What is Landing Page Optimization?

Why should you read this guide?

Take a peek behind the landing page optimization curtain and find out why optimizing landing pages is crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns

Find out what elements you need to include on your landing pages to persuade visitors to fulfill the landing page goal

Discover the user experience principles you need to include on landing pages to make every visitor interaction on your landing page count

Learn the seamless process of creating an optimized landing page from scratch

What is LPO?

post-click landing pages are dedicated standalone pages that allow you to generate conversions for your campaigns. Where creating post-click landing pages ensures you present your visitors with relevant information they need, post-click landing page optimization makes sure that your post-click landing page has the right balance of design, relevance and functionality to persuade visitors to convert.

An optimized post-click landing page makes it easy for visitors to understand the offer presented on the page and click the call to action button.

Landing-page-optimization is the process of improving a post-click landing page to increase the number of visitors who take the desired action. Optimizing post-click landing pages includes but is not limited to writing better copy, adding compelling images, speeding up page load time, modifying the lead capture form etc.

Simply put, any action taken on a post-click landing page to better its user experience and user interface comes under the umbrella of post-click landing page optimization.

An un-optimized post-click landing page makes getting conversions a challenge because it doesn’t take the user into account when it comes to explaining your offer.

See, case in point:

The page is quite cluttered, so much so that it is hard to recognize what the headline is, making it difficult for visitors to fully understand the offer.

The page also has:

  • Company centric copy – discussing the offer from the company’s perspective with the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ doesn’t help you get conversions.
  • The chunks of copy that appears in paragraphs isn’t easy for visitors to read, and so they aren’t able to gauge what the offer is about.
  • The form has too many fields for a first encounter, and seems too invasive.
  • The arrow as a visual cue is a good idea on its own, however, because of the sheer size of the arrow it looks odd on the page.
  • The navigation header has multiple links on it which means that visitors have multiple opportunities to exit the post-click landing page without fulfilling the conversion goal.
  • The two videos on the post-click landing page add visual appeal, but, one of the videos focuses too much on the company.

As a contrast, let’s look at Smartsheet’s post-click landing page, which is optimized for visitors:

  • The page is neatly organized, with the headline standing out describing for visitors exactly what the service is going to help them accomplish.
  • The CTA button is designed in a contrasting color which makes it stand out and easier for visitors to notice.
  • The copy on the page is arranged in easy to read small paragraphs, with all the images on the page complementing the page copy.
  • The video gives an overview of what Smartsheet can do for visitors, discussing the features of the product from the user’s perspective.
  • The customer badges on the page add credibility and make the page more trustworthy.
  • The customer testimonial has a photo alongside it which helps drive in the concept of social proof.
  • The numerical count of users ‘Over 5 million users. 90,000 Organizations. 160+ Countries.’ lets the visitors know how successful the service has been for its customers, which encourages them to click the CTA button and ‘Try SmartSheet Free’.
  • The image of the Smartsheet staff allows visitors to attach human appeal with the product, persuading them to click the call to action button.

Notice the difference between the two pages?

The former page focused on the company instead of the visitor, the latter page did the opposite, it made sure that the visitor had all of the right information presented in the right way before they were expected to click the call to action button.

post-click landing page optimization involves creating post-click landing page elements and design that makes it extremely easy for the visitor to understand the purpose of the page and ideally click the call to action button.

The Difference between post-click landing page Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) deals with optimizing the entire marketing funnel starting from the first encounter the visitor has with the brand down to the thank you email, while post-click landing page optimization only deals with optimizing post-click landing pages.

Conversion rate optimization focuses on overall business outcomes whereas post-click landing page optimization focuses on meeting post-click landing page goals.

Both, conversion rate optimization and post-click landing page optimization basically deal with optimization practices, data collection and interpretation methodologies, the key difference here is the scope of these two practices.

The scope of conversion optimization is quite vast as it takes into account the entire marketing funnel, while post-click landing page optimization just caters to post-click landing pages – in fact, post-click landing page optimization comes under the umbrella of conversion rate optimization.

Why are post-click landing pages Important?

A post-click landing page is a dedicated page that caters to an individual offer, whereas your website homepage is a page which hosts almost all of your company’s offers. A visitor coming to a post-click landing page from an ad, or a link in an email gets to see the exact information that they were looking for or hoping to see. This is not the case when you use your homepage where you should have used a post-click landing page.

Let’s elaborate with an example. Imagine your visitor is in the market for a social media app, a quick search on Google for ‘best social media apps for agencies’ generates the following results:

They click on the first ad, which takes them to this Hootsuite post-click landing page:

(Note: Please click the post-click landing page link to see the entire post-click landing page)

  • The page headline reassures the visitor that they’ve landed at the right place. The Sub-headline ‘Manage multiple social networks, connect with customers, and grow your brand on social media’ is relevant to the keyword that they searched for when they were looking for a tool to manage their agency work.
  • The features of the app are mentioned in short, easy to read paragraphs, giving the visitor the right information quickly.
  • The page has customer testimonials on it as well as customer badges and a customer count of over 10 million customers.
  • The visitor can see the pricing structure and choose the plan that’s right for them.
  • The sticky navigation menu follows the visitor around, making sure they don’t have trouble navigating to different section of the page.
  • There are CTA buttons on every section of the page which means the visitor doesn’t have to scroll to find one.

This is the experience your visitor should get on an optimized post-click landing page. Now let’s see how different the visitor experience would be if they landed on the Hootsuite homepage instead of this dedicated post-click landing page:

(Note: Please click the link to see the full homepage)

  • The page headline is relevant to someone searching for a social media tool.
  • The images next to the product features helps visitors visualize the product.
  • The sticky navigation bar serves as a distraction, giving visitors a chance to navigate away from clicking the
  • CTA button, and going to the ‘Plans’, ‘Products’ or ‘Pricing page’.
  • The massive navigation footer can easily distract a visitor from signing up for the service.

Which page do you suppose the visitor will convert on?

Your homepage is not dedicated to a single offer, it’s a place where you need to showcase everything that your company does, just look at the Hootsuite footer:

Multiple navigation links are a norm for homepages because they aren’t dedicated pages. Your post-click landing page is the only page that’s dedicated to one offer at one time and this is precisely why they are so important.

post-click landing pages are important for your campaigns because they have the two characteristics the pages need to advertise one offer to particular audiences without any distractions:

1. Message Match: Message Match refers to the of matching the content of an ad to the content of a post-click landing page so that the message is reinforced in the mind of the prospect, and they know it’s relevant. Hootsuite’s PPC ad and post-click landing page had message match.

