The fastest way to increase conversion rates is landing page optimization.

Your entire marketing funnel will fail if your landing pages don’t work well.

This crash course will cover all you need to know about optimizing landing pages. We’ll also show you some incredible pages and give you the best tips to optimize your landing pages quickly.

This guide will help you increase sales, reduce ad costs and make more money.

Let’s get started.

What is Landing Page Optimization?

LPO (landing page optimization) refers to the process of optimizing a landing page’s performance (increased sales, signups, and clicks). By improving various aspects of the page (copywriting and layout, load speed, etc.

A crucial part of any Miami digital marketing campaign is landing pages.

No matter what you do, whether you are running paid advertising or driving organic traffic through social media, the end goal is to funnel your audience through landing pages (or multiple) to make them customers.

Landing page optimization isn’t a one-time activity. It is an ongoing process. After making a change, you will observe how the page performs and then make adjustments based on those results. You might have to make major changes or completely rewrite the page, but most often you will make small tweaks over time to improve the page’s performance.

This is a huge issue, so let’s get into the reasons why it’s so important.

Why is Landing Page Optimization so Important?

A digital marketing agency in New York campaign cannot be run without at least one landing page. The initial version will only be a “best guess” in many aspects. Until the sales numbers start coming in, you don’t know how great your page is.

You will have one or more landing pages that are not perfect when you launch a campaign. These landing pages are critical to the success of your campaign.

Landing page optimization is an obvious choice in this context.   

You can improve the landing page and your overall campaign.

But let’s get specific.

How can improving your landing page result in wins for your company?

A. Acquire More Customers

A landing page that is “better” by definition means that you get more signups and sales.

Optimizing your landing page can be compared to acquiring more customers with the same traffic.

B. Make More Money

All things being equal, more customers mean more money. Your landing page will do a lot of heavy lifting for your business than if it was just hitting the gym.

Get stuck on the landing!

C. Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

These two benefits are obvious but landing page optimization can also have a significant impact on your marketing performance.

Your Quality Score (QS), which closely links to your CPC, is directly related to the relevancy and quality of your landing page. Data shows that ads with a QS greater than 6 have a 16-50% drop in CPC. Ad accounts with low-quality scores pay up to 500% per click.

You’ll be charged more for each acquisition if your ads don’t engage users. You might not be seen at all, and you could lose out to a competitor who optimized its landing pages.

D. Maximize the Value of Your Ad Spend

This is a way to look at the benefits that we have already mentioned.

A great page that converts well is a sign you’re getting the most out of your advertising dollars.

Poor landing pages can lead to poor campaign performance and amazing ad results. Poor landing pages can lead to bounces and visitors who click through.

Let’s now understand the importance of optimization. Let’s look at some great examples of landing pages to get an idea of what we are aiming for.

6 Examples Of Great Landing Pages

This crash course will focus on the most important things that give you the best bang for your buck.

These are the most important aspects of your landing pages:

1. It is a powerful headline that grabs the attention of the audience and sparks their curiosity
2. Copy persuasive that emphasizes your unique value proposition
3. A simple, clean design makes it easy for visitors to convert.
4. A strong CTA with persuasive elements

These landing pages are a great example of how to optimize your pages.

1. Hubspot’s Social Media Workbook Landing page

Hubspot’s content minions, the Jedis of lead generation are their content minions. It’s therefore no surprise that they appear on this list. Although there isn’t much information on the social media book landing page it’s clear WHY it works.

The Hubspot landing page is simple, clear, and intuitive. In a matter of minutes, users can understand exactly what Hubspot offers — a Beginner’s Guide on Social Media — and the next steps. Although the call to action is clear, Hubspot makes it easy for users to take the next steps by highlighting that the eBook is completely free.

Hubspot has a list with outcomes and a preview of the eBook content for those who aren’t convinced and want to keep scrolling.

Highlight the benefits

2. Spotify’s homepage

This is not the simple, but strong value proposition

Like Hubspot’s, Spotify’s homepage looks clean, simple, and intuitive. It clearly explains the user’s benefit: unlimited access to millions of songs, regardless of their tastes. It is simple and bright. The background also reflects the brand’s playful personality.

Spotify instantly removes all barriers to conversion when it comes to the CTA. Spotify users can also get Spotify free of charge, without a credit card.

3. Dollar Shave Club Homepage

“Will it work for me?”

Dollar Shave Club… no more!

This brand has been featured in many case studies. However, they just updated their website, and it is a huge success!

The new value proposition is based on the question “Will it work for me?”

You can also focus the copy in this direction by clicking here. The header background shows people with different hair types. It visually illustrates that this razor is made for you, even if your hair is unique.

4. Jacob McMillen’s Sales page   

Your page’s quality doesn’t matter if nobody is reading it. To entice readers and make them want to interact with your page, a compelling headline is essential.

This sales page illustrates how to use key audience pain points to grab attention.

He’s created the ideal context for enticing readers to his sales page by combining the headline that focuses on pain points with the subheadlines that focus on benefits.

5. Brightland Homepage

The food industry is all in the use of content to sell. Brightland’s homepage perfectly does this. Brightland’s landing pages feature their olive oil in a stunning photo. The copy also highlights the product’s California roots and ethical production.

Brightland has a call-to-action to shop, a banner that highlights their free shipping for orders above $60, and also includes a pop-up with their newsletter.

This seems simple!

Brightland’s popup newsletter sign-up form is simple and offers a chance to win a $100 Visa gift certificate.

6. Coursera Homepage

“Join for Free!” will remain a strong call for action

Coursera’s landing page is about encouraging people to succeed through education. The headline is aspirational and taps into the visitor’s desire to learn and grow. Partner logos from Google and IBM and Duke University give credibility to the platform.

This landing page, when combined with the call to action to sign up for Coursera, is a powerful tool to get people to sign up.

18 Tips for Optimizing Landing Pages

We now know what you want, so how can you optimize your landing pages?

The process can be quite simple or extremely complex. is the place to go for a deeper dive into conversion rate optimization.

We want to give you some quick, simple tips that will help you achieve results quickly in our crash course.

1. Double-check that you have the basics right

Common errors, like long page loads, broken links, or typos can have a significant impact on your conversion rates.

Before you begin testing and tweaking your landing pages, make sure you have followed all the best practices.

• Make sure to check for typos. Typos can be a huge credibility killer. A landing page that contains spelling mistakes has an 85% lower bounce rate than pages with no errors. You can eliminate any errors by reading your page aloud to a friend, asking them to review it, or running through Grammarly.

• You can check your page speed. Why? Google explains: “If your website takes too long to load after someone clicks on your advertisement, they are more likely to abandon your site.” Google may consider this unwelcome behavior to be a sign that your landing page experience is not good. This could impact your Ad Rank.

• Concentrate on one offer. BLULEADZ says that having multiple discounts on your landing pages can confuse visitors and decrease conversion rates by 266%. Keep your message clear and only create one landing page for each offer.

• Make it adaptable to the device. More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. Your landing page should be optimized for desktop, but mobile visitors will make up a large portion of your traffic. This can lead to diluted messages and lost leads.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Landing Page Design is about connecting with users and communicating your value as quickly as possible. You need to create landing pages that are intuitive and resonate with your target customers.

Most brands think they know their target audience. When it comes to designing a landing page, however, they do it for their benefit and not the customer. A landing page designed for a 27-year-old office worker should not be used for a mother of two who is 50.

To get to know your customers, run a survey. Ask your customers about themselves, their browsing habits, and why they use your product. These insights are not possible to get from analytics but they can be invaluable in building landing pages that convert.

3. Take a look at the Customer Journey

Your landing page doesn’t exist in isolation. Your landing page is part of a larger customer journey that must be considered when designing or tweaking it.

You would communicate with a visitor who is new to your site in a different way than you would with someone who has been to your site several times and is considering converting.

Take a fresh look at your page. You can even ask someone in your target audience to take a look at your page. Give them the same context as your user and ask:

• What messages are most effective?
• What’s unclear?
• Are you interested in this offer?
• What can be done to make the page more powerful?

It is possible that you have completely missed a key piece of information or that your offer isn’t making sense at the moment. Based on your insights, you can test different copies.

4. Match the Message to The Purchase Intent

You must match your message with the intent of your PPC campaigns and the keywords used to bring people to your landing page.

A generic landing page may do the job well, but a landing page that is relevant to a user’s search intent will encourage your audience to convert.

Let’s suppose you are a used car company and that a visitor clicked through to your ad after searching “cheap cars in Oklahoma”. A generic landing page could be used that lists all your top-selling cars regardless of price. You could also show the user what they are looking for by filtering the search results to cars below $5,000. This will increase your chances of selling the car.

Always take into account the keywords and the purchase intent behind them. To find the messages that resonate with different ad groups best, run A/B testing and then use these insights to improve your future campaigns. This one simple step will make a big difference in your conversion rate.

5. Focus, Focus, Focus

It is possible to test almost anything: your headline copy and button placement, image choice, page lengths, testimonials, and so on.

It’s easy to lose track of all the possibilities.

Start with the easiest tasks first if you are just starting. You can test the following elements:

• Header image
• Headline copy
• Different types of imagery
• Social proof:
• Long form for signing up
• Call-to-action

6. Use a Heat Map

Heat maps can help you understand user behavior on landing pages by showing:

• Click here to see where users click
• Users can move their cursors with the mouse
• How far do users scroll down the page

You can optimize landing page performance by analyzing user clicks and browsing patterns. If you notice that a lot of people click on the “About Us” link in the navbar, rather than signing up, it might be worth giving more context about who you are on your landing page.

7. Only one change can be tested at a time

It is easy to get distracted by all the elements that you can test, and then jump into testing them all. As the old saying goes, if you try to do it all, you end up doing little.

It’s difficult to identify which elements worked if you test multiple elements simultaneously. Focus on one element at a time, just like a science experiment in school.

Choose one element that you want to test, like your headline copy. You can change that one part only and keep everything else the same. After you have tested it, go through the results and implement them. Then, move on to the next step. Although it takes more time, this is the best way to optimize and test.

8. Concentrate on Content Above the Fold

The browser’s bottom is where the fold is located. Anything that appears on the page when you open it is considered ‘above’. Any content that a user must scroll to is considered ‘below’.

Here’s what “above and beneath the fold” means.

Although the fold concept is somewhat outdated for mobile, it still applies to the principle that you should make the first impressions.

It is content that appears on a user’s first visit to your site (without scrolling), that matters most. So focus on optimizing and testing this area. Once you have that down, experiment with other ways to encourage scrolling.

This is possible by cropping images at the fold. Visitors will intuitively want to continue reading.

9. Always test with an objective or hypothesis in mind

You can see that they have a little copy between the top of the screen and the header image.

To continue the science experiment analogy, you must have a goal or hypothesis in mind before you run your tests.

Yes, increasing your landing page conversion rate is the ultimate goal. Many elements go into locking down that conversion.

Your bounce rate may be high. This means you are paying for clicks, but your message isn’t landing. Your landing page copy might not be strong enough to drive traffic to your site.

Before you start any test, define your objective and your hypothesis.

Your objective might be to lower the bounce rate. A solution-oriented headline may have a lower bounce than an offer-based headline.

This structure provides a structure for every test that you run and informs the next point.

10. Establish KPIs Based on Key Metrics That You Are Measuring

You must track your results when you test any portion of your webpage.

Before optimizing your campaign, make sure you have all conversion goals set up in Google Analytics. Although a sale or lead might be your ultimate goal, many other KPIs can help you optimize your campaign. You might measure the number of people who have added a product or service to their carts, clicked on your contact form, and subscribed to your newsletter.

Prepare a list with the metrics you will be tracking for each test. Include primary and secondary KPIs and your target.

After the test is completed, you can review the results and ask yourself these questions:

• Are you achieving your goals? Why/why not?
• Did the test have any other unanticipated effects on other metrics?
• What can you learn from the results?
• What lessons can you learn from your next experience?

11. Play with your Headline Copy

Your headline is the most important piece on the page. It’s so crucial that we wrote an entire post about creating killer landing page headlines.

This is the best option if you only want to test a single piece of copy on your entire webpage.

Your headline is your chance for you to connect with your audience, and entice them to continue reading. Your headline is the most important part of your content.

Your headline should be clear and concise. Try different headlines. You can experiment with length, value propositions, and numbers to find the one that has the greatest impact.

A subheading is another element you should test. Make a landing page that contains more information and then compare it with the one without.

12. Try the Use of Imagery and Color

Visual elements can be a powerful way to communicate important information quickly and engage users.

This is best illustrated by comparing the Shopify and Squarespace websites.

A similar product, but a different focus

Both websites offer similar products. Shopify is more for small business owners who can use a person to create their website, while Squarespace appeals to a design-oriented audience.

