Marketers are funny.
We’ll spend HOURS testing creative, rewriting hooks, tweaking audiences, and analyzing click-through rates. We’ll debate whether a headline should say “increase revenue” or “drive growth” like the fate of the entire company depends on those 2 words.
And then, we take all that lovingly optimized traffic, aaand…dump it on the same generic landing page we’ve been using for the last 8 months.
Or even worse: the homepage. Yikes.
And that’s why…
87% of Marketers Are Leaving Conversions on the Table
I think about this a lot, because landing pages were 1 of the first things I learned to build when I started out in Marketing.
I was in Marketing Ops, and we were targeting different audiences with different messages. I wasn’t about to wait 3 weeks for someone on the web team to tweak a headline on a landing page variant, so I learned how to build the pages myself.
(Let’s just say I spent a lot of time in Unbounce, LOL.)
That was years ago, and somehow the problem hasn’t gone away:
- 87% of Marketers have at least 1 barrier preventing them from fully utilizing landing pages.
- Less than half of Marketers are beating ROI targets.
We’ve never had more ways to optimize a campaign. But the page that captures the click is still the hardest part to change.
When you can’t get a new page built, the old page starts to look…good enough. But “good enough” is a money incinerator. Because you still pay for every click that old page doesn’t convert.
So, while I’m on my soapbox, let’s do something about it.
Coming up: 3 things I’d rethink about landing pages NOW, 4 tests I’d run on yours, and maybe a little speculation about the future of AI in this space. 🙂
3 Things to Rethink About Landing Pages
1️⃣. Your Landing Page Should Feel Like the Next Sentence of Your Ad.
Think about what happens when someone clicks on an ad.
Every click means someone left whatever they were doing to visit your page, and you paid for it. (2 very big deals.)
If you send them to a generic page that doesn’t continue the conversation your ad started, you’ve already lost them.
I see this constantly in B2B Marketing.
Your landing page should feel like the natural continuation of your ad.
Instead, an ad promotes a specific solution, but the landing page starts talking about the company’s entire platform. The nav lists half a dozen products, there’s a headline about “transforming business outcomes,” and none of it has anything to do with why they clicked.
The fix is smaller than you’d think.
When I built landing pages, we’d tweak the headline, a little copy, and maybe the social proof for whoever was being targeted, from HR teams to executive assistants.
Imagine you’re selling a scheduling tool to 2 audiences.
For agencies, you might say:
- Ad: “Stop playing email tag to book client calls.”
- Landing page: “Let clients book kickoffs and reviews on their own time.”
And for in-house Marketers:
- Ad: “Book webinar speakers without 14 ‘does Tuesday work?’ emails.”
- Landing page: “Get every speaker and podcast guest on the calendar in 2 clicks.”
Same product. Same template. Different messaging based on what each audience cares about.
🧪 TRY THIS: Duplicate the landing page for your highest-spend campaign. Change the headline, supporting copy, and social proof to match the audience in the ad. Then, split traffic and compare conversion rates and lead quality.
You don’t need 15 variations to start learning what works.
2️⃣. Get Your Landing Pages Past All the “No”s.
Getting 1 landing page published can take a ridiculous amount of internal politics.
Seen it more times than I can count: the paid media team has a campaign ready, but they need a landing page. The designer doesn’t have bandwidth. The developer is working on a website update. Someone from the brand team needs to approve the layout.
That’s a lot of NOs to get through. Suddenly, a teensy page with a headline and a CTA is a full-on cross-functional project. 🫠
Agencies hit the same wall, 1 step removed. Now it’s your client’s web team you’re waiting on, and you can’t exactly walk over to their desk.
Eventually, the paid media manager gets tired of waiting and just sends the traffic to an existing page.
And I get it. Seriously! But think about how nuts it is for a company to drop $50,000 on a paid traffic campaign, all while making it THIS hard to optimize the page all those clicks land on. </soapbox>
In Unbounce’s State of Paid Media ROI research, Marketers said team capacity (18%), limited design or development resources (18%), and lack of in-house strategy or expertise (17%) among their biggest landing page barriers.
Ops problems directly affect Marketing performance. That’s why the people responsible for conversion performance need control over the conversion experience. Campaign landing pages should have a different workflow from major website projects.
🔧The fix: Work with your brand and web teams to create 2 or 3 approved landing page templates, or customize ready-made landing page templates to match your brand. Lock the brand elements, then give Marketers control over headlines, messaging, testimonials, and CTAs.
P.S. Agencies: figure out who owns landing page creation and approvals during client onboarding. Trust me.
3️⃣. Before Spending More on Ads, Do Conversion Math.
Let’s say you’re spending $20,000/month on ads, with an average CPC of $5. That gives you 4,000 visitors, ish. At a 2% landing page conversion rate, you’re generating 80 leads at $250 per lead.
Then, you make a few optimizations to your page, and your conversion rate climbs to 3%. Suddenly you’re generating 120 leads instead of 80, and your cost per lead drops from $250 to ~$167.
