What is the Ideal Length for a Landing Page?

Your landing pages are one of the most important elements of any digital marketing campaign. Landing pages help businesses communicate their value proposition and drive conversions from the traffic generated by a campaign.

There are a number of elements on a landing page that impact whether a visitor is likely to convert or not. Things like including an explainer video, adding trust elements like client logos or testimonials as well as the use of relevant images and calls-to-action are all proven to increase the conversion rates on a page.

The length of a landing page also has an impact on conversion rates. The ideal landing page length is a topic that’s much-debated by digital marketers. However, their conclusion is yet to be determined. Long and short landing pages both have advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal length of a landing page for your website will depend on the specifics of the campaign and the goals and objectives it is trying to achieve.

Long Landing Pages

According to Neil Patel, the bigger the ask, the longer the page should be. Longer landing pages are more effective in building trust and credibility as they can give the visitor more information about the business. This means that they can be more effective in driving action, particularly for more high-involvement purchase decisions. Longer landing pages are also more effective for products and services that require someone to fill out personal information in a form to convert. As you are providing a user with more information, it is easier to gain their trust, which will increase their chance of converting. 

One thing to bear in mind with longer landing pages is that typically, a greater amount of copy helps to increase the quality of conversions. Users who look at all the information on a long landing page and scroll to a sign-up form at the bottom are much more likely to be a higher quality lead. It’s also important to remember that pages with a lot of quality text and properly optimised visuals will perform better in organic search results. 

The drawback of a long-form landing page, however, is that while you are likely to get better quality leads, you will probably generate fewer leads overall because it’s more difficult for the customer to convert. With a long landing page, there are more elements, and as such, the user is more likely to get distracted and may miss the call-to-action. 

Short Landing Pages

Short landing pages are typically more successful if the goal of the page is to increase overall leads and conversions. As shorter landing pages have less information, there are fewer distractions for the user to take their attention away from signing up. Shorter landing pages will also typically have shorter forms, which are more likely to be filled out by users. In fact, research has shown that the ideal number of fields for a form to get a user to convert is just 3.

The thing to bear in mind with short landing pages, however, is that because there are fewer elements on the page, the ones that are, have to be convincing enough for the user to convert. It may be useful to carry out tests on these pages to find out what elements are the most effective in driving conversions, and how you can optimise them to increase the overall conversion rate.

The main drawback of a shorter landing page is that it will typically generate lower quality leads.  As it’s much easier to sign up, the user is less likely to ponder over whether they genuinely want the product or service or not and as such, may not respond to further communications from your business after signing up.

The Takeaway? Test Your Landing Pages

As with most forms of digital marketing, working out the most effective strategy for your business is key. What works for one business won’t necessarily work for another, and while other companies and marketing experts have conducted research that can be useful in informing your strategy, the only way to know for sure what works for you is to try it.

When it comes to choosing the ideal landing page length for your business, performing extensive testing to see what works best for your audience is key. With all digital campaigns, you can A/B test two versions of your landing pages. A/B tests are most effective when you test one element at a time. In this case, you would divert half of your traffic to a long-form page, and half your traffic to a short-form page then measure which is most effective at converting.

The same can be said for all aspects of your landing page. Carrying out multiple A/B experiments on your page can confirm what you already know about your online audience, or teach you something new that might help to boost the performance of your campaigns.

If your business wants to accelerate your digital marketing campaigns, get in touch with the experts at Digital Squad.

We aren’t your typical digital marketing agency. We make sure our clients’ digital strategy is fully looked after. Leveraging the power of all other digital avenues is key. With proven results, talk to us how we can help you with YouTube advertising, Instagram marketing or any other social media marketing Auckland. Additionally, we’re here to show you scalable growth with programmatic advertising Auckland and marketing automation.