The slightest variations in landing page design can have a major difference in whether a visitor clicks through or clicks away.
To minimize the risk that their pages are ineffective, many businesses create data-driven landing pages.
A data-driven landing page is one that’s designed with a data-driven approach — one where every decision you make is backed up by numbers and analysis of customer behavior.
Using a combination of tried-and-true techniques, as well as the data you collect on customer behavior, can help you craft a landing page that’s tailored to fit how your customers scan web pages.
These are four essential tips for designing a data-driven landing page.
1. Make Your CTA Stand Out
One of the most common landing page mistakes is a hard-to-spot CTA (call to action). This CTA may be unclear, tucked away in a block of text, or it may just blend in with the rest of the page.
It’s always good to make your CTA the most visible button on the page, for example, or the most visible link. Using contrasting colors, spacing, and whitespace around your CTA can help it stand out from the rest of the page and ensure users don’t get confused about where to go next.
2. Keep Text Concise
Some of the earliest web research found that people don’t really read when they’re on the web. Instead, they scan. They quickly look through your copy, skipping around to find the most essential information. If they can’t find it, they move on.
Later studies and research have backed up this early conclusion and provided a little more insight into how users scan.
For the most part, what you need to know is that users are looking for key information — they’re not reading every single word on your landing page.
As a result, if that key information isn’t readily available, a visitor may get confused or click away.
This landing page, from supply chain management software developer ConnectPointz, shows how you can communicate a lot with just a few words.
“We process your profit. +1.6 million annual orders processed. +$1.25 billion annual gross order value.”
Almost every word in the page body is essential. This helps ensure a potential customer who lands on the page will immediately know the benefits being advertised.
Keeping your landing page copy concise is one of the best ways to ensure customers know what you’re selling.
3. Keep Form Fields Brief (or Split Them Up)
The more you ask of a visitor, the more likely they are to click away. Form fields are a great example of this idea in action. Study after study has found that longer fields generally result in fewer conversions than short ones.
This makes your landing page less effective and more expensive as a result. However, sometimes you need a lot of data. Maybe the amount of data you need would require a fairly intimidating form field.
Multi-step forms are a way of solving this problem. This field, for example, is from an Uber landing page. Uber needs much more information than other companies may need — in addition to name and contact information, they also need info on a visitor’s car.
To keep their form fields short, they split them up over multiple steps. This makes the landing page portion of the form field more reasonable, while still ensuring Uber gets the info they need.
If you’re running into problems with form fields that are too long, finding ways to shrink them or split them up may be a good strategy.
4. When In Doubt, A/B Test
If you’re struggling to pick between two options that appear equally good — like two CTA buttons with different text — it’s often a good idea to gather more data.
A/B testing a CTA, for example, can help you identify a winner between two options and gather data that helps you understand what your customers are looking for.
Any time you get stuck on a major decision — like what benefit to emphasize, what CTA text to use, or how long a form field should be — A/B testing is one of the best ways to get real feedback on both options.
Using Data to Design Your Landing Page
Data-driven design is a great strategy to help ensure the success of your landing pages. By adopting a few design best practices and collecting data on how visitors interact with your pages, you can build landing pages that are more likely to convert.
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
