Lessons Learned from Analyzing 3000 Landing Pages Pt. 1

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming today. Today's webinar is on one of my favorite topics, conversion rate optimization. We're going to be talking about going from average to amazing, lessons learned from optimizing 3,000+ landing pages. So let's dive right in. My name is Neil Patel. I'm the co-founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency. Along with me today, I have Aubrey and Kyle. Aubrey, do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself? And then Kyle, you can do the same.

Sure. Hi everyone, I'm Aubrey Maloney. I'm the UX lead for the NP Excel SMB division of NP Digital. Happy to be here.

Hi everyone, I'm Kyle. I'm a senior CRO manager at NP Digital. Been doing agency CRO for around 13 years. So lots of landing page testing and I'm excited to talk about landing page optimization today.

Awesome. So let's dive right in. So we're NP Digital, over 1,000 employees, 60+ clients, 20+ countries, a lot of awards. Just keep in mind, we do a ton of CRO, so we wouldn't be getting a lot of these results, these clients, if the strategies didn't work. So what's really the secret to increasing your conversions? That, that's the million-dollar question, right? And that's what we're going to break down today. We may go a little bit quickly through some of the slides because that's because we have 76, 77 slides or so, but let's dive in. Well, before we dive into the secret to improving your conversions, you need to first figure out, are your landing pages letting you down or are they doing well? And this will help you with that. The average conversion rate for a B2B landing page is 1.8%. The average conversion rate for a B2C landing page is 2.1%. Your goal is to be higher than that. Now, of course, if your product's really expensive, like you're selling something for $1 million, you're not going to convert at 2% or even 1.8%. But you guys get the point. And depending on the industry you're in, these are roughly the average conversion rates. Now keep in mind, a conversion for different industries means different things. For example, for professional services, it could be a lead. On the flip side, for a toy company, it could be actually selling a toy and shipping it to your house, right? So you have to keep that in mind. Conversion points are very different per industry as well. And the secret to more sales when it comes to CRO, well, there's a lot that goes into it. It's not just one thing. People believe it's, oh, you make one change, your conversions just go through the roof. That's not necessarily the case. It's a lot of little things that add up. Well, what you really need to first do with marketing is not just focus on how do I spend more money. You need to think about how can you get more out of your current traffic because that allows you to scale your campaigns. A lot of people struggle scaling up their ads, their SEO, and a lot of different social media campaigns because they're like, wait, it breaks as they scale. A lot of times the reason it breaks is because the conversions aren't there. If your conversion rate was higher, you can then end up scaling up your campaigns more and in a much more profitable way. Now, example of a conversion rate, if you have 100 visitors, 10 put in their email address, that's 10 conversions, 10%. If you have 1,000 visitors and you're selling a product and 30 buy, That's a 3% conversion rate. These are all examples of how conversion rates work. If you want to increase your conversion rate, as I mentioned earlier, it's not just about tweaking your website. It's really understanding them, figuring out their objections and issues that they have and solving those. When you do that, you're much more likely to grow your conversions versus just be like, oh, let me just change the color of this button. It's going to drastically increase my conversions. Typically, if a color increases your conversions by a lot, there's something else that's wrong with the page that's causing that. Color change usually doesn't have a 20% impact in conversion. Sometimes it can, but it's very rare. It's usually there's something else bigger on the page that's the issue. Sorry for the kids crying in the background if you guys can hear that. So what's the difference between CRO and UX design? Well, conversion rate optimization and UX do go hand in hand. User experience involves a lot of the elements that improve conversions, such as increasing or reducing site load time, right? So the faster your website loads, the better off you are. A lot of user experience elements can increase conversions, but there are differences. A lot of times with conversion rate optimization, it's about figuring out what issues people have, solving them, and then optimizing and fixing those. And here are some UX elements with the highest impact on conversions, from page load to mobile optimization. Although websites these days are responsive, having clear value propositions, answering people's objections above the fold, all these things can really help boost your conversion rate. Now, the other thing that I want you guys to keep in mind is You know, when you're trying to boost your conversions, a small increase in conversions can have a massive impact in profit. For example, if you're spending money to acquire a customer, but you get a 10% lift in conversions, a lot of times you've now just saved money on acquiring a customer from an ad perspective, and a lot of that money drives to the bottom line. And look, the way you need to think about it is more conversions equal better ROI, right? So there's a lot of fixed costs and variable costs. If your fixed costs are staying the same, which they do, but your variable costs start going down because you optimize your conversions, you know, what you'll find is you can end up generating a lot more revenue.

All right, so let's talk about some of the fundamentals of CRO. So I think it all starts with understanding your audience. So Knowing which ads and keywords are actually driving traffic to that landing page can help inform the content of that landing page, right? So, you know, you want the headline to be, you know, hyper-relevant to the ad that they came from and the content to kind of support their motivation or intent. But I've seen a lot of tests where, you know, just changing the headline to kind of be continuous with the ad that they came from can have a huge impact. Another key element of conversion is calls to action. So in this particular slide, we're talking about a single call to action, which is critical. If you have several different objectives, sometimes that can distract visitors and they're not sure where to actually continue. So in this case, an overall increase potential of 371%. So this is a test that a client that I actually had where we not only had a very clear CTA, which is that next step button, but we had a line of copy underneath the CTA, which was another chance to kind of communicate additional value and clarify kind of the objective from there and saw a 6.5% increase. And we've actually run similar tests with this client. On a variety of pages and continue to see impacts.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, The ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So Again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

So mobile optimization is kind of a hot topic. May seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many clients, you know, certain pages get neglected and they don't necessarily lay out correctly on mobile, any number of issues. And as, you know, as time goes on, the share of visitors definitely is trending more mobile. According to Forbes, that's 96.5%. At this stage.

