How I Use Landing Page Split Testing to Find Untapped Marketing Potential [+ 12 Places to Start]
I’m a tinkerer at heart. As a content marketer, I can’t help it — there’s that perfect word hiding somewhere. That’s the mentality I bring to landing pages I create for companies, too.
You might love your page’s first iteration — just like how I love the first draft. But, you know it’s due for a rewrite. Landing page split testing helps you conduct an effective page rewrite by showing your page’s performance among your audience to improve conversions and user experience.
And yet, even though testing can bring a bevy of benefits, only 17% of marketers currently use split testing to increase their landing pages’ conversion rates. That’s a ton of wasted marketing potential.
So, let’s start from the top. What goes into a split test and what elements should you prioritize in your tests?
Table of Contents
As you go through the process of designing your landing page, you naturally want to make the best decisions for what goes on the page, where it goes, and why you put it there. Conducting split tests with your audience gives you a wealth of unique first-party data to make your case.
Regular split testing and page iteration is one of several landing page best practices worth your time.
Pro tip: If you don’t have a landing page to test yet, we can help you get started with our free landing page builder.
Why split test your landing pages?
Testing brings many benefits — let’s explore a few of the most critical ones. And, to help us do so, I chatted with Rachael Pilcher, B2B SaaS conversion copywriter at Mighty Fine Copy. She has spent the past eight years invested in landing page development and testing.
Improve conversion rates.
A landing page’s purpose is conversion. In a typical user flow, prospects arrive at landing pages via ads, and the landing page should convince them to take the next best action in the marketing journey.
Your testing’s primary goal should be to increase the number of users who take that next action. From her experience, Pilcher says that marketers can miss prime opportunities to tweak conversion on their landing pages.
“Landing pages tend to be the forgotten child in marketing campaigns,” she says.
“While everything else is optimized around them (ads, emails, etc), landing pages are often treated as a once-and-done asset — but even tiny changes on these pages can lead to a significant uplift in leads and sales. If you’re not testing, you’re potentially sitting on a gold mine.”
As a benchmark, our research shows the average landing page conversion rate across all industries is 5.89%. Use that figure as a starting point for assessing your testing successes and failures.
Refresh your lead pool.
Over time, your qualified leads stagnate. People leave companies, say no, or buy from competitors. In an ideal world, you’re regularly attracting fresh leads and drawing them through the marketing funnel and fuller buyer’s journey.
A well-constructed landing page can help you capture not only more leads but also ones more willing to engage with your offer.
“I like to think of landing pages as a freshwater source for your entire marketing ecosystem,” says Pilcher.
“They constantly replenish leads and ensure growth for your whole company. So, just like a clean water supply sustains growth in nature, optimizing your critical landing pages sustains growth by providing a constant flow of good traffic, and nurturing your best prospects into customers.”
Understand user behavior.
As your users interact with your landing page, you can gather good intel on what makes them tick. Instead of guessing at what they want, the data they generate will tell you. Through multiple testing iterations, you’ll learn which page elements appeal to them the most.
Metrics are your friends here:
- Bounce rates
- Time on page
- Click-through rates
- And, yes, conversion rates
More in-depth research methods like scroll depth analysis and recorded user sessions can provide additional insights into how users connect with you via your landing page.
Optimize your marketing resource expenditures.
As a part of your marketing mix, landing pages consume marketing resources. You put time, energy, and money into creating and maintaining these pages.
A well-built landing page brings in qualified leads and primes them to convert. A poorly designed landing page does not — and can have far-reaching consequences.
“If there’s a problem with your landing page, it causes a trickle-down effect that impacts everything from that point on, which can lead to wasted ad spend, unqualified leads, and frustrated sales teams,” Pilcher warns.
“Landing pages are always a little bit wrong, which is why it’s so important to strategically test and optimize them month on month.”
Pro tip: Based on our experience with thousands of marketers, we’ve put together a guide on best practices for optimization. Download our guide for a detailed list of optimization tactics.
Refine messaging and branding.
Personally, I find the landing page testing experience forces me to get better at explaining my brand and offers.
It feels like it emulates the Feynmann Technique in that you learn a topic more thoroughly with more opportunities to teach it to others. The act of testing, learning, and iterating helps more effectively hone what I want to say to the market and how I go about it.
I believe that’s especially true with complicated products and services. I’ve sold content team services that can get fairly complex, requiring knowledge from multiple disciplines and critical thinking about organizational structures. Rewriting landing page copy to explain an offer like that helped me tighten my messaging and make it make sense to my audiences.
