SEO Techniques

 GA4 Advanced Segments, Audiences, and Comparisons are three ways to group your visitors, sessions, and events in Google Analytics data and find deeper insights.  These three features are somewhat similar in their functionality while are also different. In this post, I am going to clarify what these three features are, how they are similar or different from others, and when you use them.

Comparisons in GA4

The comparison feature in Google Analytics (GA4) allows you to compare one subset of your data with other subsets. This feature is available on top of most of the standard reports. Those who are familiar with the Segments or Advanced Segments feature of Google Analytics will find this feature similar. However, this feature is very limited in nature and can't be considered "Advanced Segment".  You can read about this feature in detail at Comparisons in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Use Comparisons, when you want to quickly compare your data from past data.

Segments in GA4

A segment is a subset of your data. In GA4 segment allows you to narrow down and focus on a group of users or sessions based on common attributes and conditions.

This feature is only available in Exploration, Segments can not be used in standard reports while Comparison is available for comparing charts and various metrics in Standard Reports. Comparison on the other hand can't be used in Exploration.

Just like Comparison, segments look at the users in past sessions so are retroactive.  Read GA4 Segments Explained for more details on Segments.

Use segments when you want to drill deeper into your data explore it in detail.

 Audiences in GA4

GA4 Audiences are groups of users based on common attributes, behaviors, etc. You can create an Audience using dimensions, metrics, and events to include any subset of users that makes sense for your business. In this post, you will learn about the GA4 audience so that you can start to create and use them with confidence.

Segments can not be used in standard reports while Audience can be used in standard reports by including them in Comparison as comparison criteria.

The audience is not retroactive, which means the Audience starts to accumulate users from the moment you build it. Audiences can be used to build comparisons and also target and retarget users using Google Ads. Read GA4 Audiences; How to create, edit, archive, and use Custom Audience to learn more about Audiences.

Use Audiences when you are going to target your users on Google Ads and do some quick comparisons.

  Other Google Analytics 4 posts that might like

GA4 Cross Domain Tracking: How to Track Multiple Domains and Sub Domains

GA4 Segments Explained

GA4 Audiences: How to create, edit, archive, and use Custom Audience

Comparisons in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

35+ Things About Google Analytics 4 That Will Make You Look Like a Genius

How to Upgrade Google Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) - Get Answers to Common Questions

Where to get more help with Google Analytics 4?

Get your team ready for GA4 with this online self-paced course - Google Analytics 4 Masterclass

Workshop - We offer onsite customized workshops. Reach out to us for more details.

Consulting - We can get you up and running with Google Analytics 4 as well as train your and your team to use it effectively. Reach out to us for more details.

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You know the drill: You build a quick landing page and start promoting it. 

The leads start rolling in, but there’s a problem: None of ’em are turning into paying customers. They’re just sitting there, waiting.

Sounds familiar? You’re not alone. Too many businesses throw quick landing pages together, thinking only about the immediate next step (say, generating leads). They often don’t think about the most important thing: How the landing page impacts sales conversions further down the line.

This often causes a pipeline of unqualified leads that wastes your time, energy, and—worst of all—money. What if there was a way you could improve not just the conversion rate of your landing page, but the overall sales conversion rate as well?

Guess what? There is!

By following the three steps outlined in this post, you’ll build more trust with your prospects before they even reach your sales team, making sure your leads not only convert but also turn into paying customers.

1. Use Your Copy to Pre-Qualify Traffic

Here’s a question almost every marketer asks: “How much should we spend per lead?”

And although this question is well-intentioned, it misses a key point. Cost-per-lead is a very important metric and it’s one you should track carefully, but you shouldn’t seek to always generate the most leads at the lowest cost.

Lead generation is a see-saw. You need to balance both lead quality with lead quantity. There’s really no benefit in generating cheap leads if they’re unqualified. Doing so is just a waste of your sales team’s resources.

And this is where your landing page steps in. You can use it to filter out unqualified leads before they ever enter your sales ecosystem.

You can do this in two ways:

By using language that subtly speaks to the people you’re targeting, while pushing away those who aren’t part of your target audience.

By being upfront and clearly stating who you help and who you don’t in a “who is this for” section.

This is a great example from Membership Academy, where they clearly call out who the membership is for and who it isn’t for.

Whichever way you decide to do it, there are typically four things you want to clarify with prospects before they contact you. It makes up the acronym BANT:

Budget: Does this person have access to the amount of money required to purchase your product/services? 

Authority: Does this person have the decision-making power to approve a financial purchase? 

Need: Is the person viewing this landing page someone who actually wants to achieve the outcome you promise?

Time: In what timeline are they looking for a solution?

When you’re building your landing page, make sure you address each of these points in your copy to ensure only the right people are making it through to your sales team.

2. Include Imagery of Yourself, Your Team, or Your Office

The more you can do to build trust with a prospective customer before you ever speak to them, the better. This is even more important with service providers where there’s typically more of a 1:1 connection with customers.

Take healthcare, for example. It’s an industry where an enormous amount of trust is required.

Typically you’ll run an ad campaign directing people to a landing page where they can fill out a “complimentary consultation” form. From there, the office will call them to book their in-person consultation.

One of the biggest roadblocks for a funnel such as this is that people will fill out the form but won’t answer their phone when the office calls. After coming across this problem multiple times, it was time to do some research.

It turns out people are nervous. They’re nervous about coming into a health practice without first knowing more about the practice, the team, and the service they signed up for. 

They sign up in the heat of the moment, then get the classic “buyer’s remorse.” (Or, y’know, “buyer’s jitters.”)

To remedy this problem, make sure to add photos of yourself, your team, or even your office space to your landing pages. By doing this, the visitor gets to see who they’re dealing with and (in the case of a health practice) where they’ll be visiting.

UK-based gym Faultless Fitness is a perfect example of this. They approached us looking for support with their advertising and landing page conversion rate. They told us their target audience wasn’t necessarily “gym-goers” and that they wanted to cater to a wider demographic (i.e., people that hadn’t ever stepped into a gym before).

With this in mind, we wanted to include pictures of the gym, personal trainers, and other members working out on the landing page. This way, people could see that the gym wasn’t a scary place and that it was a fun, sociable environment.

By simply adding pictures like this, we saw the landing page conversion rate increase from 4% to 11%—a 275% conversion rate boost!

Tip: Do you know the average conversion rate for your industry? You can find out in the 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report.

3. Link to an Informative Confirmation Page

The confirmation page (the page someone lands on after the landing page) is the most underutilized piece of real estate on the internet.

Once someone has signed up for the offer on your landing page, they should be redirected to a confirmation page that does two things:

Confirms the action they’ve just taken.

Introduces the next step.

You’d be surprised at how many people sign up for things without realizing what they’ve done. The confirmation page is the perfect place to reinforce the action they’ve just taken, making clear that they’ve signed up for your offer.

You can also use the page to reiterate the benefits of having filled out your form. By doing this, they’re much more likely to actually pay attention to the thing they’ve signed up for. 

Once you’ve confirmed the transaction, it leads you perfectly into introducing the next step. 

When someone has signed up for your offer, they’re in a state of intent. They’re actively trying to solve a problem—and if you don’t give them the opportunity to take the next step, you’re missing out on an opportunity.

Here’s another example from Faultless Fitness. The confirmation page offers success stories—so people have a chance to see what success might look like before they even get on the phone.

Your next step might be to upsell them something, or it can even be as simple as “selling” the next step. If the next step is for your sales team to reach out, tell your customers on the confirmation page! Set up their expectations and you’ll increase the chance that they’ll show up.

Bonus: Show Specific Social Proof

I know, I know—I said there would be three tips. But you’ve read this far, so have another!

Here’s the thing: Nobody likes to be a guinea pig. When people visit your landing page, they’re there because they’re intrigued by your offer. They believe you may help them solve a specific problem. 

The goal of the landing page is to tell people how and why you’re the right person or business to help them. One of the best ways to do this is by providing specific social proof showing you’re trusted by people like them that you’ve helped before.

Image courtesy of Yatter

Videos work particularly well because they feel real. (However, be sure any videos are serving a key purpose on your landing pages, as they’ve been shown to have either a neutral or negative impact on conversions.)

There are many ways you can add social proof to your landing pages, such as showing trust logos, social media support, reviews, ratings, testimonials, or case studies. 

If you can show social proof that is specific to the offer you’re making, that goes a long way. For example, if you’re a dentist and you’re trying to get people to sign up for your teeth whitening offer, share the stories of people who have used that service with you.

Always Think Two Steps Ahead to Turn Those Conversions Into Sales

Remember: When you create a landing page, don’t just think about the immediate next step—think about how the landing page can help you with the entire sales process. 

Your landing page is the first real impression people get of your brand. And as we all know: You only get one chance to make a first impression. So make it count!

A great way to do this is by using Smart Traffic. It allows you to automatically serve your prospects with the landing page that’s most likely to convert ’em based on their unique attributes. This means you could try different variants of a landing page using the tips above, then turn on Smart Traffic and see which ones perform best.

When done right, marketing can be about more than return on investment or brand metrics. 

It can inspire audiences, tell meaningful stories, and share valuable information with the world.

When we talk about “marketing that moves,” global brands like Nike or Dove easily come to mind. Y’know, the big-scale campaigns that go viral, make you cry with their upbeat messages of hope and wonder, and are forwarded to you by your Aunt Annette 10 years after the fact? 

For small and midsize businesses (SMBs), marketing campaigns may be smaller—c’mon, who has the budget to advertise in the Superbowl?!— but there’s no reason they can’t pack the same punch. 

Great marketing campaigns stand out when brave marketers take chances and play by their own rules to get ahead in the game. And that’s exactly what the team at allWomen do. Unafraid to stay true to their mission, they boldly test and re-examine go-to tactics to create a truly unique marketing experience. 

Simply put, they bring Nike’s iconic slogan to life: They just do it.

Meet allWomen—a Small Team with a Big Mission 

What’s in a mission statement? For many companies, it’s a drawn-out declaration painted in bold colors in their foyer. For Barcelona-based allWomen—an academy that upskills women in the workforce to take on and excel in tech positions—it’s something that fuels everything they do, from operations to marketing. It’s not lengthy or overly complicated. It’s simple and gets straight to the point:

We aim to close the gender gap in tech, as well as empower women in any field or life aspect within our community. — Laura Fernandez Gimenez, CEO, and co-founder, allWomen

With a goal like that, it’s pretty easy to root for allWomen—what kind of troll is against empowerment, right? But a great story doesn’t mean success is easy for the team.

Looking at the Landscape

Currently, only about 25% of tech jobs are held by women worldwide. Sounds like a big opportunity for talent-starved companies to recruit, right? Wrong. When it comes to increasing the number of women in tech roles, it’s a slow-burning candle. For example, female software engineers have increased by only 2% in the last *21 years*. And it’s not for lack of trying. It’s reported that 66% of women who enter tech fields find no clear career path going forward and often leave the industry entirely. With issues like pay gaps, gender discrimination and bias, and workplace harassment rife in the tech industries, it’s a tough sell. 

Then we’re not even mentioning an increasingly competitive continuing education industry—an added challenge since allWomen only speaks to about half of potential students as their competitors do. (They only speak to women, not all people—duh.)

These obstacles only make allWomen’s results even more impressive. In just three years since opening its doors, the small startup has grown to 11 employees, 20 instructors, 280 graduates (with that number growing as we speak), and thousands of community members who join in their webinar series and networking events—with a global expansion currently in the works. 

Most importantly, 80% of students have been hired in their target positions. That’s in roles across data science, product management, web development, UX/UI design, and UX writing. Talk about a mission that’s more than just bold words on the walls! 

So, what’s the allWomen secret? How’d they grow from a small startup to a budding global player?

It All Starts with Community 

Before launching allWomen, CEO and co-founder Laura Fernandez Gimenez found herself living and breathing in Barcelona’s budding startup and tech network. Coming from a media background, she discovered a passion for building collaborative communities by joining a startup incubator, Makers of Barcelona—and eventually also running the organization. 

Entrenched in the startup, tech, and education sectors, Laura saw the gender gaps within the tech and startup industries, and the idea for allWomen came to life. 

“I always knew what the main ingredients were going to be from the start: education, community, feminism, and tech,” Laura explains.

This notion of “community” is a golden thread that runs through the organization. To promote networking, women holding leadership positions in leading tech companies run courses as well as open-invite webinars that explore topics from feminism to salary negotiation. 

Community is also a key feature in their marketing lead gen efforts. Chief Marketing Officer Patricia Fernández Carrelo explains this is one of the big reasons why they don’t prioritize Google Ads or even SEO. “If you look at the strategies of other competitors, the tactics they are following and the campaigns they are creating are kind of the same, all of them,” Patricia explains.

We’re different because we’re not just an academy. If you’re just looking for a boot camp to improve your data science or UX skills, there are many players out there that offer just that. It’s very important for us that when someone finds us, they can feel other women have been there, and they will understand them, from the teachers to the alumna. And that’s something you just can’t put on a Google Ad. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

Instead, the team gives most of their PPC budget to Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, where they have more space to develop their message and speak with their audience rather than at them. “Community building works much better for us than just typical marketing acquisition strategies. And that’s why it defines our marketing strategy,” Patricia adds.

How’s that for courageous marketing by daring to be different, hey?

Small businesses like allWomen need to be creative to get a competitive edge against big players in their industries. allWomen does that by being courageous in their marketing and not being afraid to test trusted tactics. But testing takes time, and often small teams don’t have that kind of capacity. That’s where conversion intelligence steps in to help you stand out of the crowd. It’s about using the power of artificial intelligence to get more out of your marketing, with less effort.

Powering Up with Design

It’s also interesting to see how “community” shapes the allWomen sales funnel. “We have this marketing funnel, and when we contact or have contact with women, we have a high conversion rate,” Patricia says, “because once someone talks to our admissions department, they generally convert.” 

A trick to ensure prospects move forward through the funnel to meet with the admissions team is to design a targeted and relevant digital experience. “We’ve always tried to make design and usability allies of allWomen,” she adds.

Image is important for our community and us. We work with a designer to create a specific brand and look that appeals to our audience. This is also something we have been, and are continually developing. We get a lot of comments from our audience about the design. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

What does this look like in practice? Let’s start with allWomen’s landing pages.

Click on the image to see the full landing page.

Direct and to the point, right? It’s no accident. Patricia explains: “We always work to deliver all of the relevant information about our courses in the best way possible in terms of copy and content design.” 

This means testing different elements on course landing pages to see which ones perform best. For example, they create variants that include more or less information about the courses to see what leads more to users downloading the syllabus. They also try different angles of their value proposition by experimenting with messages—from the skills you’ll learn to career moves made possible by allWomen courses.

See how allWomen experiments with their landing page variants?

We’re really focused on what messages resonate with our audience at every moment, as this is the most important part of building a strong community of like-minded women and is aligned with our mission of creating tech courses for and by women. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

And that strategy works. allWomen’s landing page conversion rates sit between 16% and 52%. For the education sector, the median conversion rate is a meager 5.8%.

Knockin’ it out of the park. Boom.

Unleashing the power of design … to increase conversions?! What magic is this? Actually, the science checks out on this one. Here’s how you, too, can create a landing page without a designer that not only looks good—but converts better too.

Experimenting Without Fear

A key differentiator in allWomen’s marketing strategy is an experimentation mindset—and not being afraid to re-examine trends that have been proven to work for other companies.

Google Ads not doing the trick? No problem!

Our goal with allWomen has always been to generate a community of engaged and diverse women, working to overcome their fears and upskill their professional profile with technological knowledge. To do this, we’ve used different, appealing channels available today to attract them. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

This can be a scary tactic, for sure. Ultimately it’s about focusing their efforts on channels that best connect with their target audience. Instead of having their already small team trying to do everything, they focus on what works. 

This doesn’t mean the team at allWomen only saddles up one proverbial pony, however, as they are constantly experimenting with new and different tactics. 

“You can’t get comfortable in one place. Because technology and digital is a super fast-moving environment, and what works for you today might not always be the best choice,” says Cristina Monclus, digital marketing specialist at allWomen.

This includes bringing artificial intelligence into their marketing game. Using Smart Traffic, allWomen adds a second layer of relevance to campaigns, with the tool diverting traffic to the variant that’s most likely to convert. And to Patricia and the team, the proof is in the pudding. “We actually see an increase in conversion rate, which is really exciting,” she says.

We love to explore new channels, tools, features, and tactics. It’s part of our mindset. AI can provide a lot of new insights for us to create new ways to reach our potential audience and students. We are super excited about the present and the future we are moving to with AI. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

Optimizing with AI—isn’t that like really hard? Actually, no. You don’t need a data scientist or software engineer on your team to get more conversions with the power of AI. Here’s how to get started.

How to Embrace allWomen’s “Just Do It” Mentality

What works for allWomen isn’t going to work for everyone. But that’s precisely the point. What makes their strategy so much fun—and successful—is the courage to test, try, and learn.

There are so many tactics and so many channels you could use, especially as a startup. But it’s all about finding what best supports your mission. We love to use tech to get to know our community and our audience better and, with that information, make a bigger impact on women who could potentially be really interested in our courses and services … For us, the future is intelligent, the future is bright, and the future is female. — Patricia Fernández Carrelo, CMO, allWomen

What does *your* future look like? Go make it happen.

We’ve all hand-washed our cars before (and regretted it), right? 

We get lured in by fond childhood memories of soaping up the family station wagon. (It’ll be so nostalgic—I’d always spray Dad with the hose!) And then we’re sold by the idea of saving a coupla bucks. (Twenty bucks for a car wash these days?! That’s robbery.)

But then you gotta go round up all the right cleaning supplies. After three washes and rinses, you realize you’ve still missed several spots. You remember you have other household chores to do. You’re sweating. Gosh darn it—hand-washing a car is a lot more work than you remember!

Let’s be real. Many of us are not professional car detailers. We don’t have the right tools, the process takes longer than expected, and the results are… subpar at best. After a life lesson like that, most people opt for an automatic car wash despite the $20 price tag. Why? It’s easier, it’s faster, and it gets you a cleaner car. (Money. Well. Spent.) 

If only there was something similar for doing all those time-consuming marketing tasks…

Wait—there is.

