Why Isn’t My Landing Page Converting? A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization (Part 1)
Everything you do on your website is aimed at converting as many leads as possible into customers.
So when your landing page isn’t converting as well as you’d hoped it would, it can be quite a disappointment.
In the first part of our guide on landing page optimization, we’ll cover everything you and your web design company can do to make sure you’re getting as many customers as possible.
Let’s take a look!
What is a landing page?
Often, the objective is lead generation, conversion, or anything else that advances leads through your sales funnel and turns them into customers.
These are typically pages that visitors land on after clicking on a search result, a paid ad, or another form of targeted promotion. That means that they’re usually not a result of a random search.
In fact, when you’re creating a landing page, you’re counting on a lot of people visiting it. And that’s why you need to make sure your website design facilitates conversions.
Why do you need a landing page & how does web design affect it?
Every one of your visitors comes to your site with a specific intent. This is especially true when they come to your site after clicking on a search result or an ad.
Now, simply directing them to a general page means that they’ll be seeing content that’s not tailored to their intent.
For example, let’s say you sell watches and earrings. You set up an ad about Rolex watches for men.
When interested visitors click through, they’re directed to a homepage that has both watches for men and women, watches from different brands, and earrings too.
It’s a mess.
The majority of visitors won’t be interested enough to manually go through your site and set up all the right filters to find the products that you originally advertised.
In summary,
What is landing page optimization anyway?
Now that you understand why landing pages matter, you should also understand why it’s important that they’re the best version they can be.
If your landing page and your offer aren’t convincing enough, visitors will leave without purchasing anything.
If it’s not organized enough, they’ll be confused and leave.
If the process of purchase is not frictionless…
Well, you get it. The visitors will leave.
Which landing page metrics should you track?
In order to understand your landing page performance, we typically track the following metrics:
1. Conversion rates
This is a no-brainer. If you want to know if your landing page is working as it should be, you have to track your conversion rates.
In some cases, the conversion rate will pertain to the number of visitors who turned into leads by submitting a form with their information.
In other cases, it can be the number of direct purchases.
2. Bounce rates
Bounce rates define the number of people who leave your site immediately after landing on it.
A high bounce rate could indicate a poor browsing experience or that your content isn’t compelling or aligned with the visitor’s objective.
This is an incredibly important metric — it’s also one of Google’s search engine ranking signals.
3. Time on page
Understanding the amount of time your visitors spend on your landing page can answer the following questions:
Is my landing page valuable enough?
Is it clear enough?
In the first case, you want people to spend time on your landing page reading what you have to say (and converting).
However, if they’re spending too much time on it, it could be a sign that your landing page is not clear enough.
4. Traffic sources
In some cases, it’s really not you. It’s the channels you’re getting traffic from.
If you notice that some traffic sources convert better than others, put them at the forefront of your strategy.
Conversely, if some traffic results in extraordinarily high bounce rates and little conversions, consider investing less time and/or money into those channels.
5. Abandonment rate
Finally, abandonment rate is one of the most important metrics.
It’ll show you how many people started performing your target action (e.g. filling out a form, adding items in their cart), before leaving your website.
If you’re struggling with a high abandonment rate, it may mean that your forms are confusing and/or your purchasing process has too much friction.
What’s a good conversion rate for my landing page?
Thanks to the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report, we now have a scientifically-grounded answer that’s based on the behavior of over 74.5 million website visitors, to 64,284 landing pages.
Here’s a quick summary of the median conversion rates for these industries:
- Travel: 5.0%
- Real Estate: 2.8%
- Business Consultancy: 5.0%
- Business Services: 3.4%
- Credit & Lending: 5.5%
- Health: 2.8%
- Higher Education: 2.6%
- Home Improvement: 3.3%
- Legal: 3.2%
- Vocational Studies & Job Training: 6%
So, why is my landing page not converting?
There are 3 things that could potentially be wrong:
We can’t advise on your product or offer, but if you’re sure it’s not either of those, then it’s most certainly your landing page.
The most common cause behind ineffective landing pages is simple: They don’t understand the visitor’s intent, aka the landing page doesn’t know what the visitor wants to see when they land on it.
Sometimes, the culprit is website design.
Web designers who don’t follow conversion optimization best practices often end up creating ineffective sites for their clients.
This is why it’s best to work with a web design company that has a track record of success and expertise not just in web design, but in marketing as well.
Next, if your landing page has plenty of distractions, that could be another reason why it’s not performing as expected.
Your goal should always be directing the visitor to perform the singular action you want them to take. Your calls-to-action (CTAs) have to support that intent, just like every other element on your landing page.
If you want them to sign up for your mailing list, only talk about the mailing list and set up mailing list CTAs.
Leave everything else for a different landing page.
Improving your landing page conversion rates
We’ll be covering more on best practices for B2B, PPC, SEO, and mobile landing pages in part 2 of this landing page optimization series, so be sure to check that out.
In the meantime, if you’re still uncertain about why your landing page isn’t converting, one of the best things to do is to run a heatmap analysis.
By understanding where people are clicking on your landing page and the density of clicks, it becomes a lot easier to figure out what needs to be changed.
If that sounds like a lot of work, why not reach out to us? Heatmap analysis and conversion-optimized web design are things that we love doing, and we’ll be happy to help :)
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