2. Conversion Ratio: Conversion Ratio refers to the number of places to click compared to the number of conversion goals. Ideally, the ratio is 1:1, meaning there’s only one place to click on your post-click landing page: the link that accomplishes your conversion goal. On the majority of post-click landing pages, that link is a call-to-action button. Adding navigation links on post-click landing pages changes the value of your conversion ratio.

When you market a particular offer on your homepage rather than a post-click landing page, you’re basically setting up your offer to fail, because it has to compete with all of the other offers on your homepage, and you can’t really make sure what offer is going to catch your visitor’s’ eye.

The navigation links present on homepages are enough to distract visitors from fulfilling the conversion goal you want them to fulfill. As opposed to this, when you advertise your offers on post-click landing pages you make the offer the hero of that page, everything on the page from the headline to the customer badges is complementing that offer.

For example, visitors coming to the monday free trial page, could get distracted by the navigation links in the page header before they click the call to action button to create their free account:

There are no navigation links on post-click landing pages which essentially means that your offer isn’t competing for visitor attention. As soon as a visitor lands on a dedicated optimized post-click landing page, they have at their disposal everything they might need to know about the page, the benefits the product will give them, how to get it – the whole shebang.

This makes their transition from post-click landing page headline to post-click landing page call to action button easy and seamless.

When you’re creating dedicated offers for your customers, why not create dedicated optimized pages to promote those offers to them.

Components of LPO

Regardless of the offer you’re promoting, before you create a post-click landing page it’s important that you get to know the people you’re creating the post-click landing page for – your audience.

Knowing your audience doesn’t merely involve knowing the basic demographics such as age and gender, you need to dig deeper. Find out their problems, their motivations to buy and the reasons why your offer is the best to solve their problems.

Only when you find out the answers to these questions will you be able to create detailed buyer personas and craft post-click landing pages that your particular buyer persona responds positively to.

The more insights you have about your audience the better your chances of creating post-click landing pages that are meaningful for them. Use tools such as Facebook’s Audience Insights and Quantcast to know your audience better and create relevant post-click landing pages for them.

Once you’ve gathered all the information you can about your audience it’s time to create your post-click landing page, and we recommend you start with an MVP (minimum viable page).

What is a Minimum Viable Page?

A minimum viable page is the least you need to start converting leads into customers. It’s the page that starts your relationship with your customer, it helps you create, iterate and perfect your promotion channels, your brand language, and product positioning.

With an MVP you have the opportunity to perfect message match with your audience as you have the option to match your page at three different levels (A/B testing your page at every level is the key to getting the best out of your MVP):

1. Simple Message Match: At this level you create the most basic page, the copy on the page can be compared to an elevator pitch you might give about your offer to someone who you’ve just met. This is the starting point, the information you get from this page should be used to better your page for the next level.

2. Deep Message Match: With deep message matching you create a page that understands your user’s lifecycle and is relevant to them where they currently stand in that lifecycle.

3. Experience Match: By now you should have enough data to create a page that your audience will respond well to. An experience match MVP has page elements that reflect your visitor’s specific experience and so are well equipped at converting your visitors into leads.

An MVP gives you a better chance to know your audience, and once you do that you’re all set to take the insights you’ve learned about your audience and create optimized post-click landing pages that your visitors can’t resist converting on.

Components of post-click landing page Optimization

To fully grasp what post-click landing page optimization is it’s important we know all the components that combine to create an optimized post-click landing page. post-click landing pages that have the right mix of persuasion, UX and UI principles have the following components:

No Off-page Navigation Links

Navigation links that take visitors off your post-click landing page serve as distractions for your visitor. They dilute your conversion goal by giving visitors a chance to exit the page and forget about the offer that the post-click landing page was promoting. An optimized post-click landing page doesn’t have navigation links, even a hyperlinked logo shouldn’t be welcome on your page.

The only navigation links that can be used on post-click landing pages are links that help with the credibility of your page such as a Terms of Use link or a Privacy Policy link.

The Tracx post-click landing page has no navigation links:

Primary and secondary headline

The primary headline is the first thing your visitors sees as soon as they land on the page, so the headline should be crafted in a way that it commands attention. There are different types of headlines you can create for your post-click landing page, from statistical headlines, to question headlines.

The headline should explain what you do to your audience. Whether you mention that in a statement headline or use curiosity to get them to stay on the page to find out more.

The Marketo post-click landing page has a statement headline:

The secondary headline should complement your primary headline. Not every post-click landing page has a secondary headline, in fact, this post-click landing page element should only be used if your primary headline is running too long.

The headline can also be used to achieve something your primary headline couldn’t achieve, for example, if your primary headline didn’t have a statistic on it, you could use your secondary headline to mention a statistic.

Media

You can add images, videos or gifs on your post-click landing page. The media you include on your post-click landing page should add visual appeal to the page and be relevant to the offer. You can also add human appeal to your page with the help of a human image.

Use images to showcase product features – give a sneak peek of your dashboard to the visitors with the help of an image. Gifs can also be used to showcase products, the same is true for video.

No matter what type of media you are using on your post-click landing page, just make sure that it is relevant to the offer you’re promoting and it is of high quality.

CTA Button

The call to action button is where the conversions take place on a post-click landing page, so, create a button that draws the visitor in. The button should be contrasting in color and have personalized copy on it.

Personalized CTA button copy is tailored to the specific post-click landing page offer, instead of using a generic ‘submit’ or ‘download’ button, use copy that is individual to your offer. Button copy that reads, ‘submit your information for more’ or ‘download the marketing ebook’ has more chances of appealing to your audience.

Another way to create personalized button copy is with the use of personal pronouns, make a habit of addressing the visitor with the call to action button, using ‘you’, ‘your’ and ‘me’ on your post-click landing page.

Lead Capture Form

The purpose of the lead capture form is to collect information about leads on post-click landing pages, such as the email address, contact number, brand name etc. The length of your form depends on where your offer lies in the marketing funnel. As a rule, the higher up you are in the marketing funnel the shorter the form should be and as you progress down the funnel the form should be longer as at that point visitors already know about you and so aren’t hesitant to share their information with you.

Your post-click landing page lead capture form should be arranged properly in easily discernable fields so that visitors find it easy to fill. The form fields should be clearly labeled.

Trust Indicators

Getting visitors to click the CTA button isn’t an easy task, this task becomes increasingly difficult if they have trust issues with your post-click landing page. For your post-click landing page to appear trustworthy there are a few elements you can use, namely:

    1. Customer testimonials: The testimonials show your future visitors that your brand has the capacity to do what you promise to do, as they get to hear about your product directly from your customers.
    2. Customer badges: They let the visitor know about all the companies you’ve already worked with.
    3. Trust Seals: For post-click landing pages that ask for their visitors’ credit card information, these seals ensure that their information is safe and they won’t be scammed by anyone.
    4. Privacy Policy link: Assures the visitors giving their email address that they won’t be spammed with useless information.

