One of the most common bits of advice in eCommerce is to make landing pages.
But what do you put on those landing pages? And how do landing pages impact other marketing tasks you take on, such as running ads?
These are complex questions, but important ones to answer. That’s why we reached out Ro Patel from Starbound, a company that specializes in improving eCommerce conversion rates.
We sent him a bunch of questions by email, and he was kind enough to send responses back. We will now share those responses with you with only minimal editing for clarity and flow.
Why do store owners need landing pages?
This is a great question, and a pretty common one we hear from store owners.
As you likely know, most e-com businesses spend a ton of money on paid advertising, as it’s a critical part of most growing brands’ marketing strategy.
But most of that traffic is sent directly to templated, generic product pages or collections pages.
And that’s a real problem, because sending visitors to a simple product page is like handing them a catalog.
Sure, it lists the features, prices, and technical details to give you a general idea of what the product does.
But that’s not why visitors came to your site.
They came to your site because they want to know if your product is the solution to their problem.
And your job is to guide the visitor towards understanding that what you’re selling is for them.
And that’s where landing pages come in.
Landing pages are standalone web pages designed specifically to convert visitors towards some targeted and specific goal (like purchases or signups).
It’s like having a personal salesperson that deeply understands your visitors.
It doesn’t just show them the product, it tells them why they need it, addresses their concerns, and guides them to make a confident purchase without any distractions or confusion.
So that’s why landing pages are critical, especially for stores that are spending money on paid ads:
- Provide Clear Direction – Landing pages remove all distractions and make it extremely obvious what next step the visitor should take, making it much more likely they’ll continue down the customer journey.
- Address Objections – A landing page anticipates questions like, “Is this worth the price?” or “Will this really work for me?” and answers them right there, removing barriers that would otherwise keep the visitor from purchasing.
- They Tell the Story – Product pages list features, but landing pages frame those features as benefits that solve your customers’ problems, and give your offers context to drive more sales (i.e. landing page for a limited time holiday bundle)
- Seamless Customer Journey – A landing page aligns perfectly with the ad or email that brought them there, creating trust and consistency to leads to higher likelihood of conversion.
- They Boost Conversions – By guiding your visitors with hyper-targeted copy, engaging visuals, and a structured user experience, landing pages turn more visitors into customers.
When you’re running traffic to a product page, you’re relying on your visitors to sell themselves. A landing page gives you the ability to overcome all your visitors’ objections and get (way) more of them to actually buy.
How do conversion rates matter in the larger picture of marketing and sales?
Your conversion rates are one of the biggest levers you can influence that have an outsized impact to your:
- ROI
- Customer Acquisition Costs
- Scalability
- Long-term Growth
Here’s a quick example of a business that gets 50,000 visitors to their site every month, with a product they sell for $50:
Notice that the only thing changing is the conversion rate, and only by a few tenths of a percentage. But it results in huge growth in revenue.
Having higher conversion rates mean you get more value out of every dollar spent on ads, emails, or any other traffic source.
And the best part? These are permanent gains, not one-time quick wins. When all this comes together, you end up with:
- lower customer acquisition costs
- higher profit margins
- revenue growth
Bottom line: improving your conversion rates is amongst the highest-ROI things you can do to dramatically grow your business in a relatively short time period.
How do the key elements of a landing page (e.g., design, copy, and CTAs) influence ad conversion rates?
Ads will drive traffic to your website all day long, all you need to do is throw money at it.
But whether or not that traffic actually turns into paying customers is the main job for your landing pages.
There are quite a few different components that make up a conversion-optimized landing page, and each one impacts visitor behavior directly.
Site Speed
There’s been multiple studies done that show a direct correlation between page load time and conversion rate impact.
And it should come as no surprise that the faster your page loads, the higher your conversion rate will be.
According to a recent Portent study, an e-commerce site that loads in 1 second will have conversion rates 2.5x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
We’re not talking about small differences, we’re talking about double and triple revenue, just due to site speed.
Page Structure
All landing pages don’t follow the same formula, and how they’re structured depends on the purpose of the page.
Some take the form of advertorials that blend informative, editorial-style content with promotional elements to subtly promote products.
Others take the form of hero pages that are designed to immediately capture visitors’ attention and convey the core message or value proposition, without requiring the visitor to read too far down a page.