Marketing Needs to be Faster, Easier, and More Effective

How we think about marketing is similar to those childhood memories of washing cars. In theory, it can be a whole lot of fun. There are tons of opportunities to get your hands dirty, create killer content, and make a big impact on business growth. In theory. 

If you’re marketing a small business, you’re already up to your neck in tasks that are getting your hands dirty. In fact, you’ve probably developed some serious calluses. (The allure of being an artisan is long gone.) Whether it’s a lack of time, resources, or skills, there’s always something holding you back from assembling those marketing campaigns you’d hoped for: eye-catching, relevant campaigns that convert your target audience.

Much like hand-washing your car, your expectations for your marketing campaigns are quite different from reality, aren’t they? So here’s what we have to say: Say goodbye to doing it all by hand, by yourself. It’s time you run your marketing through conversion intelligence.

That’s Right—You Can Market Your Business Like You Wash Your Car

Whether we’re washing cars or marketing businesses, we want the same thing: an easier, faster way to get better results.

Instead of operating all the brushes and hoses ourselves, automatic car washes allow us to sit back, relax, and watch all the moving parts rinse, clean, and polish our cars. In minutes, we can have a sparkling clean ride.

That same effortlessness describes conversion intelligence—a new approach to marketing where you partner with AI to create those dazzling marketing campaigns you’ve always wanted. You’re still in the driver’s seat (you know your business more than anyone), but now you can kick back and have an AI team detailing your campaign for you—and trust that you’ll see more conversions in record time. Intrigued? Then you’ll love how simple it is to get started.

The three-step conversion intelligence loop: Here’s how it works

Similar to running your car through the car wash, adopting conversion intelligence involves a few steps.

To convert your visitors, you need to know what content piques their interest and what kinda stuff they’ll glaze over. Traditionally, you’d be doing all the number-crunching yourself. But once you enter the conversion intelligence loop, you can hand over the baton to AI to sort through the data and tell you what’s relevant to your audience today. This step sets you up for a successful campaign because you’re working with insights that are up to date and actionable. (You don’t go straight to waxing your car before you’ve even washed it, right?)

Much like the automated gadgets that wash your car, working with AI tools simply makes life easier. Powered by data, they can identify the online channels your audience uses, which designs and layouts catch their eye, and what words speak to them. With these insights on your side, you end up building high-converting campaigns right away.

Yep, without the testing and guesswork, the whole building process is done in a fraction of the time. (These AI-powered teammates are probably the best backseat driver you’ll ever meet.)

We don’t just wash our cars for aesthetics—it’s also to add longevity. Dirt, grime, and salt are natural enemies to your car’s paint. 

Optimization operates under the same logic. The whole point is to get more mileage out of your campaigns. (You know, more conversions.) Thing is, optimization tactics require a lot of effort and attention—and many small business marketers don’t have either of those. So they launch their campaigns and cross their fingers it’ll bring in conversions.  With conversion intelligence, you have control over your content even after you launch it. Using its predictive capabilities, your AI sidekick helps you deliver more impactful, relevant content to your target audience. Instead of wishful thinking, you can launch your campaigns knowing they’ll convert visitors. It’s time to set the bar higher, y’all.

Here’s where it’s different, though: you gotta rinse and repeat

Hold up—the automatic car wash ain’t a loop. You go in one end and out the other.  You got me. The automatic car wash isn’t a perfect analogy. But that’s because what the conversion intelligence loop does is actually much more impressive.

  When you leave the car wash and drive your car around town, it’ll eventually get dusty and dirty and go back to its previous condition, right? But when you run your campaigns through the conversion intelligence loop, it’ll never go back to its previous (worse) condition. Every time, you generate new personalized insights that’ll help you improve and refresh your campaigns. In other words, it can only get better. 

To return to the car wash metaphor, imagine a car wash that loops on itself and gets your car infinitely cleaner with each pass. Sounds pretty futuristic, eh? That’s because it is. Conversion intelligence is the future of marketing. What will separate top-performing campaigns from the average ones are marketers who leverage AI to learn more about their audiences and improve their content. 

With AI doing all the heavy lifting, how could you say no?

“So Uh, Where Can I Run My Marketing Through This Loop?”

Good question. 

When you’re looking for the best car washes in town, you usually Google it, right? Try searching up “conversion intelligence” and see what pops up. (C’maaan, humor me.) Yep, you’ll see Unbounce’s Conversion Intelligence Platform right at the top because Unbounce is pioneering this approach to marketing. While other AI marketing tools can certainly help you achieve conversion intelligence, we’re the first to launch a platform dedicated to helping small business marketers adopt conversion intelligence.

In other words, there are no prerequisites to get started. You don’t need training or marketing certifications to use our tools. They’re simple and straightforward—and they’ll keep you from being left behind in a competitive landscape.

There is a much larger problem going on even beyond Unbounce … the world is not built to support small businesses. It’s difficult to start one. They generally have fewer resources. Business owners are often wearing multiple hats. They don’t have the luxury of spending their whole day just thinking about marketing campaigns, landing pages, and conversion rates. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

Let’s meet your new AI-powered companions, shall we?

Meet The Unbounce Conversion Intelligence Platform

If you know us, you probably know us as a landing page builder. 

While we still offer Classic Unbounce with our original drag-and-drop builder, we realized landing pages are not enough for small businesses to rev up their marketing and drive results—which is why we launched the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence Platform. 

With so much juicy conversion data in our back pocket, we decided to put it to good use and build a suite of AI-powered products to support your marketing. From the moment you enter the conversion intelligence loop, they’re there to help you learn, build, and optimize. Each product plays a role in optimizing your campaign—just like the different brushes and cleaning agents do in an automatic car wash. 

While the plan is to continually evolve and grow our platform, here are a few tools you can start working with today.

Build your highest-converting landing pages with Smart Builder

Building landing pages definitely gets the creative juices flowing. From picking images to writing headlines and CTAs, the options are endless. 

But that’s also why it’s tricky. With so many possible variations for copy, design, and layout, how can you truly know which combination will score the most clicks? 

That’s where Smart Builder can help. And all you gotta do to get started is answer a few questions:

What is your company or project name? 

What type of page is this? (i.e., what’s your industry?)

What is the purpose of this page? (Are you lookin’ for leads or sales?)

Do you want to include a form? 

Once you provide some information on your industry and campaign needs, Smart Builder uses proprietary conversion data to design a pre-optimized layout that’s most likely to convert your target audience.

Then, as you plug in your content, it’ll continue to provide personalized recommendations to boost your chances of conversion—like suggesting alternative headlines based on high-converting copy in your industry.

You’re still the one putting the pieces together, just like when you run a car through a car wash—but you skip the hours of guesswork if you were to do it on your own. Seriously, users starting out with Smart Builder are building landing pages twice as fast as those creating pages manually with Classic Builder. (While there’s no link here, we have the internal data to back this up.)

Write on-brand copy for all your content needs with Smart Copy

No matter your copywriting skills, everyone faces writer’s block—and a nasty bout of it can really set you back in your (already) busy schedule. Especially if you’re tackling all the content marketing on your own. 

You need to write copy for the website, landing pages, emails, ads, blogs, social media captions, press releases, and a whole lot more. That’s a ton of writing on your plate (my hand’s cramping just thinking about it), which means there’s little time to get stuck on a sentence or idea.  But with Smart Copy, you have a copywriting assistant by your side to help you transform your ideas into compelling marketing copy instantly. All you gotta do is provide some info on your brand once, and you can expect the copy suggestions that fit your needs every time.

As you build and optimize your marketing campaigns, Smart Copy is truly there every step of the way. It can help you brainstorm ideas, expand on or remix content, and write original content.  That remixing capability is my personal fav. I’m always looking for ways to refresh and repurpose old content, but sometimes it’s hard to detach from my current copy and create something new. With Smart Copy, just copy and paste the old stuff and it’ll spit back something completely different. You can even customize the length and tone. Woah.

Deliver relevant marketing experiences with Smart Traffic

Creating and delivering relevant marketing experiences are essential for grabbing your audience’s attention—but it’s hard to do it (and do it well). 

Why? Because your audience’s needs and behaviors are diverse and constantly changing. (That moment when you finally get the hang of Instagram marketing, and then you find out your customers prefer TikTok. Ugh.)

To keep up a finger on the pulse, marketers traditionally have two choices: 

Research industry trends.

Monitor their data themselves.

But that’s a lot of work with a lot of room for error. Unless you’re referring to a study written last week or you have a knack for data analytics, your campaign runs the risk of being outdated. When you have to do everything yourself, you constantly feel one step behind.  Smart Traffic eliminates that feeling. Once you create a few landing page variants (to speak to your different audiences) and turn it on, you can rely on Smart Traffic to connect each and every visitor with the best-fit variant.

How? It reads your visitors’ attributes, such as geographic location, traffic channel, and device. So you can create variants that target visitors from different locations, devices, and traffic channels—and trust that Smart Traffic will route ‘em to the right page.

And as your audience evolves, it’ll automatically pick up on these changes—so your marketing will never go out of style. (Bring on “the TikTok.”)

For Small Businesses, This is Your One-Stop-Shop for Better Marketing

Sure, there will always be marketers that want to spearhead all the tasks themselves—just like there are folks who prefer to hand wash their cars. But for most of us, there’s simply not enough time in a day to do either of those things.

An automatic car wash is faster, easier, and gets you a cleaner car. You’ve got all the soap, water, wax, spinning brushes, and blasts of hot air you need to clean your car in minutes.  Similarly, conversion intelligence is faster, easier, and gets you more conversions—without having to break a sweat. With Unbounce’s Conversion Intelligence Platform, you acquire a team of helpers that will add the spit and polish to your campaigns for you. Finally, you have the time and resources to create the high-converting content you dreamed of.

Best of all, conversion intelligence is an ongoing process that keeps delivering better and better results. Oh, you just broke a record for your conversion rate? Put it through the loop again and see what happens.

Google Analytics 4 also know as GA4 is in news for the past year. Here are some Google Analytics 4 blog posts that will help you demystify this new tool from Google.

18 Key Benefits of Google Analytics 4

If you are wondering what are the benefits of Google Analytics 4(widely know as GA4) then this post is for you. Read more...

How to Downgrade Google Analytics 4 to Universal Analytics?

When you create a new Google Analytics property it is automatically created in GA4, this post shows you how you can create it in the old version. Read more...

How to Connect GA4 to BigQuery

GA4 can send data to BiGQuery without any 3rd party tools. Learn how to enable that data transfer in this post. Read more...

35+ Things About Google Analytics 4 That Will Make You Look Like a Genius

The intent of this post is to highlight a few things about Google Analytics 4 without going into the details. Read more...

Should You Upgrade to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Well GA4 is all new, this post answers if you should upgrade or not. Read more...

Learn More about GA4

Optizent Academy memberships’ sole focus is to develop data-driven marketers and digital analysts. No matter which stage of your knowledge and career you are at, we have courses and training options for you. Visit https://academy.optizent.com/courses/membership to learn more about Optizent Academy.

Optizent Academy Membership provides

Access to courses, eBook, and presentations based on 20 years of Digital Analytics Consulting and Training Experience and 20+

Regular training sessions and challenges to test, enhance and add to your skillset

Exclusive access to a community to support you when you need it, so you never feel alone

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Practical advice - apply what you learn right away

GA4 Consulting Services

Contact Us to learn about our consulting services and how we can help your organization.

Get the Book version of this post at https://academy.optizent.com/f/30-things-to-know-about-google-analytics-4

Imagine this: You go to a swanky cocktail party with the top names in your industry. There’s live jazz music and waiters going around with fancy hors d’oeuvres.

Dressed to the nines, you sidle up to a professional acquaintance and show them a dog picture on your phone. You proclaim, “Look at that heckin’ chonkerino!” 

The pianist stops playing. Someone drops their mini cup of caviar. Everyone stares.

Casual language and memes are fun to use, but you’ve gotta know when and where to use them. They can work for landing pages, but only for the right type of audience and with the right execution. When you do stick the landing, you’ll deliver one-of-a-kind landing page copy.

We’re here to help you learn how to line up your audience and brand voices and use popular elements of casual language in your landing page. Read on to set yourself up to create fun landing pages that resonate with your visitors. 

Matching Your Audience and Brand Voices

Before you try adding casual language to your landing pages, it’s essential to evaluate how much of it you should use with your brand and audience. You need to think about your audience and brand’s voices, then figure out how you want to match ‘em.

How does your audience speak?

Language is a powerful tool for relating to your audience. You can gain a lot of trust by mimicking the language they use in their speech and writing.

So before you try any new language styles or tones of voice on your landing page, you’ve gotta have thorough audience research on hand. Your customers’ demographics, interests, and survey responses say a lot about the language that’ll work for them. For example, you have a higher chance of succeeding with meme-speak if you have a younger audience.

How does your brand speak?

While your audience might speak one way, it might be ideal for your brand to speak another way. It all depends on how you want to position yourself compared to your customer. Do you want your audience to see you as a friend or coach?

In some cases, you need to choose more authoritative language to build trust with your customers, even if they wouldn’t use those words themselves. For example, the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report found that agency customers prefer complicated language because it shows authority.

On the other hand, the same report also saw legal landing pages perform better when using more straightforward and down-to-earth language. It all comes down to making decisions based on a strong foundation of audience and industry research—whether it’s ours or your own.

For more guidance, you can also check out your brand voice guide if you have one. If you don’t, you should at least sit down and ask yourself questions like:

What personality do I want my brand to express?

How do I want my audience to feel after they read my brand’s copy?

What sets my brand apart from others?

Elements That Affect Your Landing Page’s Tone

Now that you understand how casual you want to be on your landing page, think about the ways these elements affect how it’s perceived:

Jargon (or lack thereof)

Jargon is language that only makes sense within a niche or industry. Best practices suggest cutting jargon in landing page copy. This rule especially applies when you’re shooting for a casual tone.

You see, jargon puts you at the risk of alienating visitors. Unless you’re in a business-to-business (B2B) industry, you’ll want to minimize or define jargon wherever you can to keep your landing page casual.

Look how Wealthsimple makes investing sound simple by avoiding jargon:

Image courtesy of Wealthsimple

Investments are complicated stuff, but Wealthsimple explains the process in one line: “Get rich slow.” That phrase makes it feel like the brand is speaking on your level, implying that they’ll work with you side-by-side.

Slang and informal language

Slang is informal language used outside of standard definitions and speech. When you use it alongside informal language, you can create conversational, relatable copy. But, informal language and slang can also backfire if you don’t use them well.

If you want to try informal language on your landing page, don’t type a single character unless you know its meaning inside and out. One common example of misused slang is “Netflix and chill.” While the original phrase has sexual connotations, many brands combine their product names with “and chill,” leading to unfortunate results.

You should also stay away from informal language if you’re covering a serious topic. It should go without saying, but you’d be surprised to see how often it happens.

Here’s an example of informal language done well from a Mooala landing page headline:

Image courtesy of Mooala

The headline, “BANANAMILK. It’s a Thing.” uses informal language to acknowledge that, hey, banana milk’s a weird concept, but Mooala’s happy to sit down with you and explain. They poke a little fun at themselves, lowering their audience’s defenses.

Swearing

Swearing can be a powerful marketing tool, but you’ve gotta make sure you’re working with the right industry and audience.

While cuss words used to be utterly taboo in marketing, you’ll see them in the wild a lot more frequently nowadays. Heck, some brands use them in their names, like Big Ass Fans.

When you use swear words with the right people, you could increase your chance of conversions. A study by Gong found that sales professionals swear on 20% of their buyer calls and that those calls had a higher chance of closing sales.

So, should you use cuss words in your landing page copy? Check out whether other companies in your niche are swearing, look at the language your audience uses, and go from there. If you decide to try it out, start small and adjust according to your audience’s reaction.

This landing page for a Telegram sticker pack uses a (censored) swear word off the bat. Its audience—developers—and industry—tech—are both pretty casual and open to swearing, so it works.

Image courtesy of Evrone

Emoji

You might think emojis are too casual for a business landing page, but it turns out these little characters have a place in the professional world. About three-fifths of emoji users say they use them at work. So, you have room to use them, too—but, as always, you need to consider how they’ll come across.

If you decide to use emojis on your landing page, you’ll want to make sure all of your visitors feel included. Try to use emojis one at a time and sparingly, so they don’t crowd a screen reader’s content. Show a diverse range of skin tones and experiences in your emojis if you plan on using any that look like people.

Keep in mind that emojis have different meanings across cultures, too. For example, Western folks connect the flying money emoji () to wealth, but in Japan, that emoji means you’re *losing* money.

This Flowmagic landing page ends each of its feature headers with an emoji. This careful use of emoji adds a casual tone to the page without feeling overwhelming:

Image courtesy of Flowmagic

GIFs and memes

Are you looking for more visuals to break up your copy? You could try adding a GIF or a meme to make your landing page more fun and relatable. Consider these factors when deciding to get your meme on:

Load time: If you’re using a GIF, is it optimized for fast loading? Speed has a huge impact on conversions, so you don’t want it bogging down your load times.

Meaning: Memes and GIFs often have hidden origins or meanings. Research each one you use to make sure you aren’t sending the wrong message.

Audience: Will your audience appreciate your meme or GIF? People from different generations and interest groups use different memes.

Does Your Brand Wear Jeans or Slacks?

What kind of casual language should your brand use on landing pages? The answer depends on your industry, audience, and marketing goals—there’s no definitive answer. Only strong research and a little experimentation will show you the way. Since most brands have more than one audience segment, it can also help to create landing page variants with different tones of voice. Try using a tool like Smart Traffic to direct visitors to variants that match their preferences.

As online competition intensifies and consumer expectations continue to evolve, Unbounce’s latest innovation is a crucial part of the company’s aggressive ambitions: To help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) optimize their marketing with AI marketing insights traditionally designed for large corporations.

The Unbounce Conversion Intelligence Platform expands the company’s offerings beyond landing pages to meet the needs of SMBs aiming to level up their growth.

The platform pairs a marketer’s intelligence with machine learning to increase the conversion rates of marketing campaigns at every touchpoint. Composed of a suite of smart solutions, including Smart Builder, Smart Traffic, and the newly launched AI copywriting assistant, Smart Copy, the new platform provides the fastest way to increase visitor conversions using conversion intelligence—a disruptive new approach to marketing.

