U.S. digital ad spending hit $259 billion in 2024 and is forecast to surpass $350 billion by 2026, and you're feeling every dollar of that increase in your margins. If your landing pages aren't converting at a rate that justifies what you're spending to send traffic to them, you're subsidizing your competitors' growth.
So instead of just playing defense against rising costs, you should be playing offense, and a huge part of that is continuously working to increase your landing page conversion rates. Here's what it takes to do that at scale.
5 factors that can make or break landing page conversion rates
Before we dig into how to boost those rates, let's cover a handful of things that can tank them in the first place.
1. Your landing page offer
The highest-converting landing pages are hyper-personalized for a specific segment of your audience, offer, and all. Hyper-personalization means using accurate audience insights to create a compelling, custom experience. The slightest inaccuracy can do a number on your conversion rates, particularly if it leads you to present the wrong offer to the wrong person.
What might a so-called "wrong offer" look like? Just to name a few, it could be a call-to-action (CTA) that doesn't match visitors' customer journey stage, a package deal with the wrong quantity, or a bundle with only a few items of interest to a certain persona.
There are many seemingly small, easy-to-miss details like this that could be stunting the potential of your landing pages. Serious, ongoing customer research and continuous A/B testing are essential for optimizing their performance.
2. Alignment with awareness stages
Tailoring each landing page to a customer persona is important, of course, but customers in the same persona category can be in different stages of the buyer's journey. One may be in the awareness stage and just realizing a problem they have, while another is solution-aware and researching products that may help them. These differences affect behavior, so they should inform your landing page goals and messaging.
For earlier stages of the customer journey, you'll need more educational landing pages, and you can progressively ramp up to more product-, service-, or brand-specific pages in later stages.
3. Your messaging
Messaging (the core ideas you need to get across to your audience to turn them into customers) is critical. That includes a killer value proposition that accomplishes three things:
Let's potential customers know your solution is what they're looking for
Points to the outcome they want most
Clarifies what makes your offer unique, different from, or better than alternatives
All of this needs to be expressed in a way that resonates with your target customers, particularly with the customer persona each specific landing page is meant for.
That means doing message mining (surveying website visitors or doing customer interviews, for example) to understand what matters to the people you're trying to sell to and how what you offer meets their needs. And it means gathering voice-of-customer (VOC) data that can inform how you speak about the problems you solve, what your products or services help customers achieve, and what differentiates your brand from others, and why it matters.
4. Traffic source and quality
There are at least a few ways traffic sources can impact conversions, and understanding the nuances is what separates brands that scale from brands that plateau. Different channels attract visitors with varying levels of intent, which directly affects how your landing pages perform.
Even within a single channel, landing page visitors often exhibit different behaviors and have different intentions. This can be a result of several things:
What platform did they come from? There's definitely overlap in why people use different social media platforms, but think about some key use cases for each. TikTok is popular for short-form, entertaining content, Instagram has had a greater focus on shopping as of late, and YouTube is a popular platform for learning. Choosing your landing page types accordingly could be the difference between your highest conversion rate ever and few to no conversions at all. For instance, you might direct TikTok traffic to a quiz landing page, Instagram traffic to a product or collection-focused landing page, and YouTube traffic to an advertorial.
Which subset of your audience are they in? You may have target customers active on Instagram and Facebook, for example. However, your Instagram audience may be part of a younger demographic than your Facebook audience. As a result, it may be hard to convert people from both sources with the same landing page.
Their level of familiarity with your brand. Who's more likely to convert: a person already familiar with your brand who was directed to your landing page via your latest marketing email, or a person from a cold traffic source like a paid ad? That's a trick question. You could convert both if your landing page meets them where they are at their level of brand awareness.
5. User experience
A good-looking landing page can make a great impression, but it's all for nothing if you don't check other user experience boxes. Is the page fast-loading to retain visitors? Is the navigation user-friendly? Does it look polished and function properly on mobile devices with varying screen sizes?
If your answer to even one of these questions is "no," it's almost certainly costing you some sales. These are just a few of the many reasons for low conversion rates.
7 ways to boost conversion rates for Shopify landing pages
How can you optimize your landing pages to get higher conversion rates?
1. Optimize page load time
Pop your landing page or website URL into Google's PageSpeed Insights, and you'll get a report on performance, including loading speed, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization.
The report includes opportunities and their potential impact, diagnostics, and how you can fix any issues that are negatively affecting page load time.
Many of the recommendations are fairly technical and involve code tweaks, so it's best to have your developers implement these changes or work with an external partner (ideally one trained in conversion rate optimization, like SplitBase's dev team).
Additionally, it can be helpful to use a landing page builder like Replo. Replo and similar builders can sometimes load pages faster if your theme isn't quite optimized for speed.
