This is the second post in a 6 post series I am writing about how early stage startups should approach paid user acquisition. My last post outlined some of the basic rules of customer acquisition. This post will cover how to approach landing page optimization coming from paid channels. These rules are based on my first-hand experience running millions of dollars in paid ad spend over the last few years while consulting. They are also informed by the millions of dollars a month in spend we track and analyze on behalf of our customers at my current company, Interstate Analytics.

The Four Rules of Landing Page Optimization

1. Have a Single Call to Action
Your landing page should only have one action that can be taken. Pull users in one direction, not ten different ones. Don’t make users click to a features page or a solutions page or a list-of-products page before deciding to sign up or give you their email. Users should not need to wade through tons of copy that describes every single possible use case. You should have enough copy and supporting material to get them interested and no more. Get users interested, then collect email. Save further education for onboarding.

2. No Distractions
You shouldn’t have navigational links to other parts of your site on landing pages. They’re effectively secondary calls to action that distract from your primary call to action per #1. For example, compare the landing experiences for Everlane between organic and paid traffic…

Everlane’s Landing Page for Organic Traffic

Everlane’s Landing Page for Paid Traffic

Or check out how Amazon’s navigation disappears the second you get into the checkout flow…

Keep it simple and remove as many distractions as possible.

3. Collect Email First
95% of the time email collection should be the call to action your landing page focuses on. Put the field right on the page and at the bottom. Don’t make users click through to another page with more information before they submit their email address. If you do this you should see between 20-40% conversion rate from users hitting your landing page to submitting their email address. If you’re worried about the additional drop-off this will cause, you should not be, the ability to email a large percentage of your landing page visitors far outweighs the marginal drop-off that forcing email signup early will cause. One caveat: while this does always seem to be true for pages a user lands on via a paid source in my experience, it is not always true for visitors landing on your site via unpaid channels (e.g. Google Search, etc) who you may sometimes want to drop directly into different content.

4. More Steps Are Often Better Than Fewer Steps
This is counter-intuitive, but you’re often better served by creating a multi-step onboarding process rather than putting everything into a single step. This allows you to have a simple ask up front which is easier for the user to complete, then once the user is invested (by means of completing a couple steps) you can ask them to complete more complicated tasks without triggering any drop-off. I explore this in detail with a real-world example in another post I wrote previously.

In the next post we’ll cover the basics of Facebook advertising. Sign up here to get notified when the next post goes live: