Turning website visitors into paying customers is the ultimate goal of any online advertising campaign. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the key to making the most of your advertising budget by identifying the perfect formula that persuades the highest percentage of potential customers to take action. But what constitutes a good conversion rate? Is achieving a 3%, 5%, or even 10% conversion rate the pinnacle of success? The average landing page conversion rate across all industries is a mere 2.35%, but the top 25% of businesses are converting at an impressive 5.31% or higher. The real goal is to crack into the top 10%—those elite landing pages boasting conversion rates of 11.45% or more. Our recent analysis of thousands of Google Ads accounts, representing a combined annual spend of $3 billion, revealed that certain advertisers are achieving conversion rates two to three times higher than the average. The question is, do you want to be just average, or do you aspire for your campaigns to outperform your competitors by a significant margin? This extensive data analysis of landing pages and conversion rates allowed us to pinpoint shared characteristics among the highest-converting landing pages. What sets them apart? Surprisingly, you’re not far from doubling or even tripling your current conversion rates. However, the path to achieving this remarkable growth lies in challenging the conventional wisdom of CRO.

• Debunking the Myths: Why Traditional Conversion Rate Optimization Advice Falls Short
• Defining Success: What Constitutes a Good Conversion Rate?
• Cracking the Code: Replicating the Success of High-Performing Landing Pages Are you prepared to uncover the flaws in everything you thought you knew about CRO? Let’s embark on this journey, but first, let’s assess your current standing: Does your conversion rate surpass or lag behind the average for your industry? Discover the answer with our conversion rate benchmarks

Challenging the Status Quo: The Conventional Approach to Conversion Rate Optimization

Discovering that the experts you’ve been following are mistaken can be a disheartening experience. It’s like realizing that those beloved mascots are just people in costumes. Unfortunately, much of what you’ve learned about CRO is similarly superficial, lacking real substance beneath the surface. Why are so many people getting it wrong? Primarily, adhering to the same strategies as everyone else will only yield average results. When all the gurus promote the same optimization techniques, and your competitors follow suit, standing out from the crowd becomes an impossible feat.

The Futility of the Traditional Conversion Rate Optimization Test

Here’s the age-old CRO fairy tale: A self-proclaimed marketing guru emphasizes the importance of website optimization, citing an example where a simple change in button color, font spacing, or image magically increased conversion rates by 2-7%.

Impressive, right? Not really. These are rudimentary A/B testing practices that, while necessary for ongoing optimization, are unlikely to propel your conversion rates into the coveted 10% or higher bracket. They may result in minor, single-digit improvements, but nothing groundbreaking. Let me illustrate what happens to the gains achieved through these minor tweaks. The following graph depicts a landing page split test. The gray line represents the initial page version, while the blue line represents the second version. Initially, the new page outperforms the old one. Seems promising, doesn’t it?

However, these gains are short-lived. The “better” page eventually plateaus. We observed this pattern repeatedly across numerous tests, a phenomenon we call the premature testing dilemma. You experience an early surge, but it quickly fades away. While this isn’t always the case, we’ve found that minor changes like line spacing or font colors typically yield insignificant gains. Achieving substantial, lasting improvements requires moving beyond these fleeting spikes. This often occurs because the initial conversion volume is already low. When dealing with a small sample size of 50, 100, or even 200 conversions, even minor fluctuations can appear more significant than they actually are.

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Beyond Rearranging the Deck Chairs: Time for a Paradigm Shift

Landing page optimization can easily turn into a futile exercise of making insignificant changes that have little impact on the bigger picture. It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to shift our focus from these trivial tweaks to impactful strategies that can truly transform our results. But first, let’s establish a clear understanding of:

What Defines a Good Conversion Rate?

Hint: It’s probably higher than you think. Conventional wisdom suggests that a good conversion rate falls somewhere between 2% and 5%. A jump from 2% to 4% might seem like a remarkable achievement, effectively doubling your conversion rate. However, this still places you in the realm of average performance. In our analysis, we examined three months’ worth of data from numerous accounts, excluding those with improper conversion tracking, low conversion volumes (less than 10 conversions per month), and low traffic (less than 100 clicks per month). The remaining accounts were then categorized based on their conversion rates.