When you combine these optimized elements on a post-click landing page what you have in front of yourself is an optimized post-click landing page that has the capacity to convince visitors to click the CTA button. The way you design your page is also extremely important, the next chapter is going to discuss the UX principles that go into creating and optimized post-click landing page.

UX Principles that go into Creating Optimized Landing Pages

An optimized post-click landing page is persuasive, visually appealing, easy to navigate and interact with. You can’t simply arrange page elements randomly on a layout and expect the outcome to look good and hope to get clicks.

For instance, an emotionally powerful headline won’t stand a chance at converting if your font isn’t readable, nor would personalized CTA button copy do you any good if your CTA button color gets lost in the page background.

Designing a good looking page is great, but with post-click landing page optimization it’s not just about visuals. What you need to do is take care of the user experience – this is where user experience design comes in.

What is UX Design?

UX stands for user experience, it deals with how your visitor feels about every interaction they have with your post-click landing page once they land on it. Peter Morville, explains the facets of User Experience with the UX Honeycomb diagram:

The post-click landing page design you create shouldn’t only look visually appealing but visitors should have a positive experience interacting with it. Having a clickable element looks unclickable just because it looks ‘good’ isn’t going to get you any conversions.

Here are some of the UX principles you need to implement on your post-click landing page.

White Space

White space or negative space is any portion of a web page that is intentionally left unmarked or empty. It is the space between different page elements, such as lines of text, paragraphs, and images. White space shouldn’t be considered wasted space because it is left empty as it works as an active element on your post-click landing page and makes sure that all your post-click landing page elements look pronounced and draw your visitors’ attention toward them.

Although it’s called white space but the space doesn’t have to be white colored, in fact, it can be of any color as long as it serves its function of cutting out clutter and making your post-click landing page elements more visible.

Sendible’s post-click landing page uses white space that isn’t white:

There are four main types of white space:

1. Micro White Space: This is the white space between smaller page elements such as the space between words and letters or an image and its caption.
2. Macro White Space: This is the space between main elements such as the headline and copy.
3. Active White Space: This is the space that’s added to the page to make it more structured.
4. Passive White Space: This kind of white space occurs naturally and isn’t added externally, such as the space around a graphic, or space between words in a sentence.

You should have white space on your page because it:

Enhances readability: When you use white space in your copy, you essentially de-clutter the text, making sure that the visitor is able to enjoy reading your copy.

Establishes visual hierarchy: Whitespace helps you dictate how your visitors should look at your page.

Makes your post-click landing page look upscale: Want to add a dash of sophistication to your post-click landing page, just add in whitespace and you’re sure to transform your page’s look. When page elements aren’t squished together, they give off a sophisticated vibe.

Contrast

We’ve all heard about the A/B test results that claim that a certain color CTA button converts better than the rest, this color could be red or blue – it really doesn’t matter. Because what matters isn’t what the individual button color was on the page, but how that button color contrasted with the page background to draw more attention toward it.

So, it isn’t about color at all, it is however about contrast.

Contrast refers to the state of being strikingly different from something else, typically something is juxtaposition or close association. On your post-click landing page contrast refers to the contrasting colors you design certain elements in, mainly the CTA button so that they stand out from the rest of the page and draw attention.

When including contrast on your post-click landing page venture back to the color wheel.

Colors that lie opposite on the color wheel are complementary, which means they contrast strongly and can be used to attract visitors’ attention toward them. So, a yellow CTA button on a blue page background will stand out and get visitors to notice.

The green and blue button contrast with the black background on the Brad’s Deals post-click landing page:

The LearnVest page takes a different approach and not only has the CTA button designed in a contrasting color but also a few words on the page to make them more prominent:

Visual Hierarchy

It’s important that your visitors look at the page the way you designed it for them, this involves arranging your post-click landing page elements in a way that a certain visual hierarchy is achieved that influences where visitors will look first and where they’ll proceed from there.

Visual hierarchy can be achieved with the help of:

    Scale: Use different sized elements to guide user’s attention, larger elements draw more attention compared to smaller elements.
    Color: Visitor’s will be drawn more toward bold and contrasting colors.
    Contrast: Shifts in colors can be also be used to grab attention, contrasting the color of one element against the other draws focus.
    Alignment: Columns and grids can be used to create alignment between elements and make the visitor take notice.
    Proximity: You can use proximity to separate and group certain post-click landing page elements together and apart to help distinguish between the elements.

Eye tracking studies have helped us understand where visitors focus their gaze once they arrive on a web page and how do they then proceed to look at the rest of the page. Results taken from numerous eye-tracking studies have led to the introduction of the F and Z patterns of page hierarchy that explain how visitors look at a page so you can create a page according to their natural eye movements and place the most important elements where they need to be.

The F-Pattern

The F-pattern dictates that visitors first read the page in a horizontal movement, mostly along the upper part of the content area, they then move down the page and read across a second horizontal line and finally visitors scan the left side of the content in a vertical movement.

This is what the movement looks like:

Designing your post-click landing page elements so that they fall into this particular visual order ensures that you get them to go through your page and click the CTA button. The F-pattern usually works for pages that are content heavy.

The Z-pattern

On pages that don’t have a lot of content on them, the visitor’s eye movement resembles the pattern of the letter Z. The Z-pattern eye movement is most suited to most post-click landing pages because the pages have one main takeaway which is the call to action button.

You can use the visual information from the Z-pattern to arrange elements in an order that appeals to the visitor.

The Exact Data post-click landing page takes a cue from the Z-pattern and places the headline and the CTA button where the visitor is sure to take notice.

Using these User Experience principles on your post-click landing pages ensures that your post-click landing page doesn’t only look pretty but also provides visitors with the best experience, where they can interact with the page in the way that you want them to.

How to Create an Optimized Headline

A post-click landing page headline is quite similar to a physical first impression, it’s the first thing the visitor sees and so it sets the tone for the rest of your post-click landing page.

Would you want to know about the Liberty University based solely on the post-click landing page headline, ‘Why Liberty’?

We didn’t too.

The headline and sub-headline has one very specific job to do and that is to convince and engage visitors to stay on the page long enough to go through the rest of the copy and in the end click the call to action button.

Not all post-click landing pages use a sub-headline, but those that too use the element to further explain the offer or share the unique value proposition. When your main headline is running too long and you feel you still haven’t hit that marketing sweet spot, you should use a sub-headline to get your point across.

