An effective direct response campaign requires work. Lots of it. From carefully orchestrated goals to eye-catching copy and compelling design, your goal is to get in front of the right people and wow them into the right funnel. And any misstep, mistake, or miscalculation can transform “record results” into “rethinking the budget.” And the thing that may be letting you down right now? Your landing pages.

Perhaps more than any other single step in the marketing funnel, your landing pages can truly make or break a campaign. And that’s why it’s important to spot—and solve—potential issues with your landing pages before they wreck havoc on your results.

That’s what we’re here for. We’re going to walk you through why your landing pages may not be converting how you need, how to spot issues, and a few tips for avoiding common conversion issues—before they happen.

Common Culprits for Underperforming Landing Pages

If your landing pages aren’t performing how you’d like, there can be a number of factors at play. But typically, there’s one or two major issues holding you back from direct marketing glory—and the numbers to prove it. Here are a few common culprits.

Too Much Text

You’ve got them this far, so why are you wasting their time? It’s all-too-easy to view the landing page as the opportunity to really sell a potential customer, but that’s not what landing pages are best at. Especially with some goals (email signups, for example), it makes little sense to try to spend a few paragraphs on your landing page before your CTA. The more text on a landing page, the more time you have to lose a reader. Get to the point and get going.

Confusing Layout

The old adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While we at Green Candy Media applaud those risk takers who are willing to reinvent the wheel in the pursuit of results, it’s all too easy to take this a step too far. Overly confusing layouts, hidden text fields, vertical text orientations, and the like can all hurt your conversion rates. If your landing page looks confusing to you as a marketer, it’s likely it will have the same result on a potential customer.

Weak or Unfocused CTAs

Simplicity is key. When you stray from your campaign’s goal, or you don’t clearly spell out what you want from potential visitors to your landing page, you’re likely to get a whole lot of nothing. However, sharp and concise language that inspires action in a customer and ties directly to your goal will supercharge the success rate of your landing page.

How to Spot Issues in your Landing Pages

When your numbers are down, you can just about guarantee that one or more issues are stopping your landing page visitors from taking the final step and clicking, signing up, or taking whatever action you’re hoping they will. So, here’s what we want you to do:

Look at your landing page.

This may seem unhelpful, but we promise it works 90% of the time. You know the fundamentals of landing pages, and you know where things can go wrong (and often do). So, take that, and trust your fundamentals. If something strikes you as off, it probably is.

Now, if an issue doesn’t immediately present itself to you, that’s when you need to get a little more discerning. For many troubled landing pages, the issue isn’t just one thing, but rather, a number of smaller problems. Perhaps the text is slightly too long, and on mobile it pushes onto a 5^th line that feels bulky to look at. Maybe also the “Sign Up” button is too similar to the background color.

If you have a marketing team, try getting their input as well. One of them may have an insight in—or outside—their area of expertise that can be a game changer. But now, let’s talk about avoiding these landing page issues in the first place

Avoid Landing Page Problems—Before They Happen.

Have you heard of A/B testing? Of course you have. Well, fortunately for you, A/B testing is one tool that can come in particularly handy for your landing page development. With good comparison of different headlines, copy, CTAs, button language, images, design, you can get fairly granular when determining what may or may not work for this particular campaign and goals.

The trick is to ensure your tests have enough data from which to pull meaningful insights. But with thoughtful testing and refinement of your landing pages, you can spot and fix issues before they ever begin to impact your campaign results. 

Stick the Landing (Page)!

Landing pages are an art just as much as they are a science, and it can be frustrating when things just! Aren’t! Converting! Fortunately, there’s only so much that can really go wrong on a landing page—which makes your work making it right that much easier.

So, go out and prosper! Get the clicks you want, the sign-ups you need, and stick the landing on your next landing page!