A lot of people may say they know how to build a landing page but can they make an Effective Landing Page? A landing page and website are different. Landing Page is meant for a particular goal, mostly conversions. A website is meant for your holistic brand with many different ideas.
Optimizing landing pages to performance can improve your overall ROI by 10X and more. Check out the below table to see how every 1% conversion rate change can take your marketing ROI to the next level.
So how to optimize the landing page? This blog outlines the methodology we used and the results we achieved which will help you in learning to create an effective landing page for startups. We share the aspects that we optimized and how all of them came together to increase our marketing ROI by 3-4 times.
Here are the original ads that we ran before optimization and the results we achieved. This campaign was for Ruby on Rails development service.
Fig. Ads before optimization
Fig: Google Adwords Dashboard
As you can see our CTR was around 1-2%. Spending around $1000, we achieved an ROI of 174%. Now, before I share with you the results post optimization, here are the factors that need to be optimized for the landing page.
a. Page Speed: Portent Law says “ Website Conversion Drops 4.42% for every 1 sec additional load time”
Additionally, Google too has announced about page speed and performance to become more important factors on the search engine optimization and ranking algorithms. Hence, first of all, start to work on making your page speed faster. Here is the GT Metrix report on our original page
Fig: GTMetrix report of landing page pre-optimization
You can see many factors in the report, the ones that are most important are the
- First Contentful Paint
- Largest Contentful Paint
Full load time of your page may not be that important a parameter as there is lazy loading involved on most pages nowadays. We also checked out and removed the additional JavaScript files that were not useful and removed them.
Fig: GTMetrix report of landing page post-optimization
b. Image Optimization
One of the usual suspects of any optimization plan is the images. Images by default are large in size and their size needs to be optimized. Tiny.png is a good tool to quickly change size. If you have a WordPress website, you can use plugins like Smush or ShortPixel. One of the hacks to find problematic images is by using the Download all Images chrome extension that can help you find all images in one place and see through the sizes.
Fig: Download all images plugin interface
c. Improving Speed technically
Once you have the corrections done, the more technical aspects to improve page speed are
- Setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN stores all of your images into multiple servers located in different locations
- Compressing JS
- Caching
- Set rendering Order
- Removing unused scripts/WordPress content
- Changing website host and technology if the backend is a problem
Doing the above changes, we were able to bring the landing page to load between 3-4 secs.
Fig. PageSpeed Insight Score pre-optimisation
This was the optimized Page Speed insights score for the page.
Fig. PageSpeed Insight Score post-optimisation
Ayush Jain, CEO & Co-founder of Mindbowser Group
At Mindbowser, my CTO and I teamed up to build an agency that can bring the best of tech and knowledge to founders.
In case you would like to discuss your options further, feel free to get in touch at ayush@mindbowser.com or book a 30 minutes free consultation call!
Get Free Consultation!Part 2 of the optimization strategy is around your copy and ad quality.
We call it the Symmetric Messaging and User conversion strategy. Once the technical part of the page is set, the next optimization is related to making the user get what he/she came for. Check out our original ad and the landing page.
Fig. Original Landing Page
Do you notice the problem????
Correct: The message on the ad and the landing page does not match. Such disparity leads to higher bounce rates and low conversions. Here are our numbers before optimization
Fig. Numbers before optimization
If your page has an average session time of less than 10 seconds then users are not getting what they came for, which means the messaging is not clear.
For symmetric messaging the Ad and the landing page content should match. Even if not the whole page, at least the heading of the page should be symmetrical. Here are the things to do to build a symmetric and optimized copy for your landing page
- Understand how users are coming to your landing page
- Check the messaging on the ad
- Check what’s the first thing users see on the landing page
- Do the users see what they are expecting so that they feel like seeing more of the same
- Make the color and copy matched if possible
Make sure that your landing page value proposition is very clear. Tools that you can use to further experiment are Google Optimizely and Optimize.
End of the day understand that Data > Instincts. Always!
Gradually, we created 2 different pages to experiment with which worked best.
Fig: Landing Page Variation 1
Fig: Landing Page Variation 2
Bonus Content: Tools Used
Here is a list of other tools that we used to optimize our copies. To come up with headlines we used the tool Peppertype.ai and Usability Hub. Peppertype generates headlines, subheadings, CTA, etc quickly on the basis of keywords. Headline Studio is a tool that helps you rate headlines.
So we made a sheet with shortlisted headlines from Peppertype and checked their score on Headline Studio
Fig: An analysis of headlines using Peppertype and Headline Studio
Attention Insight is another tool that helps to analyze design performance. It tells where the user gaze would go and can be used to further optimize.
Some other aspects that we applied
i. Less Distraction– Kept only one CTA throughout the page
ii. Provided assurance to the user by using social proof, testimonials and feedback.
As you can see we were able to achieve
Too much to absorb. Here’s the Landing Page Checklist that you can use.
Now let’s work together on optimization and see results.
Conclusion
Today, it is vital to have a high-quality landing page if you want to achieve your business goals. Landing pages are meant for a particular goal, usually conversions. Optimizing them for high conversion can be tricky, but the insights and the checklist shared above can help you to improve your landing page and increase your marketing ROI by 3-4 times.
We hope this article helped you in learning to create an effective landing page for startups that converts.