Asana uses a sub-headline to explain their UVP, while the main headline explains what the service does for users:

Process Street analyzed headlines from 87 SaaS startup post-click landing pages, taken from the top 100 AngelList’s Trending section, they reported the following key findings:

  • 14% of SaaS post-click landing pages have no subheadline.
  • The average word count of a headline is 6.
  • The average word count of a subheadline is 12.
  • The average CoSchedule headline analyzer score of the sample set was 59
  • 39% of headlines sell a benefit of the software
  • 20% of headlines use social proof
  • Around 50% of headlines and subheadlines had a positive sentiment
  • Around 13% of headlines and subheadlines had a negative sentiment
  • You and Your are 10 times more likely to appear than We and Our
  • 42% of headlines contain jargon terms
  • Speed, simplicity, humanity, growth, money and improvement are the 6 main themes expressed in post-click landing page copy
  • Every single headline can be boiled down to 9 formulas

The great David Oglivy, had this to say about headlines:

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Headlines are a high ticket item because in this day and age of internet marketing where 2.4 million search queries are made on Google in one minute visitors are cautious and untrusting, and if they don’t like your headline or worse if they’re put off by it, well then that post-click landing page of yours doesn’t really get a second chance.

An optimized headline should have the following characteristics:

1. Clear: The headline you choose for your post-click landing page must be clear, it should explain what your UVP is and also communicate the benefits your product/offer has for your visitors. Whether you use a question headline, a statistic in your headline or go forward with humor, your headline needs to clearly explain your offer.
2. Relevant: The headline you end up including on your post-click landing page needs to be relevant to the offer you’re trying to promote and the google ad that your post-click landing page is connected to. If your headline isn’t relevant to your offer, there is a strong possibility of you confusing visitors who’ve landed on your page after clicking the PPC ad.
3. Emotive: Establishing a human connection with your audience is a very important aspect of marketing. Your headline should ideally speak to your visitors on an emotional level. It should empathize with their problem and present your product or offer as a solution to their problem.

Creating a headline that checks off all three boxes of clarity, relevance and empathy is a headline you can attract visitors with and hopefully convince them to click your call to action button.

Types of Headlines

John Caples identified four main types of attention worthy headlines you can use on your post-click landing page:

News Headlines

These headlines are structured in a way that they arouse curiosity. News headlines typically begin with the word ‘Introducing’ or ‘Announcing’, you can also use words like ‘At last’, ‘New’ and ‘Now’ to write news headlines.

The Kissmetrics webinar page features a news headline:

Self-Interest Headlines

These types of headlines appeal to the visitors’ self-interest, headlines like, ‘The guaranteed to gain more muscle’ fall in this category.

Uber uses a self-interest headline on their post-click landing page:

Quick and Easy

The headlines to the visitors’ desire for quick fix formulas, such as ‘lose belly fat in 10 days with this one secret formula’.

Viddyoze uses a quick and easy headline on their post-click landing page:

Curiosity

These headlines make the visitors want more by piquing their interest, such as ‘You won’t believe how I made a million dollars while sitting on my couch’.

Don’t think of yourself as a master wordsmith who can create a headline that makes visitors stick? Use the following formulas to craft a headline worthy of your post-click landing page.

The PAS Formula

The PAS in the PAS formula stands for ‘problem-agitate-solve’, these are the main steps you need to follow to ensure that your headline works:

    a. Problem: Identify a problem
    b. Agitate: Pick at the problem, by making prospects emotional
    c. Solve: Tell them the solution to that problem

Your headline should include the problem your target customer is having, it should then pick at that problem by explaining how bad you have it and finally, it should present your service as the solution to your potential customers’ problem.

Imagine you work at a boutique copywriting agency struggling to get clients because most of them end up going with big brand companies. You do know however that the target customer yearns for a customer-centric approach on a budget so this is the headline you come up with using the PAS formula, ‘Can’t get your customers to click (problem)- Is your business writing suffering because you don’t have enough cha-ching?(Agitate) The Boutique Copywriting Agency provides you with conversion copywriting on a budget.’(Solution)

Here are some other examples of the PAS formula in action.

Conversion XL’s Headline Formulas

Peep Laja from Conversion XL has created three headline formulas after analyzing 500 headlines, these formulas help you craft headlines that work for visitors who crave authenticity and are allergic to BS.

Formula #1: Say What It Is

This formula addresses our brain’s most fundamental question, ‘what is that?’. Your headline should simply explain what your offer is about, and if you’ve done due diligence with your research your target visitors would be convinced in no time.

Tableau uses a ‘say what it is’ headline on their whitepaper post-click landing page:

So does Crazy Egg:

Formula #2: Say What You Get

Tell your visitors what benefit they’ll get when they click your call to action button, this could be done by mentioning your UVP.

Zoho uses the ‘say what you get’ headline on their post-click landing page:


Formula #3: Say What You Can Do With It

Tell your prospects what they’ll be able to do with your offer, so they can visualize themselves performing that action and click the call to action button.

Got it tells visitors what they’ll be able to do once they click the call to action button:

Craft engaging headlines to make your visitors stay on the page to find out more about your offer.

How To Write Optimized Copy

post-click landing pages when created effectively are powerful conversion tools, they persuade wandering un-decided visitors to focus on one thing, and convert.

post-click landing pages can be used to boost your blog subscribers, launch a new product or offer a free trial.

Copy is the page element the visitor reads after the headline, which means that your body copy should deliver what your headline promised. To ensure that you stay on track and write copy that piques visitor’s’ interest, you need to make the copy about them.

Explain how the offer is going to help make their lives better, solve their problems and put an end to their pain. Don’t tell them what your product does, explain to them what it can do for them.

With every word of copy you write, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and think, ‘what’s in it for me?’. If you write something that doesn’t straightforwardly answer that question, you can swap that out for something that does.

post-click landing page Copy Should Focus on Benefits

When Apple advertised the iPod they didn’t talk about the fact that people should buy the gadget that had 5 GB worth of storage, what they said instead was enjoy ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’.

While the former statement is true, it focuses on the feature of the product, while the latter talks about the benefit the user will derive when they purchase an iPod. Nobody really cares what your product/service can do, what they do care about is what it can do for them.

So tell them that with your post-click landing page copy.

Copy that focuses on features rather than benefits, assumes that visitors have a certain level of knowledge about your product, which compels you to use jargon in the copy, and well jargon never does your post-click landing page any favors.

Discussing benefits your product features provide visitors with puts them at ease because it lays out for them the expectations they should have with your product.

The Logi Analytics post-click landing page copy talks about how the features of the product/service helps visitors solve their analytics problems:

Landing Copy Should Be Readable

Readability refers to how easy words, phrases and blocks can be read. It describes how a typeface (font type) is used on a given page. Copy becomes readable with the help of good typography, as it encourages the visitor to read by reducing the effort it takes them to read something.

It wouldn’t really matter how expertly you’ve crafted post-click landing page copy if visitors are having problems reading it. Ensure that all the copy is readable, you can do that by adding in white space and arranging the copy in bullet points.