“Since opening our doors more than 10 years ago as an innovator in landing page software, Unbounce has existed to help small businesses grow smarter by making access to essential digital marketing tools easy,” said Tamara Grominsky, chief strategy officer of Unbounce. “However, today, we’re seeing small businesses falling behind while large enterprises with big budgets are dominating the competitive landscape.

“Conversion Intelligence allows marketers, with limited budgets and teams, to pair their own expertise with data-powered AI insights to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. It’s simple: Marketers who aren’t embracing this new approach are going to be left behind.”

Conversion Intelligence: The New Era of Marketing

By leveraging Unbounce’s Conversion Intelligence Platform, small business marketers can pair their creative know-how with machine learning to effortlessly create relevance, improve conversion rates, and understand where to best spend their time for optimal impact. A game-changer for solopreneurs and marketers alike, the platform provides the fastest way to increase visitor conversions through the following conversion intelligence solutions:

Smart Copy: A new AI copywriting solution released today, Smart Copy uses GPT-3 to generate human-like copy within seconds and in six different languages for ads, emails, landing pages, blog posts, TikTok videos, pitches, and 40 more copy creation needs. 

Smart Builder: An AI-powered landing page builder that allows marketers to create on-brand pages designed to convert and based on a marketer’s specific industry and campaign goals.

Smart Traffic: A self-driving optimization tool for SMBs that connects your visitors with their best-fit landing pages to increase conversions by an average of 30%, while identifying conversion patterns in as few as 50 visits for landing pages. In comparison to traditional A/B testing, Smart Traffic saves marketers precious ad spend, time and effort, and eliminates the need for one champion page.

“The Unbounce Smart Copy solution inspires me. It’s like brainstorming with a room full of people, but it’s just me and my AI copywriting ‘assistant,'” said Sebastiaan Hooft, founder of Redesign Records. “Without Smart Copy, I would be spending an extra four hours a day crafting copy—precious time that I’d rather spend on building my brand and business. Now, I can say so-long to writers’ block and be confident in the quality and performance of my content.”

A Solution for Time-Strapped, Budget-Constrained SMBs

Today’s small business owners face limited time, ad budgets, and marketing expertise to reach audiences in the hyper-accelerated digital landscape; research demonstrates that 47% of small business owners run marketing entirely on their own and inevitably end up wearing too many hats.

With Unbounce as a core part of their marketing team, small businesses have been able to increase success without a new budget, improve conversion rates across all segments, and increase the confidence needed to grow their business while reducing the need for a designer, copywriter, or Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) expert. 

“For many SMB marketers, taking on marketing efforts while trying to grow the business on limited budgets is a daunting and seemingly impossible task,” said Jonathan Naccache, founder of Webistry. “The changing digital landscape means that one-size-fits-all and traditional marketing no longer yield results and small businesses like myself need to create meaningful marketing experiences that drive conversions to survive.

“With Unbounce, we‘ve been able to grow our customers, better understand and reach their target audience, and keep pace with the changing digital landscape.”

It’s the middle of the night and all of a sudden: drip, drip, drip…

You wipe your face and peer through the darkness at the ceiling. Uh-oh, something’s leaking up there. Like most people, you reach for your smartphone and search for a plumber that would be available to help at this ungodly hour.

Scroll, tap, and voilà: There’s a landing page for 24/7 plumbing in your area with a CTA to dial the number right away.  

In the olden days, you’d likely look up the number in the phone book (a phone what?). Now, people turn to their mobile devices as soon as they have a problem that needs solving or a question that needs answering.

We all know there’s nothing more reassuring than hearing a human voice at the other end of the line. And that’s why optimizing your landing pages for pay-per-call advertising campaigns is crucial in this digital landscape.

Why Pay-Per-Call Ad Campaigns Are Critical in the Mobile Age

Pay-per-call ad campaigns are the holy grail of mobile online marketing. They’re what every marketer dreams about and strives for.

Why? Because today 56.75% of all web traffic originates from a smartphone, a device that can make a direct phone call to your business with the single tap of a call to action button.

It’s never been easier to generate high-quality leads with virtually no friction. Consider this:

Phone leads enjoy a much higher conversion rate than form-based leads (a 5-1 advantage or better is not uncommon).

With a phone call, leads don’t need to hide behind technology: no intrusive qualifying questions to reply to, no multiple-choice buttons, no pull-down menus, no CAPTCHA riddles.

Phone leads are more engaged and less guarded.

Why Are Landing Pages Important for Pay-Per-Call Campaigns

A landing page is the first thing your potential customer will see after they click on your pay-per-call ad. To be effective, your page needs to become an extension of your ad by:

Showing clear benefits that answer your prospect’s search query: If the search term is “weekend plumbers near me” your benefits must reflect your ability to be on site in 30 minutes or less, your lack of a weekend surcharge, the fact that you run a 24/7 operation including holidays, and so on.

Reflecting the needs of your prospect through putting yourself in their shoes: “We know how frustrating it is when your plumbing fails in the most inopportune time, the inconvenience of a pipe leak, or a clogged kitchen sink when all hardware stores are closed.”

Presenting a clear call to action: This is where you reach out offering your help, where you say, “Our reps are always on standby, just a phone call away to get all your problems solved.”

What Should You Include in Your Pay-Per-Call Landing Page Design?

When it comes to pay-per-call landing page design, you need to use a less is more approach. Your job is to persuade your prospect to call you without making them fall into a rabbit hole of unnecessary information.

Don’t sell your business by showing endless feature lists and a company backgrounder. Instead, build a bridge of trust by reflecting their needs and presenting your solution in a way that makes them feel you’re the white knight that’ll come to their rescue.

To this effect, your pay-per-call landing page design needs to include:

A headline and sub-headline that reflects your prospect’s main pain point and your solution. Make this text, font, and color clearly contrast with your page’s background palette.

A call to action button that jumps out of the page so there’s never any doubt in the mind of your prospect that a single tap will immediately put them in touch with you.

An offer that creates peace of mind. In other words, an offer that’ll relieve their pain, not showcase your bells and whistles (so, stay away from expressions that have nothing to do with your prospect, like “30 years in business,” “No job is too small,” etc.).

Last but not least, your business logo.

Examples of Pay-Per-Call Landing Pages

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, so let’s look at a few pay-per-call landing page examples and discuss their key elements.

1. Health and wellness

As you can see, the choice of a forest hero shot evokes a sense of grounding and peace, which is what someone in need of the services of a drug rehab center is looking for. 

The messaging encourages without being forceful, emphasizing confidentiality coupled with free advice.

Most importantly, the call to action is clear and tells you exactly what to do when you call (“Press 2”), yet it uses a subdued tone that complements the color palette of the background.

2. Home services

Here’s a landing page in response to a search for an “affordable weekend plumber.” Cost is key in the messaging to counter the expectation that a weekend plumbing call is going to be a lot more expensive than a regular business hours call.

This landing page’s job is to convey the message that even though they operate 24/7/365, they’re still affordable. To make this even clearer, the call to action button stresses that there will be no charge to get an estimate for the work.

Finally, the hero shot shows an expert’s hand and tools to instill trust and peace of mind—meaning that no matter how dire the plumbing emergency might be, the prospect shouldn’t worry (because things will get better soon).

3. Legal

This is a landing page for a legal firm specializing in food poisoning personal injury claims. The focus here is to get top compensation for their clients, a key expectation for these types of calls.

They clearly point out the fact that clients are not expected to have any out-of-pocket expenses whatsoever and that all services will be offered on a contingency basis.

They also stress their 24/7 availability, because food poisoning cases often occur after hours and they want to make sure their prospects know they’ll be available when the incident happens, so they can advise them what to do while the iron is hot.

The call to action is clean and the message makes it clear how to navigate the firm’s phone answering choices since personal injury law firms handle many different types of cases.

Finally, the hero shot reflects the predicament of the victim, signaling empathy towards their situation.

Want to Optimize Your Pay-Per-Call Landing Pages? We’re Here to Help

When it comes to optimizing your landing pages to maximize pay-per-call conversions, you always need to make sure that the job of your page is not to “sell” your services, but to become the natural solution to your prospect’s pain points.

All your design choices, from the color palette to call-to-action buttons to hero images, must be chosen to reflect the needs and hopes of your prospect.

The same goes for your messaging: Empathy drives conversions. The more your prospect identifies with your messaging and feels that you truly understand them, the more they’ll feel comfortable taking action and making that call.

Try Smart Builder to create and optimize variants of your landing pages, and watch your pay-per-call conversions get the boost they deserve.

As you may have heard, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a competitive game.

PPC is a method of digital advertising in which you aim to get your ads to rank as the highest result displayed for user searches, and you, as the advertiser, pay a fee each time it’s clicked. This means that when a user types in words related to your business, your customized ad will be the first result they see—sometimes.  

Thousands of businesses are willing to spend unbelievable amounts of money to rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERP) and in the most relevant places for their users around the web.

In 2019, small businesses spent between $9,000 and $10,000 per month on PPC, with Google making an average of $116.5 billion in revenue from Google Ads alone the year before.

So, yeah—businesses bid high numbers to play. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play too.

The key to maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS) is to be highly strategic in your audience targeting, keyword usage, and landing page design.

We’re here to show you how to get the best bang for your buck by cleaning up your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategy. 

(Pssssst … Do you have a specific PPC-related question? Hop straight to it here :)

How Do Paid Ads Work, Anyway?

The Role of PPC in Marketing Strategies

Why Your PPC Ad Needs a Dedicated Landing Page

A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Post-Click Strategy

1. How Do Paid Ads Work, Anyway?

Think of your paid ad as an internet detective. Each platform varies in how you can create your ad sets, but one thing remains the same: Your ad (internet detective) finds the most relevant spots to be seen by your ideal customers and fights for optimal placements. 

There are two ad formats to choose from once you and your team set your campaign goals: display and search.

Display

Display ads rely on graphic formats to catch user attention, build brand awareness, and guide users to your site. They’re shown based on specific audience targeting criteria such as demographics, interests, or retargeting events and show up in images and video. You typically see them displayed on the newsfeed of your social media platforms. Although, your display ad isn’t just confined to social media. It can also appear on websites that have similar content and keywords to your business. That way, even when your prospects are considering alternatives—you can still be top of mind.

Image courtesy of Bloomberg Wealth.

Across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube, standard placements for display ads are:

Stories

Timelines

Video feeds

Right column

(Facebook) Marketplace

(Instagram) Explore section

Messenger inbox and sponsored messages

Image courtesy of Kajabi.

Search

Search ads are a wordsmith’s dream. These ad formats rely on short, impactful copy that sends the right message and captures user intent. This is where knowing your audience well will pay off—literally. These ads appear at the top of the SERP.

Image courtesy of Google.

Aside from the above or below search results on Google search, through the Google Search Network, your ads can appear beside, above, or below search results on Google Play, the Shopping tab, Google Images, Google Maps, and the Maps app.

If your budget doesn’t allow for a high bid (or you don’t feel it’s the best use of your budget), then you’ll need to be extra clear on the keywords you use. Coupling keywords with your offer determines what your winning combination will be. You need to secure space in your market with a relevant keyword while also finding a way to stand out. It might take a couple of tweaks to get the formula right, so make sure you keep track of your ad performance. This way, you can jump into your campaign to move things around while making the necessary changes to your post-click landing page.

Tip: Take a look at your competitors’ performance by typing in a keyword you might share. Take note of where their ads and other pages land on the first search results page and use that insight to determine how you can differentiate your copy/offering.

FYI: Search ads can increase brand awareness by as much as 80%. Give it time, and you’re sure to strike gold as you refine your ad set.

Retargeting

You can use retargeting ads in both display and search formats on the same platforms you launch your PPC campaigns from (i.e, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Bing, LinkedIn). Retargeting leverages past engagements with your brand to show consumers ads to re-engage them.

For example, when you’re shopping online and leave a website before purchasing the items in your cart, the brand receives an “abandoned cart” notice. If they have retargeting ads in place, you’ll notice reminders to revisit their website through:

Email messages Social media display ads Website banners (even if the website you’re browsing has nothing to do with that brand specifically)

Retargeting ads allow you to finish the job and turn prospects into leads.

You have lots of flexibility when it comes to paid advertising. However, knowing what role you want it to play in your marketing strategy can be the difference between dollars gained and dollars wasted.

2. The Role of PPC in Marketing Strategies

PPC advertising is an efficient way to find ideal customers that would otherwise be difficult to find. After all, you can’t be in all places at once. But when your PPC ad finds the right audience, you need to make sure that you’ve created it to address the right intent. 

As the name implies, purchase intent is when a consumer shows signs of being ready to buy a product or service. 

A general ad about your business is unlikely to get the conversions you’re hoping for. PPC provides an opportunity to create a sense of urgency by addressing the specific problem your ideal customer is seeking to solve. 

To create an effective PPC campaign, you need to decide what your ultimate goal is. Is it brand awareness? If you’ve just launched a business, a new product, or you’re trying to attract new customers, your goal should likely be brand awareness. Brand awareness can be like a social currency for startups. Sales will always be a top priority. However, before you can start to grow your revenue, you need to build credibility in your industry, build trust with your ideal customers, and slice out a part of the market.

Think about what messaging resonates with your audience most. Your goal here is to have your ad illustrate your style and expertise in a compact package.

Image courtesy of Squarespace.

Is it increasing sales? If you need to prove product-market fit, generate more sales, or justify upgrades for a product, this is the goal you want to focus on. You’ll need to customize your copy and targeting strategy to ensure you’re communicating the transformation your offer provides while also never losing sight of your customer. In a brand awareness campaign, you may not have been using retargeting ads. But when you’re focused on maximizing each site visit to its fullest potential (i.e., a purchase)—you’ll wanna make sure that potential customers don’t slip through the cracks. Base your targeting on your buyer personas. Confirm what you know and don’t know about their purchase habits. Then, use those insights to craft a customer journey map that enables you to send them the ads relevant to their journey at the right time.

3. Why Your PPC Ad Needs a Dedicated Landing Page

Look, you can create the most quintessential display ad, craft the most impeccable search ad, and kick your feet up expecting the traffic to roll in like a runaway train—but you’ll only see tumbleweeds if you don’t optimize the post-click. 

Post-click marketing is the practice of engaging with potential customers after they click on your business’s PPC ad. Think of it as your typical marketing funnel. The first click achieves awareness and proves user interest. The next stage is where decisions get made. Users can either leave your site entirely or travel further down the funnel, depending on how your post-click marketing impacts their consideration of your product. This is your opportunity to personalize the redirect path as much as possible.

Imagine seeing an ad like this:

And being sent here:

Image courtesy of Facet.

It’s a beautiful homepage, but as a user—you’re lost. 

You clicked that ad for one thing only: home extensions. But that homepage requires you to navigate the site to find what you’re looking for. While it wouldn’t be that hard to find, it’s more clicks and content for your brain to consider while browsing. 

When optimizing your post-click strategy, your goal is to limit distractions and bring the user to the exact destination implied by your ad. This is called message matching and, for PPC marketers, conversions are made and lost on the accuracy of this strategy.

That’s why Facet’s ad brings users to the page below instead of their home page. Well done, Facet. 

On average, 52% of B2B PPC ads point to their homepage instead of a landing page. Using our landing page analyzer, Unbounce found that dedicated landing pages converted 65% higher than website pages.

Personalized, targeted, and relevant landing pages play a huge part in determining whether your PPC ads convert as intended. 

With each campaign you create, you should also consider how to customize the landing page it leads to. Your PPC ad and landing page need to work together like Batman and Robin to achieve your goals.

But there are a host of variables you need to consider to make that happen.

4. A Step-By-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Post-Click Strategy

Copy

Instead of starting from a blank slate when creating copy for a new ad, why not remix the content from your landing page?

It’s a tall order to jam all the relevant information from your landing page into a headline and a 90-character description that’ll get users past the first click. 

But when you prioritize message match and focus on being clear rather than clever, you’ll find that your headline almost writes itself! If it doesn’t, here are a few headline formulas you can rely on to help you frame your offer: The how-to headline: Highlight your expertise by linking it to a common goal your target audience is trying to achieve. You’ll need to make it specific and show some social proof to back up your claim for this one to work.

Image courtesy of Shopify.

The agitator: The goal here is to highlight a pain point for your target audience and provide an alternative solution that they’re unlikely to have considered (i.e., your differentiator). You’ll want to use this strategy as a play on your key search term. In the example below, Noom leverages the high-yielding keyword “diet” to capture the attention of its target audience and present a bold alternative. In this case, their differentiator is using behavioral science to help people take control of their health.

The listings lab: Show your target audience you know exactly who they are by both highlighting a pain point and naming their demographic. Example: “Stuck at Six Figures in Your Real Estate Business?” The headline speaks directly to the ideal customer. In this case: real estate professionals looking to grow their business. Remember that, whichever headline you choose, you want to make sure that it mirrors what the user will find on the landing page that comes post-click. 

Marketers need to master a suite of different skills to be effective, but they all boil down to understanding how to manage user expectations. 

It doesn’t mean that your PPC ad needs to be a carbon copy of the copy on your landing page (though, when in doubt, that wouldn’t be the worst option). You can diversify your copy while still keeping it clear, creative, and connected. 

You can use a hierarchy system to leverage the use of your keywords. For example, if you’re advertising a “contactless payment system,” you can leverage keywords associated with that same theme, such as:

Accept online payments

Online payments

Payment processing

Remote payments

Pre-built payment options

Take card payments

Secure payment solutions

By adding terms like “best” or “buy,” your keywords are now directly tied to active buyers in comparing and contrasting solutions in the purchase stage of their search.  Just a tip here: 65% of traffic to this type of keyword comes from paid clicks compared to 35% of organic results.

If you don’t feel 100% confident with your first draft of ad copy, don’t hesitate to experiment with different combinations—as long as your copy mirrors what’s on your post-click landing page. Finding the right keywords to string together will require a bit of tweaking before you discover the right fit for your audience.

