How Landing Page Length Affects Conversion Rate

By Phillip Koo - Last Updated on May 20, 2018

Hey folks. This is our first blog post on lead generation. My goal is to share some of the results we get with our clients who have hired us to generate leads or conversions for them. Along the way, there are plenty of "aha" moments for us that I hope to illustrate in these posts so that you can become a better marketer.

In this article, I'll show some of the results we've been having with one of our clients, Allianz, and answer a question that comes up frequently:

"Does the length of the landing page or the amount of content have a negative effect on conversion rates?"

First, let me give some context to what we're doing. Allianz is a globally-known insurance company and we're generating leads for their travel insurance division, where we target companies who want to provide insurance for their traveling employees. These are Allianz's most profitable types of customers for their travel insurance product.

They give us a monthly budget of $60,000 for advertising spend, which we use on various CPC channels like Google Adwords, Bing, and Facebook. For this campaign, we've put aside $5,000 to split test between 3 different landing pages that are nearly identical, except for the length to see which one performs the best.

Here are the landing pages we are split testing:

Variant 1

Variant 2

Variant 3

All we did was created Variant 1. Then we just cut out several sections to create Variant 2, and then cut out all of the other sections except for the top section to create Variant 3.

Also the top sections and their background for each page look different in the screenshots above but they aren't. The background features a looping video:

The results are at the very bottom of this post but before we jump there, here is a diagram of the journey from click to conversion:

Variant 1

Variant 2

Variant 3

Basic Campaign Information

What Our Client Expects

Our client expects a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of $350 for us, which is very ambitious. Typically when we start a fresh campaign, our first iteration/split-test gets pretty close as was the case for this campaign (see below). Over time, as our Quality Score increases and our CPC decreases, we inch closer and closer to that CPA.

Overall Results

The Winner

Here's a screenshot of our Unbounce dashboard for this campaign:

We run a lot of "page length" tests, and the common thought is that either:

• The longer the better
• The shorter the better

The survey results at the top of this post reflect that. But neither seem to be true.

Of course, there are a ton of other factors that play into conversion rates such as traffic type, search match, content, etc. But most of the time, we find that the shorter variants convert better, although there is a point where conversion rates start to sharply decline:

Variant 1 - 7.21%

Variant 2 - 10.62%

Variant 3 - 9.14%

So what's the optimal page length? The answer is "I don't know." Although our tests hint that the shorter the better, the only way you'll truly find the optimal page length for a certain creative/landing page is to aggressively split test it.

Next Steps

Now we know that Variant B converts MUCH better (+47%), we're going to test page lengths in that area (3 sections) while swapping out content along the way to increase our conversion rates further.

A couple of important caveats here before you leave:

1. Shorter is not always better - In some cases, we found longer pages (5+ sections) convert better. Here's some aggregated data from another client with a lifetime media spend (to date) of $410,200 in the heavy machinery tooling industry:

2. More sections don't always translate into longer pages (height in pixels). Some sections have short content and take up very little space. A page with 3 sections can be longer than a page with 4 sections in some cases.

3. If you take out a section of a page and test it as a variant of another, you might see a difference in conversion rates, not because of the presence of the section, but because of the section's quality of content. Adding another dimension to your tests and swapping out shorter/longer content could shed some light on what's going on.

More Tests

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Also, let me know if there is anything on this topic that should be covered or addressed in this article.