Tips For Optimizing Landing Page Conversion Rates in 2023

Ad costs are rising. Customer acquisition costs are rising. In many ecommerce verticals, there’s more competition than ever. All of these factors can put a serious dent in your online store’s revenue and profit.

So instead of just playing defense against them, you should be playing offense, and a huge part of that is continuously working to increase your landing page conversion rates. 

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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. 

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1. Your landing page offer

The highest-converting landing pages are typically hyper-personalized—offer and all—for a specific segment of a brand’s audience. 

Hyper-personalization implies leveraging accurate audience insights to create a compelling, custom experience. The slightest bit of inaccuracy can do a number on your conversion rates, particularly if it leads to you presenting 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 a lot of 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. 

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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 impact behavior, so they have to 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.  

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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: 

1. Lets potential customers know your solution is what they’re looking for
2. Points to the outcome they want most
3. 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 and, particularly, with the customer persona each specific landing page is meant for.

That means doing message mining (e.g., surveying website visitors or doing customer interviews) 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.  

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4. Traffic source and quality

There are at least a few ways traffic sources can impact conversions. First, Hushly’s research suggests that social media traffic often converts better than traffic from other sources like search and retargeting. Driving traffic from those sources may give you a leg up, but only if you remember this next point. 

Even if they come from social media platforms, landing page visitors often exhibit different behaviors and have different intentions. This can be a result of several things: 

• What platform they came 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 they’re 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. 

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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.

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7 ways to boost conversion rates for Shopify landing pages

How can you optimize your landing pages to get higher conversion rates? 

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1. Optimize page load time

Pop your landing page or website URL into Google’s Pagespeed Insights. You’ll get a report on your website’s performance, including loading speed—as well as accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization. 

The report includes opportunities and their potential impact, as well as diagnostics and how you can fix any issues that are negatively impacting page load time. 

Many of the recommendations are fairly technical and involve making tweaks to code. So it’s best to have your developers implement these changes or to work with an external partner (ideally one who’s 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.

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2. Perfect the mobile experience

As of Q1 2023, nearly 60% of web traffic worldwide was from mobile devices, according to Statista. That percentage has steadily risen over the past several years, so 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 the arms of your competitors.  

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’s designed to adapt seamlessly to any screen size. Also, stick to single-column layouts and keep copy concise so that it’s not visually overwhelming. 

Also, 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. 

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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 which 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. 

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The ad directed people to the landing page below. Can you spot the similarities?

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Both the ad and landing page place emphasis on the reason people are interested enough to visit the landing page—the 20% off deal and promo code. Message matching like this makes the user experience seamless and prevents confusion for visitors about whether or not they’ve landed on the right page.  

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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.

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5. Add trust signals

Unfortunately, consumers don’t trust brands by default. If your messaging sounds like just another marketing spiel with no proof that what you offer is as good as you say, 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 (e.g., product unboxing videos or before and after photos)
• 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 benefits of using trust-builders are worth it. A 2023 study by Edelman found that 59% of people are willing to buy from brands they trust regardless of price. And 67% are likely to stick with you and become advocates of your brand, which will attract more customers. 

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6. Limit form fields or simplify checkout flows

No matter where they are in the buyer’s journey, you have to make it as frictionless as possible for visitors to take the next step. In the earlier stages, they likely don’t have much of a relationship with or commitment to your brand, i.e., 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 follow through. 

For instance, with your checkout flow, limit the number of clicks it takes to complete a purchase: 

• Add the desired quantity of items to the cart (e.g., some small tweaks to Dr. Squatch’s quantity selector led to an increase of up to 54% in revenue per user)
• Apply promo codes
• Calculate taxes and fees
• Select the desired shipping method and provide shipping info
• Select a payment method and provide payment info
• Reviewing and confirming an 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. 

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7. Leverage live chat and chatbots

No matter what your call-to-action is, your goal is to get landing page visitors to convert immediately. To reach that objective, you have to remove as many obstacles to conversion as possible, including burning questions and lingering concerns. 

You can do this with conversational AI chatbots, using enticing hooks to spark engagement and provide additional info to potential buyers or 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. 

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What’s a good landing page conversion rate? 

Raphael Paulin-Daigle, SplitBase’s founder and CEO, says, “Average conversion rates vary wildly between types of landing pages (i.e., heroes, advertorials, and listicles), as they sometimes service different goals. They, of course, vary a ton between industries and based on the price of your products as well. Ultimately, a good landing page conversion rate is whatever's higher than your current conversion rate.”

But what if you still want to have some sort of benchmark in mind? Unbounce’s analysis of landing pages across 10 industries found that the average conversion rate is 4% with industry-specific conversion rates sitting between 3% and 6%. Other studies have come up with similar percentages, so that’s where many people set the bar. 

However, many high-converting landing pages convert well over 10% of visitors, 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%. 

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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. By default, it will track the performance of your Shopify landing pages. 

However, to get the right attribution and understand which sources and 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 route. 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 (e.g., a referrer like Facebook or Google)
• The campaign medium (e.g., email or banner)
• Your campaign’s name 
• Your campaign term (i.e., the paid keyword you’re targeting)
• Content (e.g., nav link or text link)

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 added, you’ll then be able to track conversions for individual landing pages in Google Analytics. By driving traffic to the URL with UTM parameters added, you’ll then be able to track various metrics for individual landing pages in Google Analytics—conversions included. 

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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 sets you up to make more impactful tweaks than just doing what’s worked for other brands. Following that up with qualitative research reveals why your audience does or doesn’t respond 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.