Last Updated on April 16, 2023 by Alex Birkett
Marketers build landing pages, and landing pages require optimization.
They’re a great playground for optimization and experimentation. Whether designed for SEO (search engine optimization) or paid advertising marketing campaigns, they’re typically narrowly targeted and more controlled in terms of the traffic that is sent every month. Therefore, it’s a great place to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Just think: if you can increase your landing page conversion rate by just 1%, you lower your CAC correspondingly. That means you can reinvest in more paid spend or even more landing pages to spread your efforts across more campaigns and keywords. Efficiency is the name of the game.
What is Landing Page Optimization Software?
Conversion rate optimization is more than just best practices and it’s more than just running A/B tests. Typically it’s going to include a full set of tools to measure, diagnose, and improve your pages.
To optimize landing pages, you’ll need a few key tools:
- A landing page builder
- Qualitative insights tools
- Quantitative insights tools
- Experimentation tools
I’ll cover each of those categories on this list, but since each category could be a post in its own right (e.g. my post on conversion optimization tools), I’ll only outline my personal favorites in each category.
I’m also going to highlight the lower cost tools, or at least those that start at a lower price point (for example, Ceros and Unbounce are both landing page builders, but Ceros is way more expensive and thus a higher consideration purchase).
Editor’s note: I’m going to use some affiliate links when possible to try to earn some revenue from my content. These don’t change the opinions espoused in the content nor the style in which they are written. If I think a product sucks, I’m not going to say otherwise. This is just a bonus and a way to fund the whole operation. Anyway, enjoy the article!
The Best 11 Landing Page Optimization Tools
- Unbounce
- Leadpages
- Instapage
- Google Analytics
- Google Optimize
- Convert.com
- HotJar
- Fullstory
- Wynter
- Qualaroo
- HubSpot
1. Unbounce
All that said, Unbounce is my preferred landing page builder. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first landing page tool I ever used, but I got accustomed to the platform and I still prefer it when working with clients.
Functionally, it’s an easy-to-use page builder. You can work with a designer to build a template or just choose one of their many pre-made templates to get started. Then you work with the drag-and-drop editor (though you can also edit the HTML or CSS straight up or add custom Javascript) to make small tweaks to the page.
I love the clarity around their mobile editor vs the desktop editor. This ensures you’re not just building mobile responsive pages, but pages truly optimized for mobile (which, nowadays, you just can’t overlook).
Unbounce is also of particular interest because I think, at heart, they’re a conversion optimization company. Sure, they make landing page tools, but they also have a pretty decent native A/B testing functionality as well as popup tools to help max out conversion throughout your website as well as on your landing pages.
Price: $80/month
G2 score: 4.4
2. Leadpages
Leadpages is my final installation of landing page builders on this list, as it tends to be in direct competition with those choosing among Unbounce and Instapage.
I like Leadpages. It’s easy to use, has all the features you’d expect (drag and drop editor, landing page templates, mobile responsive landing pages, and a myriad of integrations). I also like Leadpages, because like Unbounce, they seem to bake landing page optimization right into their company ethos, which stretches from their product and the features they develop all the way to their blog and education materials.
Leadpages also includes more than just landing page tools. They also enable:
- Website building
- Popup lead forms
- Sticky banner CTAs.
Great product overall, especially for those looking for a lower priced starter tier (theirs begins at $27 / per month when paid annually or $37 / month when paid monthly).
Price: $37 / Month
G2 Score: 4
3. Instapage
Starting off with one of my favorite landing page creators, Instapage is a powerhouse.
So, any landing page builder is going to have some common features. Things like:
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Ready to use templates
- Native form builder or integration with web for tools
- Analytics
Instapage, however, goes above and beyond, especially for PPC marketers. They have features like AdMap, where you can visualize your ad campaigns and effortlessly connect ads to relevant post-click landing pages all in one place.
If you’re just running a few landing pages, this is no big deal. But as soon as you start to ramp up your paid spend, or even your organic efforts, you’ll quickly end up with dozens to hundreds of pages. This becomes more an issue of management than of any tactical execution.
It also becomes important to map these out to your pre-click experience (i.e. your paid ads or search results) in order to optimize the full acquisition funnel and maximize conversion. Having a map like this lets you optimize and experiment on a series of pages, not just on one-off pages (this lets you increase sample size and learn even more than you could normally).
Without getting too in the weeds, Instapage balances power and performance with simplicity. For marketers dealing with scale, but who prefer the simplicity of a good WYSIWYG editor and don’t always want to work through designers and developers, Instapage is awesome.