How Landing Page Split Testing Works
Running a split test for your landing page is much like how you’d conduct A/B testing for any other piece of marketing collateral. While conversions are likely your primary business goal, consider what other outcomes (like user behavior and messaging refinement) you should measure.
Also, ensure you follow testing best practices, like:
- Define a clear hypothesis to test.
- Test one variable at a time to show causation.
- Check your page’s mobile version for inconsistencies.
- Give yourself enough time to test — at least a two-week testing window.
A/B testing software can help you put together useful tests and collect meaningful data for insight creation.
Roughly 44% of companies have deployed a testing solution to help them. If you want to join their ranks, we’ve recently compiled a list of the top A/B testing software.
Pro tip: Trying to set up your A/B test? Download our complete A/B testing kit, ready-made for your first (or next) landing page.
Landing Page Split Testing Ideas: 12 Places to Start
Now, the question is: What should you test? Well, you have plenty of options worth testing on your landing page. Pilcher shares that whatever you choose to do, you should be thoughtful and methodical in your approach.
“For landing page split testing to be an effective use of your time and money, it needs to be treated as methodical exploration of what works — and what doesn’t — for your specific customers and product,” she says.
Define your testing method and keep it in mind as you review these landing page elements for opportunities to improve your conversion rate and better tell your brand’s story.
1. Offer Type
What do you want to give your prospective buyer at the end? Knowing the destination can help you better plan the journey they’ll take through your landing page.
Different content marketing options, like ebooks, templates, or strategy guides, appeal to certain buyers across different marketing funnel stages. Or, if your user is closer to the buying stage, consider offering a 1:1 consultation or free trial.
Make sure you know your target audience and where in the funnel they sit. From there, you can A/B test offers and monitor for conversion rates. Also, tinker with guarantees, special discounts, or time-bound offers and see how they encourage (or detract from) converting.
2. Call-to-Action
How do you want to convince your buyer to accept your offer? Another key part of planning your landing page journey is to establish a call-to-action. Ideally, your CTA is a specific, clear next step for your prospect:
- Download the ebook.
- Fill out a form.
- Book a demo.
- Read more.
The text you use is important — so is how you structure your CTA.
For instance, using a clickable button for your CTA has shown to increase conversions by up to 28% (although results are all contextual — that’s why we test). As you test CTAs, consider your text, structure, and position on your landing page.
3. Titles
Ideally, you want your prospects to spend several minutes reviewing your information, considering your offer, and then converting via your CTA. But, research shows that you have 10-20 seconds max to capture their attention and communicate a compelling value proposition. Or, they’ll bounce.
That makes your titles (anything in hero text) incredibly important to landing page success. Your largest and most visible text should connect immediately to your offer, your CTA, and your value.
Users have little patience — don’t waste your first impression. Test titles extensively to see what clicks best with your prospects.
4. Body Copy Length and Structure
You’ve hooked your reader — great! Now what? Your body copy is where you explain your offer, why your user should care, and work to convince them to take action.
While the ideal length is something you’ll test, aim for roughly 500-1,000 words on your landing page. Prospects need enough information to make informed decisions, but overwhelming them with content is a surefire way to bounce them.
Also, pay attention to how you structure your information. Endless paragraphs of blocky text will bore all but the most dedicated readers. You can use headings and subheadings to divide content into manageable chunks.
Since most internet readers still follow the F-shaped pattern and skim content, make it easy for them to understand your offer at a glance. Play with headings and subheadings to see what clicks best.
5. Social Proof
Humans want to belong. And, they want to feel like they chose wisely about what groups they belong to. That’s the innate human desire that social proof uses. Social proof has been shown to increase landing page conversion rates by up to 34%.
Testimonials and (honest) reviews are great places to begin. Try experimenting with where you place them in the body copy and how many you use. Social proof should support your offer’s value without distracting from your story by overwhelming prospects.
6. Images and Videos
As a writer, I certainly enjoy when people read my words. But, even I prefer a good visual from time to time. Images and videos can provide different perspectives on your brand and offer and drive more user engagement. Plus, video content can increase conversion rates by up to 86%.
That said, videos are not created equal. They depend heavily on subject matter, industry, and storytelling capability. For instance, marketers often fret about video length.
Best practices point to keeping videos under two minutes, with the main points getting covered in the first 60 seconds. Square that with this four-minute Volvo ad that blows most advertising videos out of the water — an ad that fed a positive social media frenzy for days.
