Key Takeaways
- Analysing Performance - Use GA4 and Microsoft Clarity to identify what’s working and what’s not. Focus on data-driven changes rather than assumptions.
- Technical - Fix technical issues like page speed, mobile responsiveness, and broken elements to improve user experience and conversion rates.
- Messaging - Ensure your messaging answers user questions, aligns with search intent, and addresses buying hesitations clearly and concisely.
- Proposition - Highlight key benefits, unique selling points, and competitive advantages to reduce bounce rates and increase conversions.
- Reviewing Impact - Test changes systematically using A/B testing and track performance metrics to evaluate the impact of your optimisations.
Your landing page conversion rate is the biggest lever that you can pull to improve your ads performance.
That’s right, the biggest gains don’t come from campaign side changes - providing that you’ve gotten the campaign setup correct.
Uplifting conversion rate with landing page optimisations will increase your lead or sales volume, whilst also reducing your acquisition costs so it’s a win-win endeavour.
Most other forms of optimisation either increase volume or improve cost-efficiency.
For the ProfitSpring team, landing page optimisation is a standard part of any PPC or paid social management. If you can get a better throughput of ads users into customers, you can spend more and scale on the front end.
We do a huge amount of landing page optimisation so we’ve put together a simple and systematic approach that you can use to improve performance in your business.
Analysing Performance
The first part of optimisation is to understand what’s performing and what isn’t.
In all instances, avoid making changes to landing pages for changes sake. If you don’t know that there’s an issue, making changes can decrease your performance baseline.
We have the tools and tech available now to ask the data so assumptions can be left at the door.
We use a mixture of GA4 and Microsoft Clarity to work out what’s working and what isn’t on a landing page and ensure it performs well not just for users but also on search engine results pages.
Microsoft Clarity is a free tool which you can add to your website, this will allow you to see heatmaps and actual user screen recordings.
Reviewing this data, you can see where users (broken out by marketing channel and even campaign) scrolled too, what they hovered over, what they clicked, what they didn’t and much more.
It can be eye opening to see how a real potential customer interacts with your business.
Top things to review:
- Are there technical issues such as images not loading, elements not working properly which need to be fixed?
- Are there too many intrusive pop ups disrupting a user who was about to take further action?
- If the user is scrolling images on an ecommerce site, do you need to build out more information content similar to Amazon listings?
- Is the user not getting to see something that would motivate them to buy that’s too far down the page?
- If the user is hovering too long over a message, is it unclear what is meant by it or how they take the next step?
- If the session is very short or elements aren’t loading, is site speed an issue that needs to be resolved?
Once you’ve gathered this valuable data, you should have a shortlist in terms of areas that you need to work on to optimise your landing pages.
We will now look at the most common areas in more detail and outline how we optimise them.
Technical
Issues on the technical side can be plentiful! Fully custom or Wordpress sites can have mobile templates which don’t render correct for the user or have issues which block the content formatting in a way that is user friendly.
These are your 80/20 issues to get resolved as they will increase your conversion rate significantly. If you have no baseline conversion rate, these issues could very much be the culprit.
If you are thinking that page load time is an issue, run the site through the Pingdom page speed test or Google PageSpeed Insights to get validation on your hypothesis.
These tools provide reports which can be shared with your developers to then take corrective action.
Technical issues are function over form optimisations.
Microsoft Clarity will show these to you quickly and easily so that you can take action.
Other common technical issues:
- Cart doesn’t have country or address selection options
- Checkout isn’t showing a popular payment method
- User didn’t accept cookies so certain elements are broken or not loading correctly
- Desktop template works well but doesn’t translate to mobile
- Too many marketing pop-ups blocking the user from completing valuable next steps
If you have a large number of technical issues, it may be easier to replatform than paying to fix them.
Shopify for ecommerce has become the dominant choice for this reason. The key parts of the ecommerce journey are locked as they’re proven to convert 30%+ more effectively than other solutions. Templates are conversion tested in many cases and have a similar structure and have become familiar and easy to use for the customer.
We see almost zero technical issues on Shopify stores compared with countless issues on Wordpress WooCommerce and other platforms.