And one thing to keep in mind too is some people are still using AMP, uh, for mobile, and what you'll find is AMP will take away a lot of your call to actions as well. So you got to figure out how to put them back in so you can get the mobile conversions.

Yep. And here's an example. I believe this was, uh, actually Aubrey's team that ran this test, so I'll kind of let her run through this. But that's an example of the the layout issues.

Can you guys hear me?

Yeah.

Okay. Sorry about that. By improving the scaling for Keir's product listing page for mobile devices, we just enhanced the visibility of that view detail CTAs and really streamlined user focus towards product pages. And then this adjustment led to a 21% increase in conversion rates, just really demonstrating the impact of mobile optimization on site usage and conversion metrics.

Yeah, that's a substantial lift there with what, you know, could be considered kind of a smaller change. I mean, there's a lot changing, but it, you know, it's not like a whole page change.

Yeah.

So here's kind of some of the, kind of the hot mobile issues that we see a lot. Visual misalignment, which we talked about. Sometimes, you know, navigation or even functionality tabs, things like that don't necessarily lay out correctly on mobile. Which can actually prevent them from progressing through the funnel. Broken CTAs where, you know, for example, the button's actually too small on mobile. A lot of times I see this a lot where images and icons get stretched out, they don't scale correctly, which just, you know, display issues actually detract from credibility at that point. And then font sizes too is kind of a tricky one to make sure that everything is Legible on smaller screens. And then mobile, obviously, potentially a different intent to where you may not need as much content or need certain content that you don't need on desktop. So kind of one of the key elements of testing is the ability to iterate and kind of hone in on certain elements. So for example, you can kind of test your way into figuring out which value props and kind of messaging resonates or even which kind of imagery your prospects like to see. So it's absolutely critical for, you know, taking an existing design and really kind of fine-tuning it. The concept of A/B testing is relatively simple. You're usually using a testing platform which What that does is randomly samples traffic between the 2 variants, the control and the variant that includes the change or the independent variable. And because they're randomly sampled, you can control for seasonality and other external factors and kind of get a good signal as far as whether that change actually caused the impact or not. So if there is a statistically significant difference, then you can say that the independent variable actually caused that.

And on your end, if you have a lot of conversions and generate a ton of revenue and you don't want to test all your traffic, you don't have to. You can do a test with 10% of your traffic, 100%, 50%, 3%. You can literally pick. If you don't have tons of conversions, you're going to have to use 100% of your traffic. But again, you can, if you have a lot, you can start smaller and if it starts working out, just, you know, let it rip to 100% of your traffic.

Yep. See that a lot. It's a good way to reduce risk for if it's a pretty wild idea, you might wanna reduce the traffic allocation. So at this point, 70% of marketers are invested or believe in A/B testing. And I think this is an interesting one because it's still continuing to grow. Like, I feel like there's still room to kind of get A/B testing baked into the normal process of product managers or you know, website managers and things like that. So I think there's still growth here, but it's, it's, uh, more common than it's ever been, which is good.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly think about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com— grain like rice— so singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

If you do find a winning variation, uh, you know, you should really strive to get that implemented as soon as possible because you don't, you know, you don't want to leave revenue on the table. So if you can hardcode the changes to the winning variant, that's ideal. If not, a little tip is that using the testing platform, a lot of times you can push 100% of traffic to that winning variant if there's, you know, limited dev resources or something of the like. But in general, you don't want to necessarily Leave money on the table, so to speak. So this is actually something we run into quite a bit with clients is trying to figure out how to get these things implemented.

All right, let's identify some core CRO strategies as well as some factors that can contribute to harming your conversion rates. First, poor form design leads to user fatigue and frustration, causes mistakes or abandonment. But in contrast, good design principles make forms easier to use, to complete by avoiding unnecessary details and confusion, helping users stay engaged and complete the form efficiently. So form field reduction is really ground zero for bottom-of-funnel conversion optimization. One key principle is less is more. Reducing form fields is a fundamental tactic for boosting conversions. This approach really requires just minimal effort and resources while offering significant potential gains. When optimizing forms, just questions of the necessity of each field— is phone, fax, or address information truly needed? And focus on asking only what's relevant to really streamline that user experience and enhance those conversions. Household name David Ogilvy once said, on average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. So when you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar. This just really underscores the crucial role of a compelling headline in capturing attention and driving engagement. Obvious changes to headlines and imagery are effective, but small tweaks can also make a big impact. Adding the word now in this example to a blog title boosted conversion rates by 120%. And again, it just highlights how subtle, even subtle changes like creating a sense of urgency and intent in the language you're using can significantly enhance that effectiveness of your headlines. Creating a sense of urgency on product pages can really drive action and boost conversions as well. Highlighting key offers such as free shipping, limited stock, and buy one, get one can significantly increase the likelihood that visitors are going to perform an action such as add to cart or complete their purchase. So emphasizing these elements effectively prompts customers to act more quickly. Another method for building a sense of urgency is highlighting limited availability of an offering or product. In this example, adding a site-wide banner highlighting limited availability and a call to action to join now really impacted and boosted engagement. This simple change led to a 32% increase in consultation requests and improved average session duration by 10%, just demonstrating Again, that power of urgency in driving user action and enhancing those site metrics. Adding a countdown can also really build a sense of urgency on landing pages, also in the cart or checkout or on contact and signup pages. Countdown timers prompt that quick action by highlighting this limited time opportunity and really kind of boosts motivation through that sense of FOMO, that fear of missing out, encouraging again just swift decision-making and kind of Distinctive choices. In this example, the musician's guide increased sales by 332% by adding that countdown.

Cool.

Awesome, everyone. Thank you very much for attending. And if you need help with your marketing, check out npdigital.com.

Take care.