Get an immediate lift in your conversion rate without changing anything.
We can raise your conversion rate in about ten minutes.
You will not run a test. You will not change a headline, move a button, or ask a developer for anything.
Your conversion rate will go up, and the new number will be more honest than the old one.
Most of the internet is not people anymore.
The bot traffic problem we keep finding in client accounts
Automated traffic passed human traffic in 2024 and has kept climbing.
The 2026 Bad Bot Report puts automated traffic at more than 53% of all web traffic. Bad bots alone account for 40%.
The newer pressure comes from language models. Cloudflare handles something like 50 billion AI crawler requests a day, and some of that is aimed at you.
We see some version of it in most of our clients’ data.
It costs real money. Roughly $63 billion in global ad spend went to invalid traffic last year, and about one in twelve of your paid clicks is not a person.
It also quietly wrecks your tests. Bots have no preferences, so they land in both variants and convert at zero in both.
That drags the two arms toward each other. Enough of them and a real winner reads as a tie. Our guide to A/B testing statistics covers why.
So you get a slower answer, a wrong cost per acquisition, and a quarter of decisions that were slightly off in a direction nobody could see.
What sellable traffic means
Your conversion rate is a fraction. Conversions on top, sessions on the bottom.
Nearly every dollar you spend on optimization goes to the top of that fraction. Better copy, faster pages, cleaner forms.
Almost nobody audits the bottom.
Sellable traffic is the share of your sessions that could plausibly buy from you. Not sessions that did buy. Sessions that were capable of it.
A bot cannot buy from you.
Neither can your developer testing checkout. Or the job applicant reading your careers page. Or the customer logging in to track last week’s order. Or the student in a country you do not ship to.
They are all sitting in your denominator right now, making your conversion rate look worse than it is.
On one specialty ecommerce site we audited, ninety percent of the sessions in the denominator were machines.
The site reported a 0.28% conversion rate. The real rate was 2.6%, which is about where a site like that should be.
That number also fixes your test schedules. Hand a duration calculator gross sessions when a third of them are machines, and every test runs a third longer than your plan says.
The button in Google Analytics you have probably never pressed
There is an icon in the upper right of your GA4 interface that opens a chat window.
It is called Ask Advisor. Google folded its earlier Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor tools into this one assistant, so you may still see the old names around.
Most marketers we talk to have not clicked it. A few clicked it, asked something vague, got something vague back, and never returned.
It is free. It is already in your account. No API key, no developer, no credit card.
What it needs is a real question.
One thing Google does not document is the size of the box. The input caps at 2019 characters.
I found that by pasting progressively longer prompts until it broke, which is a dull afternoon I am happy to have spent on your behalf.
The prompt below is 1,905 characters. It fits with room to spare, and the reason it reads so tersely is that ceiling.
Use Ask Advisor to audit your GA4 traffic
This is the prompt we use. It is yours.
Open GA4, click the Ask Advisor icon, and paste it in.
Act as a CRO analytics auditor. Define "sellable traffic" for this property: the share of sessions that could plausibly buy. Analysis only, change no settings.
1. State the business model, the conversion event that is the money action, and your assumptions.
2. Give total sessions and users for the last 90 days, with trend.
3. For each non-buyer segment, report sessions, the filter used, engagement rate, and conversion rate: bot/invalid traffic (direct spikes, data-center cities, 0-second sessions, and screen resolutions impossible for real hardware such as perfect squares; list the top resolutions first); internal traffic; logged-in pages (/login, /account, /dashboard) but only for SaaS and subscription sites, on ecommerce and lead-gen these show buyer intent so keep them; /blog/ and informational pages; /support, /careers, /legal; order tracking and returns; referral spam; and geos we cannot ship to or sell into by policy, not merely geos that convert poorly.
4. Do not exclude any segment that converts at a normal rate for this business. Mark those "keep but monitor" and say why. Flag any segment converting far above the site average as suspected form spam, not a top performer. Never exclude AI assistant referrals (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude); they are real prospects.
5. Build a waterfall table: layer, segment removed, sessions removed, % of total, conversion rate of removed segment, running sellable total. Apply exclusions in a fixed order and note overlaps so nothing is subtracted twice.