To enhance post-click landing page copy readability, use the following methodologies:

    1. Layout: Use ample white space between text. You can also break up blocks of text with the help of images and bullet points.
    2. Alignment: Left justified text works best for long blocks of text. Text can also be left aligned, right aligned and centered.
    3. New paragraphs: Writing short paragraphs gives copy room to breathe, and visitors find it better to read short paragraphs instead of large chunks of copy.
    4. Measure: This refers to the length of the line of copy. When the copy length is too long it can make your visitors’ eyes weary. It’s necessary that your post-click landing page copy measure shouldn’t be too lengthy.
    5. Leading: This is the vertical space between lines of copy. Common practice dictates that leading should be at least 50% larger than the font size you choose.
    6. Kerning: Kerning is the space between characters, for your copy to be readable it should have enough kerning.
    7. Case: post-click landing page copy can be in lower case, upper case or mixed case. Upper case copy is more difficult to read if the copy is too long. Lower case (with capitalization for grammar purposes) is the easiest to read.
    8. Contrast: This refers to the color of the copy against the page background. The more contrast between the copy and the background the easier it is to read it.

The GoToWebinar page has readable copy, arranged in bullet points:

How Long Should your post-click landing page Copy be?

One of the common questions that pops up when creating post-click landing pages is the length of the post-click landing page copy. Should you play it safe and use a short-form page or should you write down everything there is know about your service on the page?

Joanna Wiebe from CopyHackers explains how lengthy your page should be with the help of a graphic:

The length of the post-click landing page copy also depends on the type of page you’re creating. Sales pages usually have more copy on them as their intent is to go into intricate details about the product/offer.

Look at Conversion XL Institute’s sales page as an example:

Squeeze pages on the other hand are generally short-form and don’t have too much copy on them.

See case in point CopyHackers squeeze page:

Think about what your target customers want when you sit down to write your post-click landing page copy – make sure the copy you write explains to them why your offer is the best for them.

Always make it about the visitor, use personal pronouns such as ‘You’ and ‘Your’ and stay far away from the ‘We’ word. post-click landing pages are about the visitor, your post-click landing page copy should be centered around them.

How to Create Optimized Images/Video

Every element on a post-click landing page serves its own individual purpose – the headline introduces the offer, the CTA button urges you to take action. The images and video, however, perform a two-fold function, not only do they explain your product or service but they also add visual appeal to the page.

A post-click landing page without any media on it (image, video, and gif) is boring because it doesn’t catch the visitor’s eye – however, that doesn’t mean that any image would look good on a post-click landing page.

All post-click landing page media should have the following basic characteristics:

    1. Relevant: The image, video or gif you use on a post-click landing page should be relevant to the offer being promoted. Don’t add an image just because it looks good if it has no connection with your offer.
    2. Visually Appealing: The media you end up using on you post-click landing page should look good. It should be of high quality and non-cheesy, something that attracts the visitor and appeals to their aesthetic side.
    3. Shouldn’t Affect Page Load Time: Don’t end up adding an image or video that slows down page load time, page speed is much more important than eye candy images.

Let’s discuss the characteristics of the different types of media used on post-click landing pages separately.

Images

Images on post-click landing pages perform the following functions:

  • Showcases how your product works
  • Introduces your team members
  • Creates an emotional connection with the visitor

The Instapage post-click landing page images showcase screenshots of the application to showcase how the platform works:

Search Engine Journal’s webinar post-click landing page uses images to introduce the webinar hosts:

Care uses their image to make an emotional connection with the visitor, so they are persuaded to donate more:

Most people buy for emotional reasons, this is why using post-click landing page images to connect with your visitors helps increase conversion rates. If you can tap into your visitors’ emotions with the help of the images you use on the page, you have a better chance of convincing them to click the call to action button, this is exactly what Care’s post-click landing page featured above does.

You can also showcase smiling people on your post-click landing page to invoke an emotional response in your visitors. When visitors see a human face, your brand becomes humanized and its credibility increases because visitors feel confident that you’re not trying to hide behind your product.

Sure, your visitors are buying a product but they are buying a product from a human, so they’ll trust your product more when you form a human connection with them.

When Signal v. Noise tested a human page versus their original design, they saw a 102.5% increase in conversions:

They then tested the single-person page using different people to see if Jocelyn was responsible for the increase in conversions.

This is what happened:

As showcased in the example above human images can in fact increase post-click landing page conversions, but this works only on one condition i.e when the images are relevant to the other page elements. If you’re going for the “human using the product” approach, use Tableau as an example. You can clearly see the people in the image using the software, which helps with the visualization process:

Videos

According to Forrester Research’s Dr. James McQuivey, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.

This is precisly why so many post-click landing pages have videos on them. When we look at speakers or characters in a video, our brain’s fusiform face area (FFA) is activated, this increases our attention and focus.

When watching a video, our brain acts on instinct and starts to pay more attention to the video than it would have to a paragraph of words. This happens because our brain is attempting to gauge whether or not we know who the characters in the video are.

Videos force us to engage more with the content.

The FFA area also has a direct link to our emotions, so not only are we trying to recognize the characters, but we start to form social and informational connections with what’s happening in the video.

The video voiceover helps you actually talk to your visitors, you are able to enunciate the words you want them to focus on instead of simply relying on exclamation points or bold fonts. Hiring a professional voice artist for your video ensures that your video makes the right impact.

A big reason why videos go viral is because of the element of emotion. Showing how easy it is to use your product via a video makes the visitor stick to this emotion while they go through the rest of the page, which makes them more inclined to fulfill the conversion goal.

SharpSpring uses video on their post-click landing page to showcase their service:

One common issue with post-click landing page videos is autoplay. With autoplay videos you risk turning visitors off by startling them as soon as they arrive on the page. If you simply have to use autoplay videos because you think visitors may not notice the video without it, putting the video on mute is a good alternative.

post-click landing page videos help create an emotional connection with visitors and explain how the product or service works which in turn increases your chances of getting a conversion.

Gifs

It would come as a surprise since they just recently became such a sensation but gifs have been around since 1987. Gifs are able to compress the image quality and support only 256 colors — as opposed to the 16.7 million colors that JPEG files support.

Gifs also don’t have audio, plus they play on a loop so there is no way to actually pause or stop them. These are reasons why gifs work so well on post-click landing pages when explaining how a product works. They have become a post-click landing page trend because they’re much more cost effective than videos when demonstrating a product or service visually.

Domo uses gifs to explain how the service works:

ActiveCampaign also uses gifs on their post-click landing page:

Whether you opt to use images, gifs or videos or even a combination of the three media types on your post-click landing page ensure that everything you use is of high quality, and is relevant to the offer.

