Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I hope you’re all enjoying the first glimmers of Spring (at least, in the Northern Hemisphere), along with the start of daylight savings time (for most of the people in the US). It’s difficult to believe, but Q2 is only a few weeks away, Memorial Day, Graduation & 4th of July events are well into the planning phase, and a few of our clients are even scheduling calls for back to school planning. Put another way: 2025 is off to a rolling start.
As we get into all of these events, the requests from the marketing team pile up: new creative, new videos, new collateral/signage, new influencer campaigns, new digital campaigns…the list goes on and on. But, in many cases, these lists omit a critical (if overlooked) component: the lander.
Before we dive into why landers are so overlooked, I want to clarify the relevant definitions. I refer to “landers” as pages engineered with the express purpose of converting users from a specific audience/audience segment, usually from paid traffic, into customers/leads/subscribers/whatevers. That makes landers fundamentally different from landing pages, which are site pages a user might be directed to by any source, such as a social link, a search engine, a referral URL or an LLM response (as a concrete example, a site’s home page, services/product page, blog article, and/or collection page could all be landing pages, though none are landers).
What boggles my mind - in both meetings and in reviewing ad accounts - is the magnitude of the difference between how brands approach ad accounts + ad creative, and how they think about landers. Most brands I speak with spend tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (or even millions) per month on paid media, plus a small fortune on creative, third-party management/optimization/attribution (please don’t) software, etc. They’ll spend even more on other random things (tech, people, etc.) if they think it’ll improve their efficiency by even a small margin. But ask those same brands to invest a small fraction of that total investment into landers, and watch the objections roll.
It’s categorically insane. And it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both the role of the ad + and importance of the lander.
Let’s take a step back.
The role of the ad is simple: pique the interest of the user and create enough interest/value to earn the click. After that? The ad’s job is done. From that click forward, it’s up to the destination - the lander - to turn curiosity into conversions.
That makes (at least in my book) conversion rate as much about the lander as it is about the creative, platform + audience targeting. Yes, the creative needs to resonate with the right audience for your brand, but if what happens next does not live up to the expectation created by the ad + brand, the sale/lead/subscription/whatever isn’t happening.
One of my favorite exercises to walk through with brands who are reluctant to test more landers is the math behind the madness. Here’s one example, anonymized from a lead generation brand spending about $260,000 per month:
$150,000 Spend (Google)
$28.50 CPC
$497 Cost/Lead
5.73% Conversion Rate
302 Leads/Mo (Google Only)
$110,000 Spend (Meta)
$1.85 CPC
$586 Cost/Lead
0.32% Conversion Rate
188 Leads/Mo (Meta Only)
For this brand, leads close at about a 35% rate across the board. The acceptable cost per closed deal is anything under $1,800 (though they’d be willing to invest even more if cost per closed deal falls below $1,250). Quick math tells you that both Google ($1,420) and Meta ($1,674) are safely within “acceptable return” territory, but neither is particularly close to the ideal (<$1,250). This is a classic case of a brand being mired in the “muddy middle” – it’s not bad enough to justify a wholesale change, but it isn’t good enough to increase the investment and reach the next level of scale. The brand is stuck.
More context: this brand sends all paid traffic directly to services pages on their site. These are standard, if unremarkable, experiences for those users – think: form at the top + bottom, loads relatively quickly, lots of detail on the specifics, etc. Generally speaking, the content is good and the experience is passable.
Here’s where things get interesting: competitors in this industry have conversion rates that are ~25% to 150% higher than this brand’s. Those same competitors are running remarkably similar ads (with near-identical messaging), targeting similar audiences + keywords, and offering a similar product/service. From a marketing analysis perspective, there’s only one major difference between this brand and the competition: the landers.