Price: Starts at $199/month when paid annually
G2 score: 4.3
4. Google Analytics
If you’re going to do landing page optimization, you’re going to need digital analytics. If you want to know where you’re going, you have to first know where you’re starting from, they say.
Google Analytics is as close to ubiquitous as a SaaS tool gets. It’s, for one, totally free (unless you upgrade to Google Analytics 360, in which case we’re talking enterprise pricing).
Beyond that, it’s simply become the tool of choice for analysts and optimizers. Because of this, Google Analytics reports, metrics, decisions, and capabilities have become the lingua franca of website analytics.
No matter which landing page tool you use, you’ll be able to easily integrate Google Analytics with a simple Javascript snippet, which you either deploy manually on your header tags or through a tag management solution like Google Tag Manager (which I highly recommend).
I won’t go into incredible detail about the power of Google Analytics, because I and many others have covered that. Suffice to say, it’ll go beyond the analytics capabilities of your landing page builder or CMS.
You can slice and dice by pretty much any metric or dimension you can think of, analyzing the user behavior and conversion rates of segments based on demographics, behavioral data, acquisition data, referral sources, and more. It also includes real-time user analytics to ensure proper QA on your website visitors and potential customers. Of course, it also shows engagement and user experience metrics like bounce rate as well as robust ecommerce and AdWords analytics tools.
More, it integrates incredibly well with a/b testing tools, which I’ll cover in the next two list items.
Price: starts free and then Google Analytics is enterprise pricing based on your needs (aka very pricey)
G2 score: 4.2
5. Google Optimize
What’s a good landing page design? I don’t know. Let’s test it.
A/B testing is a tried and true way to increase conversions while capping your risk and downside of implementing page changes that hurt its performance. It allows you to figure out which are the most important elements on a page and how best to display them, from copy to imagery and more.
Sure, Unbounce, Instapage, and all the other landing page tools will have native A/B testing functionality. But I don’t trust it. I’m a data skeptic, and I prefer to understand how my users are randomized and how users are behaving on each variant I’m testing.
Granted, Google Optimize represents its own kind of black box in terms of the underlying analysis and randomization models, but at least you know you’re getting a proper proportional allocation to each experience, and you can then export your data to Google Analytics for further segmentation (something that is hard if not impossible to do with native A/B testing tools).
You can certainly optimize a landing page without A/B testing. In fact, if you have low traffic, you must do this. A/B testing requires a certain amount of traffic to warrant the investment.
But if you do have the traffic, it’s worth using a dedicated A/B testing tool.
I put Google Optimize on this list because it’s free, it’s widely used and has great documentation, and because they’ve come a long way since their debut. They now offer pretty good personalization technology, multi-page funnel experiments, and split URL tests.
There are, however, tons of limitations and disadvantages to using Google Optimize, particularly when you get into high scale experimentation and more complex tests. But for landing pages, you’ll be fine.
Note: Google Optimize no longer available Sept 2023. Here’s a list of GO alternatives.
Price: starts free and then Google Optimize 360 is enterprise pricing based on your needs (aka very pricey)
G2 score: 4.2
6. Convert.com
If you’re looking for a more robust platform to test landing pages, however, look beyond Optmizely and get Convert. Convert has comparable features at a fraction of the price, and since Optimizely has been acquired, the product and community does not seem to be thriving.
Convert is awesome. Easy to use, powerful, and a great founder and team. Phenomenal support and documentation. They offer client-side experiments as well as server-side, and they have a powerful personalization offering as well, with in-built segments right in the tool.
Finally, they integrate and play well with common analytics and optimization tools like Google Analytics, HotJar, and HubSpot.
VWO (Visual Website Optmizer) is another great solution for running A/B tests, and it’s actually a bit cheaper than Convert in most cases. They also include a suite of qualitative user experience research tools like HotJar.
Price: starts at $699/month if paid annually
G2 score: 4.7
7. HotJar
HotJar is my qualitative research tool of choice.
I like it because it’s low cost (and in many cases, a free tool), widely used with a passionate community of fans, and is essentially an ‘all-in-one’ qualitative insights solutions. It’s like CrazyEgg, Qualaroo, Zuko, and some usability tools all rolled into one platform that you can deploy with a Javascript snippet.
They’ve got:
- Heat maps (click maps, scroll depth, and mouse maps)
- Session replays (gold mine of optimization isights)
- Polls
- Surveys
- Form analytics
All of these, particularly form analytics and session replays, will come in incredibly handy when optimizing your landing page.