On the B2B side, Unbounce is a landing page builder which can give the user the same look and feel as your core website but offers agility in being able to make changes via a drag and drop style editor. This removes the need for development resources, cost and time. These pages are mobile responsive and instant loading out of the box so can get you going much faster.
We default to this for all B2B clients as even if the website experience is good, message testing and optimisation is faster via Unbounce which unlocks more commercial opportunities.
Messaging
Messaging is the biggest area for optimisation once technical has been resolved.
Website messaging can be too broad and not pragmatic enough for PPC users who are actively looking for what you offer.
Using your Clarity screen recordings, you can review the user’s keyword search, what got engagement in the ad copy and see if there is parity on the landing page.
Separate landing pages for advertising campaigns can be beneficial as you need a higher conversion rate on paid traffic to generate a viable return given the additional acquisition costs. These pages can either be built into the website and not shown in the navigation or deployed via a tool like Unbounce.
Think about the hesitations or internal questions that a potential customer would have when they are considering buying from you.
Are these questions being answered clearly and concisely on the landing page?
If you see users clicking off the landing page and trying to navigate to other parts of the site, this is a good indication that questions aren’t being answered.
On the B2B side, speaking to the sales team is invaluable for finding out this information. Sales know the common reasons why they lose and win deals. This messaging, especially in the customer’s language, is very rarely displayed on the front end of the website.
Make the changes that you need to on your messaging and go-again.
If you are unsure, a clear and concise message will still be understandable to someone who is more impacted by brand type messaging, a brand heavy message may not be clear to a pragmatic user.
Proposition
The third key element to optimise are the propositional elements of the landing page.
Are the key feature/benefits and unique selling points clear on your landing page?
Are you losing users to competitors where a faster shopping service or lower cost is available?
Is your returns policy strict where others are more open?
Are your callback times for B2B enquiries not stated or much slower than others in your ads auction?
Is your guarantee or warranty not comparable to others in the market?
Is your pricing much higher than the market average?
All of these elements lead to a higher bounce and lower conversion rate.
You can optimise your landing page sometimes by just taking action on the broader propositional elements as stated.
To diagnose if these are a factor, work through technical and messaging first. If you are still seeing a lower conversion rate and want to explore this element further, deploy exit intent surveys via a tool such as Hotjar and ask the customers why they are leaving.
This paired with information from the sales team or reviewing yours and your competitors' Trustpilot reviews will give you insight to what to change based on data.
Some propositional elements you may not be able to change and that’s fair enough. If it’s blocking sales though, how do you then better articulate the reasons why it is how it is?
A common scenario is that a client is over market average price. There are two options here, reduce the price or the more strategic, go back to messaging and ensure that it’s clear why this offering is better value, even though it might be a higher price.
Reviewing impact
With landing page optimisations, if you have a baseline of performance, try to change only one variable at a time or it can be very difficult to ascertain the impact of the change.
A/B testing via Experiments in Google Ads is a great way to scientifically push one landing page against another to measure the impact of the changes made.
The only exception to this rule is with technical issues. If there are clear technical problems with the landing page, make optimisations in one go and then measure the impact.
Changes with messaging can take a longer to see an impact. It’s a worthy endeavour if you have a strong performance baseline and want to move into incremental performance gains.
As a summary, here is our approach to optimise your landing pages:
- Analyse how users interact with your page with Microsoft Clarity and GA4
- List potential issues and areas for optimisation
- Fix technical issues first and review performance uplift 7-14 days after
- Ensure that buying uncertainties and hesitations are clearly addressed in your landing page messaging
- Deploy the messaging changes and review new Clarity recordings as well as metrics like conversion rate to identify if there has been a positive change
- Review the propositional elements of your landing page against the domains shown in your auction insights report
- Deploy Hotjar exit intent surveys if you need to gather customer feedback
- Make propositional changes or revise messaging to articulate ‘the why’ more clearly
- Review performance once changes have been made
It’s natural with landing page optimisation to reach a plateau where you have optimised performance enough that you can’t drive conversion rates any higher.
At this stage, we recommend focussing on other areas rather than pushing for tiny increments which don’t have commercial impact.
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