2. Perfect the mobile experience
Mobile devices now account for roughly 62-64% of global web traffic as of 2026, and that number keeps climbing. Your landing pages' mobile experience has to be just as good as the desktop experience. Otherwise, you might as well be driving customers straight into your competitors' arms.
What are a few things you can do to ensure that your mobile landing pages are set up for success? First, choose a responsive theme that adapts to any screen size. Also, stick to single-column layouts and keep copy concise to avoid visual overwhelm.
Ideally, you should remove page navigation from your landing pages entirely to keep the focus on your call to action. But, if you have even a limited version of your nav bar, make sure it's sticky so visitors can get around easily.
3. Write impactful landing page copy
In an exclusive video interview, world-renowned copywriter Ry Schwartz gave this advice: "Read each block of copy and ask yourself, 'so what?’ Does the sentence or paragraph speak to something that has value to a prospect, or doesn't it? And that 'so what' test leads nicely into my second point, which is the 'specificity sweep.'
"This means raising the stakes by being more detailed about everything you're talking about because that's what really involves a prospect. … Be specific about pains, be specific about outcomes, be specific about what your prospects have already done to achieve entitlement for your product."
Use voice-of-customer data to inform the way you write, but be careful not to dilute your brand voice. For example, leaning too heavily into the casual tone your audience uses may make you seem like less of an authority. In contrast, using some casual language informed by VOC data and educating visitors on industry terminology can boost your authority.
And we can't forget to mention the importance of message matching. Whether you're directing visitors from social media, marketing emails, or other channels, visitors should be able to see a clear link between the copy from the referral source and your landing page.
To illustrate, Italian shoe brand Velasca ran this Facebook ad.
The ad directed people to the landing page below. Can you spot the similarities?
Both the ad and the landing page emphasize the reason people are interested enough to visit: the 20% off deal and promo code. Message matching like this makes the user experience consistent and prevents confusion for visitors about whether or not they've landed on the right page.
4. Segment and personalize
From the messaging to the copy to the design, each of your Shopify landing pages should be fully customized for a specific segment of your target audience. What are their needs, pain points, preferences, and desires? Each landing page should show that you know your stuff.
But how can you gather this info in the first place? Customer research methods such as website polls, customer surveys, and customer interviews are pure gold. Because so many brands do little to no qualitative research, doing it gives you an automatic leg up over competing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.
5. Add trust signals
Unfortunately, consumers don't trust brands by default, and if your messaging sounds like just another marketing spiel with no proof, you'll struggle to drive conversions. So incorporate trust signals and social proof every chance you get, such as:
Customer testimonials and other user-generated content (product unboxing videos or before and after photos, for example)
Case studies and success stories
Certifications or awards
Mentions by influencers and/or respected media outlets
Impact measurements (for purpose-driven brands)
Sustainable clothing and home decor brand Kotn uses the latter two on one of its landing pages. Plus, it has a customer review further down the page, which you can check out in our swipe file for DTC brands.
The payoff of using trust-builders is real. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust now equals price and quality as purchase considerations, and that 80% of consumers trust brands they use more than traditional institutions like government and media. For DTC brands, that means every landing page is an opportunity to either build that trust or erode it.
6. Limit form fields or simplify checkout flows
No matter where visitors are in the buyer's journey, you have to make it as frictionless as possible for them to take the next step. In the earlier stages, they likely don't have much of a relationship with or commitment to your brand, meaning they'll be less willing to fill out long forms and the like, even in exchange for free resources. In the later stages of the customer journey, when they're ready to buy, it wouldn't be smart to make them jump through hoops to complete the purchase.
For instance, with your checkout flow, limit the number of clicks it takes to complete a purchase:
Select the desired shipping method and provide shipping info
Select a payment method and provide payment info
Review and confirm the order
The faster and easier visitors can get through these steps, the lower your cart abandonment rate will be and the more revenue you'll rake in.
7. Use live chat and chatbots to remove last-minute objections
No matter what your call to action is, your goal is to get landing page visitors to convert immediately, which means removing as many obstacles to conversion as possible. Burning questions and lingering concerns are among the biggest of those obstacles.
You can address them with conversational AI chatbots, using enticing hooks to spark engagement and provide additional information to potential buyers, or to gather information about them. Offering live chat works too, allowing visitors to get personalized answers to their questions and to learn how your product or service can make their lives better.
What's a good landing page conversion rate?
A good landing page conversion rate is whatever's higher than your current conversion rate."
But what if you still want a benchmark, Unbounce's Q4 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report, which analyzed 41,000 landing pages and 464 million visitors, found that the median conversion rate across all industries is 6.6%, with ecommerce-specific rates sitting lower (typically between 2.5% and 4.3% depending on what you're measuring). The top 10% of landing pages convert at 11.45% or higher.