There are many other ways to structure a landing page, and sending visitors to the right ones based on where they are in their customer journey has a direct impact to conversion rates.
Headlines & Copywriting
Without a doubt, your headlines are one of the only things that you can be reasonably sure that most page visitors will read.
We’ve seen over and over again, through using heatmaps to identify on-page behavior, that almost everything else is likely to be skimmed, or even skipped entirely.
That’s why writing engaging headlines that immediately hook visitors to continue reading down the page is the most influential component of any landing page, when it comes to conversion rate impact.
Design
Design is not just about making things look pretty.
It’s about trust.
When your landing pages are organized and designed to engage the visitor, they’re way more likely to continue consuming the content on the page.
And the more they consume, the more “bought-in” they become to your story, your products, and their benefits. And that ultimately leads to more conversions.
Social Proof
Social proof is one of the most important elements of any landing page, and again, comes down to trust.
Nowadays, people don’t buy anything without first reading and watching reviews.
According to Capital One Shopping, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, with nearly 70% of online shoppers reading between 1-6 reviews before deciding to buy (Statista).
That means your landing pages must include real proof of what your customers are saying about your products.
Offer
Most businesses think their “offer” is simply the product(s) they sell.
But the reality is, it’s actually how they package what they sell. And this matters a ton for landing pages.
Let’s use planners as an example.
The product might be a quarterly habit tracking planner.
An offer, however, would be an discounted annual subscription for the planner (where the buyer gets 4 to cover them for the year).
Notice the difference?
How you position what you sell is your offer. And the more compelling your offer is on your landing page, the better your conversion rates will be.
What common mistakes do you see on landing pages that harm conversion rates, especially for eCommerce businesses?
While there are quite a few, I’ll limit it to the top 6 that I generally see:
- Templated product pages as landing pages – Particularly for e-commerce businesses, so many rely on their site’s default product to do all the selling for them, which leaves a lot of money on the table
- Slow load times – As we discussed earlier, even a 1-second delay can have huge negative impacts to conversion rates (one study shows every second results in a ~6% drop in conversion rates)
- No social proof – Nowadays, people don’t buy without getting the opinions of others first (even from strangers on the internet). If you don’t share what your customers love about your products, you’ll have a hard time converting new customers, since they won’t trust that you can actually provide what you say you will.
- Overwhelming information – So many landing pages try to cram as much text as possible into page section, thinking that getting as much information out as possible will help the visitor make a decision. It doesn’t, it only confuses people.
- Lack of mobile optimization – Even in 2024, you’d be surprised to see how many businesses still have barely useable mobile landing pages, where core elements end up being covered by popups and text becomes illegible. Nowadays, the majority of many business’ traffic is mobile, so this is critical.
- Generic copywriting – So much page copy simply describes features and technical specs, without targeting the reasons people actually buy: benefits.
How can landing pages be optimized specifically for eCommerce clients to align better with ad campaigns?
Iteratively testing and improving any/all of the components can immediately improve conversion rates for most landing pages.
But if you want to get even more granular, you can do things like:
- Make sure your headline and visuals on your landing page mirror the ad’s promise, so visitors know they’re in the right place
- Promote ONLY the product(s) that you promote in your ads, and nothing else, to keep the landing page distraction-free
- Ensure your mobile pages are optimized, since the majority of e-commerce traffic is mobile now
- Incorporate urgency (”this offer ends in 12 hours!”) and scarcity (”Only 8 left in stock!”) into your landing pages, to drive people towards a purchase decision faster
- Build landing pages that target the specific demographics that your ad campaigns are targeting
- Write your landing page copy such that the headline references back to the copy used in the ad campaigns they are tied to
- Incorporate as many trust elements as you can, including social proof (reviews, testimonials, user generated content), certifications, security badges, and clear return policies
What metrics should eCommerce businesses track to evaluate the success of their landing pages in ad campaigns?
While the importance of each metric listed here may differ depending on the intent of the landing page, at a high level, these are the 7 core metrics that are most important to track:
- Conversion Rate – The percentage of visitors who complete the desired action, whether it’s a purchase, sign-up, or other goal. This is your north star.
- Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors who leave without interacting with anything on your page. A high bounce rate usually means that the page isn’t meeting expectations, and there’s a disconnect between your ad traffic and your landing page content.