So, what constitutes a good conversion rate? A staggering one-fourth of all accounts have conversion rates below 1%. While the median conversion rate is 2.35%, the top 25% of accounts achieve double that rate—5.31% or higher. The most impressive performers, the top 10% of Google Ads advertisers, boast account conversion rates of 11.45% or more. It’s crucial to note that these figures represent account-wide conversion rates, not just individual landing page performance. This clearly demonstrates that achieving such high conversion rates is not an anomaly but an attainable goal. If your current conversion rate is 5%, you’re outperforming 75% of advertisers. However, there’s still significant room for improvement.

Instead of settling for mediocrity, you should aim for 10%, 20%, or even higher conversion rates—three to five times the average. Aspire to have those exceptional landing pages, the conversion rate unicorns, in your account.

Industry Benchmarks: Conversion Rates by Sector

You might argue that conversion rates are inherently lower in your specific industry. While this may be true, we segmented our conversion rate data by industry (e.g., legal, e-commerce) to determine if these insights hold true across the board. Here’s what we discovered after analyzing four major industries:

As you can see, there’s considerable variation. E-commerce conversion rates tend to be lower, especially compared to finance. However, notice the Top 10% Conversion Rates—they consistently surpass the average for each industry by three to five times, indicating that this principle applies regardless of the sector. Conversely, if you’re in a high-performing industry like finance, a 5% conversion rate is nothing to boast about. Comparing yourself to the average across all industries creates a false sense of accomplishment. In reality, the top performers in your industry are achieving almost five times your conversion rate. Even in industries with lower average conversion rates, the top advertisers are still outperforming the competition by a significant margin. Display advertising, however, is a different beast altogether, typically yielding lower conversion rates. If you’re leveraging the display network, tools like our Smart Ads Creator can help you design high-quality ads that generate more clicks and conversions.

Five Strategies to Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

What makes these top 10% landing pages so effective? Our qualitative analysis of 1,000 landing pages revealed common traits shared by the highest-performing pages. Here are our top five tips to enhance your conversion rates:

1. Reimagine Your Offer

High-performing landing pages consistently featured creative and distinctive offers. Businesses often rely on a default offer, often similar to what their competitors are offering. For example, lawyers typically offer a free consultation, while software companies entice prospects with a free trial. These offers lack originality and fail to captivate the audience. So, how can you inject creativity into your offer? We realized that offering a free trial of our nexus-security software wasn’t particularly compelling. We had to think outside the box and develop something unique, tangible, and more enticing than a generic software trial.

That’s how we came up with our free Google Ads Grader, which provides users with a comprehensive account evaluation report and personalized recommendations to improve their Google Ads strategy. This proved to be a game-changer. Prospects loved it, and our landing page conversion rates skyrocketed. If your conversion rate is stuck at 2% or lower, your offer might need a makeover. The most effective way to gauge the effectiveness of your offer is to simply ask your customers. By adding a field to your landing page form asking visitors what they need help with, you gain valuable insights into their needs and preferences. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different offers. You won’t discover the winning formula without testing and iterating.

2. Optimize the Conversion Flow

Sometimes, we unknowingly create barriers to conversion.

The above example illustrates how an excessively long and demanding form can deter potential customers from converting. Asking for too much information upfront creates a negative user experience that hinders conversions.

Here’s the revised landing page, which performed significantly better. By streamlining the flow and allowing users to download and install the software first, the company effectively removed a major obstacle. The registration form, now appearing as the final step after users have already invested time exploring the software, is more likely to be completed. This tactic proved so effective that the company was initially overwhelmed with conversions. They eventually adjusted their approach, using the registration process to qualify leads more effectively by requesting information a week after the download, allowing prospects ample time to familiarize themselves with the software. Here’s another example where an advertiser recognized that their landing page offer might not resonate with the person conducting the search. In this case, it was likely a concerned friend or family member seeking help.