You’ll know you’ve found the right fit for your PPC ad when the copy includes three components vital to your campaign’s success:

A compelling tagline: We already touched on headlines, which hold the highest importance for your ad, but your headline and tagline shouldn’t always be the same. Your tagline is a short, memorable phrase that demonstrates the vision behind your offer. With your headline, it’s better to be clear instead of cute. With your tagline, it’s better to be distinctive than it is to be dry. Crafting a compelling tagline leverages memory recall, which can be to your advantage since you want to stay top of mind when it’s time for your ideal customer to make a purchase. Here are a few common taglines that the world has adopted over time: Nike: Just Do It Apple: Think Different. Subway: Eat Fresh.

A clear and strong CTA: Your main goal with your landing page is to get your users to take a specific action. Sometimes, marketers fall into the trap of “selling mode” and neglect the need for a refined call to action focused on the product or service’s value to the end user. Think of the CTAs you commonly see across different websites and platforms: “Get started.” “Sign up now.” “Subscribe now.”

Yes, technically, they’re telling the user to take a specific action. But that’s just it—they’re telling as opposed to guiding. Those CTAs don’t communicate value from a user perspective. By changing your language, your CTAs can become more targeted and personalized, converting 42% more visitors into leads than non-targeted CTAs like the ones above. Here’s how you give those CTAs a personal touch. Notice the word “your” in each line: “Take charge of your finances.” “Grow your following.” “Launch your site.”

Urgency: Listen, there are billions of search entries per day, which means that you need to compete for your audience’s attention. After you’ve crafted your headline and tagline, it’s time to bring it home with a sense of urgency that signals the value of your commodity. Set a deadline, offer a bonus incentive, use phrases like “last chance,” “before it’s gone,” and “one time only.” In part due to advertisers using this strategy, online shopping for Black Friday hit a record $9 billion in 2020. The products are similar to what you’d typically see year-round. But, who wants to miss out on a good deal?

Tip: Writing conversion-focused copy can take more time than you think. You need to research your customers and their past purchase behaviors, test different copy combinations, and create high-quality content quickly to remain competitive.That’s why we’ve acquired Snazzy AI, an AI content generator that takes the pain out of copywriting to help you create those optimized marketing campaigns way faster. AI-powered copywriting gives you better results with less work. See how you can start optimizing your landing page copy with Snazzy—for free.

Imagery

Your post-click landing page is the user’s first impression of your brand—so you have to be looking your best. 

There are endless theories out there regarding what colors and images you should use on your landing page to bring you closer to converting visitors. Before relying on those “best practices” to provide the results you’re looking for, you should always, always, always let your copy inform your use of imagery. 

One way to get started is to make sure the header on your post-click landing page matches the keywords and/or CTAs used in your PPC ad. 

Let’s use the Deel payroll search ad as an example.

Take a look at their post-click landing page:

Image courtesy of Deel.

The landing page doesn’t imply Deel will do the payroll for you (as they state in their headline). However, the keywords “world,” “work,” and “international” all work in tandem with the image of the young employee dressed in casual clothing, wearing a backpack, and smiling. Even without reading the descriptive text, you can tell that you’ve landed in alignment with where you expected the ad to take you. (Excitement and interest sustained .)

As a B2B company, Deel is less likely to be targeting the persona shown in this image. However, research has shown that visitors respond best to landing pages with realistic, human imagery instead of stock images. 

Instead of using the header of this post-click landing page to feature a picture of a hiring manager, Deel creatively uses the image of a satisfied employee (the woman looks ecstatic) able to work remotely from anywhere in the world. 

So, here are some questions to consider when choosing imagery based on the keywords used in your PPC copy:

What does your headline say?

What is it communicating (ease, quality, simplicity, speed)?

Who’s your target persona for this ad?

How can they be reflected in your header image?

What emotions from your ad copy will you mirror in the imagery you choose?

Also, keep in mind that social proof and testimonials can be your best friend.

Word of mouth recommendations from industry friends carries a lot of weight in the B2B world. About 97% of B2B customers stated that testimonials and peer recommendations are the type of content they rely on most.

Business is changing these days, and people are much more skilled at judging the authenticity of a brand from their landing page imagery, clientele, and presence online. 

You can also optimize your landing page to feature images of the product your customers enjoyed the most or had questions about.

Segmentation

Creating personalized experiences for different segments of your audience is no easy feat.

More companies started using an account-based marketing (ABM) approach for this very reason—but even ABM marketers admit that personalizing their strategy is their biggest challenge due to the complexity of scaling campaigns without losing that effect.

Demographic data alone won’t cut it.

You’ll need to know more about your audience segments than just their age, where they live, and how much money they make. 

Your PPC ad will perform better when you use segmentation to target different keyword variations, locations, personas, and events.

Making audience research a continuous process will help inform the details you’ll need for your PPC ads. If you’re:

Conducting customer interviews or distributing micro surveys.

Monitoring social media platforms.

Comparing competitive data.

Monitoring site performance.

Then you have all the data you need to personalize your PPC ads. 

On top of targeting demographic data like age, location, and gender, it also helps to consider the psychographic data of each of your audience segments. Understanding the habits of your ideal customers allows you to take advantage of time targeting. 

Let’s not beat around the bush: PPC campaigns can get expensive quickly. 

By monitoring the conversion and performance data day by day and comparing it to previous weeks, you’ll be able to spot times of peak engagement that occur on specific days within a defined time frame. It’s a technique called dayparting. 

You can use the technique to optimize your PPC campaigns and control your ad spend by serving ads at those specific peak times.

Psychographic data can help you with your ad scheduling and assist you in creating variant post-click landing pages that convert visitors. 

You want to be that overeager friend in the group that asks all the questions:

→ What are their working hours? → When do they like to shop online? → What devices do they use to shop online? → What payment options do they prefer for online purchases? → What are their hobbies?

This way, you can segment your PPC targeting by topics, interests, and life events.

With Google’s broad match keyword targeting, the keywords in your PPC campaign can show up beside related topics that don’t contain your keyword. For example, if your keyword were “low-carb diet plan,” it would show up as a result in the associated searches below:

Image courtesy of Google Support.

Broad match keyword targeting can help you find audiences you may not have considered and give you insight into how you can optimize your search terms if you’d like to make them more refined. 

But that ad spend will pile up quickly if you have a broad target with no way of narrowing down your audience. 

The key to saving your ad spend is to use negative keywords in conjunction with your primary keyword terms and phrases. You can continue with your long-tail keyword “low-carb diet plan” while excluding the common search term “diet” so you won’t serve your ad to general audiences. 

Once you find the proper targeting parameters for your various audience segments, you need to make sure that to maintain your personalized message on your post-click landing page.

You can create various post-click landing pages by simply adding a few thoughtful edits to your original creation.

Let’s continue with the low-carb diet plan idea:

 If one audience segment is women, 25-30, living in Los Angeles, searching for low-carb diet plans, tired of going to the gym, and making $70K annually, modify the imagery and CTAs on your post-click landing page to appeal to that persona.

If another audience segment is men, 35-40, living in Manhattan, searching for low-carb diet plans, tired of eating fast food, with no time for the gym, and making $50K annually, modify the imagery and CTAs on your post-click landing page to appeal to that persona.

Creating variants may take more time, but your audience will be far more likely to respond to an offer that shows an intimate understanding of their situation. If you need help expediting this process, check out Unbounce’s Smart Traffic tool. 

Page structure, design & hierarchy

Once a user lands on your post-click landing page, the heat is on. 

This is the consideration stage at which that visitor either becomes a customer or chooses to leave your site.

Tip: Keep in mind that site bounces aren’t always a bad thing. Of course, we always want visitors to convert, but that’s not realistic for most first-time visitors. Learn how to leverage remarketing here, so you never lose touch with a potential customer.

You have two main goals with your post-click landing page: 1. Ensure that PPC ad messaging is maintained 2. Reduce friction along the path to purchase 

Advertisements above the fold have about 73% more viewability than CTAs below the fold. If your site visitor needs more convincing, then they’ll scroll down for supporting info. But make sure your main message is prominent on your page. 

It also helps to have data on the device your target audience uses most frequently to browse online. For example, heat mapping shows how users navigate your page, including where they click and how far they scroll. You can leverage this data to make changes to where you place information and structure your page with a user interface (UI) design delivering a great customer experience for both mobile and desktop devices. 

In July 2021, a study found that 49.71 percent of total web visits come via mobile, compared to 50.29 percent from desktops. Even if the ratio favors desktop over mobile, optimizing the mobile user experience (UX) is still good practice. There’s one way you can ensure your design transfers well between devices: visual hierarchy.

If you follow the law of visual hierarchy, you increase your chances of getting your visitor to convert. Users will spend an average of 6 seconds above the fold on your post-click landing page. You’ll want to make sure you’re as clear as possible, that you sustain the excitement from the PPC ad, and that there are no interruptions.

Learn more about visual hierarchy.

Speaking of interruptions, don’t do this:

Pop-ups? Find out if they’re worth the risk.

Even if your newsletter has thousands of subscribers and you feel that any interested page visitor could benefit from it, now is not the time. Remember: Reduce friction along the path to purchase.

This brings us to the length of the forms you might be hosting on your post-click landing page.

First, you’ll need to confirm what type of information is critical for this step of the signup process and whether you need new leads or higher-quality leads. 

If you need new leads, short and straightforward forms make the best first impression. You just need to make sure you have enough information to contact these new leads. Ask for their:

First name

Last name

Email

If you deem it necessary, you can also ask for their job function and the company they work for. But for locking in new leads, this form shouldn’t exceed five questions. 

In the B2B world, you’ll often need to sift through hundreds of forms to segment higher-quality leads. You’ll want to make sure the people filling your forms can pay for your offer and are confident in your solution. 

For longer forms, it’s common to ask questions like:

First name

Last name

Email

Job function

Company

Industry

CRM system(or alternative tech inquiries)

Again, knowing your audience segments will help you create the right forms for the right clientele.

Tip: B2B doesn’t have to be boring. The colors, images, and graphics on your forms have a big influence on that last click. We’re not saying, “Grab a CSS expert and go wild!”

Use the styling of your landing page forms to stay aligned with the personality of your audience segments. Oh, and don’t be afraid of white space. Having a bit of white space around your forms increases its readability.

Using a tool like Hotjar across different pages you’ve published can help you understand how your audience navigates content. This practice of heat mapping shows you how visitors interact with individual website pages, where they get stuck, and what elements they spend the most time on to optimize your landing pages based on real-time interaction data. 

That’s one step closer to working smarter instead of harder if you ask us. 

Streamlining your strategy 

Once you make sure your landing page and PPC ad copy are in complete alignment, it’s time to set some goals and get into campaign mode. 

Throughout this guide, we’ve been talking as if you’re selling a product or service. In truth, we don’t know what your goal is. That’s because whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or sales, the same principle still applies: Optimize the post-click experience through message matching.

Copy, segmentation, and page design are the tools you’ll need to make that happen. And once it does, there are a few metrics that will matter more than others. These include:

Landing page views: Page views are the first indication your PPC ad struck a chord with someone (hooray!). The number of page views your PPC ad generates shows you two things: Whether your ad copy reaches your audience (or not) and attracts the right audience (or not).

Sessions by Source: When you’re able to see where traffic to your post-click landing page is coming from, it saves you from guessing how to optimize your campaigns. Whether people are reaching your post-click landing page from a blog post, a referral website, a display ad, or a search ad, these insights reveal where your target audience spends their time online and your best way of reaching them. Once that’s discovered, you can refine your targeting to base your ad spend on demographics, timing, and trigger events that have already shown positive results.

Bounce rate: As we mentioned above, as much as we dislike it, bounce happens. Bounce rates represent the percentage of visitors that come to your page and leave without viewing other pages or converting. Your bounce rate doesn’t mean you failed. It’s an opportunity to figure out what isn’t resonating with visitors. 

Goal completions: Here’s a metric that shows you when you’re winning! Whether it’s a purchase, a subscription, or a resource download, conversions are what make your efforts worthwhile. Just make sure that you’re tracking the goal completions that justify your investment in the PPC campaign compared to company revenue. 

Cost per acquisition (CPA): This is the metric that shows how much money you’re spending. CPA is the average amount you pay for a customer to take action like:

Clicking

Filling out a form

Downloading a resource

Purchasing a product

Signing up for a newsletter

Here’s a simple formula to calculate CPA: ad spend ÷ number of actions taken. 

You don’t want to wait for this number to get high and out of control before optimizing your campaign, so improving your CPA and making the most of your marketing budget is essential.

Put It All Together and What Do You Get? 

A dedicated landing page for your PPC ads (rather than just a generic homepage) enables you to streamline content and reduce friction along the path to purchase.

Cha-ching.

With this guide, you can rest assured that, regardless of the format you choose for your PPC campaign, your post-click landing pages will be ready to go. 

Remember why your PPC ads need a dedicated landing page:

1. To align to the user. 2. To increase personalization for your audience segments. 3. To increase conversions, of course!

To achieve those goals, you’ll need to focus on a combination of copy, imagery, page design/structure, and audience targeting. It may sound like a lot, but it’s all about connecting the dots. Make sure you keep your messaging consistent, and you’ll be well on your way to optimizing a post-click landing page that delivers better results in your PPC campaign.

If you need help testing out variants of your landing page, try Smart Traffic and let machine learning speed up your results to get the best conversion rates possible.

An AI copywriting tool able to generate content at the push of a button? Copywriters the world over shudder at the mere thought of it. A machine that writes emails, headings, landing pages, and more?! Madness! 

But as this copywriter—who’s very much human—will tell you, there’s nothing to fear. 

Imagine a world where you don’t have to agonize over every word, but rather plug your requirements into a machine—and presto!—the work has been done. It means you can spend your time editing, refining, and optimizing copy for various personas and channels, not brooding over draft 4.5 trying to make it all make sense. 

With AI, meet your new copywriting assistant that takes care of tedious writing tasks so that you can focus on what really matters: getting campaigns to convert.

Typing like you’re a minute away from a deadline every day? Yeah, an AI copywriter can help with that.

So, how can you use AI copywriting tools in your marketing efforts? Let’s start with everything you need to know and explore how you can incorporate AI into your marketing stack—without alienating your human creators:

(You can also fast-track straight to your burning questions here: )

1. What is AI Copywriting?

2. Will AI Replace Copywriters?

3. How to Use AI Copywriting Tools

4. What is the Best AI Copywriter?

1. What is AI Copywriting?

AI copywriting is content generated by machine-learning software. It does this by training an algorithm to crunch millions of web pages looking for patterns. It then uses that knowledge to generate new content on a set topic.

Artificial intelligence tools have become remarkably clever in their ability to mimic and understand language—even slang. Headlines, emails, ads, meta tags, even product descriptions—the possibilities are endless. You simply add your parameters and let the machine do the rest. Talk about time-saving not having to tackle content word by word, right?

Chris Frantz, Vice President of Snazzy.AI—an AI copywriting tool part of the Unbounce family—explains:

Much of a marketer’s job is writing. Sometimes, writer’s block occurs, making it difficult to come up with the next sentence or an additional revision. That’s where AI copywriting comes in. It supplements your writing stack and process with a third-party smart assistant, and can help bolster your existing copywriting skills and fill in the blanks where you might get stuck otherwise. — Chris Frantz, VP, Snazzy.AI

Understanding the basics of AI

Artificial intelligence can become very complicated very quickly, which is why there are often misconceptions about it—ugh, thanks for that, Skynet. So let’s break it down in simple terms: What do we really mean when we say “AI”?

In one corner, we have Artificial General Intelligence. This is what most people think of when someone says AI. Y’ know, the story of the robot who learns to love? This is something we only might see sometime within our lifetime. Even then, probably not an advanced version of it.

In the other corner, we have Artificial Narrow Intelligence—ANI. This is the AI marketers have at their disposal today. ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications, performing one type of task or function, typically better and more efficiently than a human ever could. 

We’re talking chatbots able to understand subtle nuances of human speech, personalized digital experiences, and enhanced PPC campaigns thanks to automated smart bidding. AI-generated copy is but one of these exciting solutions.

We’re at the beginning of a bold new era of marketing—with AI making your life as a marketer easier and your campaigns more effective in the years to come. 

Want to know more? Here are some exciting examples of AI that are changing the face of traditional marketing.

Did you know Unbounce pioneered a new marketing approach called conversion intelligence? We believe the best—and most efficient—way to get more conversions lies in combining the data-crunching power of artificial intelligence and the creativity and experience of marketers. It’s you, your know-how, augmented by machines. Here’s what that future looks like.

2. Will AI Replace Copywriters?

No. AI will not replace copywriters. But it will change how they do their jobs. Just because an AI content writer is carrying most of the load in creating content, it doesn’t mean that content is entirely ready for use.   

Have a look at this video where a person wrote the first few lines of the script before letting AI take over the rest:

Although entertaining and impressive for sure, it’s not exactly nuanced, is it?  

There are still a couple of significant limitations to AI copywriting. Machines aren’t renowned for their subtlety and human touch—and looking at the video above, from a certain point, the story just doesn’t quite make sense anymore. 

It’s also important to remember that even though text created by AI isn’t copied from anywhere on the web, it’s also not quite original. The content is generated based on copy patterns already out there and published—so in a sense, you’re creating a copy of a copy of a copy.

A machine pretending to be human? Yep, I’m going ahead and say AI isn’t going to kill copywriting just yet.

This isn’t really an issue for meta tags and product descriptions since you’re mostly talking to bots anyway, but you’ll always want an actual human to go in and add some creative flair for anything a bit more in-depth. 

When you partner with a machine to write content, it’s not about handing over a big project and never thinking about it again. You’re still going to need a human to finetune it, but you’ll be able to produce at a much faster rate than you would have on your own.

Marketers know the importance of great copy but also know the effort it takes to make copy great. In fact, we’ve found that copy plays double the role of design in predicting conversions for landing pages. AI copywriting opens up a world where you don’t have to stare at a blank page waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s about getting a head start with copy that conveys your core message, reflects your brand and tone, resonates with your audience, and drives results—in minutes, not weeks. — Yosem Reichert-Sweet, Chief Technology Officer, Unbounce

Does this mean copywriting will be automated in the future? Yes, probably. But the art of copywriting won’t ever be lost. It’ll just be adapted to something new.

