Landing pages play a critical role in digital marketing, driving leads and revenue by giving potential customers what they need, when they need it.
Whether your goal is to generate leads, sell products, or collect data, landing pages are where the action happens. Optimizing your landing pages ensures they’re planned, designed, executed, and always working correctly to provide your visitors with the very best user experience (UX).
This chapter of the LPO guide gives you a list of actionable steps—along with landing page optimization best practices and tips—so you can start boosting your site conversions today. Ready to get started?
5 steps + best practices to create high-performing landing pages
Many great user experiences begin on a landing page, setting the tone for how visitors will engage with your business moving forward.
Outstanding landing pages help convert a higher percentage of website visitors into customers. The question is: how do you optimize your homepage and landing pages to fulfill these promises?
Follow these steps to give your landing pages—and your business—an edge.
1. Analyze user insights and behavior
The best way to improve your landing page performance is to understand how—and why—your visitors really use the page.
Knowing your users and analyzing their on-page behavior is critical to LPO. It helps you understand what drives, convinces, and persuades users to take action and puts you well on your way to developing a unique plan for optimization.
2. Draft hypotheses
Pinpointing the barriers and hooks your users encounter should bring major conversion issues and opportunities into focus. The next step is to develop strategies to minimize the barriers and maximize the hooks while considering your users’ unique concerns and desires.
Formulate hypotheses about how changes to the landing page might address these areas and improve the user experience.
3. Implement and test your changes
With your hypotheses in mind, it’s time to implement your changes and create and execute tests to measure their impact on the landing page.
A/B testing—or split testing—any changes you make to your landing page lets you scientifically measure their effect on your conversions and determine their short- and long-term impact on your user experience. It’s also a great way to be bold and take risks without applying one hypothesis to all of your page traffic.
Use A/B testing tools like Optimizely and Omniconvert to implement and test changes to the landing pages you’ve drawn from the research stage. The more you test your landing page elements, the more accurate your data is.
Remember that A/B testing doesn’t have to be a complete redesign—it can be smaller landing page iterations tested over a few weeks or months.
4. Analyze results and measure performance
Once your experiment is complete, track and monitor the performance of your landing page variable to ensure the optimization efforts have been effective.
If you don’t see a significant uplift in performance from the variable, that’s okay too! You can still gather data from this experiment and go back to the drawing board with other iterations. Your experiment only ‘fails’ if you don’t learn something from it.
5. Iterate and continue optimizing
Landing page optimization is iterative: your job continues after the first round. Once you’ve started making changes to address your visitors’ drivers, barriers, and hooks, and testing their effectiveness, it’s time to go back to Step 1 and uncover your next big opportunity.
This step-by-step guide to effective LPO is a great starting point to help you construct your best first attempt at an optimized landing page. After that, experiment! Let your customers decide—and tell you—what the best-converting page looks like.
Keep testing user experience and reiterating the continuous discovery process to improve results even further as your products and the needs of your target audience change.
This optimization process ensures each high-converting landing page is adapted to suit the users you’re targeting, the conversion goals you’re reaching for, and the means you need to get there.
As you continue to iterate and optimize based on test results and user feedback, you invest in a user experience that will help you create a truly valuable landing page that solves problems for your users and helps them reach their objectives.
Before starting a campaign, specific metrics are set to measure. Ensure that you are selecting the right and achievable goals for yourself. Answer the following questions before you set campaign goals-
- Which pages generate the maximum page views?
- Are the goals relevant to your success?
- Have you set the specific objective for your campaign?
- Do you think it’s going to be time-consuming?
- Are the targets aligned with your personal goals?
Answering these questions will help you state real and achievable goals for yourself and the organization. It will also help you work efficiently and keep you focused & motivated toward the target.
Here are a few important attributes of Landing Page Metrics-
- It helps analyze which Page gets more viewers and conversion rate.
- It lets you identify for how long a viewer stays on the Page.
- Let’s examine if targets were achieved, i.e., Conversion Rate=Investment in the ad campaign.
- Analyze the average Landing Page Conversion Rate.
- What was the Bounce Rate?
How do we calculate Conversion Rate?
Data speaks louder than words. Hence, one should know how to calculate the Conversion Rate to identify the landing page further.
Conversion Rate is the percentage of the visitors who take action on the website. The simple formula for Conversion Rate is-
Number of Conversions/ Total number of Visitors * 100
What is a good Landing Page Conversion Rate?
Track Landing Page Metrics That Matter
One shouldn’t ignore the importance of landing page metrics for any campaign. These metrics can help you build an efficient and successful landing page for the customers. Measuring metrics timely can help you clutter out the page and keep only informative things.
At Apexure, we design high-converting landing pages that can increase your conversion rates, drive additional traffic, and simply help you gain access to the landing page metrics that are most important to you. Contact me today!