5 Essential Tools to Boost Landing Page Conversion Rates

We already know that creating a landing page that really sells your products or services requires a killer design, catchy headlines, clear messaging, and a powerful call to action that gets people clicking. But how do you actually know what’s working? Collecting and analyzing the right data is crucial to running any successful advertising campaign, allowing you to tweak specific elements on your landing page to help you drastically improve your conversion rates.

During the time I spent managing the Conduit Affiliate Program and leading various online marketing projects, I worked a great deal on optimizing landing pages for a wide variety of traffic sources. Here are five essential tools I picked up along the way that prove extremely useful  for anyone involved in building landing pages.

1. Google Analytics — Data analysis is one of the most powerful ways to improve your conversion rates. Google Analytics has been around for quite a while now, but Google has only recently placed more emphasis on conversion-oriented features and capabilities, providing an array of metrics to analyze the KPIs of your marketing campaigns. Prior to the recent upgrades, you would have needed a more robust data analysis tool, but with the addition of Goals and Multi-Channel Funnel reporting, Google Analytics meets most of my data analysis needs. But be prepared: There is a bit of a steep learning curve you’ll have to overcome in order to utilize its features in the most efficient manner.
2. Google Content Experiments — This is another great tool by Google, which lets you run A/B and multivariate tests to see which combination of your landing page’s content improves or reduces your conversion rates. Using it in addition to Google Analytics can provide you with real insights into what’s working and what’s not working on your landing page. Google Content Experiments will replace Google Website Optimizer effective August 1.
3. ClickTale — Working closely with our graphic design team taught me just how important UI analysis is for increasing conversion rates. To back up our ideas of where to best place certain elements, we implemented a service called ClickTale, which includes various heatmap tools. (A heatmap is a visual representation of where on the page users are focused on, either by moving the mouse over a certain area or clicking on a certain part of the page.) Heatmaps illustrate where users are looking, allowing us to gain valuable insight into how to better design our pages.
4. Formstack — If your landing page includes some kind of form to collect user data or perform various actions, then I suggest you have a close look at Formstack. We don’t use Formstack at Conduit because our registration form is built into our user control panel, but I was thoroughly impressed when friends in the industry showed me how the tool works. Formstack features an easy-to-use form builder, payment processing functionality, third-party integrations, and custom redirects/confirmation emails. This tool really gets rid of a lot of the headaches associated with the signup and post-signup processes.
5. Olark — This Y Combinator-funded startup is probably not for everyone, but adding live chat functionality to your landing pages can really increase your conversion rates. Just copy and paste the Olark code to your landing page to enable the live chat feature and make that final push to convert prospective users to sign up to your service or submit their information. The best part of Olark is that it integrates with your IM client (even a mobile one!) so you don’t need to use some clunky chat app. The on-page chat functionality is packaged in a sleek, customizable UI, and allows you to initiate chats with users on your site —a great way of getting feedback about your products. You can also choose to hide the feature if you are offline.

I realize that there are literally thousands of tools and services out there that can improve the performance of your campaigns. The ones I mentioned give you the most bang for your buck, from my experience. If you’ve discovered any other tools that really work for you, I’d love to hear about them.