6. Report final sellable sessions and % of gross. Give a before and after table: sessions, conversions, and conversion rate for gross vs sellable, with the change. Then channel, device and geo mix of sellable only.
7. Give the reusable segment definition as GA4 filter conditions, plus caveats.
8. Return the whole report in Markdown so the tables can be copied without breaking.
No email gate, no download form, no upsell.
Two things make the next five minutes go better.
Ask Advisor has no copy or save button, and copying the report destroys the formatting. That is why step 8 asks for Markdown. If you forget, a second message saying “display the report as Markdown” converts what it already wrote.
The 2019 cap applies to each message, not the whole conversation. So spend a second message on your business.
Ours would say: our office is in Austin, our staging site is staging.example.com, and we cannot ship outside North America.
The report gets noticeably better for it.
The segments, and how you know
The report walks your traffic layer by layer. Here is how to find bot traffic in Google Analytics, and how to tell the report got it right.
How to identify bot traffic in Google Analytics
Most bots never reach GA4, because they do not run JavaScript. The ones that do are the ones worth finding.
The prompt asks for daily spikes far above your median arriving as Direct with no landing page. It asks for data center cities, which is why Ashburn, Council Bluffs, Boardman, Columbus and Dublin are in there.
Not many people live in a data center.
Then it asks for your top screen resolutions, which is the tell that rarely gets checked.
On that specialty ecommerce site, 11.8 million sessions arrived at 1600×1600. Zero purchases, 3.8 seconds each, 0.33 pages per session.
On Google’s own demo store, 129,929 sessions arrived at 1024×1024.
Screens are not square.
No monitor, laptop, tablet or phone ships with a 1:1 aspect ratio. A large block of sessions sharing one perfectly square resolution is a machine running a default that came out of the box.
We found that by asking one follow-up question: what are the most common screen resolutions of the bots you detected? 99.7% of a 130,000 session block shared a single impossible resolution.
That one number is a far more durable filter than the parameter that first exposed them.
How to exclude internal traffic from GA4
Your own team is in your analytics. Office cities, staging hostnames, localhost, QA paths, self referrals, and the person who has visited your pricing page four hundred times.
Our favorite example is not from a client. It is from Google.
Their public demo property flags direct traffic from Mountain View converting at 32%, roughly ten times the site average, and identifies it as internal Google employee traffic.
One of the most scrutinized GA4 properties in the world has its own staff in the numbers. Yours probably does too.
The other five
Logged-in pages are the tricky one. On a subscription product, /login and /account are existing customers and belong out. On ecommerce sites, they are part of the buying funnel. That same audit showed /checkout/Review converting at 72.1%, so a rule that stripped account pages would have deleted the best traffic on the site.
Blog and informational traffic are interested in the articles, not necessarily your offering.
Support, careers, press and legal are small until a hiring push or a news mention.
Order tracking and returns look like normal traffic in every report you already run.
Post-conversion traffic is the one to check by hand. If your conversion event fires on the thank-you page, removing those sessions pulls them out of the denominator but leaves their conversions in the numerator. That inflates your rate twice.
The check: when you remove a segment, your conversion count may fall a little. If the numerator never moves, look at your event configuration.
The guardrail, which runs in both directions
Never remove a segment that converts at a normal rate. If your blog brings in real leads, the blog stays in the calculation.
On one lead generation audit, blog traffic ran about 6,000 sessions and 90 genuine leads at a 1.5% conversion rate. Ask Advisor flagged it, checked it, and kept it. That is the right answer.
A segment can also convert too well.
On that same audit, a referral from ahrefs.com produced 17 leads from 19 sessions. Traffic from South Korea produced 224 leads from 272 sessions.
Those are machines filling out your forms.
Segments converting at normal rate are kept. If the conversion rate is essentially zero, look closer. Segments converting impossibly well also warrant a closer look.
You can tell Ask Advisor which to keep and which to exclude from reports, segments, audiences, and comparisons. Once you build these, the decisions are locked in. See “How to exclude bot traffic from Google Analytics for good” below.
How to calculate your real conversion rate, and why you should read the report
We ran this exact prompt against Google’s public demo property so you can reproduce it.
