce may seem alarming, but you need to keep in mind that it’s an enormous industry, where audiences are huge and competition is respectively stiff. E-commerce is an industry that is immensely challenging… but also rewarding unlike any other.
This is why you want to reach for solutions that are proven to significantly boost conversion rates. By optimizing the targeting, bids, sources, and placements you can reach your target audience more effectively, capture their attention quicker, hold it for longer, and – what’s most important – encourage an immediate conversion.
Landing page optimization – best practices
The process of landing page optimization is not straightforward. It’s a process of trial and error – the best landing pages usually go through a few different iterations before they reach their maximum potential.
Let us share a few optimization tips that will make this process easier:
- Track the most important metrics and make changes based on data, not just gut feelings.
- Always keep your lander congruent with the product page (colors, products, descriptions, angles).
- Keep things simple, but don’t be afraid to throw in an extra script for additional conversions.
- Use the FOMO and ROMO marketing strategies.
- Make sure your CTA button is visible at all times.
- Start with a/b testing and reject the underperforming landers.
- .Do further a/b testing on the landing page that won the previous iteration.
- Add legitimacy to your sites by providing testimonials and a customer seal of approval.
- Be clear about what you’re selling and why.
Conclusions
Landing page optimization is essential for increasing conversion rates and turning visitors into customers. It’s not a straightforward process and in a manner of speaking, a perfect landing page doesn’t exist. Even ones that have been optimized with the best practices in mind and reached their maximum potential may decrease in effectiveness over time. Audience behavior depends on many fleeting factors and it’s crucial to stay conscious, informed, and ready to implement changes whenever the situation calls for them. The more tools you have when it comes to the optimization of not only your landers, but also entire campaigns, the better equipped you are to face the numerous challenges of performance marketing in the e-commerce industry – and emerge victorious.
Magdalena Bober