How to Create an Optimized Form

post-click landing page lead capture forms allow you to collect critical information about your visitors in exchange for something – this could be an ebook, a blog subscription or a free trial depending on the conversion goal of the page.

While lead capture forms help marketers collect important information about prospects, they are also the post-click landing page element that has the highest possibility of giving way to post-click landing page friction.

Friction can be defined as any part of the conversion process that makes a user less likely to convert. On a post-click landing page, an example of friction could be a long form, poor message match, or too much text.

An optimized post-click landing page form ensures that visitors feel at home when submitting their information, making sure you get the lead.

A post-click landing page form must have the following characteristics:

    1. Appropriate length: The length of your form depends on the offer you’re promoting and where your visitor is in the conversion funnel. Don’t create unnecessarily lengthy forms because those just turn visitors off.
    2. Organized: Arrange the form properly by labeling the fields and using ample white space. Visitors shouldn’t have to work to fill out the form.
    3. Non-invasive: The lead capture form shouldn’t expect visitors to fill out information that’s not necessary for the offer. If the form asks visitors to fill out supplementary information, they should be placed in optional form fields.
    4. Easy to Find: Make your form stand out on the page with the help of contrast, don’t tuck it away. You can also create a form headline to make it stand out.
    5. Trustworthy: Visitors don’t fill out lead capture forms that just want their information and don’t offer them any guarantees, mention your privacy policy link with your form.

Types of post-click landing page Forms

There are essentially three types of post-click landing page forms:

    1. On page forms: These forms are visible as soon as you land on the page
    2. Two-step opt-in forms: The forms aren’t available as soon as you land on the page but become visible when the user clicks the CTA button.
    3. Multi step opt-in forms: These are similar to two-step opt-in forms, however, where two-step opt-in forms are single forms these are multiple forms that keep on showing as you enter the information.

On Page Forms

These are the most common types of post-click landing page forms, they are immediately visible to the visitor and can be placed above or below the page fold.

The Simply Measured post-click landing page has an above the fold on page form:

Two-Step Opt-in Forms

Two-step opt-in forms or double opt-in forms only appear after a visitor clicks the CTA button. When a visitor arrives on a post-click landing page that has a two-step form, they don’t see the form on the page, what they see instead are all the other post-click landing page elements explaining the offer, so they don’t have to think about giving their information before finding everything out about the offer.

A two-step opt-in form makes the form the primary element only when visitors are ready to convert. When the visitor clicks the CTA button, and the form appears in a lightbox, all the visitor’s attention is isolated on the form.

The Instapage webinar post-click landing page uses a two-step opt-in form, the form appears as soon as you click the CTA button:

Visitors are much more likely to fill out a two-step form because the absence of a form on the page helps them learn about the offer in a non-friction environment. A two-step form actually acts like a 2-step verification process because only the visitors committed to fulfilling the conversion goal click the CTA button and then fill out the form that pops up.

Two-step opt-in forms also don’t intimidate visitors as they break down the conversion process into two parts:

  • Information phase: the pre-form phase
  • Commitment phase: the post-form phase

In the information phase, visitors are only concerned about collecting information about the offer and deciding whether or not they want to click the CTA button and proceed to the second phase. Only committed visitors enter the commitment phase to fill out the form.

Host Analytics also uses a two-step opt-in form:

Two step-opt in forms also increase your chances of getting conversions because they use the psychological phenomenon of the Ziegarnik effect to convince visitors to fill them out.

The Ziegarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon that dictates that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better which compels them to finish what they’ve started. So, when visitors click the CTA button on a post-click landing page they’ve essentially started a task, completing the two-step form is what completes their task. When a visitor clicks the CTA button, they then feel compelled to fill out the form and complete the conversion goal.

Multi-Step Forms

Multi-step forms similar to two-step forms, they don’t appear immediately on the page, the visitor has to click the Call to Action button to prompt the form to appear. The difference between multi-step forms and two-step forms is that the former includes multiple forms while the latter just has one form.

Lead capture forms allow you to gather information from your visitor, making them a vital post-click landing page element. Optimize your lead capture forms by taking care of their length and formatting to help convert more visitors.

How To Create an Optimized CTA Button

The inherent purpose of every post-click landing page – regardless of funnel position, audience segment or marketing channel is to get visitors to take action. The Call to Action button, as its name appropriately suggests is the element that gets you that action.

Every visitor coming on a post-click landing page has one decision to make – to act or not to act. It’s the duty of the CTA button to get them to do the former.

An effective CTA button has the power to:

  • Get visitors to focus on the right spot
  • Allow them to take the desired action
  • Increase your conversion rates

So, what makes a CTA button effective, optimizing call to action buttons includes the following four things:

  1. copy
  2. size
  3. color
  4. placement

Call to Action Button Copy

The CTA button copy should be written in a similar way as the body copy i.e. it should be relevant to the page offer and talk about the visitor.

The secret to writing effective CTA button copy lies in using ‘possessive determiners’.

A possessive determiner is a type of function word that is used in front of a noun to express possession or belonging (as in ‘my phone’).

So, when you use ‘my’, ‘you’ and ‘your’ on your CTA buttons you essentially speak to the visitor, making them feel at ease and persuading them to click the call to action button. When you add the right pronouns to your buttons, what you’re doing is personalizing the button for the visitor.

The Intercom post-click landing page uses a personalized CTA button:

Personalized CTA button copy such as the one used on the Intercom page not only lets the visitor know what they are going to get after they click the button, but, also helps them visualize the action they’re about to take.

The key to writing effective button copy lies in never using these two kinds of words:

  • Friction inducing words
  • Generic words

Words that portray to visitors that they need to give up something to get the post-click landing page offer cause conversion friction, the thing they could be giving up could include their time, money, or energy. Generic CTA words such as “Submit,” “Buy,” “Sign Up,” and “Download” are high friction words when used by themselves. These words imply that the visitor has to do work to get your offer.

When you personalize your button copy and avoid using any friction and generic words you make the visitor feel at ease and get to know what’s in it for them when they click the CTA button.

Call to Action Button Size

It’s reasonable to think that a bigger thing will catch your eye more than a smaller thing, in fact, Fitt’s law confirms this phenomenon too. The law dictates, ‘larger and closer a target, the faster and easier it is to select that target.’

Which translates into, the bigger your CTA button, the easier it is for your visitors to take notice and eventually click it.

The important thing to remember here is that the CTA size is not absolute, but relative to the rest of the post-click landing page elements. The CTA button shouldn’t be insanely large, it just needs to ‘bigger’ than the other post-click landing page, so that it is prominent.

You can also use a visual cue to point toward the CTA button and guide visitor attention to it. Visual cues can be in the form of an arrow or a human’s line of sight.