It went from 330,798 gross sessions to 134,961 sellable. Only 40.8% of their traffic was sellable. That takes the conversion rate from 1.04% to 2.50%.
Nearly sixty percent of Google’s own demo data cannot buy anything.
The report got one thing wrong, and it is worth checking for in yours.
It removed 46,560 sessions using the filter “countries with conversion rate under 0.5%,” then reported that conversion had improved.
That is circular. It cut the worst-converting traffic and took credit for the lift. We put those sessions back.
A country comes out because you cannot ship there, not because it converts poorly.
So read the filters, not just the totals. The report is a first draft, and you are still the analyst.
How to exclude bot traffic from Google Analytics for good
Once the report exists, you have an assistant that already knows what your junk traffic looks like.
Send this second prompt to turn the analysis into something you can reuse.
Turn the sellable traffic definition above into reusable GA4 setups for this property, using the exact paths, countries and values from the audit above.
Give me step-by-step instructions for all three:
1. A comparison in a standard report, for a quick look today.
2. A saved audience, for tracking sellable traffic going forward.
3. An exploration segment, for building funnels on sellable traffic only.
For each, name the menu to open, the dimension and match type to choose, and exactly what to type. Flag anything that will not apply retroactively.
The comparison is the fastest. The audience is the one your team will still be using next quarter. The exploration segment is where the funnel work happens.
From there it will also write your internal traffic exclusion, the IP filter and traffic_type parameter and why the change is not retroactive, a data filter that keeps staging out of production, and the developer brief for whatever instrumentation problem it found.
Excluding traffic from a report is not the same as blocking it at your firewall. For reports, the friendly bots come out too. Googlebot cannot buy anything, so out it goes. For filtering, friendly bots go back in. Block Googlebot and you leave the index.
Going deeper
Everything above is free and complete.
Ask Advisor has limits. It cannot remember, so next month you paste the prompt again. It cannot reach Tag Manager to fix what it finds. It cannot be scheduled. It caps at 2019 characters, and it sees one property.
A Google Analytics MCP server gets past all of that and connects your analytics to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini for free. Setup took me 45 minutes of OAuth and credentials, and I am a computer science major. Give yourself more time.
The other option is EverOpt, which is what we use.
I have an affiliate relationship with EverOpt. I recommend it because it changed how we do analytics, and I would tell you about it either way.
It talks to the Google APIs directly instead of through an MCP server, so the model writes queries rather than reading tables, which means fewer hallucinations. It remembers your exclusions, supports Tag Manager, and emails you a weekly brief.
When the number is bad and somebody has to act on it
Sometimes you run this and the news is good. Your rate was better than you thought, and your denominator was lying.
Sometimes your sellable conversion rate is genuinely low, on genuinely qualified traffic, and now you know it.
That is our work. Our conversion rate optimization audit starts where this article ends, and a Conversion Scientist runs the tests that move the number that matters.
Either way, go press the button. It is free, it is already in your account, and it takes ten minutes.
Your conversion rate is about to go up, and this time you will be able to defend it.
Stop building GA4 reports. Conversational analytics lets digital marketers ask plain-English questions of their data and get answers. Free prompt kit inside.
Your Website Knows More About Your Prospects Than You Think
You just can’t hear it yet.
Every session, every channel, every dropped form, every product page that converts at 0.8% when it should be at 3%. It’s all in your analytics right now.
The problem isn’t the data. It’s how we’ve been accessing it.
Building reports takes time. And even when you do it, you get numbers. Not answers.
I’ve been doing CRO since 2007. We’ve built scorecards, dashboards, custom Google Sheets that pull from the API. We’re pretty sophisticated about this. But nothing has changed our analysis the way this has.
You can now have a plain-English conversation with your analytics data.
Ask it what’s wrong. Ask it what’s working. Ask it why that traffic channel dropped off in March. It will tell you.
Here’s how we do it, and how you can start.
Why Most AI Website Tools Get This Backwards
The AI tools pitching you right now have this backwards.
They look at your website and hand you a list of things to fix. I’ve tried a number of them. We haven’t adopted any.