Did you know that in the 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report we found that emotional language—whether positive or negative—was a key influencer in landing page success? We studied more than 44 thousand landing pages and over 33 million conversions using machine learning and found different industries and audiences had entirely contrasting preferences. As it turns out, to get that sweet ROI, tone matters. A lot. And that’s why it’s essential that a human with the know-how and expertise *partners* with AI writing tools.

3. How to Use AI Copywriting Tools

The best way to use AI copywriting tools is simply by starting to experiment with them. The possibilities are endless for what you can create, and every marketer’s needs will be different—you just need to find what works for you. To guide that journey, here are a couple of best practices to keep in mind to make sure you get the most out of your AI experience:

AI copywriting best practice #1: Set parameters and define the context

AI tools can create several variants of different content types in seconds. Product descriptions, emails, mission statements, and more. So it’s key to set specific parameters for the generator—what kind of copy you’re looking for and what information it needs to include. AI can’t actually think for itself, so without a clear idea or task, the machine will fill the blanks. 

Let’s look at an example drained of context:

What’s this copy for? Who is the target audience? Is “furry hats” the product or the company? With so many questions left unanswered, here’s what we got back:

Hi boss. Please sell us a hat?” How’s that for a unique value proposition?

Yes, it’s endearing—buuuuuut, what are we actually going to do with this jumble?

Let’s see what happens if we give the machine just a bit more info:

Note: This isn’t an “about us” content template. It’s a content expander. With just a few pieces of info, the AI copywriter expands your ideas to create something complete—cool, right?

After giving the machine a clear what, why, and how about our fictional company, here’s what we got back:

Although this copy isn’t 100% ready to publish—you might wanna check those facts and quotes the tool added in—with a few tweaks, you’ll be well on your way to a pretty good “about us” blurb.

The rule of thumb when working with a machine—the same as it is when working with a human—is a clear brief. After all, if you ask stupid questions, you’re going to get stupid answers. If you’re still not happy with your results, just tweak your parameters—your new copy is just a click away!

Different tools each have their own measures to set content parameters. Within Unbounce’s Snazzy.AI content creation platform, you can create a company profile and define your audience, branded keywords, and a general company description for super-fast content creation without retraining the tool every time. Within the tool, you can even customize different content templates for tone and length. It’s all about creating content in minutes, not weeks.

AI copywriting best practice #2: Spice it up

AI is amazing. It has incredible data-crunching power and can understand and make sense of content in a way that’s beyond impressive for a machine. But it’s neither creative nor original.

For certain types of content, this isn’t too much of an issue—let’s be honest, meta tags aren’t really created to inspire. But for content that carries brand weight like a value proposition, or something that requires engagement like an email, you’re going to want to take the AI-generated content as a starting point and add in subtle persuasive tactics yourself.

Have a look at this example of a sales outreach email created by AI:

It does the job, sure. But it really does the bare minimum. Would you respond to an email that *looks* like it was sent by a heartless bot? Probably not. 

That doesn’t mean you need to pour hours into writing and rewriting, though. Most of the work has been done. It just needs a bit of zhushing up. Add in a clear campaign goal, some personality, and brand flavor, maybe also a few fun graphics and a striking subject line, and—BOOM!—you’ll be serving up a great mailer.

(P.S. Copy is only one part of the email experience. Get inspired for your next outreach campaign with this email marketing guide.)

AI copywriting best practice #3: Personalization is key

“Buy now”

“Click here”

“Sign up”

“Learn more”

These are the CTAs we all know and love. They’re simple, to the point, and littered across most web pages. When it comes to effective, high-converting CTAs, though, you don’t really wanna go that way. Personalized CTAs have been found to perform 202% better than basic prompts. 

The thing is, though, AI copywriters are most likely going to recommend generic CTAs—remember how AI copy is created based on what’s already published? Yep, see for yourself what happened when we asked an AI copywriter to create a landing page for a new product release …

Wanna know the secret to a great landing page? Get to know the 5 essential elements of a winning landing page. Boom.

CTAs aside, how awesome is it to see a complete landing page written and conceptualized in a few clicks? But at the end of the day, it’s estimated that people only read 28% of content on a webpage, at most. So it’s critical that the most important part of your campaign—your CTA—pops. Even if your AI-powered writer gets a bit more exciting when it comes to CTAs, you don’t really want to take risks here. 

Learn more about the art of effective CTAs with these real-world examples. 

AI copywriting best practice #4: Get some headline help

Did you know that traffic can vary as much as 500% based on your headline? Yup, this one’s a biggie. Just like CTAs, headlines are a crucial factor in determining whether or not your content will be successful or not. 

Writing attention-grabbing headlines is an art. Although you probably won’t publish just any recommendation from AI, it’s a great resource to get ideas for your headline if you have no idea where to go. 

These are suggestions from our trusty AI writer for a Facebook ad headline. You can also generate options for blogs, landing pages—heck, even email subject lines.

From here, you might wanna check the search results for these recommendations and see what pops up. How can you tailor your headline so that it stands out from the crowd? What problem is your content solving, and how can the headline address it head-on? 

The good news is that once you’re committed and happy with your headline—or multiple variants if you’re testing ’em out—you’ll be able to give the AI copywriter a clear direction where to go for the body copy. Remember, giving the machine context will make the whole process go much faster and give you much better results—talk about a win-win!

(Psssssst … Do you really *hate* writing headlines? With the Unbounce Smart Builder, get custom AI-generated headline suggestions powered by conversion data to get you the best possible results—headline optimization, just like that!)

AI copywriting best practice #5: Bulk up with research

Bots are fantastic for menial work, but they’re not the greatest of strategic thinkers. And for that, there’s no replacement for good ole fashioned research. What makes your audience tick? What are industry-wide best practices in terms of language? Should you write an essay or keep things short and sweet?

Competitive intelligence can give you these insights to help discover the secrets of a good conversion rate for your campaign. This knowledge then empowers you to optimize your machine-generated content. A good idea is to follow the conversion intelligence model to kickstart the process. It’s broken down into three simple steps:

Learn: AI-derived insights can help inform how your audience will respond to your campaign. It can be something as simple as knowing that the sweet spot for SaaS landing pages regarding word count is no more than 300 words, to more intricate insights like the effects of language sentiment in different industries. Resources like the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report are a great way to learn more about what works for different industries.

Build: This is the fun part—bringing those insights into practice. When working with an AI copywriter, it’s about creating custom parameters in the tool, such as copy length or voice and tone. Remember, for anything nuanced like emotional sentiment, bring in a human to make sure you get it spot-on.

Optimize: The goal is to become bigger and better, right? Optimize your AI writing process, learn and test what works, then rinse and repeat the process to see your conversion rates grow.

AI copywriting best practice #6: Edit, edit, edit

Poor spelling and grammar scare 59% of website visitors away—yes, really. Regardless of how much you trust your AI-powered copywriter, you’re gonna want to double-check your content before publishing. 

This is also essentially how AI will be *changing* the role of the traditional copywriter—note the emphasis on change, not replace. It will mean moving away from sole creator to becoming a strategic editor, having a machine do the menial work while a human becomes the warden of spelling and grammar, voice and tone, and high-level strategic planning. 

CD Baby partnered with AI tools to see epic double-digit conversion rates. Daniel Parscale, former Digital Marketing Strategist, explains what this relationship with AI looks like:

Because of AI, we’re starting to trade our responsibility for mundane tasks for more strategic, directorial duties. In a way, it means we have to stop thinking of our tools as tools and start thinking of them as employees that we trust to do their jobs. — Daniel Parscale, Unbounce customer and former Digital Marketing Strategist, CD Baby

After all, your time is far too valuable to sweat about writer’s block.

Got an AI copywriter but still no idea where to start? Page goal! Voice and tone! Call to action! Get acquainted with the basics of great content and make each word count with the Unbounce guide to landing page copywriting.

4. What is the Best AI Copywriter?

The best AI content writer is the one you work best with. There are many tools out in the wild that you can try, each with a different strength or focus. The more you experiment with AI copywriting tools, the more you’ll know what you need in each service.

That said, all the examples used in this article came from Unbounce’s Snazzy.AI platform. What makes this tool stand out is that there are over 30 templates you can use to create content with AI—from fully-fledged landing pages, to Amazon listings and taglines. You can even have artificial intelligence create TikTok video ideas for you!

Brainstorming? Yet another thing you don’t have to worry about.

Welcoming AI to Your Marketing Team

Artificial intelligence is steadily becoming a more and more important part of the marketing team. It’s a time saver. It’s data-backed and—most importantly—it’s key to being competitive in the digital world.

“But, but … AI will kill copywriting!” No, it won’t. It also won’t eliminate data analysts, marketing strategists, or campaign managers. We believe the future of marketing lies in conversion intelligence—an AI-augmented approach that sees the raw power of AI partnered with the know-how and creativity of marketers.

I think AI tools will end up supplementing existing creators instead of replacing them. If you look at the history of technology, tools augment what artists are doing. There’s no way to have a symphony without instruments, but the addition of instruments is fundamentally different than replacing an orchestra with an iPod. — Chris Frantz, VP, Snazzy.AI

We’re looking at a future of more conversions and fewer hassles. And AI copywriting is just the start of it all.

Adding a video to your landing page—whether it’s a product demo, customer testimonial, or an animated background—has often been championed as an effective way to showcase your offer to visitors. For years, it’s been widely accepted that videos can (and do) boost your conversion rates. Heck, at the time of writing this, we’ve got loads of content explaining why you oughta have one of those newfangled moving pictures on your page.

But it looks like we’re gonna have to change that.

At Unbounce, we love to learn—and lucky for us, we’ve got access to data from millions of landing pages (and billions of conversions) that we can use to determine whether marketing “best practices” hold up. It’s what conversion intelligence is all about: combining your know-how with mathematically validated insights to help you make informed decisions and get the best results from your campaigns.

So, we decided to explore a best practice that we’ve believed for years. Does including a video on your page boost your conversion rate?

The answer is somewhat nuanced, and we’ll get into the details below. The bottom line, though, is this: Videos do not boost your landing page conversion rates—and in some cases, might even harm them.

How We Got Our Data

Before we get to all the juicy results, let’s talk a bit about our data set and how we went about our analysis.

To ensure our results weren’t impacted by seasonal conditions (around Christmas or other holidays, for example), we looked at three separate and distinct time frames. We also wanted our analysis to produce current, reliable insights, so we used data ranging from late 2020 into early 2021.

For each time frame, we examined approximately 35,000 Unbounce customer landing pages that included a mix of:

Pages without video, pages with embedded videos (i.e., iframe videos), and pages with background videos

Pages broken down by industry as well as conversion type (e.g., form-fill and click-through pages)

Pages with traffic from different ad channels (e.g., social, paid search, organic search)

Pages with traffic from different devices (e.g. mobile and desktop)

Some bonus info for the real data-heads. Conversion rates can vary widely, and it’s therefore necessary to remove any extreme outliers to avoid skewed data. Throughout the analysis, outliers are trimmed by removing all rates > Q3 + 1.5*IQR and rates < Q1 - 1.5*IQR. Any small cohorts are also excluded from the analysis using a lower limit of 100 pages.

Video Doesn’t Improve Performance—No Matter Your Conversion Goal

Overall, videos are used on only a fraction of Unbounce customers’ pages—and, out of those, embedded videos are significantly more popular than background videos. YouTube is the most common hosting platform, accounting for a far greater percentage of videos than Wistia or Vimeo. 

The plot below shows the median conversion rates for pages not using video, pages with embedded videos, and pages with background videos. The plots are separated based on the conversion goal of the page: form-fill or click-through.

At first glance, when we compare pages without video to those containing embedded or background videos, we see very little difference in conversion rates for form-fill pages. While background video seems to perform slightly better, embedded videos don’t. (The number of pages using background video is also much smaller.) And, as you’ll see, the negative difference on click-through pages is even more striking.

This tells us that, overall, video appears to have a minimal or negative impact on the performance of a landing page—regardless of the conversion goal.

Note that the cohort size for background videos on click-through pages was below the minimum threshold and has therefore been removed.

In Almost Every Industry, Videos Do More Harm Than Good

Let’s dig a little deeper and look at the impact of video on landing pages for different industries.

Here we examined 10 industries ranging from business services to real estate and travel. Across the board, it appears that videos generally correlate with neutral or even negative page performance.

You’ll see from the graph that, in most cases, the median conversion rates between the pages with and without videos are quite similar. However, some industries (like real estate) show a strongly negative effect when a video is present. This tells us that, for these particular sectors, the inclusion of a video could significantly reduce page performance.

You might’ve noticed that some industries appear to have higher rates for landing pages with videos than without. Good news, right? Eh, not so fast.

Looking at just the medians (as we are in the graph above) can be a little misleading. To have an accurate picture, we need to look at the distribution of conversion rates across the pages. And for that, we need to use a box plot.

In this graph, the colored boxes represent where most pages sit. (We’ll note that the median isn’t in the middle, as pages’ conversion rates are rarely distributed evenly.) The vertical lines represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding extreme outliers. Essentially, this shows us how most pages are performing.

Take a look at the finance and insurance industry. Our earlier graph showed that the median conversion rate for finance pages with a video is higher than those without. However, the box plot reveals that the vast majority of pages—with or without a video—actually have similar rates.

That means there’s no apparent significant change to page performance when including a video or not.

Think Video’s Good For Social? Think Again

Let’s examine whether certain traffic channels respond more positively to video than others.

For example, we might hypothesize (given the increased use of video on social media) that video landing pages would perform better with visitors arriving from social platforms. But our analysis shows that people coming to your page from Facebook or LinkedIn generally convert on video landing pages as often as those coming from organic search or referral channels.

If we break it down further (using another box plot) to compare how pages with and without a video stack up by traffic source, we get the full, ugly picture. The distribution of conversion rates is significantly lower on video pages than non-video pages across every channel.

Yep, that goes for social media as well.

Video Doesn’t Stack Up for Mobile

Finally, let’s take a look at how video performs on mobile and desktop devices. 

Considering the number of videos viewed on mobile, we might guess that landing pages with videos would be favored by users on those devices. In reality, video appears to have a negative impact on conversion rates for both mobile and desktop visitors.

Looking at the box plot below, we can see that the distribution of conversion rates for video pages—from either mobile or desktop traffic—is significantly lower than for non-video pages. 

To Get the Best Results with Video, Use It Intentionally

This data analysis shows that video landing pages perform roughly as well or slightly worse than pages without video. But does that mean adding a video to your page is always bad?

No, not always.

Our recommendation is for marketers to think critically before committing to a video landing page. (Especially if you have limited resources that could instead be used to improve other aspects of your campaign.) What will the video help you achieve that you couldn’t otherwise? What value will it provide to your visitors?

If you’ve already got a video page that works, we certainly wouldn’t suggest you undo all your hard work. Instead, you can create landing page variants with and without video, then lean on tools like Smart Traffic to automatically route visitors to the variant they will most likely convert on.

If you spend 15 hours creating your landing page and three minutes on your call-to-action (CTA) button, you’re making a huge mistake. Every part of your landing page impacts your conversion rate, including that lil’ clickable zone.

As it turns out, there are plenty of variables going into your CTA button and its ability to convert visitors. You’ve gotta combine the right copy, location, and design to optimize your results. A successful CTA button takes some TLC.

This article will teach you how to give your CTA buttons the oomph they need to put the icing on your conversion cake. Find out what a CTA is and how you can supercharge it with a well-crafted button.

WTH is a CTA?

A CTA is a short phrase that leads visitors to the action you want them to take. It’s a critical part of every landing page strategy.

Think of it as your grand finale—it’s the last text your visitor will read before they decide to convert. So, you want it to lay a clear path to your conversion goal.

Most CTAs come in the form of a clickable button because it draws attention and asks for a simple action from the visitor. By mastering the techniques behind a compelling CTA button, you’ll get even more from your landing page.

The Big Three Elements of a CTA Button

Every CTA button has three main elements to optimize:

1. Copy

You’ll see many marketers throw some popular phrases on their CTA buttons and call it a day. Think “Sign up,” “Try now,” or “Get started.” They get the job done, but they don’t optimize the CTA to its fullest.

To get the best results from your CTA button’s copy, you need to consider your CTA as a call to value. Explain how clicking the button will change your visitor’s world.

As Ross Simmonds demonstrates, you can turn a generic phrase like “Get started” into a customer-focused saying like “Plan your finances” or “Grow your following.” These phrases directly connect clicking the button with the main benefit the conversion provides.

First-person language is another tactic that encourages visitors to convert. When ContentVerve rephrased a CTA to say “Start my free 30-day trial” instead of “Start your 30-day free trial,” they saw a 90% boost in their click-through rate. Another example you could use is “I want it!” instead of a second-person phrase like “Get it here.”

Now, let’s combine the call to value and first-person language tactics. Here’s what they look like in action on a landing page for Firstleaf:

Image courtesy of Firstleaf via Taboola.

The phrase “Send me the best 3-pack” gives the visitor a feeling of control over their conversion. While many CTA buttons give the visitor a command (e.g., “Order a 3-pack”), Firstleaf’s button lets the visitor ask instead. This button also emphasizes that the visitor will get the best 3-pack, not your run-of-the-mill 3-pack.

As you put these tactics into action, remember that your landing page audiences fall in different stages of the conversion funnel. For example, if you have a landing page encouraging top-of-the-funnel customers to sign up for emails, you don’t want to be selling the value of your product yet. Show your visitors the value they’ll get for taking action at the stage of the funnel they’re currently in.

2. Location

Your CTA won’t get you the results you want if it’s not in a place where it’ll make an impact. At best, it will lead to fewer conversions, and at worst, folks won’t be able to find it in the first place.

When you think about where to place your CTA button, size doesn’t always matter as much as noticeability. A huge button won’t make a difference if it’s jumbled in a bunch of other elements.

You see, your CTA button should follow the natural visual hierarchy our brains use to process online content. Your most important landing page elements should fall in a Z or F pattern and visually “pop” through size, color, or contrast.

Of course, your button’s position on your landing page content will also play a role in its effect on conversions. Consider placing your button “above the fold” or at the top of the page before visitors start scrolling. If you’d rather pitch your landing page subject first, you could also try putting it at the end as the “conclusion” to your content.