You can experiment with different images to find the one that resonates best with your visitors. You can also replace the image with a plain background, such as the ones shared by Hubspot or Spotify.

13. Incorporate social proof

People want to feel confident about buying something. People want to feel confident about purchasing a product or signing up for a service that has been tested and approved by others.

This is the best way.

Validate their decision-making.

Case studies, testimonials, and reviews can be very persuasive tools for conversion. These tools increase your credibility and strengthen the value of your product. Simple things like including a testimonial on your landing pages can make a big difference in your conversion rate.

There are many ways to incorporate social proof in your posts. It’s worth trying different types of social proof to determine which one converts the most.

There are many forms of social proof. Here’s one testimonial from our homepage.

• Ratings or reviews
• Testimonials
• Information such as your number of customers, subscribers, and happy clients
• Brands with which you have worked
• Popups indicating that someone has just purchased

There are many options. It is all about communication.

14. You can speed it up even more

A 1-second delay in landing pages can result in a 7% decrease in conversions, according to Neil Patel, This means that if you have the opportunity to speed up your landing page, do so.

You can speed up your site even if it loads quickly. But you shouldn’t compromise on design. You can achieve a balance between great design and optimized site speed with A/B testing.

Make a landing page, and then see what happens.

• Images can replace videos
• Reducing the number of images you have on your site
• You can play with the size of your photos
• Animations can be cut down or removed
• Minimize your Javascript and CSS files

You’ll eventually reach a point where your page performance is minimally affected by the addition of design elements. This is the sweet spot.

15. Exit Intent Popups

When a user attempts to leave the page, exit-intent popups are displayed.

Although you hate ’em, you still like cash so…

Exit popups can be a powerful tool for increasing your landing page conversion rates. These pop-ups are much less intrusive and appear immediately after a user visits your site. They also offer the same benefits: data capture and lead generation.

To encourage users to sign up for your newsletter or click through, use a combination of a strong headline and a dedicated offer or discount.

16. Test Different Form Lengths

No one likes to fill out lengthy forms. Nobody. It is possible to make a huge difference in the conversion rates by simply removing some fields from your sign-up forms.

More fields equal more friction… but also means more data…   

You can increase your conversion rate by removing some fields from your form field that currently has 6 fields.

Reexamine your form and consider what information is most important to your visitor. You can cut or consolidate unnecessary fields (e.g. Merge “first name” with “last name” into one “Full name” field or simplify it to just one field for your email address.

17. Make your call to action clear

It’s not a good idea to create a landing page with a beautiful copy and a poor CTA.

It pays to be clear and direct when it comes to your CTA. Don’t try to be vague here. If you want them to purchase from you, make sure you say it in your CTA. You can tell them what you want.

Conversions can also be affected by powerful words like “free” and “now”. To test which CTA performs best when you have a subscription platform that offers a free trial, try one CTA with “Join Now” and another with “Join For Free”.

A line of copy should be included below the CTA button. If a user is required to sign up for a trial, the line copy “No credit card needed” will give them the push they need to click that button and convert.

SaaS Gold: Free Trial and No Credit Card

18. Always Be Testing

What is the difference between a landing site that converts and one that produces average results?

Testing landing pages.

PPC is full of testing. It’s one of the most important elements in optimizing campaigns for ROI or ad spending. You should also test your landing page.

The fluent.group split test page length

Although testing can seem like an endless adventure, there are three areas that we recommend you start with.

1. Page Length
2. Copywriting
3. Design clarity

It can be difficult to predict the impact of page length on your conversion rate. It is best to start with a shorter page as it is the most cost-effective to produce. Then, expand to see if your conversion rate increases or decreases.

Copywriting is the second area to focus on. Does your message get across? Are you covering all the important points? Are you wasting your reader’s time with things that aren’t necessary?

Design clarity is the third area. Is it clear to you, when you look at the page? Are you able to see the direction you should go? Is there anything that could be eliminated? Do you have missing pieces?

Test. Examine the results. Take the time to digest the information. Make the necessary changes.

Rinse and Repeat.

It’s Time to Take Action

It’s cliché to say, but you won’t know what works unless you try it. Get out there and put your landing page optimization skills into practice.

Are you unsure what test to run?

Do you have questions or would like to know more about landing page optimization? Let us handle everything.