Here’s why. They skip your data. They start with your pages, not your analytics. So what they give you is best practices dressed up as personalized recommendations.
That’s a problem.
A page that’s performing well is a dangerous page to change. There are more ways to hurt it than help it. If you’re testing ideas that aren’t grounded in your actual data, you’re guessing.
Conversational analytics starts where we start. With the data.
How to Connect AI to Your Google Analytics
There are two ways to connect a language model to Google Analytics.
The first is an MCP server. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s essentially an API that’s designed for AI to use. Once connected, your language model can query your analytics directly.
Google provides instructions for setting this up. Allocate about 45 minutes. It involves granting credentials and OAuth setup, which gets a little nervifying if you’re not a developer. My advice: paste Google’s guide into your AI and have it walk you through each step.
MeasureU has also published setup guides for Mac and Windows if you want more hand-holding.
The second option is EverOpt, and it’s what we use.
EverOpt connects via the Google APIs directly, which means fewer hallucinations. Most AI tools read a table and fill in the gaps with pattern matching. EverOpt generates JSON and SQL to pull the actual numbers. That’s a meaningful difference when you’re making decisions based on the output.
It also has memory, a daily or weekly briefing agent, and supports Tag Manager, PostHog, and Convert.com.
The Three Prompts That Get You Started
We’ve put together three prompts that get you started.
Here’s what each one does.
The first is the Business Health Audit.
Tell the AI to act as a CRO and business intelligence leader. Ask it to deliver a plain-language health report on your analytics. Tell it not to change anything yet.
It will figure out what kind of business you are just from the data. Then it will tell you which traffic channels are performing, which aren’t, and drill down to the specific campaigns or products causing problems.
The output is a rich report. Read it in full. Or paste it into your ongoing business AI and let it start building strategy from there.
The second prompt is Sellable Traffic.
Not all of your visitors are trying to buy anything.
Bots, AI scrapers, blog readers, existing customers logging in, internal employees — they inflate your session count and suppress your conversion rate. This prompt identifies and removes them so you’re working with numbers that actually mean something.
In one example, removing invalid traffic moved a site’s conversion rate from 3.2% to 3.6%. Without changing a single page.
Once the AI identifies what to exclude, tell it to remember those exclusions for all future analyses. In EverOpt, it saves that to memory and applies the filter automatically.
The third prompt is the Weekly Brief.
Most digital marketers don’t check their analytics every week. This prompt fixes that without requiring you to go anywhere.
Set it to compare 90-day trends against the last 7 days. Ask it to flag traffic channel changes, conversion rate shifts, form abandonment rates, and 404 errors. In EverOpt, paste the prompt into the briefing feature, set your cadence, and it emails you the report.
One of our client briefs flagged a spike in SMS conversions we never would have caught manually. Now we know what drove it, and we can do more of it.
What to Ask Once You’re Connected
Once you’re connected, the questions you can ask are limited only by what’s in your data.
Build funnels. Graph trends. Diagnose why a channel underperformed last month. Examine any A/B tests running on the site.
You can even ask why a variation won or lost. Paste in screenshots of both and the AI will help you build hypotheses. That “why” question has always been the hard one. It still is. But now you have a place to start.
Tell it to interview you about your business. The more context it has, the sharper the analysis gets.
Go Have a Conversation With Your Data
I was a little reluctant to put this together.
This has become a real competitive advantage for us at Conversion Sciences. Being able to walk into a client conversation with an inventory plan or a traffic diagnosis that most agencies don’t even think to produce. That changes the conversation.
But we’ve decided to give away the good stuff.
You’ve got the setup. You’ve got the prompts.
Go have a conversation with your data.
Get the free prompt kit at conversion.science/ad+lp.
There is a fundamental disconnect in our organizations that is showing up in our ad campaigns.
One team creates and manages the ads, Meta ads, Google ads, Bing ads. The landing pages from which the ad team chooses were created by another team, the web team.
The ad team has one priority: increase traffic and demand that generates revenue. The web team has a number of goals, most of which involve publishing pages.
These goals are not aligned.
How bad can things get?