So why not set your benchmark high? With strategic A/B testing, you can dramatically improve your conversion rate. NeuroMD did (with our help) and saw conversions rise by over 55%.
Tracking your Shopify landing page conversion rates
Shopify has several helpful behavior reports, including online store conversions over time, search conversions over time, and sessions per landing page. Many DTC ecommerce brands also use tools like Triple Whale and Northbeam to provide a clearer picture of attribution and landing page performance. But Google Analytics is the gold standard for measurement, and by default, it tracks the performance of your Shopify landing pages.
However, to get the right attribution and understand which sources and campaigns are driving your traffic, it's important to add Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters to your ads' landing page URLs.
You can create these parameters manually, but using a UTM builder tool, such as Google Analytics' Campaign URL Builder, is a simpler option. All you'll have to do is enter a handful of details that will inform your new URL:
The landing page URL
The campaign source (a referrer like Facebook or Google)
The campaign medium (email or banner, for example)
Your campaign's name
Your campaign term (the paid keyword you're targeting)
Content (nav link or text link, for example)
You'll end up with a link that looks something like this: https://www.example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_sale. By driving traffic to the URL with UTM parameters, you'll be able to track conversions and other metrics for individual landing pages in Google Analytics.
The role of conversion rate optimization in boosting landing page conversions
So far, we've covered landing page do's and don'ts, what ballpark your conversion rate should be in, and how to measure your progress. Now, it's time to get to work on the improvements we talked about, right? Not quite. Effective conversion rate optimization is not limited to implementing general recommendations and hoping for the best.
It starts with understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your existing landing pages, then learning about your audience's wants, needs, pains, and goals. Next, coming up with informed hypotheses about what improvements would have the greatest positive impact. And, finally, validating those hypotheses through testing, while being careful to avoid common validity threats.
These steps are just a preview of what goes into the Testing Trifecta we've used for years at SplitBase to help DTC ecommerce brands increase conversions and make more money. Why does this approach work?
Starting with quantitative research on problems, opportunities, and successes specific to your business positions you to make more impactful tweaks than simply doing what's worked for other brands. Following up with qualitative research reveals why your audience responds well to certain aspects of your brand and site experience. That way, you can come up with appropriate solutions and also know what not to change.
Even though split testing should be ongoing, the Testing Trifecta cuts down on the trial and error you have to do to reach your objectives. We highly recommend using this methodology whether you're prepping to build out new landing pages or optimize existing ones.
Alternatively, you can have SplitBase take the work off your hands. Book a personalized discovery call with our team. We'll walk you through what it will take to create more effective landing pages, increase conversions, and improve your overall return on investment from marketing campaigns.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average landing page conversion rate for ecommerce?
It depends on what you're measuring and what type of landing page you're running. According to Unbounce's Q4 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report, the median conversion rate across all industries is 6.6%, but ecommerce purchase-based conversion rates tend to range from 2.5% to 4.3%. The top 10% of landing pages convert at 11.45% or higher, so there's always room to push past the average.
How do I know if my landing page conversion rate is "good"?
A good landing page conversion rate is whatever's higher than your current one. Benchmarks are useful as a starting point, but the number that matters most is whether your rate is improving over time, as demonstrated by research-backed testing. If you're running strategic A/B tests informed by both quantitative and qualitative research, your conversion rate should trend upward consistently.
Should I build separate landing pages for different traffic sources?
Yes. Visitors from different channels arrive with different levels of intent, familiarity, and expectations. Someone who clicks a paid ad on TikTok is in a different mindset than someone who clicks through from an email campaign. Matching your landing page type, messaging, and offer to the specific traffic source is one of the highest-impact moves you can make.
How long should I run an A/B test on a landing page before making changes?
Most tests should run for at least 3 to 4 weeks, even if you've reached your sample size targets and your testing tool shows statistically significant results. You want at least 100 conversions per variation, the required sample size, and at least 95% statistical significance before calling the test.
What's the single most impactful thing I can change on a landing page?
There isn't one universal answer, which is exactly why research matters more than best practices. For some brands, the offer itself is the problem. For others, it's the messaging or the page structure. The only way to know what moves the needle for your specific audience is to do the research first (analytics, qualitative research, VoC data) and then test the hypothesis that emerges.
Does page load speed really affect landing page conversions?
Absolutely. Research shows that ecommerce conversion rates drop by an average of 0.3% for every additional second of load time. On a high-traffic landing page, that can translate to significant lost revenue. Run your pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights regularly and prioritize the fixes that have the biggest impact on load time.
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