PostcardMania uses an arrow as a visual cue to point toward their appropriately sized CTA button:

Another element that makes the CTA button more prominent is white space. When you surround the button with ample white space, you essentially isolate it from the other elements which in turn makes it more noticeable.

The CTA button should look clickable because if the button blends in with the rest of the copy visitors won’t be able to see it, which of course means they can’t click it.

Call to action buttons should be noticeable as soon as the visitor comes on the page, this can be done by increasing their size and using a visual cue to point to them.

Call to Action Button Color

A button that’s not instantly visible to visitors has failed to fulfill its goal.

To ensure that your buttons are visible, make sure they are:

  • Contrasting in color
  • Clickable
  • Surrounded by ample white space
  • Have visual cues (arrows, hand pointing, or eye sight) pointing to it

A color contrasting button stands out from the background and other post-click landing page elements, like Upwork’s webinar post-click landing page CTA:

When choosing button color, don’t simply focus on which color is appropriate for the buyer persona you’re targeting, or the color that commands the most attention – because there is no one supreme button color.

It’s not really about an orange CTA button converting better than a blue CTA button, it’s all in the color contrast. For your CTA button to stand out from the other post-click landing page elements, the button color should contrast with the page background.

You can read more about color contrast in the third chapter.

Call to Action Button Placement

The page fold is extremely important to marketers, it is wrongly assumed that only the elements that are placed above the fold get visitor attention and the rest are ignored.

However, this can’t be further from the truth.

Where you place your button shouldn’t be dependent on the page fold, it should be contingent on the post-click landing page offer, and the type of page you’re creating. Your CTA should only become visible to your visitors once they have sufficient information about your offer when you place a button prematurely, you risk losing conversions.

On longer sales pages, CTA buttons aren’t placed until the visitor is well acquainted with the offer.

Visitors don’t mind scrolling for your CTA button if they are interested in the offer; you just need to make your button visible and contrasting, that’s what UserTesting does with their CTA button.

Having two CTA buttons also works on long-form pages, you can place one button above the fold after the main headline and sub-head and put the other one at the end of the page.

Where the CTA button is placed on a post-click landing page is dependent on every individual page, not on the page fold – don’t place the button above the fold just because you believe it is a post-click landing page best practice.

Secondary Call to Action Buttons

A secondary CTA button provides an alternative conversion opportunity or action to visitors. If you have more than one CTA button – the second and third buttons don’t automatically become secondary CTA buttons. They only become secondary buttons when they lead the visitor to a different conversion action.

Secondary CTAs come in handy to promote intermediate level offers to visitors who aren’t ready yet to sign up for your product. The secondary CTAs then act as a gateway of sorts to secondary conversion goals that take the visitor down the marketing funnel.

Every post-click landing page doesn’t require a secondary CTA button. In fact, we recommended you A/B test if the secondary button is valuable in getting you conversions — instead of diverting your visitors’ attention from the primary conversion goal.

The trick with including a secondary CTA button is to make sure you’re not taking the focus away from your primary CTA button. If you choose to include a secondary CTA button, it should always complement the primary button and not act as a competitor.

The best type of post-click landing page for a secondary CTA button is a sign-up page for your service. A secondary button can help you offer hesitant visitors to download a resource like an ebook or a whitepaper and follow up with them further down the funnel if they aren’t ready to sign-up yet. You can also showcase other reasons why your service is right for them by explaining other product features.

Optimizing the post-click landing page CTA button ensures that you convince visitors to perform the conversion action you want.

How to Optimize Other Landing Page Elements

The myriads of online pyramid schemes and Ponzi scams have made visitors cautious of who they interact with online. They won’t give away their information for just anyone, this means if you want your visitors to convert on your post-click landing page you need them to feel at ease as soon as they arrive on the page and you do this by letting them know that they can trust you.

Two elements that make your post-click landing page credible and serve as trust indicators are:

  1. Customer badges and trust seals
  2. Customer testimonials

Optimizing both these elements ensures that your visitor won’t second guess whether you can be trusted with their information.

Customer Badges and Trust Seals

Common trust indicators used on post-click landing pages include customer badges and trust seals. Customer badges showcase the logos of companies who happen to be your customers. The badges add credibility to your page because they showcase that other brands have had success with your product or service – they essentially help you borrow credibility from those brands.

A visitor who is on the brink of making a decision can be convinced to click the CTA button after they recognize a famous company logo on your post-click landing page. Visitors are quick to judge your post-click landing page, and when they see that someone influential has already judged you and found you capable, they are quicker to make their own decision.

This is appropriately called the “halo effect.”

Qubit uses customer badges on their post-click landing page:

Another element that adds credibility to post-click landing pages are trust seals. Trust seals are especially important for eCommerce businesses. A survey by Econsultancy showed that the effectiveness of trust seals is dependent on customer recognition of the symbols. The study tested 20 different trust logos, and the results revealed the three most recognizable logos were that of Paypal, Verisign, and McAfee.

Want your visitors to enter their credit card information to sign-up for your service, show them that their information is secure with the help of recognized trust seals.

Customer Testimonials

Visitors expect you to think that your product/service is the best solution to their problem, they know you’re biased, hence you have to work to convince them that you’re actually telling the truth. This is not the case when another unbiased human makes the same claim for your service – your customer.

Visitors trust customer testimonials because they recognize that these testimonials come from real people just like them who faced a similar problem that they face – customers often think alike, which is why they trust each other’s opinion.

The testimonials you include on your post-click landing page need to be honest and descriptive, just including a customer quote saying “Great Service” won’t persuade your visitors. Instead ask for a quote that explains how using the service/product solved the problem they were facing, and which features work best for them. Try adding testimonials that tell an inspiring customer story to get the most clicks on your CTA button.

post-click landing page testimonials with images of your customers next to them have a more positive impact as they add human appeal. Adding customer testimonials from well-known people from your industry also have a positive impact on your post-click landing page credibility.

Autopilot uses a customer testimonial with the picture of the customer, helping the visitor make an emotional connection:

Credible post-click landing pages add to a convincing post-click landing page experience because they help the visitor get rid of their anxiety and focus on the conversion goal.

Measuring Landing Page Optimization

An optimized post-click landing page makes sure that the combination of elements on the page persuades visitors to click the call to action button and fulfill your conversion goal – we have established this thus far.

What’s left to discuss is how you can ascertain whether or not your post-click landing pages are optimized. How do you find out if your post-click landing page headline actually persuades visitors to scroll the page and if the CTA button copy is enticing enough to get them to click?

How do you measure post-click landing page optimization – through heat maps and A/B testing.

Heat Maps

Heat maps are used for analysing the behaviour of visitors on a web page. The data collected through heat maps allow you to gauge if visitors are having trouble finding what they are looking for on the page.