Let’s assume that this brand can only achieve a 20% improvement on their current CVR with better landers – less than the low-end of competitor performance. That improvement has both a direct and an indirect impact on the cost per closed deal:
Direct Impact: a higher conversion rate leads to more leads on the same spend
Indirect Impact: higher conversion rate, over time, results in increases to both landing page experience (Google Ads) and click-to-conversion rate (Meta Ads), which, in turn, improve the Quality Score (Google Ads) and Total Ad Value (Meta Ads) – ultimately resulting in LOWER costs per click (while this is a massive oversimplification, Ad Rank = Quality Score (Total Ad Value) * Bid; increasing quality score allows you to maintain ad rank while bidding less).
For the sake of keeping things simple, I’m going to use Google Ads’ Quality Score, which ranges from 1 (worst) to 10 (best). Improving Landing Page Experience (one of the three components of quality score) from “poor” to “above average” - on average - tends to increase QS by 2 points. In order to be as conservative as possible, we’re going to cut that in half - just a 1 point increase.
This brand had a CPC of $28.50 (from above), and a Quality Score of 6 for most keywords. Overly simplified math yields a Total Ad Rank of 28.50 * 6 = 171.0. If we assume that dramatically improved landers increase that Quality Score to 7, then the cost/click required to maintain their current ad rank (171) = 171/7= $24.43. That’s a 14.28% decline.
Let’s put all this together:
$150,000 Spend (Google) → No Change
$28.50 CPC → $24.43 CPC
$497 Cost/Lead → $355 Cost/Lead
5.73% Conversion Rate → 6.88% Conversion Rate
302 Leads/Mo (Google Only) → 422 Leads/Mo
$1,420 Cost/Signed → $1,014 Cost/Signed
$110,000 Spend (Meta) → No Change
$1.85 CPC → $1.59 CPC
$586 Cost/Lead → $414 Cost/Lead
0.32% Conversion Rate → 0.384% Conversion Rate
188 Leads/Mo (Meta Only) → 266 Leads/Mo
$1,674 Cost/Signed → $1,183 Cost/Signed
Even assuming a conservative improvement in performance, the net result of improved landers is transformational for this business – it elevates the brand firmly into “growth” territory, and does so without major disruptions to other aspects of their marketing organization.
While this is a lead generation example, the same math holds true for eCommerce and subscription brands – the terminology changes, but the fundamentals at play do not.
Once we share the math, the next question - almost inevitably - is: how do we do it? What’s the playbook that gets us from the landing pages we have today to the landers we need to achieve these outcomes?
Let’s get to it.
Step #1: Reframe The Role of the Lander
The single-biggest blocker to remarkable landers is the misconception of their role. Landers are not just another page on your site; they’re a self-guided sales experience. The person who arrives on the lander has (at best) a moderate understanding of what you’re offering – they’re curious, but they're (very likely) not sold yet. This makes the role of the lander comparable, in some ways, to the role of a salesperson: convert curiosity into commitment.
The difference is that the salesperson is doing this on a one-to-one basis; s/he can observe how the prospect reacts, pivot based on the flow of the conversation, and adjust the offer based on the prospect’s needs/wants/challenges/desires. That’s personalization that’s simply not possible on landers today (though, we’re not that far off from a world where AI + LLMs make it possible). Landers need to achieve the same objective as the salesperson, but without the ability to read/react – which means they need to be clear, specific, tailored and highly relevant to each audience segment.
Every time I speak with marketing leaders about landers, this is the biggest unlock: the best landers bring an audience-centric sales script to life for the product or service. Once you acknowledge that this is what the lander is doing, everything else gets much easier.
Step #2: Audience Insights
At the outset of this issue, I described landers as “...engineered with the express purpose of converting users from a specific audience/audience segment into customers…” That was intentional. High-performing landers don’t happen by accident. They’re expertly crafted experiences, built on an in-depth understanding of your target audience. If you don’t know who your audience segment is, what makes them tick, what keeps them up at night, why they’re even interested in your product/service, then how could you ever hope to convert them?
Any good salesperson knows that they must adjust their pitch, their offer, even their presentation and language to the prospect – well, the same is true for landers. Spend time understanding your audience. Find out what’s important to them. Uncover their pain points + challenges. Observe how other brands interact with them (remember: your audience’s expectations aren’t just shaped by your competitors, they’re shaped by all of the other brands they interact with on a regular basis).
