4 (free!) tools you need to improve your startup's landing page conversion

In the life of a founder, there is no more frustrating feeling that watching people visit your landing page, and the leaving without completing the action you so desperately want. Here I break down how to gather the data and insights you need to stop that from happening - turning more visitors into customers.

Broadly conversion on landing pages is made up of two factors - the quality and relevance of the visitors from the source of acquisition you're using, and your landing page itself. This post is focussed on the latter; my other blog explores user acquisition techniques.

To identify what is going wrong on your on your landing page there are lots of tools for collecting feedback. They broadly fall into two categories - quantitative (numbers/metrics) and qualitative (words/insights).

Both have a place in your marketing stack, and here are some of the best known and most-loved tools in this space. They are critical if you're exploring conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Hotjar - for watching users on your website

Hotjar is used by 350,000 businesses to watch what visitors are doing on their websites. This takes the form of watching individual user sessions known as Recordings - seeing every scroll, click and mouse movement. They also create heatmaps that summarise these recordings and highlight where users are looking and clicking on your website.

Cost: Free personal plan, and 15 day trial on Plus and Business accounts

Getsitecontrol - understanding why people are leaving

Getsitecontrol is my preferred tool for creating Exit Intent Surveys. These are obnoxious but extremely useful surveys that load as people are about to leave your website. You can use this survey to gather feedback on why people aren't converting. A simple poll can really help you understand your buyer better. Here's an example of how exit intent demonstrated I was too smug.

Cost: £5/month after free trial

Google Optimize - for comparing pages

(when you have > 300 visits a week)

You can create two landing pages and send 50% of your visitors to Page A and 50% to Page B. This is called A/B testing and is the most powerful way to test new landing page designs and copy changes. These tools run experiments for a certain length of time and return the 'winner'. Google Optimize is feature-rich, and allows you to create experiments extremely quickly.

Tip! Start with VERY different landing pages and optimise for learning. In future tests you can explore changing the smaller details.

Cost: Free!

Your landing page builder - for in-built analytics and testing

Some landing page builders have built in analytics and testing tools baked in. Versoly, Unbounce and Instapage are conversion-focused landing page tools. They already have AB testing and analytics baked int their products. You can see my review of best landing page builders here.

Cost: depends on provider

So, you can stop panicking now. Implement these tools to get a deeper understanding as to why your visitors aren't converting and experiment with new ideas to address the issues. You can thank me later.

You can review my full conversion tool stack and my full marketing tool stack. Join my newsletter for teardowns of leading landing pages.