For example, with the help of a heat map, you can tell if visitors aren’t clicking the CTA button or if they’re clicking an element that’s not clickable. The insights you collect with heat maps can then be used to test your pages and increase conversion rates.

There are basically three types of heat maps:

1. Mouse Tracking or Click Heat Maps

These heat maps record data based on where visitors click on your post-click landing page. This is what a typical click map looks like:

The red spots represent the page areas where the visitor clicked the most, the number of concentrated clicks goes down as the color becomes lighter.

With the help of click maps, you can ascertain if your visitors are clicking at the right places on your post-click landing page. For example, the highest number of visitor clicks on a post-click landing page should be on the CTA button as that should ideally be the only clickable element on the page, if your post-click landing page has a conversion ratio of 1:1 i.e. one clickable element per conversion goal.

When Truckers Assist used click maps on their post-click landing page to find out why their conversion rate was suffering, they uncovered an interesting piece of information. Here’s the heat map of the Truckers Assist post-click landing page:

The majority of clicks on the page were on the ‘No Fees’ red badge instead of the primary call to action button, which meant that visitors where clicking on an un-clickable page element and were exiting the page before fulfilling the conversion goal.

Based on the data collected with the heat map, the service changed their post-click landing page design:

The new design has a yellow primary CTA button, that attracts visitor attention as is evident from this heat map:

Make sure your CTA button is contrasting and looks clickable so that visitors aren’t confused once they decide to click the call to action button.

2. Eye Tracking Heat Maps

These heat maps record the visitors’ eye movements on a post-click landing page.

By analysing where visitors tend to focus on a page, you can place the important page elements such as the CTA button or the lead capture in the visitors’ natural eye path increasing the likelihood of them fulfilling your conversion goal.

Groupon was able to increase their conversions by 52% by decluttering their post-click landing page because of the data collected through the following eye tracking study performed by EyeQuant:

3. Scroll Maps

Scroll maps record visitors’ scrolling behavior, letting you know the exact point where visitors scrolled on the page. This type of heat map indicates if the length of your page is appropriate.

This is what a scroll map looks like:

Numerous A/B tests have shown that the fold is arbitrary and everybody scrolls. When Highrise tested a short form page with a long form one they found that the longer page design increased signups by 37.5%.

Heat maps provide you with a visual guide of visitor behavior, allowing you to see the post-click landing page through the visitors’ eyes – helping you make any changes needed to improve post-click landing page optimization and increase your conversion rate.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a method to compare two versions of a post-click landing page to see which one performs better, the testing methodology helps marketers gather data that they can use to better optimize their post-click landing pages.

A/B testing involves testing your original page design, referred to as the control page with an alternate version referred to as the variation page, direct equal number of traffic to both pages and see which page outperforms the other.

Things to Consider Before You Start A/B Testing

You can A/B test every element on your post-click landing page from the headline down to the customer testimonials. However, before you start A/B testing you need to make sure that your post-click landing page is getting enough traffic, because you shouldn’t call a test before you get at least 350-400 conversions per variation with a statistical significance of 95% – this won’t be possible for post-click landing pages with low traffic.

Always start your A/B test with a hypothesis – the thing you want to test so when you see a winning variation you know exactly what works. Don’t A/B test your post-click landing pages randomly, start with a particular idea in mind.

For example, if you are running a headline test your hypothesis would be ‘does a statement headline outperform a question headline’ – the result of the test will then prove or disapprove this hypothesis.

What You Should A/B Test

Each element on a post-click landing page can be tested, you can also test the layout of the page and the length of the page. In terms of determining what you should test on your post-click landing page instead of just relying on best practices, it is important to determine what you can test based on customer data that you collect from your page.

You can collect customer data for A/B testing through the following channels:

1. Google Analytics:

    This is the basic starting point for diagnosing a post-click landing page because the analytics allow you to see what’s happening on the back end. Analyse the number of page views, average time on a page, bounce rates etc. to find out if your visitors are staying on your post-click landing page long enough to convert. Also, see if the traffic you’re getting on the page is actually the traffic you need – are your targeted customers coming to your page.

2. User Recording:

    User recordings are recordings of the activity the visitor does while on the page. With the help of the recordings, you can find out on which part of the page your visitors spend the most time on and which part they completely ignored. For example, if you observe that your visitors spent some time on the page, but left without paying attention to the CTA button, you may consider tweaking the button copy and designing the button in a more contrasting color

3. Surveys:

    Including surveys on your post-click landing pages helps you find out exactly what visitors think about the page. Unlike data collected from heat maps and analytics you don’t need to decipher anything, all the information is spelled out in front of you in the form of your visitors’ answers.

When you conduct A/B tests based on data you collect from your actual customers, the chances of the tests increasing your conversion rates increases because you’re trying to fix a problem that you know your visitors are having. Changing the color of your CTA button just because a marketer got a significant lift on their post-click landing page because of an orange button, doesn’t mean you’ll get the same results.

A/B testing allows you to create variations of your page and see which one your visitors prefer the most. When you conduct frequent A/B tests, you are continually improving your conversion rate by tweaking the optimization of your page elements.

How to Create an Optimized Landing Page

By now you know everything there is to know about post-click landing page optimization, you know how to optimize each post-click landing page element and how to improve the page’s user experience.

All there is left to know now is how to actually create your post-click landing page – the process.

We strongly recommend you use the Instapage platform because with Instapage you’re able to create professional, customizable post-click landing pages in a matter of minutes.

The focus of this chapter will be on how you can use Instapage to create a post-click landing page.

First up you’ll need to create an account on Instapage, you can do that here.

Sign in to your account and you’ll come to the dashboard, click ‘Create New Page’:

You now have the option to pick a pre-designed template or scan an existing page:

Let’s pick a template, you have the option of selecting from the following categories:

  • Lead Gen
  • Two Step
  • Click Through
  • Thank You
  • Webinar
  • E-book
  • Event
  • App

Name your page and then start customizing the chosen template:

Click edit on the element you want to customize and add your personal touches to create an optimized post-click landing page:

Add an engaging and relevant headline, personalized and action-oriented body copy and CTA button copy, contrasting CTA button, an appropriately sized lead capture form, trust indicators.

When you’re done click ‘Preview’ and then ‘Publish’ your post-click landing page:

That’s it.

It really is that easy with the world’s most powerful post-click landing page platform.

post-click landing pages, contrary to homepages provide your visitors with a distraction-free medium to get acquainted with your marketing offers. The pages offer you a unique opportunity to convert targeted audience segments on relevant offers. post-click landing page optimization is the process of making sure that the visitor who lands on a post-click landing page has the best experience on it. Creating an engaging headline, a contrasting CTA button, and an attention-grabbing form ensures that your offer stands out for your visitor and they take the desired conversion action on the post-click landing page.

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