Your goal should be to engineer landers that your prospects/potential customers feel were made just for them.
Step #3 Create Congruence Between Ad Angles + Landers
The second major mistake most brands make with landers: they don’t align the content of the lander with the content of the ad that leads to the lander. There’s nothing worse, from a user’s perspective, than arriving on a page that feels completely disconnected from the thing I just read/saw/watched.
The easy wins are ensuring the offer + imagery presented in the ad is prominently displayed on the lander – it should feel like an extension of the ad. The next level up is creating influencer-specific pages (yes, do that), pulling in the objections/challenges/pain points/hooks from the ad directly onto the lander, even customizing the presentation of things like trust elements to better align with the audience (i.e. if you’re targeting an older audience, lead with the AARP seal of approval vs. JD Power or some blog/influencer).
The end result of implementing this advice is that you’ll have a LOT more landers – which is a wonderful thing because they will be much more relevant. Think of each lander as a key to unlocking a specific audience with a specific offer.
In my experience, it also so happens that more relevant landers often transform “loser” creatives into winners – not because the creative miraculous got better, but because the root cause of the creative underperformance was a lack of congruence between the ad and the lander.
Step #4: Try Different Lander Structures
There are dozens of different lander structures - from faux homepages to listicles, virtual sales letters, advertorials, long-form pages, squeeze pages, comparisons, quizzes, product landers, testimonial pitches, trojan horse pages, about us pages, and many more.
Most brands find one structure that works pretty well for them, and they stick with it. That’s a mistake. Test multiple structures for each audience – you’ll likely be surprised at what ends up outperforming.
In my experience, most brands love the faux homepage or the PDP-style page (that’s probably a direct result of the page type(s) their marketing team is comfortable making + used to seeing) – but what ends up working best tends to be something completely different - a listicle, a quiz, an advertorial, a trojan horse page or a long-form content page.
Why? I have no idea. I have theories, but they’re untested. What I do know is that more than half the time, the winning lander is a page structure that the brand had never even thought to test.
Step #5: Trust, Trust, Trust
Ask any salesperson what the number-one-most-important-gotta-have-it thing is to close a deal, and they’ll tell you trust.
Ergo: the first task of any lander is to establish and build trust. And not just any trust - but trust that resonates with your target audience. All of us have different sources of influence and different sources of trust – I’m more likely to believe certain people, news sources and organizations vs. others. The same is true for you. The same is true for your audiences.
That makes your job to determine the right trust elements to include on (and throughout) your lander in order to establish credibility and trust with that particular audience segment.
It’s easy to slap a bunch of random logos or awards or generic 5* reviews on the lander. Resist that urge. Dig deeper to figure out what is actually going to move the needle for this specific group of potential customers/clients – then put that front-and-center.
Step #6: The Big Three
When I was first starting in my career, I was told by an immensely successful salesman that his job was to balance three things:
- Show Love To The Lovers - there were people that came to him who were already sold (either by a referrer or they did their own research or whatever); his job was to facilitate a smooth transaction, keep the proverbial train on the tracks and sprinkle in some surprise/delight. In other words, don’t screw it up and do what you can to make it a wonderful experience. The easiest way to achieve this is to ensure that a “ready to go” prospect has an immediate next step available at the top of the page, along with congruence between ad + lander and visible trust elements. Make it easy for that person to say, “Yes!”
- Weed Out The Pretenders - in sales, there’s an old joke that a quick “no” is better than a long “yes” (and far preferable to the dreaded long-no) - not because salespeople don’t like selling stuff (they do), but because the time/money/energy involved in the long yes often makes the juice not worth the squeeze. The role of the salesperson, then, is to quickly identify the “pretenders”, the “window shoppers” and the “not serious buyers” and send them on their way so s/he can focus on the potentials. The same goes for a lander - don’t be afraid to include pre-qualifying language, additional form fields, requests for specific information or other weed-out functionality on the page. The goal is to convert as many of the “right” people as possible - not to just convert as many as possible.