Heck, you could take a page outta Indochino’s book and place your CTA button in more than one spot. They put their CTA on the top, middle, and bottom sections of this landing page:

(Full Size) Image courtesy of Indochino.

As you can see, the first CTA is more urgent than the two that follow it. The text leading up to that CTA mentions a drawing for customers who book an appointment by a certain date. 

If you use multiple CTA locations, try designating one as your main CTA and let the others catch any stragglers.

You can also put your CTA button front and center with a sticky bar or popup. These features broadcast your CTA loud and clear at the top of your page or on top of it. Unbounce has tons of templates for sticky bars and popups that you can try adding to your landing page.

3. Design

You didn’t think we were gonna overlook your CTA button’s design, did you? 

Its shape, size, color, and other visual elements influence its role in your landing page’s conversion potential.

Let’s talk about color first. Color affects your landing page elements’ success in two ways: through readability and psychological color associations.

In other words, you want to keep your button colors contrasting but complementary and use colors associated with the emotions you want your visitors to feel. Your choice of color should work with the rest of the colors on your landing page while keeping your button distinct from everything else. The Unbounce guide to conversion-centered design recommends assigning a specific color that you only use for CTAs.

A properly sized CTA button will be big enough for visitors to easily find it, but not so big that it ruins the layout around it, as UX Planet puts it. They also point out that mobile landing pages have specific size standards. While Apple recommends keeping your CTA buttons at least 44×44 pixels big, Microsoft suggests 34×26 pixels.

The design surrounding your button matters, too. If you placed your CTA button on a hero image, make sure the image directs your eye to the button, as suggested by Neil Patel. For example, you could use an image of a person to appear to be looking at the button.

Wanna see how design can make a button truly pop? SnackNation’s got you covered:

Image courtesy of SnackNation.

They use an orange button on a purple background—a color combination that sounds like it shouldn’t work yet nails it.

Why? If you look at a color wheel, you’ll see orange and purple across from each other, meaning they’re complimentary colors that contrast well. Plus, check out the orange confetti in the hero image that pulls the whole color scheme together.

If you have a hard time making a button design that feels right, try using a landing page template. Since professionals design them, their CTA buttons will already have optimized designs. For example, Unbounce’s Simple template uses a red button that draws your eye without clashing with the rest of the page.

Always Use CTA Buttons That Work for Your Audience

Whichever of this article’s best practices you try for your CTA buttons, always remember that your audience’s preferences come first. Personalized CTAs have a 202% better conversion rate than basic ones. Use your data on your high-performing CTA buttons to guide your future decisions.

Since every audience has unique preferences, try using a tool like Smart Traffic that helps you direct different folks to different landing page variants. You could create a few variants with different button designs, then let Smart Traffic direct visitors to the variant most likely to convert them.

When you’re crafting words for your landing page, you’re not just writing. You’re copywriting—writing for conversions. Every character could make or break your landing page.

After analyzing the most influential elements for conversion in 40,000 landing pages, Unbounce found that copy (28%) influenced conversion more than two times as much as design (13%) did.

Long story short, you can’t rely on flashy visuals alone to convert. You gotta sell with your copy, too.

No pressure, right?

The best practices for your landing page’s copy will depend on your audience and industry, but there are a couple of techniques you can follow to make any landing page shine brighter.

This blog post will cover four methods for better landing page copywriting and five examples to spark your inspiration. You’ll be converting more visitors in no time.

Four Rules for Better Landing Page Copy (With Examples)

These four techniques will help you craft landing page copy that converts:

1. Get rid of jargon

Jargon—terms that only make sense within an industry—doesn’t always sound clear to visitors. This language automatically excludes customers who aren’t in on industry terms. Avoid using jargon when you can.

In most industries, simple language wins more conversion than complicated terms do. The Conversion Benchmark Report found that in software as a service (SaaS) and law—two technical industries—lower word counts and lower Flesch Reading Ease Scores (FRES) resulted in more conversions. Content with a low FRES has fewer words per sentence and syllables per word, leaving less room for long-winded jargon.

You don’t have to get rid of all of the industry terms on your landing page, but you do need to know what your audience understands. 

For example, you can get away with more jargon on business-to-business (B2B) landing pages, but you should be careful with business-to-consumer (B2C) pages. Keep your projection bias in mind and write your copy in a way your audience will understand.

The home-loan process involves lots of terms that’ll go over your head if you don’t work in finance. A home-loan management service, ooba, cuts down on their landing page’s jargon by focusing on the results for the customer.

Image courtesy of ooba.

The page mentions a few terms like “price ceiling” and “credit profile” that start to cross the jargon line, but it always follows up with simple explanations.

Editor’s tip: Having trouble writing copy that speaks to your visitors? Thanks to Snazzy AI, Unbounce will have AI-powered copywriting features in the future. Plug in some details about your audience and let technology do the rest.

2. Back your writing with numbers

Numbers are convincing, so they make more convincing copy. For example, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only two will read the headline and the rest of your copy. That stat helps you understand the importance of headlines, right? (Given the emphasis on the headlines, would this be more effective if reworded? For example: “Only 2 out of 10 people will read the headline and the copy, but virtually everyone will read the headlines.”)

One of the top examples of B2B landing pages from Shopify emphasizes the fact that the platform has more than a million users.

Image courtesy of Shopify.

This number works as social proof to build your trust in Shopify. If 1,000,000 other businesses are using Shopify, why shouldn’t you?

As an employee engagement software, Peakon has users who want to improve business results wherever they can. Therefore, Peakon’s trial signup landing page uses statistics to make compelling points to its number-focused visitors.

Image courtesy of Peakon.

The “Increase revenue” and “Increase productivity” sections provide concrete numbers detailing how much Peakon increases revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

In the “Increase revenue” section, you’ll learn that revenue can increase by up to 0.6% for every 1% increase in engagement and Peakon increases engagement by up to 10% in 3 months.

The “Increase productivity” section delivers a statistical triple threat. It explains how employees at highly engaged companies have 37% fewer sick days, 30% higher productivity, and as much as 2.5 times higher customer satisfaction rates. And you’re to assume that you’ll get a similar engagement from Peakon.

3. Tell a compelling story

Every landing page tells a story. The difference between a boring landing page story and one that gets results lies in its framework.

By following the right structure, you can present a gripping story that also markets your product.

One popular storytelling framework across subjects is ABT (And, But, Therefore). It includes a setup (and), problem (but), and solution (therefore). This formula builds tension, then resolves it.

You can apply the ABT framework to marketing through the PAS (Problem Agitate Solve) framework. It begins with an issue (problem), elaborates on that issue (agitate), and presents your solution (solve).

Check out how this Twitter landing page from IronCore Labs uses the PAS framework.

Image courtesy of IronCore Labs.

It starts with a problem (“How to Make End-to-end Encryption Work for Groups”), then agitates it (“A Lot of DIY End-to-end Encryption Solutions Are a Headache”). After setting up that issue, it offers its eGuide as a solution.

4. Energize your readers with actionable words and phrases

The point of a landing page is to encourage action—a conversion. Your copy should help you reach that goal by urging your visitors to do something. Actionable words and phrases explain what your product enables the visitor to do and directs them to conversion.

Let’s see how Snapchat uses actionable language on its Snap Kit landing page.

Image courtesy of SnapChat via IMPACT.

The landing page starts off with an actionable headline: “Grow your app with Snapchat’s best features.” This title does triple duty by summarizing what Snap Kit does, framing that summary as a benefit, and offering a soft CTA to start using its features.

Image courtesy of SnapChat via IMPACT.

Throughout the landing page, each headline is an action—share, unlock, make. These actions demonstrate how Snap Kit empowers customers to enhance their Snapchat experience.

Go Above and Beyond With Your Copy

As you write your landing page copy, ask yourself, “Would I be interested in reading this as someone outside of my company?” You have to look for ways to infuse your words with value to keep your visitors’ attention. You might be interested in your content because you work with it, but you’ll need that extra something-something for people new to the subject to stay on the page.

For more copywriting advice, check out the Unbounce Guide to Landing Page Copywriting. It’ll walk you through the steps to writing copy that converts.

Before you can accomplish your goals, you’ve gotta help your audience accomplish theirs. Makes sense, right? But too many times, marketers fall into the trap of creating landing pages with only their own goals in mind.

It’s no wonder visitors aren’t clicking on that CTA.

Building a landing page that converts like crazy shouldn’t be left up to chance—it’s the result of using detailed information about your audience to create a persuasive combination of copy and imagery. The key to converting visits on your landing page? Audience research.

“How Can I Make Sure I Appeal to Every Customer Demographic?”

Marketers are often taught that if you’re talking to everyone, then you’re talking to no one.

It’s true! A one-size-fits-all approach to your campaigns will never be as effective as one that’s both specific and highly relevant to your prospective customers and their needs.

For example, your company might be selling a SaaS product and dump your customers into buckets marked “marketers,” “founders,” and “business owners.” But so much opportunity is lost from this approach!

Demographic segmentation can be a stronger starting point that can make your landing page strategy more specific.

Think about how their location, age, and place of employment might help you personalize your messaging and tighten your advertising efforts.

On the page below, for instance, the location might not be as targeted, but other demographics like age, family status, and gender were clearly used to appeal to a specific persona (type of person).

Image Source

When you consider these types of details, your landing page takes the form of 1:1 communication, instead of an impersonal 1:many blast that speaks to nobody in particular. Your customers will feel the difference, even if they don’t know the experience has been tailored just for them. 

Sometimes, though, you don’t start out with the audience insights you need to create a landing page with the exact effect you intended.

That’s when you need to do a little diggin’.

Getting to know more about the customers you already have (and what makes them unique) can be advantageous to your strategy. You just need to do is put in the work to discover more about them…

5 Methods Of Audience Research

1. Conduct Customer Interviews/Surveys

Customer interviews are usually viewed as a preliminary activity. You reach out to ideal customers to get feedback on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and that’s it. 

*See ya next year!*

The problem here is that it leaves behind a great deal of opportunity. Customer insights can provide a ton of value between your launch and development stages. 

To improve the product for your customers, you need to make sure that they’ve got some skin in the game. By using continuous research, you can co-develop a product that your community loves, especially because they helped inform it. 

You need to be talking to your customers all the time.

Here are a few tips to help your next interview be short and deliberate as opposed to long and aimless. 

Start with the big picture.

It’s tempting to create surveys and interview questions centered on a product feature you think will be helpful. But this sets you up for confirmation bias. Instead, focus your questions on the user experience. 

If your product is meant to make content distribution more simple and scalable, resist asking about tools your customers might already be using. Ask questions that help you understand their barriers and needs to execute at a high level.

Decide how the feedback will be used. 

You want to respect your customers’ time by asking questions focused on them. A common mistake in customer interviews and surveys is asking questions about making your company’s messaging better. Yes, that will always be the end goal. 

However, language is important. Your customers want to know how you can help them, not the other way around. So, before you script your questions, decide which area of the business you want responses for. This will help you be more strategic and help you script questions that give you actionable feedback.

Image Source

Write your questions, then write ‘em again. 

First drafts are rarely perfect—although they’re incredibly helpful in getting your ideas down on paper. The next step is to organize those ideas and refine them into smooth, targeted, and impactful sentences. 

At first, your technical knowledge of your product might naturally find its way into your document, but you’ll want to avoid jargon and keep it simple for your customers. Write like you’re talking to a colleague or having a conversation in a coffee shop. Consumers are much savvier at picking out sales pitches and inauthentic copy in the digital age than they were 10 years ago. 

Write with empathy, tell your customers exactly how this data will be used, and try not to leave anything up to interpretation.

Curated Tip: It also helps if you can offer an incentive in return for their feedback. Something like a gift card, small cash reward, or donation has been known to increase response rates by up to 50%. When you’re ready to start framing your questions, use our customer feedback tips to help you optimize your campaign for a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs.

2. Monitor Social Media Platforms

One of the best ways to engage in audience research is to go where your audience hangs out online. 

There’s a tendency to rely only on Google to find answers that provide more insight into your customers’ interests, online behaviors, and patterns. You might also look at competitors to see what they’re doing or review studies from industry-leading companies to see what’s worked in the past. 

But there’s a TON of insights circulating on social media platforms that you can also learn from.

Facebook You might not have access to Facebook’s old beloved audience insight tool anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn more about how your customers use the platform.

You can still:

Look at the insights on your fan page: Track which posts have the most engagement and what demographics that engagement is coming from.

Search for groups discussing topics relevant to your brand: More than 1.4 BILLION people are using Facebook groups every month. These groups usually focus on a hobby or activity which can give you more insight into the daily lives of your target demographic.

Use Lookalike Audiences in your ad campaigns: This pixel helps you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business due to similar characteristics of your existing customers.

Other Social Channels

Jump on Quora, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube to find out what your audience is curious about and how they engage with those topics online. Many of these channels have analytic reports built into the platform but you can also use social listening tools like Keyhole to track mentions of your brand, monitor conversions about competitors, and spot opportunities for relationship building.

Building a community online means showing up, participating, and adding value.

To understand how you can add value, you can use social listening to be a fly on the wall who observes the typical interactions in your industry. With these insights, you can craft strategic messages knowing what works and what doesn’t.

3. Competitive Analysis

You might want to focus solely on your brand and avoid looking at competitors to prevent being influenced by their tactics or—in all honesty—getting a little intimidated by their presence.

But the reality is that understanding your competitors’ positioning helps you better refine your own. Your main goal with competitor research should be to understand the sentiment consumers have towards competing brands and products. During your research, you should be seeking answers to questions like:

Why do people like their product? Examine the social activities that get the most engagement and study the reviews for content ideas that position your differentiators as a strength.

When do people use their product? If you can pinpoint when a consumer shifts from a learning mindset to a buying mindset, your landing page copy can be used to speak specifically to the trigger event that encourages a purchase decision.

What do people like/dislike about their product? This is where the full user experience of a competitor product can help you optimize your offering. Capitalizing on what’s different is great but you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. If there’s a feature of a competitor product that users appreciate having the ability to use, you have an opportunity to repurpose how that can be used uniquely to your own product.

How much would a customer spend on their product and why? Competition-based pricing works for businesses competing in a highly saturated market, but your strategy ultimately comes down to the elasticity of consumer demand. Be mindful of how competitors use geography, psychology, and premium offerings to determine their pricing.

Are they a go-to resource when it comes to buying a solution?Make a list of the reasons a prospective buyer might purchase your competitor’s product above other solutions in the market. Think about this in relation to the points mentioned above: social presence, problem-focused storytelling, pricing, product features, and customer service. Try to source customer testimonials that speak to your product in each of those areas. If you can’t find any, you know exactly where you need to double down.

But the most important question your messaging must reflect on is, what sets us apart from the competition?

4. Google Analytics or Site Performance Reporting Alternatives

When you’re seeking to connect with your audience online, you need Google Analytics.

This is one of the first tools many marketers integrate into their tech stack to get a solid understanding of the traffic they drive to their landing pages.

Google Analytics helps you capture demographic data from the composition of your audience, but it goes a step further by segmenting high- and low-value users so you can modify your spending to target a larger group of interested consumers.  

The power of a paper trail can also never be underestimated. Google Analytics brings you into the user journey of each demographic to see how they’ve landed on your page, which pages they’re spending the most time on, and the Customer Lifetime Value of users acquired through specific advertising efforts.

These types of metrics give you the knowledge to create more intentionally and spend more efficiently.  

5. Use Audience Research Tools

There are many tools available today that can help you streamline your research efforts to create continuous feedback from your desired audience.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Spark Toro: Helping people do better marketing by making the audience segments of publications, people, and media sources more transparent.

Buzzsumo: Uses one of the world’s largest index of social engagement data to help you discover content types and formats that your audience shares to create better content.

Audiense: Audience intelligence software that helps marketers and consumer researchers create audience-centric strategies through social consumer segmentation.

Smart Traffic: AI-powered tool that eliminates guesswork by creating page variants for segmented users most likely to convert. You can learn about your audience as you build!

Analyze Your Findings

Now that you’ve traveled far and wide to collect data on your target audience, it’s time to deconstruct what it all means.

Not all users in your audience will be the same. Splitting them into subcategories based on similar patterns will help you deliver campaigns in a way that feels personal to each segment.

Aside from demographic data, you can also group users together based on:

Lifestyle/Psychographics: Through your social listening tool, you can pinpoint particular traits and cultural trends that users in your audience relate to online. Though this isn’t as clear-cut as age and location data, these aspects of your audience are key to scripting messages in the context of their problems. This helps you build relationships with an audience that feels you know exactly what they’re going through.

Keywords: In tandem with understanding the language your audience uses, you can also segment based on keywords. However, you need to be careful with the words you use. A simple mistake is using market keywords to define your customers. Nuh-uh.

By doing that, you’re still casting a wide net. As we learned above, if you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one. Instead, use long-tail keywords to get specific on your audience segments. Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) can help you segment main commercial keywords with either transactional or informational content which serves as a helpful guide to determining your audiences’ search intent.

For example, if you’re selling coffee, rather than just using “coffee” try:

Coffee near me Coffee [location] Decaf Coffee Locally Sourced Coffee Fair Trade Coffee

You want to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and target search entries from a first-person perspective. 

Cross-reference the data you’ve gathered with what your brand offers to capitalize on industry gaps and opportunities. Research can truly be your best friend.

Optimizing Your Landing Pages Based On Research

Alright, you’ve done the research. You’ve analyzed your findings. You’ve segmented your audience groups. 

Now it’s time to put those insights to work and make some magic happen by optimizing your landing pages based on what you’ve discovered.

Want to build a perfect landing page without support from a developer? Start your free trial of Unbounce’s Smart Builder today.

Tailoring Copy

With a firm understanding of your audiences’ search intent and the phrases they use, make sure your landing copy reflects that same communication.

It helps to have a checklist to ensure you’re focusing as much as possible on the customer perspective, rather than your own. 

Is there a common experience you can use that illustrates the pain point that you solve?

Are you naming your customer demographic in the copy? (e.g., dog owners, millennials)

Do you have a strong value proposition?

Are you avoiding complex jargon?

Are you encouraging action?

It also helps to add statistics that complement your value prop throughout your copy and use social proof to show the benefits of your product. People are more likely to believe what they can see. Use this full list of tips to make your landing page copy more persuasive.