We pulled the ad portfolios of dozens of brands and compared them to the landing pages that serve those ads link. We were surprised that so many brands had serious alignment issues:
Ads linking to the home page
Ads linking to pages without calls to action
Landing pages that served dozens of different ads
Here are some of the things I cover in my presentation, which you can watch on YouTube.
Why does ad spend keep rising while conversion rate stays flat?
Because the ad makes a promise (an offer, a headline, a specific claim) that the landing page doesn’t keep, so no amount of extra spend fixes a ceiling caused by the page itself.
What is the Ad Alignment Report?
An AI-generated audit that pulls a client’s full ad portfolio, matches every ad to the landing page it points to, and flags where the offer, headline, or design don’t line up.
What does a 4.7-to-1 ad-to-landing-page ratio actually mean for a business?
It means nearly five different ads, each with a different promise — different offers, headlines, calls to action — are all dumping traffic onto the same page. It’s difficult to create a single landing page that can support so many ads and still have a high conversion rate.
The larger the ad-to-landing-page ratio, the more likely your ad spend is being wasted on misalignment.
Why do so many ads land on the homepage instead of a dedicated page?
Because building and maintaining a landing page for every ad is more work than most teams can keep up with. When the website has no good alternatives, the homepage is chosen by the ad team.
Unfortunately, the homepage isn’t designed to convert ad traffic. It serves many kinds of visitors and can’t speak to any single ad’s specific promise.
What are “The Ten Alignments”?
The ten factors a landing page should match from its ad:
the offer
headline
call to action
trust and proof
product or service
These are the five that matter most.
Add to these:
image
brand
tone
URL
color
These add extra connections for those who click on the ads.
Does every alignment factor matter equally?
The first five (offer, headline, CTA, trust/proof, product) carry most of the weight. Get those wrong and the visitor’s trust breaks before the smaller details even register.
Why do social ads and search ads need different alignment strategies?
Because social ads interrupt someone who wasn’t looking for you, while search ads meet intent someone already had. The landing page has to pick up the conversation differently in each case.
What happens when an ad’s specific offer never appears on the landing page?
The visitor who clicked specifically for that offer, like AVE’s “4 Months Free,” arrives to find no trace of it and has no reason to trust the rest of the page.
Why does a headline mismatch hurt more than it seems like it should?
It removes the visitor’s confirmation that they landed in the right place, so instead of reading on, they’re left wondering if they clicked the wrong link.
Why does tone matter as much as offer or headline?
Because a warm, personal ad voice followed by a clinical form-heavy page creates a jarring shift at the exact moment trust needs reinforcing, and visitors disengage from that whiplash.
Can this alignment work actually be automated?
Yes. AI trained on landing page best practices can generate a matching page for each ad’s specific offer, headline, and tone, which is what the AVE and Careforth “Safe at Home” rebuilds demonstrate.
What do you do once a landing page is already well aligned?
Test a differentiators band (trust signals placed above the fold) or a Good-Better-Best pricing ladder that anchors value with a high first price, both shown on Uline’s pages.
How should a business manage alignment across dozens or hundreds of landing pages?
Either use personalization and A/B testing tools to adjust the page per visit for smaller portfolios, or generate aligned pages with AI and route ad traffic automatically for larger ones.
Why does this matter more now than it used to?
Because Google’s AI and Performance Max now factor landing page quality into ad delivery itself, so a weak page doesn’t just lose conversions anymore, it quietly drags down the ads pointing to it too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ad-to-landing-page alignment?
Ad-to-landing-page alignment is how closely a landing page matches the offer, headline, and promise made in the ad that sent the visitor there. When the ad and the page tell different stories, visitors lose the sense that they landed in the right place and leave before converting.
Why do my ads convert but my landing page doesn’t?
Usually because the landing page doesn’t keep the specific promise the ad made. A generic homepage or product grid can’t speak to five different ad offers at once, so most visitors arrive expecting something the page never delivers.
What is message match in PPC advertising?
Message match is the practice of echoing an ad’s exact headline, offer, and value proposition on the landing page it links to. It’s one of the core inputs Google uses to score landing page experience, which directly affects Quality Score and cost per click.
Why doesn’t my ad’s offer show up on my landing page?
