What We Didn’t Do Boosted Our Paid Ad CVR by 11%
by Curt del Principe
Our CRO team made a change that lifted the performance of our paid ads by almost 11% — and they didn’t have to make any deals with supernatural beings to do it.
So while I’m a little bummed that I don’t get to use my Ouija board, the good news is that you’ve already got everything you need to try this out for yourself.
In fact, this tactic is all about what you don’t include on the landing page. Below, I chat with our sorceress supreme of conversion rate optimization to find out what that cryptic advice actually means.
But first, a grave warning …
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Before you go cutting content from your website, a word of warning:
“Yes, this works for us,” says Rebecca Hinton, CRO strategist and principal marketing manager at HubSpot. “But it may or may not work for you, so you always want to test it.”
Rebecca’s tests have helped my program hit triple-digit growth, so I’m going to politely insist you take her word on that.
At HubSpot, we never dive into changes without having the proof to back it up, and neither should you. Your audience could react very differently from ours.
The tactic I’m about to share came from the results of a rigorous experiment, and later on, I’ll show you how to run one just like it.
Okay, now onto the good stuff.
What She Cut
The first change, surprisingly, was to stop sending paid ad traffic to our product pages. Why? Because those pages have too many jobs already.
“Your website has to appeal to all of your customer personas,” Rebecca explains. “People who are new, people who are seasoned, people who are already customers.”
That adds up to a lot of content. And for visitors who landed on your site via a paid ad, it's a lot of distraction.
To illustrate her point, Rebecca gives the example of a user clicking on an ad that says ‘Download our ebook.’
“If you were to send them to a website with full navigation, maybe they get distracted, maybe they feel like ‘Ah! I just wanted the ebook!’” She throws her hands up in the air in mock frustration.
“But with a dedicated landing page where the primary CTA is about downloading the ebook, now they’ve had a logical experience.”
So her team set out to make a dedicated landing page for each ad being tested. But, as I mentioned above, what’s on those pages isn’t nearly as interesting as what isn’t.
And what isn’t there is about 90% of our website’s navigational links.
This article was originally published in August 2024, but we thought the insights were so good it deserved a second run.