That’s 50% more leads and a 33% lower CPL, for the same ad spend.
(Yes, you still need to look at lead quality and how many of those leads become customers. Obv.)
The point is: we spend so much energy trying to lower CPC, when the tiniest tweak to your landing page can actually do more for your acquisition costs.
Plus, unlike ad platform algorithms, you can actually control your landing pages (You know, after you clear the blockers in #2.)
🧮 Do the math: What would a 0.5 or 1 percentage-point improvement in landing page conversion do for your highest-spend campaign? Use your historical lead-to-opportunity rate to estimate the potential pipeline impact.
That’s a MUCH stronger business case than telling your CMO you want to run some A/B tests just to see what happens.
“Uh OK, but HOW do you get that extra % point?”
It’s hard to know where to begin on landing page optimization, because there are so many options. (buttons, images, nav, copy, lions, tigers, yeesh.)
I’d start with these 4:
1️⃣. HEADLINE: Test it against your audience’s actual, specific problem.
“The All-in-One Platform for Modern Marketing Teams” tells me almost nothing.
“Launch Marketing Campaigns Without Chasing Down 5 Different Teams” gives me a reason to care.
(A great way to do this is inside Unbounce’s new AI landing page builder. You get suggestions based on years of real conversion data on everything from reading level to length and most effective CTAs for your niche & goal.)
2️⃣. SOCIAL PROOF: Align it to the audience.
A Fortune 500 logo looks impressive, but if you’re targeting small agencies, a testimonial from another agency might land better.
Match your proof to the people you’re targeting, and put it close to the claims it’s backing up.
3️⃣. OFFER: Test your offer before obsessing over the CTA button.
Like we talked about in August: a 30-minute demo is a BIG ask from someone who’s never heard of you. Try a free trial, self-guided product tour, or a useful guide as a less-intense first step, and see what happens after the form fill.
4️⃣. DROP-OFF POINTS: Look at WHERE people abandon the page.
If visitors aren’t clicking the CTA, dig into the messaging & offer first.
If they’re clicking but abandoning the form, look at the fields you require.
If you’re generating plenty of leads but sales says they’re unqualified, look at who you’re targeting, and what the page promises them.
(Unbounce has heatmaps and session recordings on the way to show you exactly where this happens, BTW.)
I’d much rather run 2 tests aimed at problems you can see than 20 random experiments because someone read that tangerine buttons beat marigold. Focus up. 👏🧡
The Next Gen(eration of) Marketers Will Own More of the Funnel
There’s been a lot of convos lately about the rise of the Gen Marketer (Emily Kramer at MKT1’s term for a generalist who uses AI to own a campaign end to end). Landing pages are a perfect example of why it matters.
For years, Marketers were encouraged to specialize. You were the paid media person, the email person, the SEO person, or the Ops person.
And expertise still matters. But AI is making it easier for Marketers to work across disciplines, especially on smaller teams where 1 person might have to own everything from campaign strategy to execution.
Weirdly, this brings Marketing closer to how I experienced it early in my career.
I was technically in Marketing Ops, but I was building landing pages, working on campaigns, thinking about messaging, and figuring out how everything connected.
I think a lot of us were Gen Marketers before Gen Marketers were a thing, TBH.
The difference now is that the tools are catching up, which is why I’m watching the changes happening at Unbounce so closely.
Wait, What Unbounce Changes?
The Unbounce I used way back when looks a lot different today.
After more than a decade, they’ve reengineered the builder from the ground up. The new hybrid builder is now available with 3 ways to build: prompt a page with AI, customize a template, or start blank, then switch between AI and drag-and-drop editing whenever you want.
This way, Marketers can start with what they already have, whether that’s copy, a design concept, or just a page idea.
The best part is the data behind the AI: insights from 2.5 billion conversions, on landing pages built by real Marketers and agencies.
It applies conversion fundamentals as you build, like CTA placement and form friction, and above-the-fold optimization during the building process. AI-powered conversion recommendations for copy and page structure are next on the roadmap.
And there’s a 4th way to build: the Unbounce MCP. Build a landing page in Claude or ChatGPT from a copy doc or a Figma design, then manage pages and generate reports without leaving your AI assistant. It’s included on every plan, free trials too.
A/B testing and AI traffic routing are built in, for the people who keep optimizing after they hit publish.
All the conversion insights. Without needing a developer or designer for every iteration.
How I’d Run Paid Media Now
If I were running a paid team today, landing page performance would be part of every campaign review.
Because landing page testing can teach you a lot about what your audience actually values. And too much time spent on getting people to click can make you lose sight of what makes them buy.
So, before you spend another month trying to squeeze more performance out of your ads, take a serious look at where those ads are sending people.
You might find that your biggest opportunity has been sitting on the other side of the click this whole time. 🖱️💥
👉 Try Unbounce free for 14 days
Want a peek at what’s coming next? See what’s new at Unbounce.
Then reply, and tell me which test you’re running first.