This usually happens when ad copy and landing page copy are created separately, often by different teams. Without a shared alignment check across the ad portfolio, an offer like “4 months free” can vanish entirely by the time a visitor lands.
What are the most important elements to align between an ad and a landing page?
The five highest-impact factors are the offer, the headline, the call to action, trust and proof, and the product or service featured. Together these carry most of the alignment score. Image, brand, tone, URL, and color refine it further.
Should every ad have its own landing page?
Not necessarily one-to-one, but a portfolio where dozens of ads all route to a single homepage is a strong signal of misalignment. A useful benchmark is your ad-to-landing-page ratio. Anything close to 5:1 usually means most ads are landing somewhere generic.
How does landing page alignment affect Google Ads Quality Score?
Landing page experience is one of three components of Quality Score, alongside expected click-through rate and ad relevance. A page that doesn’t match its ad’s message can raise cost per click even when the ad itself performs well.
Can AI generate landing pages that automatically match each ad?
Yes. AI trained on landing page best practices can generate a page variant for each ad’s specific offer, headline, and tone, then route that ad’s traffic to its matching page automatically. This is especially useful for portfolios too large to manage by hand.
AI can write website copy that outperforms 80% of what is online today.
You just have to teach it who it is writing for.
In this episode of Intended Consequences, Conversion Sciences founder Brian Massey shows you how to use AI to generate website copy that actually converts.
The secret is not a better prompt.
It is writing for the four ways people make buying decisions.
You will learn the Modes of Research framework, first published in “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark,” and how to map it onto Myers-Briggs types so any language model speaks your language.
Then you will watch live rewrites that turn flat, jargon-filled copy into messaging built for Competitive, Methodical, Spontaneous, and Humanist visitors.
By the end you can build your own AI messaging agent in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and let it do the rewriting for you.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Why most B2B copy sounds the same and caps your conversion rate
The four research modes and the buyer behind each one
How to use Myers-Briggs as a shared vocabulary with any AI
The simple prompt that teaches your chatbot to rewrite by mode
How to generate personas straight from a URL
How to A/B test copy that is finally different enough to win
How to build a reusable AI messaging agent for your brand
CHAPTERS
00:00 Why AI copy beats 80% of website copy 01:30 Styrofoam copy and the conversion ceiling 02:40 How our own biases sabotage copywriting 04:10 ICPs and the four-persona problem 05:40 Corner cases: copy big enough to A/B test 06:00 The 4 Modes of Research framework 06:50 Competitive and Methodical buyers 08:00 Spontaneous and Humanist buyers 09:30 Placing copy on the page by buyer mode 10:30 Why language models beat humans at this 11:20 Myers-Briggs as a shared language with AI 14:00 The simple prompt to train your chatbot 15:00 Generating personas from a URL (Calm.com) 17:40 Rewriting copy for each mode, live 24:00 B2B example: HR services, CHRO vs CFO 29:50 Laying out multiple voices on one page 31:00 Q&A: getting your team to trust AI copy 33:20 Building your own AI messaging agent 38:00 What is next: ad and landing page alignment 38:50 Q&A: CTAs, ad frequency, and brand salience
Check out these click-worthy examples of persuasive copy for online ads. Discover why they work and how to test for persuasive ad copy.
The world of digital marketing makes it super easy for you to reach your target audience. But you have to whip up a mighty persuasive online ad if you want your prospects to click on yours. Persuasion is one of our CRO Agency secret weapons. It is layered into so much of what we do and is often the difference between beginners and conversion optimization experts.
In this post, we’ll review the definition of persuasive copy, how to make sure it works, and show you compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
Appeal to logic emotion and credibility all in one. Check out these click worthy examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
What is Persuasive Copy
Persuasive copy can be defined as an argument that elicits a desired action from a relevant audience. Easier said than done, right?
