Behind the Scenes Of Landing Pages Marketing: 2020 Edition

As part of our new Conversion Benchmark Report, Unbounce ran a survey of marketers, working in dozens of industries, in early 2020.

Unbounce wanted to know about your plans when it comes to running a high-converting campaign—as well as the role played by landing pages in supporting your post-click strategy. How do our expectations line up with the insights revealed by a machine learning analysis of 19 million conversions? How firm is the average marketer’s grasp on industry conversion rates? And how satisfied are they with their current performance?

Of course, 2020 didn’t exactly turn out how anybody expected. (Boy, that’s an understatement.) But your answers provide a unique window into the “best-laid plans” of marketers and underline how—midway through a beastly year—some things may have changed in dramatic ways, while others remain tried and true. 

Together with the findings from the report itself, these numbers provide a behind-the-scenes view of what other marketers think when it comes to their landing pages. Colin Loughran, Unbounce's Content Marketing Manager, shared some of the results.

When asked about budgets, the 400 people we surveyed were evenly split in how much they plan to spend on marketing activities in 2020. Answers ranged from less than $5,000 to more than $500,000, and this didn’t always depend on the size of the business. 

No matter the heft of their wallets, though, marketers also told us they planned to fire on all cylinders by taking on a wide variety of marketing activities. Here are the most popular types of campaigns you told us you’re running this year:

In some cases, we expect this mix of activities has changed to match the new normal. A business-as-usual approach to event marketing hasn’t been possible, for instance, and the landscape for PPC and social is different than it was six months ago. (Though PPC experts are nothing if not adaptable.)

These challenging times don’t mean these activities have been completely abandoned, however. While in-person networking is harder, many companies have found ways to achieve similar goals online by running webinars or digital conferences. (Many say this shift to virtual gatherings will have a lasting impact on how they do event marketing.)

Which brings us to another question…

Very often, it turns out.

36.2% of respondents told us they use them all of the time, and 41.8% said most of the time—that’s a whopping 77% who see landing pages as an essential part of their post-click strategy.

We surveyed marketers outside our networks, but likely attracted some fans of landing pages (and Unbounce) who may have skewed the results. Still, these responses are an indicator that if you’re not using landing pages to support your campaigns, you’re in the minority.

So, yes, marketers are using landing pages quite often. 

When it comes to how they’re using them, we naturally expected lead-gen activities to top the charts. That’s still true, but it was also surprising how many respondents said they also use landing pages to connect more directly with prospects by scheduling appointments (42%) and phone calls (37.2%). Here’s how it breaks down:

Four years ago, when we were working on the first version of the Conversion Benchmark Report, we focused our analysis entirely on lead gen because the overwhelming majority of landing pages on our platform served that purpose. That’s no longer the case.

This year’s findings reveal that what marketers consider to be a conversion has diversified. A conversion can look very different depending on your business, your customers, and your goals.

For example, while CTAs related to ecommerce (like showing off merchandise or adding a product to cart) are still less common than, say, calls to download an ebook, the popularity of these use cases continues to grow.

As competition increases and more brick-and-mortar businesses move online, we expect more marketers to adopt pre-cart landing pages. These let them tell better stories about their products or frame their offers in more compelling ways.

In advance of publishing the benchmark data, we were curious about what marketers think is an average conversion rate in their industry and what kinds of conversion rates they’d be satisfied with achieving. 

As expected, you’ve got high—but, crucially, not unrealistic—expectations about how you want your landing pages to perform. First, here’s how respondents told us they think the average page performs in their industry:

Marketers rarely expect conversion rates over 10%. More than two-thirds of them told us that the averages in their industry are likely below that impenetrable ceiling. (As we’ll see, their instincts aren’t wrong.)

But here’s where you told us you’d like to be: 

Clearly, marketers crave big numbers when it comes to conversion rates. If we total the numbers, 71.8% of marketers told us they’re trying to achieve conversion rates of 11% or higher. Many have their sights set even higher than that!

Lofty goals like these are good—great even. And our results show they’re definitely achievable, but probably not without knowing your audience very well and taking the time to test and continuously optimize your landing pages and campaigns.

So…

Drumroll, please… 🥁

According to our analysis of 34 thousand landing pages, the average landing page converts at 9.7% (or 3.2%, expressed as a median).

That’s not the whole story, though. Some industries perform much better than others. For example, the finance and insurance industries convert at 11.6% (average), while real estate achieves average conversion rates of 6.2%.

And when we decided to isolate the top quartile in our conversion data—that’s fancy talk for focusing on the top 25% of performers—we also see much more drool-worthy conversion rates. In finance and insurance, chart-topping pages convert closer to 26%! (So people who told us they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less aren’t dreaming. There are campaigns and marketers achieving those kinds of results right now.)

In the report, you’ll find the specific benchmarks related to 16 industries, including SaaS, e-comm, agencies, and business services. You can also read insights about how long your pages should be, what reading level you should target, what calls-to-action are most popular, and which emotions relate to more conversions.