- Move The Middle - The final - and most important - job of the salesperson is to move the middle toward your desired outcome. The people in (1) - the lovers - are already sold. The people in (2) - the pretenders - will never be sold. The people between those two extremes are the opportunity; a great salesperson focuses on moving the people on the fence toward his/her desired outcome as efficiently as possible. That’s what your lander needs to do.
There’s no better advice that I could give to your lander than that. A great lander - just like a great salesperson - should balance all three. Too many brands are afraid of losing sales, so they refuse to weed out the pretenders; others are so fixated on moving the middle that they forget to make it easy for the lovers (and they wind up losing them).
Balance is the key.
Step #7: Social Proof
This goes hand-in-hand with trust elements, but is sufficiently different that it bears inclusion as a separate item: integrate more social proof (reviews, testimonials, product demos, case studies, statistics) on your landers.
People may buy from brands, but they don’t join them - they join other people. Social proof is how you convey to your audience who they’re joining. To the fullest extent possible, include social proof that clearly and directly reinforces the value propositions that matter to this specific lander’s target audience.
Finally - and critically - include multiple types of social proof on each lander. Even people who are remarkably similar from a behavioral standpoint likely have different information consumption preferences: some people might prefer video, others a quick snippet of text, and still others a longer-form, detailed document. Multiple types of social proof (either in different sections or included as extensions) provide something for everyone.
Step #8: Benefits, Not Features
One of the major reasons I emphasize the importance of audience research is so that you can tailor the benefits presented on your lander to the needs/challenges/desires of that specific audience segment.
I’ve been to far too many landers (as I’m sure each of you have as well) that are glorified brand bragging experiences – the page is chock-full of features and not-so-humble brags, most of which I don’t care about, are overly technical/complex, or aren’t relevant to me. That’s a turn-off.
Instead, focus on the benefits to the prospective client/customer – how does your product/service make their life better? How does it help them overcome their challenges or achieve their objectives? If you’re not sure what to include, then go back to the audience research section + don’t leave until you’re confident you know what benefits you’re going to feature.
Pro Tip: one of the best resources in any organization to help you get clarity around this are the people who are closest to the customers – sales, customer success/service and (sometimes) executives. Talk to them. Show them the audience, then start asking questions - how would you sell X to this person? What tends to be their objections? What benefits tend to resonate? If you’re a lead gen organization, you can even bulk upload sales calls/transcripts to an AI API (like ChatGPT or Gemini) and have it analyze them for commonalities, successful pitches, etc.
Step #9: Be Brilliant The Basics
The world’s best lander still will not convert if it loads at a snail’s pace, or directs users to broken links, or leads to a 17-step checkout process, or sends users into the wrong workflow; you’ve got to nail the basics.
That means you have to test the basics. Repeatedly.
I highly recommend a combination of heatmapping software (Heatmap.com is great for eCommerce because it actually connects clicks to revenue; Clarity is free + awesome) to visualize user behavior on the page, along with negative events in GA4 to quickly spot potential problems and regular human checks of your landers (i.e. make someone fill out a form or buy a demo product on a regular basis). There’s nothing more frustrating than nailing the first seven steps on this list, only to fumble on the execution.
Step #10: Keep Testing
The best brands are continually experimenting with their landers – whether that’s structural tests, isolated variable experiments (i.e. testing a headline or hero section or CTA vs. another), or UI/UX experimentation (i.e. removing headline navigation, or adjusting the flow of the page).
The key to this is to mix incremental/iterative testing (i.e. 10% tests) with big swing tests (i.e. 10x) tests (if you’re curious about 10% & 10x tests, check out this issue) – no matter how successful your landers are, don’t get complacent. Test, learn, iterate, improve.
That’s all for this week! I hope this has given you a few things to think about regarding your landers - and maybe a few ideas for how they can be made better.
Cheers,
Sam
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