Wondering how your landing page copy performs compared to the competition? Try the Unbounce Copy Analyzer.

Tailoring CTAs

Your research will give you a better understanding of where your audience is in the buyer’s journey when they come in contact with your brand.

With this insight, you can tailor your CTAs to move that prospective buyer to the next stage. Leave the “learn more” CTA for the top of funnel folks. As consumers move further along their journey, try CTAs like: “Put me on the list!” “Send me the report!” “Talk with an agent” Remember that using first-person phrasing can help you boost your click-through rate, just like ContentVerve saw a 90% increase in their CTR by using “Start my free 30-day trial” instead of “Start your free 30-day trial.”

Just sayin’.

Refining Imagery

The images you use also have a major impact on your audience. Consumers are more likely to spend more time analyzing the imagery on your landing page before moving on to reading your copy.

So, make sure your images reflect who your audience segment believes themselves to be.

If it’s a coffee-loving millennial, reflect that in the imagery.

If it’s a digital nomad, reflect that in the imagery.

If it’s a creative SaaS entrepreneur—well, you get it.

Image Source

Setting Up Before You Go Heads-Down In Research

Your first thought might be to dive straight into research. As a marketer, your mind is already wired to:

Understand what’s happening in the market

Generate content ideas

Influence perceptions 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The foundation of any productive research is having a solid understanding of the specific purpose of your landing page. A 2018 Google survey showed that less than 40% of marketers were using consumer research to drive their decisions.

Starting with the right value proposition can save you hours building a landing page you think your audience will care about. You may have overarching value props for your product as a whole—and that’s great. But every single landing page you publish also needs to have a value prop tailored to that particular product, service, offer, and/or audience.

Your value prop is a clear message that communicates the primary value you provide to your customers. It’s not about being quirky or using heavy jargon to sound professional. Think of it like you’re offering assistance to a friend with a solution you know can solve their problem. Knowing how your value prop can benefit your business is one thing, but to really show how it can impact your customer. You’ll need to be specific, problem-focused, and exclusive.

Here are a few ways you can do that:

Use voice of customer copy: This is where you use intent data and social listening research to leverage the exact words your customers use when talking about their problem. Your value prop then carries more context, and you won’t need to rely on sounding sales-y.

Embrace clarity: Before finding creative phrases to use or animations to add, make sure you provide clear responses to what your product is, who it’s for, and how the product will improve your customer’s life.

Focus on benefits: Talk about what makes you different from competitors. Your differentiators and added benefits can be the decision-maker between a sale and a bounced visitor. Remember, people can see through the hype. Instead of claiming to be the best in the world, give the visitor an in-depth look at your specialty.

Right Time, Right Place

With the help of your audience research methods and tools, the next step is to analyze the customer journey you’ve mapped out to predict where consumers are going to interact with your landing page, and how.

You might think that a similar model—the marketing funnel—is enough to understand the user journey, but the following two frameworks have one major difference to keep them separate… The driver. Funnels are driven by assets created by your marketing and sales team. Journeys are driven by the learning experiences and specific needs of the consumer.

Much of the buyer’s journey is now completed online and, in the B2B world, buyers expect to receive unique content aligned with where they are in their journey.

This is where your audience research comes in. Consider designing variants of your landing page with custom headlines, visuals, resources, and CTAs that target a specific demographic of your audience.

This allows you to match content with critical touchpoints throughout your funnel.

Put It All Together and… Voila!

Don’t let your extensive research dive go to waste. Your audience insights will definitely help you optimize your landing page, but they can also help you optimize other parts of your marketing strategy. Start experimenting in social channels, niche communities, and with your advertising campaigns to further understand how consumer behaviors change along their buying journey. The goal with research is to consistently learn about the factors that influence your audience. Even though you have a solid understanding of them now, nothing stays the same forever as new solutions, competitors, and market trends are introduced. Show up where your community is online. Observe what they’re drawn to, talk to them, and grow with them. It’s these activities that make research feel more like an exciting process rather than a required chore.

Whoever said, “life is a journey, not a destination,” clearly wasn’t a time-strapped marketer trying to dig themselves out from under a mountain of tasks by the end of the day.  (The quote is often attributed to the 18th-century poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hmm, yeah, not exactly someone with conversion rates top of mind.)

When it comes to building landing pages, you’re not doing it for the journey, are you? In fact, you probably wish you could just skip over the whole thing and get straight to the destination: more conversions.  And that’s why we’ve launched Smart Builder (Beta), powered by Unbounce Conversion Intelligence.

Smart Builder Lights Up a Direct Path to More Conversions

Smart Builder is our new AI-powered landing page builder that uses over 10 years of data (that’s 1.5 billion conversions!) to provide marketers a guided building experience. It speeds up (and smooths out) the journey to publishing high-converting content—no more guesswork, no more endless iterations.

That means you can spend more time watching those conversions roll in. 

So how exactly does it work? 

To get started, all you’ve gotta do is share a little bit about your business and campaign—your industry, audience, and conversion goals. Smart Builder will then provide templates, section components, and even copy recommendations. It’s pretty dang spectacular, if we might say so ourselves.

  Smart Builder helps you adopt conversion intelligence—a new approach to marketing that pairs your know-how and creativity with AI to get better, faster results than you could on your own.

The thought of working with AI might give you the heebie-jeebies—and hey, that’s pretty normal. The AI black box can stir up a lot of distrust among marketers. You see the input and the output, but what the heck goes on in the middle?  When you work with Smart Builder, you’re involved in this middle process—the magic only happens when you merge your creativity and expertise with its AI-powered insights. As Unbounce customer Zoe explains, you’re still in the driver’s seat. Think of Smart Builder like a trusty co-pilot.

I’m naturally a creative person so, whenever I design landing pages, I get really excited—and also overwhelmed because of all the possibilities. Smart Builder is helpful in that it actually guides me through the process, and it saves me a lot of time that I’d spend researching all my competitors’ pages, looking at different copy, and then coming up with my own. The very fact that it can suggest recommended copy in itself is amazing and very helpful. — Zoe Alexander, Marketing Project Manager, Pantheon Design Ltd.

If you’re ready to shift your approach to marketing, it’s time to flip the switch. Once you see how easy it is to work with Smart Builder (and all the problems it can solve for you), you’ll never look back.

Sorry, Ralph. We’re focused on the destination.

1. Build a Landing Page With the Team You Never Had

When Unbounce first launched its Classic Builder, the goal was to make the building process accessible to anyone—no developer required.  But as a marketer of a small business, the reality is you’re not only working without a developer. You’re also likely working without copywriters and designers. In other words, you’re tackling all the marketing tasks alone.

Smart Builder was created with you in mind. You don’t need specialized skills or an entire crew to work the dang thing. In fact, it’s the opposite—it gives those skills to you.

You’re no longer working alone—meet your new team

Smart Builder is your Design Assistant: Not so long ago, landing page templates were a huge blessing. Instead of building a page from scratch, marketers could start off with a foundation, which saved them time. Now, there are so many options that it’s become a curse. If you’re not a designer, picking a high-converting template can be overwhelming. That’s where Smart Builder comes in. It uses the information you provide—about your audience, industry, and goals—and recommends the ideal layout for your campaign right away. If you’re not sold, you can look through some alternatives it’s picked out for you as well.

I’m always excited to build pages for campaigns and I like designing—but it quickly gets overwhelming. The Design Assistant makes it so I don’t need to look at competitors, do the research, and can trust that you’re going to tell me what’s going to work. — Zoe Alexander, Marketing Project Manager, Pantheon Design Ltd.

Smart Builder is your In-House Copywriter: The 15-second rule states that you have less than 15 seconds to grab your reader’s attention. Your headline—a mere few words—plays a big role in captivating your audience right away. Sounds like a lot of pressure (and the perfect trigger for some serious writer’s block). 

With Smart Builder, you can ask for copy recommendations to help you create those snappy headlines. Based on conversion data in your industry, it’ll serve up several alternative headlines (and rank ‘em by how impactful they’re predicted to be).

Smart Builder is your Developer: Using landing page templates, you might feel like your creativity is constrained by the layout. If only you could swap out that section, drag up that headline, or stretch that photo—then it’d be perfectly on-brand.

Now, you can bring your ideas to life. With Smart Builder’s responsive templates and grid system, everything snaps into place as you customize your page. Fiddling around with resizing and double-checking the mobile design are things of the past.

Editor’s Note: Smart Builder is still in beta—which means there are more features to come. For example, soon you’ll be able to generate high-converting recommendations for even more copy on your landing page. As Smart Builder grows smarter, so will your team. Try it out today!

2. Know What Converts Before You Click “Publish”

Marketers are working harder—but for most, results seem to be getting worse. What gives?

In an increasingly competitive landscape, you know you’ve gotta put in the effort. You’ll spend hours researching best practices and considering all the different elements. (“Green and orange are both high-converting CTA colors, so I should go with one of those, right?“) But despite this effort, you still wind up guessing what’ll perform best. (“My favorite color is orange—I’ll try that.”)

And that’s the crux of the problem.  Marketers are publishing their landing pages without truly knowing what’ll convert their own customers.

I have hunches, hypotheses, and ideas of what I think will work well. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong. There have been times when we put authentic images in a landing page to replace a stock photo—a cheesy stock photo—and the authentic photo will do worse than a stock photo. You never know. — Christian Krohn, Unbounce Customer and Owner, PatientClicks

Unfortunately, if you wait to publish your page to see what converts, you’re at risk of squandering your budget. And when ad clicks are now coming out at 16 bucks a pop, most businesses can’t afford that kinda testing. You’ll have to bring in a whole lot more conversions to offset those that bounce.

With Smart Builder, you can expect a higher return on ad spend because each decision you make is guided by industry-specific conversion data—not on guesswork, intuition, or what Joe says worked at his last job. (Damnit, Joe.)  When you’re confident in your landing pages’ performance, there’s less stress reporting ROI and managing a leaner budget—something that remains a top challenge for marketers year-over-year. Only 37% of marketers feel very confident making budget decisions. With Smart Builder, you’ll get to consider yourself one of them.

3. Win Back Time to Grow Your Business

Do you often feel like you’re being pulled in so many directions that you can’t get anything done? 

You fall behind, you rush your work, and then you see lackluster results. While you’re probably bummed, you also know it’s the best you could do with the time you had. (“It ain’t a homemade lasagna, but this soupy Kraft Dinner will have to do today. Mmm, soupy good!”)

Landing pages are one of many tasks vying for your attention, which means that optimization practices—like building landing page variants or mobile-friendly landing pages—are usually an afterthought. 

Here’s why that’s a problem. 

If you only create one landing page (even if it’s eye-catching as heck), you’re limiting yourself to one audience segment. With variants, you give your landing pages the highest chance of success by appealing to many different kinds of visitors.

Let’s say you own an ice cream shop: You wanna highlight all your flavors to lure in every sweet tooth—not just those who crave chocolate and vanilla, right?  With Smart Builder on your side, you can create variants that look good on any device in a fraction of the time. Using its responsive grid system, swap in different sections, reworked copy, or fresh design elements, and you’ve got yourself a completely new page. Just like that, you have the time to optimize and truly deliver unique experiences. (Where are my tiger ice cream fans at?)

[Smart Builder] saves me so much time. I don’t have the time to dig into anything specific and become an expert. Could not recommend that more to literally anyone that has to deal with any writing or content creation. — Victoria Harkes, Marketing Manager SchoolBundle

So go wild. Create variants that highlight different selling points. Or feature different hero images. Swap around the copy and sections. Try out those bold ideas. There’s no need to block off extra time in your calendar.

Because when you find ways to speak to each and every prospect, you’re on your way to growing your business. #BigBusinessEnergy.

Lookin’ for the cherry on top of your Smart Builder experience? Once you create a few variants, turn on Smart Traffic, our AI-powered optimization tool that automagically reads your visitors’ attributes and sends them to the landing page most relevant to them. Unbounce customers see an average 30% lift!

Marketing Ain’t What it Used to Be

Have you noticed that your workdays are becoming longer and more challenging than before? Your tasks are piling up because you’re spending way too much time (time you don’t have) figuring out what’ll resonate with your prospects and convert them into customers.

No, you’re not overanalyzing it. You’re caught in the middle of a big change to the marketing world, which is making the competition fiercer than the cast of America’s Next Top Model.

Over the past few years, the internet has gotten incredibly crowded. Advertising space is in high demand and online buyers are being bombarded by more choices than ever before. What’s that mean for marketers? A double whammy of towering ad costs and the challenge of standing out from an ever-growing number of competitors.  

What’s the solution? You’ve gotta change how you think about landing pages.

To build relevance, you gotta build smarter

In order to attract and convert your audience, your landing pages need to feel tailored to each and every visitor according to their needs, preferences, and expectations. They need to be relevant. But you can’t build relevance quickly and accurately with the landing page builders offered today.

Why? Because most page builders rely on your marketing intelligence alone. That means you’re expected to manually build variants for your different audiences. It’s assumed that you have the expertise to confidently say what is (and isn’t) high-converting, or that you have the superpowers to predict what will convert ahead of time.

Building relevant landing pages isn’t so easy on your own

This is why you gotta start working with conversion intelligence. More and more marketers are catching on. In fact, marketers’ use of AI increased by 190% from 2018 to 2020. It’s become pretty darn clear the next big power move in marketing is adopting AI and practicing conversion intelligence. 

That means—for your landing pages—the answer isn’t more time, expertise, or predictive superpowers. What you need is a landing page builder powered by AI. You need Smart Builder. 

And it’s come at the perfect time.

The Future is Smarter, Too

At the pace the consumer world is changing (and with how little time you have), we couldn’t just tell you to get out there and build more, better, and faster. We had to create a builder that’s smarter, so you can grow smarter, too. 

But it doesn’t end here. Our goal is to continue to grow and evolve our conversion intelligence offerings to help you optimize the entire conversion funnel—pre-click to post-conversion. 

Conversion intelligence is your competitive edge. As long as you show up, we’ll keep up our side of the bargain—which is providing you with all the right tools to maximize conversions. Today that means building relevance. But what will consumers expect next? With that question as our North Star, you’ll always remain light years ahead with Unbounce. 

Ready to flip the switch to a smarter way of marketing? It starts with Smart Builder.

Change is hard. 

In a world where it seems like the next big thing is just ‘round the corner every day, there’s comfort in holding on to the old way of doing things.

It’s part of the human condition, and history is littered with examples of people who weren’t able to recognize—or capitalize on—trends and events as they happened. 

Lightbulbs, bicycles, and laptops are but a few of these once-misunderstood tech inventions. Just a few years ago it was even considered ludicrous for the internet to be used for ecommerce.  

This is also where we believe digital marketing finds itself today—on the cusp of something new that’s about to overhaul traditional processes, manual data-crunching, and tedious testing by partnering up with artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

We’ve seen the signs and are calling it: The world is heading into a brave new world of marketing with more results and fewer hassles. Are you ready to join us in this mind shift?

The Problem with Digital Marketing Today

Since opening our doors 10 years ago, Unbounce has existed to help small businesses grow by making access to essential digital marketing tools easy. But over the past two years, we’ve seen that growth come to an abrupt stop. And we aren’t just talking about the effects of the pandemic. SMBs are suffering and there is no end in sight. 

Today, we’re seeing small businesses falling behind while large corporations with big budgets are dominating the competitive landscape.

We can’t say it any clearer: Digital marketing needs an equalizer. Now.

There is a much larger problem going on even beyond Unbounce … the world is not built to support small businesses. It’s difficult to start one. They generally have fewer resources. Business owners are often wearing multiple hats. They don’t have the luxury of spending their whole day just thinking about marketing campaigns, landing pages, and conversion rates. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

COVID-19 brought a massive wave of new competition to the digital space, forcing brick-and-mortar businesses online and accelerating strategies by six years. To put that into context, over the last year alone, social media ad spend in North America increased by a staggering 92.3%.

Today, Google indexes more than 35 trillion web pages, with 500 000 new pages going live each day. If it were a country, it would be the most populated place in the world. Sure, that means there are more opportunities than ever before to attract potential customers online, but there’s also a lot more competition. 

Google ads are getting steadily more expensive with CPC inflation, and we’re not just talking about the go-to keywords that were nigh impossible to get anyways. Even niche businesses feel the heat—searches for meat delivery have increased by no less than 925%.

It’s scary out there. With 40% of small businesses saying that attracting customers online will be their greatest challenge over the next year, the days of getting ahead simply by being online are over. 

And here’s the thing: It won’t be going back to how it was before. 48% of small businesses say they will stick with ecomm long after the pandemic—and then we’re just mentioning one specific market segment.

Though we hate to say it, welcome to the “new normal.”

Conversion Intelligence—A Smarter Way to Market 

We can go down the rabbit hole of stats citing that marketers don’t have time, budget, or the resources to optimize campaigns. But at the end of the day, what most marketers want is more conversions.

We’re living in a time where the old-school metric of costly clicks aren’t enough: Marketers need conversions. [Unbounce Survey]

And that’s why we are pioneering a new way to do marketing called “conversion intelligence.” We believe that the most optimal results from your marketing will come when you actively and openly pair your own expertise with the power of AI. 

As a company with deep knowledge and experience supporting the growth of small businesses, it’s our belief that conversion intelligence is the disruption SMBs need to get a step up in the digital marketplace. It’s time for business to get more and go further by working smarter, not harder.

Conversion intelligence can take away some of the stress and burden that typically comes with optimization and actually free us up to get more done and be more creative. Insights from conversion intelligence make rapid experimentation accessible to anyone, and the great thing is, you’re still the one in control. — Oli Gardner, Unbounce Co-Founder

Think of conversion intelligence as a change in your approach to marketing by pairing your expertise with data-powered AI insights to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. It’s you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines.

Conversion Intelligence brings together the best of both worlds—your marketing intelligence (creativity and know-how) and the raw data-crunching power of AI.

A fun yet poignant example comes from chess. The computer always beats the grandmaster. However, when players and computers team up together for a round of “Cyborg Chess”—with the player leading the strategy and the computer providing the tactics—the bionic team generally wins. Relative newbies to the sport have come out victorious over grandmasters AND the most powerful chess computers in the world.  