So, embrace the running theme and A/B test video lengths, formats, placement, and subject matter to find what’s right for your crowd.
The same goes for images, too. Unique images, user-generated content, or infographics all offer opportunities to capture users’ attention and help your offer stand out. Like videos, test location, formats, and subject matter.
7. Form Fields
I’ll avoid wading into the “gated or ungated content” debate for now so we can talk about forms. As a lead gen tool, forms reign supreme for information collection. Yet, how much information you collect can influence your user’s experience and eventual conversion.
Numbers span a decent range depending on your industry and offer type, but best practices settle on 3-5 fields in your form before it’s too many and users tap out. Get your field count to four or fewer, and Formstack research shows you could increase conversions by 160%.
I’d start with name, email, and job title; other fields can be your A/B testing variables. Take care to keep your user data clean as you add and remove fields. Also test different form designs and page location for conversion improvements.
8. Button Attributes
Buttons are useful tools to highlight specific next steps or to call out links to compelling social proof. And you have plenty of attributes to tweak to make the right button:
- How big is it?
- Do you match brand colors or use more contrast?
- What text do you put inside?
- Where on the page do you put it?
Button location on a page is an especially fascinating subtopic. Much like the aforementioned F-shaped pattern, UX designers also may consider the Gutenberg Principle when designing page layout.
This principle refers to how users’ eyes scan and follow information on a webpage. Research shows that primary CTA buttons often do well in the Terminal Area (or bottom-right of the page), while secondary CTAs thrive in the Strong Fallow Area (or top-right).
I say, try out positioning for yourself and see.
9. Page Navigation
Your various copy, image, and design decisions all feed into how your user navigates the landing page. Do they proceed in an orderly fashion? Or do they get distracted by the occasional external link or video review that bounces them from your page?
Test how you guide prospects through your story on your landing page. A table of contents could be useful navigation links, or it could slow down your users. Play around with adding and removing navigation links, adjusting link texts, and place them around the webpage.
User heat maps (and relevant tracking software) are excellent tools to assess navigation and can identify where you can better support user experience.
10. Color Schemes and Typography
You’re probably already working with approved brand colors and font types. But, landing pages offer opportunities to tweak those colors and fonts to increase appeal.
A lot of resources (especially in packaged consumer goods) have gone toward understanding color psychology and how it influences buying. For instance, red and orange are action-oriented colors and are typically best for increasing conversion rates on CTAs.
As you test various colors and fonts, be mindful of user accessibility, too. W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a common framework for keeping content accessible and easy to view and access.
For example, WCAG points out the importance of ensuring sufficient color contrast between your text and background elements. Follow WCAG to help ensure your A/B testing results are easily applicable post-testing.
11. Trust Signals
Why should users trust you and your offer? While social proof offers a compelling emotional appeal, trust signals help convey more logical reasons for choosing you.
In an age of GDPR, privacy statements and clear explanations of data use carry significant weight with users.
Depending on your product or service, you might show industry certifications. For instance, a SaaS product might show badges for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance for information security management.
Logos of partner organizations and companies can also extend social proof and show you’re a trusted partner in your ecosystem.
Test the number, type, and placement of these elements. Pay special attention to what your industry expects — and where you bring unique or extra-special benefits.
12. Ask Your Sales Team
So many elements to consider — where should you start? Pilcher shares an overlooked source of landing page testing wisdom: your sales team.
“Need ideas for what to test? Absolutely look at on-page analytics and user behavior, but my best tip is to talk to your sales team,” she says. “Companies often work in silos, but marketers should be talking with sales to get insights for testing, especially if the landing page is aimed at booking a demo.
“As your front-line communicators, talking to sales is like talking to 100 customers. They have a deep understanding of your customer pain points, objections, frequently asked questions, and buying triggers,” she continues.
“These insights can help marketers to develop hypotheses about which elements to test, create clear and specific messaging, and align landing pages with what customers actually care about — which ultimately drives more qualified leads and revenue for the business.”
Split Test Your Way to the Best Landing Page
Running landing page split tests require discipline and commitment to finding the best results for each element. Sometimes, that’ll fly in the face of expectations. It’s okay to admit your page got it wrong before. Use these tests as opportunities to iterate, improve, and grow.
Many marketers have yet to embrace the power of split testing. Build your tests, use software when appropriate, and grab hold of an excellent strategic advantage.