- Average Order Value (AOV) – Measures how much customers are spending on average per transaction, indicating whether upsells and bundles are working. While improving conversion rates alone has huge impacts, when you combine that with increasing AOV through better offers, you can truly explode your business.
- Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) – Tracks the average revenue generated by each visitor to your landing page. This metric helps us more easily determine profitability, as we can compare this number against how much it costs to bring a visitor to the page.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – CTR shows how many visitors move to the next step, which is mainly an important metric to track ad performance, but also important for landing pages if there’s multiple steps in your sales process.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – Calculates the revenue generated from your ads relative to their cost, tying ad performance to landing page effectiveness.
- Page Load Time – A slow page can drive visitors away, so keep an eye on this metric to avoid losing sales to technical issues.
How can A/B testing improve the performance of landing pages for eCommerce ads?
A/B testing is an amazing way to guarantee revenue (and profit) growth.
Buying habits change over time, and the interests and behaviors of your audience will also change.
What that means is, there’s always going to be ways to increase the number of site visitors that actually become your customers.
And the only way to find those ways is by running experiments (or A/B tests) on your landing pages.
After all, you can never really be 100% sure what changes to your pages are going to result in measurable improvements to conversions.
Sure, we can make educated guesses and rely on best practices based on experience. But that still doesn’t guarantee that the changes you make will perform better than what you already have.
With A/B testing, e-commerce brands can easily split their traffic between multiple versions of a landing page, allowing you to find “winners” quickly and with less risk.
E-commerce brands with experimentation programs essentially run multiple A/B tests constantly, across their entire user experience. This allows them to consistently increase conversions, without increasing ad spend.
How do landing pages differ in their impact on paid search versus paid social ad performance?
In general, the impact is the same to any type of traffic source. The better the conversion rates on the landing pages, the lower the cost of conversion, which ultimately means better performing ad campaigns.
There is a difference, however, in the audiences that come from search traffic vs paid social ads. And that influences how the landing page needs to be built.
You can get very specific with targeting your audience on landing pages that are tied to paid ad campaigns, because modern paid ad platforms tend to have very detailed targeting options. This makes it much easier to know exactly who will be coming to your landing pages, and tailor your copy and design to be super detailed and targeted.
For search ads, you have less knowledge about the exact characteristics of the people that are clicking through to your landing pages. They came to your page due to searching for topics that your ads show up for, so these landing pages would need to be designed to target a topic/search phrase.
Can you share any examples or case studies of how a landing page overhaul improved ad ROI for an eCommerce client?
I can give an example from my own e-commerce brand called Code&Quill, where we sold premium planners, notebooks, and writing tools for creative professionals.
We had launched a new productivity planner on a crowdfunding platform called Kickstarter, where we taking pre-orders of the product. It ended up doing well, so we knew we wanted to start selling it directly from our own store once we got inventory.
We put up a standard product page on our Shopify store, so we could take direct orders for the new product, and filled out the information that the template asked for. We figured that the a few paragraphs describing what the product did were good enough, and that the pictures would tell the rest of the story.
So, we started running Facebook and Instagram paid ads to the product page. After a couple weeks of testing tons of ads, we ended up with a ~1.8% conversion rate.
The planners were barely profitable at that rate, so we decided to test a dedicated landing page that included:
- a big hero section with a benefit-driven headline
- social proof throughout the page
- a visual representation of end benefits
- diagrams for how the planner worked, and how it should be used
- calls-to-action to buy either 1 at full price, or a discounted annual subscription (4 planners, 30% off)
- a couple videos of user generated content walking through their planners
The results from this were crazy. Not only did conversion rates increase, but we also increased our average order value:
Conversion rate went from 1.8% → 3.3%
83% increase
Average order value went from $35 → $46
31% increase
This allowed us to have significantly more profitable ads, which meant we could spend more to get more customers, fast.
We ended up selling 4500+ of those planners within the first 9 months of their launch.
Final Thoughts
Landing pages are a huge part of eCommerce. They don’t just convert visitors—they tell a story, answer doubts, and build trust.
Yet, their power is often overlooked. Too many brands rely on default product pages, missing out on what landing pages can do for their marketing campaigns.
Landing pages guide, persuade, and drive action with purpose. If you’re investing in ads, you can stretch your budget further by pairing them with pages designed to win.
Take the time to refine them, test them, and let data shape your approach. You’ll be glad you did!