By offering visitors the flexibility to choose their own path, the advertiser significantly improved both conversion rates and lead segmentation for remarketing and nurturing purposes. The key takeaway here is to identify the most effective conversion flow for your target audience and leverage it to boost conversions and qualify leads more efficiently.

3. Leverage Remarketing as a CRO Powerhouse

On average, a staggering 96% of website visitors leave without converting into leads or customers. Remarketing allows you to re-engage these potential customers with targeted, relevant messaging as they browse the web, check their email, watch YouTube videos, use social networks, or search for information. Refer to my post at Moz for an in-depth exploration of this highly effective tactic.

4. The 10:1 Rule: Finding Your Unicorn Landing Page

Let’s talk about effort. What level of commitment is required to uncover those exceptional landing pages? To understand this, let’s examine the prevalence of these top performers:

While luck might play a role occasionally, consistently achieving those top 10% landing pages across your account requires replicating the steps outlined above multiple times and conducting ongoing testing. As a general rule of thumb, test at least four distinct landing pages, each featuring different offers, flows, and messaging, to identify the most effective one. To unearth those unicorn landing pages—the top 10% that can triple or even quintuple your conversion rates—you’ll need to test at least ten different variations. In our analysis of an e-commerce account with 1,000 unique landing pages, we discovered that approximately one-third of all traffic went to the single most popular landing page. Further analysis revealed that a mere 10% of the landing pages accounted for a staggering 80% of all traffic.

The takeaway? You don’t need thousands of landing pages. Instead, focus your efforts on optimizing the top performers you already have. Identify areas for improvement and eliminate underperforming pages altogether. It’s far more efficient to concentrate your resources on optimizing your best-performing landing page. Here’s further evidence that tirelessly creating countless landing page variations isn’t necessarily the most effective approach:

This graph, plotting conversion rate against the number of unique landing pages for tens of thousands of accounts, reveals no strong correlation between the two. In the pursuit of high-performing landing pages, quantity doesn’t always equate to quality. Before focusing on conversions, you need to attract visitors to your landing pages. Our free keyword tool can help you identify niche-specific keywords to incorporate into your search ads and landing pages.

5. Beyond Conversion Rates: Prioritizing Lead Quality

This might seem counterintuitive, but hear me out. While higher conversion rates are generally desirable, converting a large number of unqualified leads is counterproductive. These unqualified leads cost you money without generating any revenue. Instead of solely chasing high conversion rates, prioritize landing page optimizations that attract higher-quality, more qualified leads.

Key Takeaways

Let’s recap the key takeaways from this comprehensive guide to CRO:

1. Most landing page optimizations are akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—minor changes yield insignificant results.
2. A highly focused and strategic approach to landing page optimization can increase conversions by three to five times while simultaneously improving lead quality.
3. In certain industries, a 5% conversion rate is mediocre. If you’re stuck in the 2-5% range, there’s significant room for improvement.
4. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different offers to identify the most resonant ones for your target audience. Consider incorporating offers that double as lead qualification tools.
5. Identify and eliminate any obstacles hindering conversions by optimizing the conversion flow. Test different variations to pinpoint the most effective path to conversion for your specific audience.
6. Implement remarketing to re-engage potential customers who expressed initial interest but didn’t convert.
7. Focus on smarter testing, not just more frequent testing. Aim to test ten unique landing page variations that go beyond superficial tweaks like changing font colors to uncover those top-performing pages.
8. Streamline your account by eliminating underperforming landing pages. Concentrate your efforts on optimizing the top 10% of landing pages that generate the majority of your traffic.
9. Never lose sight of the ultimate goal: generating more sales or high-quality leads that are likely to convert. Don’t prioritize high conversion rates at the expense of lead quality. Strive to find the sweet spot where everything works harmoniously. Armed with this newfound knowledge of conversion rate optimization, you’re now equipped to outperform your competitors and captivate your target audience. Try our free Google Ads Grader to assess the effectiveness of your current landing page strategy and implement these strategies to propel your business forward. As always, feel free to share any questions or insights in the comments section below.