I don’t know a single optimizer who hasn’t used HotJar; it’s that popular. It’s just so easy to get things launched and to start collecting data.
And please, don’t forgo qualitative research in your pursuit of expedition. The qualitative data can act as a proxy for decision making in absence of high enough traffic to run experiments, but it can also *inform* better experiment ideas by telling you what’s going wrong on your website or landing page.
Price: starts free, and honestly, their free plan is generous as fuck. Next pricing plan starts at $39/month.
G2 score: 4.3
8. Fullstory
Fullstory is similar in some ways to HotJar, but different in many ways, too.
It’s probably, all in, a more powerful tool but a narrower set of features. It doesn’t, for instance, have the on-site poll and survey tools that HotJar and Qualaroo offers.
It does have session replays, and they ramp up the utility by highlighting things like rage clicks and signs of frustration using machine learning.
Their form analytics are also more sophisticated and easier to set up on dynamic pages.
They also have a wide suite of integrations and enable you to connect financial data to increase the utility and richness of your reports.
Price: starts free, and then you’ve gotta get a demo if you want to upgrade (i.e. I’m not sure what their standard pricing is)
G2 Score: 4.5
9. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is the most powerful and best on-page survey tool. It was the first website poll tool I had ever used, and I still use it occasionally today with clients.
Something I love about QUalaroo is the targeting technology. You can target and trigger surveys based on so many variables, such as behavioral data (whether they watched a video on a given website page or whether they’ve already visited your pricing page), demographic data, etc.
You can also use Qualaroo as a lead generation form in its own right (though you can also do this with HotJar). Actually, I find an email capture form after a qualitative question or two is sometimes a more effective way to collect leads than traditional static forms.
Finally, they have an incredibly rich library of question prompts and templates. This helps come up with inspiration and clarification for good questions to ask your audience.
Of course, it also integrates with literally any website as well as with any testing tool or analytics platform (Google Analytics included).
Price: starts at $100/month
G2 score: 4.3
10. Wynter
Newcomer to the list! Wynter is a newish product launched by my former boss and occasional mentor, Peep, who also runs CXL and Speero.
It’s essentially a messaging and copy testing tool. Much like user testing for website and UX, Wynter is used to real and fast feedback on how your messaging is resonating and performing.
The huge bottleneck with this work, both time and financial, is recruiting target audience members as panelists. This is especially hard for specialized B2B software, because the field can be very narrow and the cost to ‘hire’ someone quite high. Imagine trying to collect a bunch of CIOs of Fortune 500 companies who use automation software. Difficult, yeah?
Wynter takes this off your plate and just delivers (like magic) insights a few days later.
I did this for our agency and it allowed us to completely rewrite our homepage to better engage directors of marketing and directors of content marketing. Super powerful stuff.
Price: $99 per value proposition test. $249 per full-page message test.
G2 score: 4.9
11. HubSpot
Finally, HubSpot. HubSpot isn’t really a ‘landing page optimization’ tool per se; rather, it’s an all-in-one marketing and sales suite.
They do have all the features that make landing page campaigns and landing page optimization possible though. This includes features like:
- A CMS
- Landing pages
- Popups as well as static web forms
- Smart content and personalization
- An Ads manager
- Native A/B testing tools (though, again, don’t trust it and instead use an actual A/B testing tool)
- Chatbots and live chat
So if you want a full suite, go with HubSpot. Most of these tools start free, and you really can build an entire scaled up operation on the tools. Sure, there are some frustrating product limitations. But I can tell you we’re using HubSpot for most of this stuff at our agency and it’s working quite well.
The best part is everything’s integrated so you don’t have to spend extra money on Zapier or a developer to integrate your stack. You build a landing page in HubSpot using a HubSpot Form, which has analytics attached, and then you can set up welcome emails and automation sequences using HubSpot Email Marketing and Workflows.
Hell yeah for simplicity.
Other tools like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and ConvertKit also offer full suite solutions like HubSpot’s .
Price: starts free, next tier (Starter) begins at $49/month
G2 score: 4.4
Conclusion
Landing page optimization is a wheelhouse of mine. It comes the controlled environment of a dedicated landing page with the opportunity to optimize at scale using templates and personalization.
At the entry point, you can get some uplifts just by doing some qualitative research and basic A/B testing. But at scale, the optimization potential is limitless – programmatically designed landing pages personalized with machine learning, enriched data and progressive forms, interactive and dynamic experiences, and more.
Happy optimizing!