The goal of any landing page is to get the reader to take action. This could be downloading a free guide, signing up for your newsletter, or buying one of your products. When someone takes one of these actions, it’s called a conversion.
Naturally, entrepreneurs and business owners want a way to track their conversions, and this is done by monitoring your landing page conversion rate.
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about conversion rates, including how they’re calculated, the average conversion rate, and the conversion rates achieved by top-performing businesses.
Plus, we’ll provide you with some tips to help you increase your landing page conversion rate so you can make the most of your web traffic.
Your landing page conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take your desired action. So, if 100 people visit your website and 25 perform an action your conversion rate is 25%.
The formula is (conversions ÷ visitors) x 100 = conversion rate.
Your conversion rate is one of the (if not the most important) metrics related to your landing page. The higher your conversion rate, the better job your landing page is doing at converting visitors into leads and customers. Conversely, a low conversion rate indicates that something might be wrong, either with your landing page or the traffic you’re sending to it.
To maximize your results, it’s important to monitor your landing page conversion rate closely. Test different headlines, images, and videos to see how they impact your conversion rate. This will help you learn what your audience responds to—and you can apply these learnings to future landing pages.
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What is the average landing page conversion rate?
As you might expect, there’s been a lot of research around conversion rates. Here’s what a few studies determined is the average landing page conversion rate:
Those are some very different findings. So, why is there such a big discrepancy between these results? Well, there are a number of factors that can impact your landing conversion rate, including:
Landing page builder software
Industry
Audience
Conversion goal
As a result, depending on who you’re surveying you could get very different results.
It’s fine to be average, but the very best business owners strive for more.
Plus, average isn’t necessarily good. According to Wordstream, an average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%, and it’s safe to assume most marketers wouldn’t be happy with that number.
So what’s a good landing page conversion rate? Again, that’s going to depend on your industry, audience, conversion goal, etc. But here are some examples of entrepreneurs who consistently achieve exceptional conversion rates:
Don’t be afraid to set a high goal for yourself because as these entrepreneurs have proven, it’s definitely possible.
How do you improve your landing page conversion rate?
It’s great that you’re thinking about improving your conversion rate. But how do you go about doing that? Luckily, there are a few steps you can take to optimize your page and turn more visits into clicks.
Offer something your audience actually wants
You could have a beautiful landing page designed by the world’s greatest marketing minds. But if your offer isn’t something your audience is interested in, your landing page conversion rate will always disappoint you.
So, before you start building your landing page do your research and come up with an offer your audience won’t be able to resist.
To start, listen to what they’re saying. Are they constantly asking the same questions? Is there a common problem that you could solve?
Next, have a look at your competitors. What kinds of products and services are they offering? If there’s a particular offering that’s working well for them you might be able to repurpose it for your own business. You can also look at your own offerings to see what worked well in the past and where you underperformed.
Using this knowledge, craft an offer that’s beneficial for both your business and your audience.
Start with a template that’s designed for conversions
If you really want to boost your conversions the best thing you can do is start with the right landing page template.
For example, Leadpages has over 250 templates that are designed by digital marketing experts and optimized for conversions. You can also sort the template gallery by conversion rate to find the designs that have historically converted the best.
This is probably the easiest and most effective way to improve your landing page conversion rate, as most of the work is already done for you. This will set you up for success right from the start and ensure your page is almost where you need it to be before you even begin building it.
Show the benefits
People always want to know what’s in it for them, so make that clear throughout your landing page. Focus on the benefits of your offer and let readers know exactly why they should care.
Here are a few tips:
State your primary benefit in your headline: Start your landing page off by telling visitors the number one benefit they’ll receive if they take action now.
Benefits over features: Don’t just say what your product or service does. Tell readers how it will benefit them and make their lives easier/better.
Use imagery: Show people using and enjoying your products to reinforce the benefits.
When you highlight the benefits, your products and services aren’t just something you want them to buy—they become the solution to the reader’s problem.
Include social proof
You can present a great argument for why someone should take your desired action. But if you really want to improve your landing page conversion rate you need to build trust with your audience, and social proof is the best way to do that.
Most of the visitors to your landing page don’t know you. So, even if you give them a lot of excellent reasons to take that next step, they’re going to doubt you. You need to provide proof that you’ll follow through with your promises.
Including positive reviews and testimonials on your landing page puts visitors at ease. Now it’s not just you telling them to take action, it’s also their peers. And when you consider that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations you begin to realize what a very powerful conversion tool this is.
Add a sense of urgency
Salespeople hate it when you leave the store to “think about it.” Why? Because they know once you leave the chances of them closing the deal go down dramatically.
A lot can happen once you leave the store:
You start to question whether or not it’s a good idea.
You find something else that meets your needs.
You get distracted by other priorities.
You simply forget about the product or service you were considering buying.
All of this is true for your landing page as well. The second someone leaves your page it’s a lot less likely you’re going to earn a conversion from them. That’s why it’s important to encourage them to act now if they want to take advantage of your offer.
Here’s an example: When someone lands on your page, tell them if they act in the next 20 minutes they get a special price, and after that, they’ll have to pay more. You can also use a countdown timer to reinforce the urgency.
By convincing more visitors to convert now you’ll actually get more conversions overall since you’ll have fewer people leaving and forgetting about your offer.
Make your call-to-action buttons stand out
Once you convince visitors to take advantage of your offer you need to make it clear where they have to click.
Your first step should be to give your call-to-action (CTA) buttons a contrasting color. This isn’t to say that your buttons should clash with the primary color of the page. They just need to be different so they’re easy to spot and stand out from the rest of the page.
Next, make sure they’re big enough so that the text is easy to read. Include a powerful CTA, such as:
Start a Free Trial
Reserve Your Spot
Send Me My Free Guide
Finally, use multiple CTA buttons throughout your landing page. You never know at one point a visitor is going to decide they want to take the next step, but if you have CTA buttons in multiple spots they’ll never have to scroll too far to find one.
Target the right audience
You might have the perfect landing page for your real estate business, but if you send a bunch of people to your page who aren’t interested in buying a home, your landing page conversion rate is going to suffer.
This is why you need to really dial in who your ideal customer is and target them with your ads.
Review any data you have on your previous customers to see what types of people typically buy from you. If you’re starting a new business, do some research to determine who is most likely to be interested in your products and services.
Build a profile of your ideal customer that includes data points like their:
Age
Gender
Interests
Education level
Occupation
Based on this, create copy and imagery that appeals to your audience. Then set up your ads to target the types of people that you know are interested in what you have to offer.
Never stop testing
Even if you apply all the above advice to your landing page it will never be perfect. There’s always something you can do to make it a little better and eke out a few more conversions.
A/B testing allows you to create two variations of your landing page so you can test different elements. For example, you could test two different headlines, two different hero images, or two different CTA button colors.
You might be surprised how one small change can improve your landing page conversion rate. Sometimes changing a single word in your headline or the placement of an image can make a big difference.
Want to improve your landing page conversion rate? Start with the right software
When you choose a landing page builder that’s optimized for conversions it makes everything a lot easier.
