Every customer touchpoint you build—whether ads, emails or landing pages—tells an important part of your story. When your landing page is designed well, each touchpoint inspires customers to continue their journey with your brand. While there are many ways a customer can reach your landing page, ads are one of the most common starting points.
As an analyst with Facebook’s Customer Growth Consulting team, I work with companies to help them build better digital and mobile experiences. I’ve found that even the most digitally savvy brands still have room to grow, especially when it comes to landing page design. We’ve found that brands that focus on optimizing their mobile landing pages can see increased conversion rates on mobile and more efficient return on advertising spend (ROAS).
What makes landing pages so important?
Your landing page is a chance to deliver on the promise of an engaging ad. Think of it as the bridge from an eye-catching ad to the customer’s purchase path on your website. When the experience is seamless and mobile optimized, it increases the chances of conversion. But when customers encounter landing page friction—things like too many steps to reach the information they want, or an unclear call-to-action button (CTA)—it can stop them from continuing the journey.
From our research, we’ve identified three best practices for landing page design that have delivered better results time and time again. By adopting these user experience (UX) best practices, several of our clients have reported increased conversion rates on their mobile websites, including Yoga International (up 14%) and Pill Club (up 5%). Follow these steps to evaluate your ad-to-landing page experience:
1. Maintain continuity. When customers tap on your ad and visit your landing page, they expect content that’s aligned with what they’ve already seen. According to research from HubSpot, at least 7 out of every 10 visitors who click to go to landing pages leave because they couldn’t find what they were looking for, or felt the website was difficult to use. Unless your page feels like a seamless next step from the ad, the same thing could happen to you.
Make sure the key elements of your landing page align with the content and messages of your ad. Ask your team the following questions:
- Does our landing page feel like a smooth transition from the ad?
- Does our landing page reflect the imagery, messaging, products and pricing or promotions cited in our ad?
- Are the images, messages, products and pricing quickly apparent when customers arrive at the landing page?
2. Optimize for mobile. Did you know that half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices? If you’re not optimizing your landing page to be viewed on a mobile device, you’re introducing unnecessary friction into your customer journey.
Landing pages that shine on mobile need more than desktop content shrunken to fit a mobile phone. Those pages need to have clear menu navigation and engaging, uncluttered content that’s easy to scan. Ask your team these questions:
- Does our landing page include global top navigation, so people can get to a different page if they need to?
- Does our content render cleanly and legibly on most devices and browsers?
- Is our landing page designed for visual scanning—that is, do we avoid large walls of text by using headers, short sentences, bullets and icons instead?
3. Use smart calls to action. Once visitors reach your landing page, you’ll need to guide them down the funnel to conversion. Call-to-action (CTA) buttons are a great way to do this. Smart CTA design gives you a chance to drive better results.
When women’s healthcare company Pill Club tested a landing page with an edge-to-edge CTA button that stayed onscreen as the user scrolled down the page, they reported a 1.78% conversion rate increase. As Manbir Sodhia, Pill Club’s head of growth, told us, “The improvement may look small, but the gains are exponential when this change occurs at the top of the acquisition funnel.”
Once again, ask your team these important questions:
- Is our CTA visible in the first viewport, on the portion of the landing page first visible to mobile users?
- Is it centered? Does it span the width of the screen?
- Does it look like a button?
- Does the copy clearly tell people what will happen if they tap on it?
- Is the button “sticky,” that is, does it follow visitors down the screen as they scroll?
Keep up the good work
Today’s best-performing brands are constantly testing new design elements to improve their customer experience. If you’re looking for additional resources that can help you optimize performance, we strongly recommend the work of the Baymard Institute, an independent web UX research organization focused on e-commerce.