Think of conversion intelligence as your chess computer. AI will provide actionable insights and recommendations, but you’re still the one making the calls. It’s about predictive data meeting the creative power of a marketer—and there’s an endless amount of possibility in what you do with that.

There are many AI-powered marketing solutions released to market each day. Exciting tools that enable conversion intelligence specifically, range from predictive email tools that let you create and send variants to the respondents based on previous click data, to AI-assisted ads that can match inputted copy and images to create a unique user experience.

When I look at all the AI tools coming to market, I’m cautiously optimistic. At the end of the day for us, it’s all about bandwidth. We don’t have a big team, and if we can do our job more efficiently and get equal to, or better results by using AI or machine learning, then we’re all about it. — Christian Krohn, Unbounce Customer and Owner, PatientClicks

This brings us to the magic question: What exactly differentiates conversion intelligence from your current marketing stack in getting you in front of more potential customers?

Well, it’s all about serving relevance …

Relevance, the Cooler Sibling of Personalization—and the Key to Conversion Intelligence

There’s been a lot of talk about “personalization” in marketing circles over the past decade or so, but it hasn’t amounted to much. It’s mostly resulted in an onslaught of {f_name} fields in promo emails rather than a real personalized experience. 

It’s no surprise that 80% of business owners who invested in personalization projects will stop funding by 2025 due to a lack of ROI. Just because personalization is dead, it doesn’t mean generic is the way to go. It’s about rethinking what we were taught about personalization in terms of relevance.

Relevance happens when serving visitors unique marketing experiences that match their needs, preferences, and expectations. It’s not just based on what they’re searching for or what they’ve already told you—but based on behavioral and predictive data. 

Many of the biggest companies today already get that distinction. Look at how Netflix does it, for instance. They’re not serving up the same lukewarm recommendations with your name attached, they use AI to promote the latest, most relevant content for each and every customer—saving the company $1 billion a year.

The future is here, and right now AI is the reality of marketing. A year or two ago it was very aspirational, with big companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon spearheading it and reaping great rewards from it. Now marketers and businesses of all sizes are getting a competitive advantage by adding AI to their marketing toolkit. It’s simple, the marketers who aren’t embracing this new perspective are going to be left behind. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

It’s about providing directions before users ask for them. Anticipating the next thing a customer would want to buy based not only on the last thing they bought but who they are, and what kind of interactions they prefer.

That’s not personalization. It’s relevance, and it’s a game-changer.

A Note on AI Scepticism

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. Although there are methods like conversion intelligence that can make the job much easier and effective, it might not be for everyone. For some companies, the ultimate goal is complete automation—simply turning something on and having the work done in a flash without needing human input. For others, they might just not be ready to embrace artificial intelligence in their efforts quite yet.

And that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean this train is slowing down anytime soon.

Nine out of ten Fortune 1000 companies have an ongoing investment in AI. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of enterprises using AI grew by 270%. Within the enterprise model, marketing and sales prioritize AI more than any other department. Big business is powering ahead with AI, and you can be sure it’s not just to sound hip and techy. It’s a major step-up to get ahead in the game.

For Unbounce, Landing Pages Just Aren’t Enough Anymore 

When landing pages came to prominence in the early 2000s, the idea of quickly creating a standalone page for a campaign was revolutionary. Landing pages rode in on a white horse and reduced friction for marketers by ensuring a message match and minimized distractions by closing the gap between clicking the ad and converting. 

And the results were incredible—within our builder alone we’ve seen no less than *1.5 billion* conversions over the last 10 years.

But as the digital landscape became more competitive, simply having a landing page wasn’t enough anymore. Proper targeting and testing can lead to a conversion rate boost of more than 300%. Three hundred!) But that requires near-constant monitoring and optimizing.

The need for optimization was always there, but there was a barrier to entry. Most people had never been introduced to the process before, and it can be difficult and time-consuming. Often marketers would have little success, most commonly because they didn’t test correctly or just didn’t know what to test. — Oli Gardner, Unbounce Co-Founder

And right there is the gap. For smaller teams with limited resources, campaign optimization isn’t really an option. We see it in the Unbounce builder—fewer than 50% of customers regularly republish their pages. This is a metric we look at to signify tweaks and updates to campaigns. We realized that this wasn’t due to a lack of wanting higher conversion rates. Most marketers just don’t have the capacity to monitor and optimize campaigns for optimal conversions.

Even for big marketing teams, who can easily run 36 A/B tests at a time, that kind of optimization isn’t scalable—you’re still only refining one landing page, for one audience segment who would only ever convert on page A anyway. So much for “relevance,” right?

Using Conversion Intelligence to Build Relevance in Landing Pages 

What if you knew that using less than 300 words would double your conversions? Or that by adding a video to a lead-gen campaign page, you might be lowering your conversion rates? How about that mobile users in North America will convert at a much higher rate if the first thing they saw was pricing?

With our Smart Traffic feature, we divert visitors based on their personal attributes to the landing page variant where they’re most likely to convert. Different variants work for different audiences—who needs one champion when you can have five? And it works—we’re talking an average conversion rate lift of up to 30%. (Uh, hello relevance, and hello campaign optimization!) And then we’re not even mentioning the long line of upcoming products.

Unbounce went to market by solving a very specific problem for our customers. And from there we started looking deeper at the other needs our customers were experiencing. It became less about the technical problems we could help them solve, but more about how we could help them grow smarter as a business. This conversation led us to realize “we can do more.” — Felicia Bochicchio, President, Unbounce

We believe that conversion intelligence is essential for businesses to be competitive in their digital marketing efforts. And we also believe that access to it shouldn’t just lie with big companies with the infrastructure and resources.

Our marketers and companies, especially those in the small-to-medium-sized space need more than just landing pages if they’re going to effectively compete in their own marketplaces. Landing pages will remain a core tactic, of course. But at the end of the day, it’s about getting higher conversion rates—and that’s where we want to support marketers. — Felicia Bochicchio, President, Unbounce

Within Unbounce, this means developing a full-scale conversion intelligence platform to help marketers get the most out of their campaigns—over and above landing pages—by effortlessly optimizing their entire marketing funnel for the best possible conversion rates.

The whole conversion funnel is as strong as its weakest link…and it constantly requires attention to the different parts of this funnel. (What can we do to this part? What can we learn here? What can we change here to improve it?). You need AI to give you these insights, and then it’s up to you to tweak or tune something. But only if you have good insights can you do something there. — Tom Suter, Unbounce Customer and Founder, CoffeeCall

Lookin’ Ahead to a New Way of Doing Landing Pages 

Artificial intelligence is not a new concept anymore, in fact it’s already part of our daily lives.  And it’s steadily changing the face of marketing—and Unbounce too. 

Later this month, we’ll launch the Unbounce Smart Builder—a game-changing landing page builder that will change the way you build landing pages. With AI-powered insights baked in from the get-go, you’ll be guided to create landing pages that get the highest possible conversion rates based on your industry and conversion goal. 

Yep, this means you can now optimize as you build, serve your audience a relevant experience, and get that competitive advantage right from the start.

My dream personally, is that the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence platform makes it easy for small businesses to become successful, compete with the big players, and grow smarter. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

Welcome to the era of conversion intelligence—the future of landing pages, and the future of digital marketing.

Change is hard. 

In a world where it seems like the next big thing is just ‘round the corner every day, there’s comfort in holding on to the old way of doing things.

It’s part of the human condition, and history is littered with examples of people who weren’t able to recognize—or capitalize on—trends and events as they happened. 

Lightbulbs, bicycles, and laptops are but a few of these once-misunderstood tech inventions. Just a few years ago it was even considered ludicrous for the internet to be used for ecommerce.  

This is also where we believe digital marketing finds itself today—on the cusp of something new that’s about to overhaul traditional processes, manual data-crunching, and tedious testing by partnering up with artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

We’ve seen the signs and are calling it: The world is heading into a brave new world of marketing with more results and fewer hassles. Are you ready to join us in this mind shift?

The Problem with Digital Marketing Today

Since opening our doors 10 years ago, Unbounce has existed to help small businesses grow by making access to essential digital marketing tools easy. But over the past two years, we’ve seen that growth come to an abrupt stop. And we aren’t just talking about the effects of the pandemic. SMBs are suffering and there is no end in sight. 

Today, we’re seeing small businesses falling behind while large corporations with big budgets are dominating the competitive landscape.

We can’t say it any clearer: Digital marketing needs an equalizer. Now.

There is a much larger problem going on even beyond Unbounce … the world is not built to support small businesses. It’s difficult to start one. They generally have fewer resources. Business owners are often wearing multiple hats. They don’t have the luxury of spending their whole day just thinking about marketing campaigns, landing pages, and conversion rates. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

COVID-19 brought a massive wave of new competition to the digital space, forcing brick-and-mortar businesses online and accelerating strategies by six years. To put that into context, over the last year alone, social media ad spend in North America increased by a staggering 92.3%.

Today, Google indexes more than 35 trillion web pages, with 500 000 new pages going live each day. If it were a country, it would be the most populated place in the world. Sure, that means there are more opportunities than ever before to attract potential customers online, but there’s also a lot more competition. 

Google ads are getting steadily more expensive with CPC inflation, and we’re not just talking about the go-to keywords that were nigh impossible to get anyways. Even niche businesses feel the heat—searches for meat delivery have increased by no less than 925%.

It’s scary out there. With 40% of small businesses saying that attracting customers online will be their greatest challenge over the next year, the days of getting ahead simply by being online are over. 

And here’s the thing: It won’t be going back to how it was before. 48% of small businesses say they will stick with ecomm long after the pandemic—and then we’re just mentioning one specific market segment.

Though we hate to say it, welcome to the “new normal.”

Conversion Intelligence—A Smarter Way to Market 

We can go down the rabbit hole of stats citing that marketers don’t have time, budget, or the resources to optimize campaigns. But at the end of the day, what most marketers want is more conversions.

We’re living in a time where the old-school metric of costly clicks aren’t enough: Marketers need conversions. [Unbounce Survey]

And that’s why we are pioneering a new way to do marketing called “conversion intelligence.” We believe that the most optimal results from your marketing will come when you actively and openly pair your own expertise with the power of AI. 

As a company with deep knowledge and experience supporting the growth of small businesses, it’s our belief that conversion intelligence is the disruption SMBs need to get a step up in the digital marketplace. It’s time for business to get more and go further by working smarter, not harder.

Conversion intelligence can take away some of the stress and burden that typically comes with optimization and actually free us up to get more done and be more creative. Insights from conversion intelligence make rapid experimentation accessible to anyone, and the great thing is, you’re still the one in control. — Oli Gardner, Unbounce Co-Founder

Think of conversion intelligence as a change in your approach to marketing by pairing your expertise with data-powered AI insights to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. It’s you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines.

Conversion Intelligence brings together the best of both worlds—your marketing intelligence (creativity and know-how) and the raw data-crunching power of AI.

A fun yet poignant example comes from chess. The computer always beats the grandmaster. However, when players and computers team up together for a round of “Cyborg Chess”—with the player leading the strategy and the computer providing the tactics—the bionic team generally wins. Relative newbies to the sport have come out victorious over grandmasters AND the most powerful chess computers in the world.  

Think of conversion intelligence as your chess computer. AI will provide actionable insights and recommendations, but you’re still the one making the calls. It’s about predictive data meeting the creative power of a marketer—and there’s an endless amount of possibility in what you do with that.

There are many AI-powered marketing solutions released to market each day. Exciting tools that enable conversion intelligence specifically, range from predictive email tools that let you create and send variants to the respondents based on previous click data, to AI-assisted ads that can match inputted copy and images to create a unique user experience.

When I look at all the AI tools coming to market, I’m cautiously optimistic. At the end of the day for us, it’s all about bandwidth. We don’t have a big team, and if we can do our job more efficiently and get equal to, or better results by using AI or machine learning, then we’re all about it. — Christian Krohn, Unbounce Customer and Owner, PatientClicks

This brings us to the magic question: What exactly differentiates conversion intelligence from your current marketing stack in getting you in front of more potential customers?

Well, it’s all about serving relevance …

Relevance, the Cooler Sibling of Personalization—and the Key to Conversion Intelligence

There’s been a lot of talk about “personalization” in marketing circles over the past decade or so, but it hasn’t amounted to much. It’s mostly resulted in an onslaught of {f_name} fields in promo emails rather than a real personalized experience. 

It’s no surprise that 80% of business owners who invested in personalization projects will stop funding by 2025 due to a lack of ROI. Just because personalization is dead, it doesn’t mean generic is the way to go. It’s about rethinking what we were taught about personalization in terms of relevance.

Relevance happens when serving visitors unique marketing experiences that match their needs, preferences, and expectations. It’s not just based on what they’re searching for or what they’ve already told you—but based on behavioral and predictive data. 

Many of the biggest companies today already get that distinction. Look at how Netflix does it, for instance. They’re not serving up the same lukewarm recommendations with your name attached, they use AI to promote the latest, most relevant content for each and every customer—saving the company $1 billion a year.

The future is here, and right now AI is the reality of marketing. A year or two ago it was very aspirational, with big companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon spearheading it and reaping great rewards from it. Now marketers and businesses of all sizes are getting a competitive advantage by adding AI to their marketing toolkit. It’s simple, the marketers who aren’t embracing this new perspective are going to be left behind. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

It’s about providing directions before users ask for them. Anticipating the next thing a customer would want to buy based not only on the last thing they bought but who they are, and what kind of interactions they prefer.

That’s not personalization. It’s relevance, and it’s a game-changer.

A Note on AI Scepticism

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. Although there are methods like conversion intelligence that can make the job much easier and effective, it might not be for everyone. For some companies, the ultimate goal is complete automation—simply turning something on and having the work done in a flash without needing human input. For others, they might just not be ready to embrace artificial intelligence in their efforts quite yet.

And that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean this train is slowing down anytime soon.

Nine out of ten Fortune 1000 companies have an ongoing investment in AI. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of enterprises using AI grew by 270%. Within the enterprise model, marketing and sales prioritize AI more than any other department. Big business is powering ahead with AI, and you can be sure it’s not just to sound hip and techy. It’s a major step-up to get ahead in the game.

For Unbounce, Landing Pages Just Aren’t Enough Anymore 

When landing pages came to prominence in the early 2000s, the idea of quickly creating a standalone page for a campaign was revolutionary. Landing pages rode in on a white horse and reduced friction for marketers by ensuring a message match and minimized distractions by closing the gap between clicking the ad and converting. 

And the results were incredible—within our builder alone we’ve seen no less than *1.5 billion* conversions over the last 10 years.

But as the digital landscape became more competitive, simply having a landing page wasn’t enough anymore. Proper targeting and testing can lead to a conversion rate boost of more than 300%. Three hundred!) But that requires near-constant monitoring and optimizing.

The need for optimization was always there, but there was a barrier to entry. Most people had never been introduced to the process before, and it can be difficult and time-consuming. Often marketers would have little success, most commonly because they didn’t test correctly or just didn’t know what to test. — Oli Gardner, Unbounce Co-Founder

And right there is the gap. For smaller teams with limited resources, campaign optimization isn’t really an option. We see it in the Unbounce builder—fewer than 50% of customers regularly republish their pages. This is a metric we look at to signify tweaks and updates to campaigns. We realized that this wasn’t due to a lack of wanting higher conversion rates. Most marketers just don’t have the capacity to monitor and optimize campaigns for optimal conversions.

Even for big marketing teams, who can easily run 36 A/B tests at a time, that kind of optimization isn’t scalable—you’re still only refining one landing page, for one audience segment who would only ever convert on page A anyway. So much for “relevance,” right?

Using Conversion Intelligence to Build Relevance in Landing Pages 

What if you knew that using less than 300 words would double your conversions? Or that by adding a video to a lead-gen campaign page, you might be lowering your conversion rates? How about that mobile users in North America will convert at a much higher rate if the first thing they saw was pricing?

With our Smart Traffic feature, we divert visitors based on their personal attributes to the landing page variant where they’re most likely to convert. Different variants work for different audiences—who needs one champion when you can have five? And it works—we’re talking an average conversion rate lift of up to 30%. (Uh, hello relevance, and hello campaign optimization!) And then we’re not even mentioning the long line of upcoming products.

Unbounce went to market by solving a very specific problem for our customers. And from there we started looking deeper at the other needs our customers were experiencing. It became less about the technical problems we could help them solve, but more about how we could help them grow smarter as a business. This conversation led us to realize “we can do more.” — Felicia Bochicchio, President, Unbounce

We believe that conversion intelligence is essential for businesses to be competitive in their digital marketing efforts. And we also believe that access to it shouldn’t just lie with big companies with the infrastructure and resources.

Our marketers and companies, especially those in the small-to-medium-sized space need more than just landing pages if they’re going to effectively compete in their own marketplaces. Landing pages will remain a core tactic, of course. But at the end of the day, it’s about getting higher conversion rates—and that’s where we want to support marketers. — Felicia Bochicchio, President, Unbounce

Within Unbounce, this means developing a full-scale conversion intelligence platform to help marketers get the most out of their campaigns—over and above landing pages—by effortlessly optimizing their entire marketing funnel for the best possible conversion rates.

The whole conversion funnel is as strong as its weakest link…and it constantly requires attention to the different parts of this funnel. (What can we do to this part? What can we learn here? What can we change here to improve it?). You need AI to give you these insights, and then it’s up to you to tweak or tune something. But only if you have good insights can you do something there. — Tom Suter, Unbounce Customer and Founder, CoffeeCall

Lookin’ Ahead to a New Way of Doing Landing Pages 

Artificial intelligence is not a new concept anymore, in fact it’s already part of our daily lives.  And it’s steadily changing the face of marketing—and Unbounce too. 

Later this month, we’ll launch the Unbounce Smart Builder—a game-changing landing page builder that will change the way you build landing pages. With AI-powered insights baked in from the get-go, you’ll be guided to create landing pages that get the highest possible conversion rates based on your industry and conversion goal. 

Yep, this means you can now optimize as you build, serve your audience a relevant experience, and get that competitive advantage right from the start.

My dream personally, is that the Unbounce Conversion Intelligence platform makes it easy for small businesses to become successful, compete with the big players, and grow smarter. — Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce

Welcome to the era of conversion intelligence—the future of landing pages, and the future of digital marketing.