Aristotle explained what constitutes persuasive copy best in his rhetorical appeals or ‘modes for persuasion’. Let’s keep in mind that his goal was to make his oratory (his presentations) more persuasive. And in doing so, he identified three types of persuasion appeals that are as valid today as they were back then.
the appeal to reason, logic or logos
the appeal to emotion or pathos
and the appeal to one’s character, credibility or ethos
Not everybody makes a decision about a specific product or service based on the same argument. Purchasing a lipstick could be more of an impulse buy and an appeal to pathos or emotion may be the right call. Adding an appeal to reason such as “Free Shipping” may seal the deal and get you the click you desperately want.
The key is recognizing that different types of persuasive copy resonate with different people—and even the same person, depending on the context. For example, a tired commuter might see an ad for cozy bedding that simply says, “Go back to bed”—and instantly feel a yearning for comfort and rest. It’s not just clever copywriting; it’s a masterclass in tapping into universal desires with brutal simplicity.
Why This Matters
Everyone brings their own motivations and objections to the buying journey. Your job as a copywriter is to identify which core benefit or emotional trigger will speak directly to your audience in the moment. Does your product offer a universal good—comfort, convenience, a boost in confidence? Highlight that.
Appeal to emotion for impulse buys or aspirational products.
Appeal to logic for practical purchases or when buyers need reassurance.
Appeal to credibility when trust and authority will tip the scale.
By combining these appeals or focusing on the one that matches your buyer’s mindset, you make your ad copy far more persuasive. Test different approaches and let your audience’s response guide your optimization.
What Makes an Ad Truly Persuasive?
Persuasive ads are fundamentally designed to spark a specific action, usually a purchase. Think back to those persuasive essays from school: the goal was always to convince your reader of something. Persuasive advertising works in much the same way, aiming to nudge your audience toward the checkout, the signup, or the phone call.
And here’s the kicker: persuasion isn’t just for one channel. Whether you’re crafting a headline for a digital campaign, scripting a radio spot, designing a billboard, or writing a snappy PPC ad, the principles remain the same. Across every medium, the best ads use a blend of logic, emotion, and credibility to win over their audience.
Let’s assume you have the right ad placement, defined the perfect audience, and have properly identified what your audience responds to. After all, persuasive ad copy in and of itself is not the only factor that weighs in on a campaign’s success.
Is your ad copy missing the mark? Has your click through rate hit a new low?
We all want our online ads to influence our audience in such a way that they are inclined to click to call or click to buy from our website. But, what makes copy this convincing? Sometimes, actual examples of persuasive copy can guide us in crafting our own click-worthy online ads.
Learning from the Best
To really master persuasive copywriting, it’s worth looking at successful ads across different platforms. Whether it’s the emotional tug of a charity billboard, the logical lure of a “limited time offer” in a digital ad, or the credibility of a testimonial-packed print campaign, top-performing ads often blend these elements seamlessly.
So, how can you apply these time-tested techniques to your own ads? By understanding your audience, leveraging Aristotle’s three appeals, and studying real-world examples, you’ll be one step closer to writing persuasive ad copy that actually gets results.
An example of emotionally persuasive copy in this Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs.”
Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection. The copy reads: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs”. Why is this a prime example of persuasive copy in advertising? The famous Prince Charming in other countries, like Brazil and Italy, is called the “Blue Prince”, royal blue blood and all. So, until the blue one shows up, have fun with the rest of the colors. Clever emotional argument to leave the guilt behind and have fun now. If the shoe fits. ;)
But what about those times when you’re not just selling color, but also convenience and irresistible options? Take, for example, a pizza delivery ad that recognizes your hunger and meets it with a smorgasbord of cheesy bites, timely deals, and endless combos to choose from. These ads don’t just rely on one persuasive angle, they layer convenience (“delivered to your door”), urgency (“limited-time offer”), and variety (so many toppings, so little time).
For many (read: anyone with an appetite), this approach makes the click almost inevitable. The lesson? Sometimes, people want a simple fix for a simple problem, but when options and indulgence are on the table, don’t hold back. Play to those cravings—hunger, desire, even FOMO—and show how your product solves the problem in style.
Fortunately for most of us, developing persuasive copy is not an art but a data driven process. And as such, it can be tested.
How to Test Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
As investment in digital advertising increases, it becomes essential to figure out what really works. Ad copy testing can be executed pre-campaign launch or while the campaign is live.
Some methods for online ad copy pre-testing may include focus groups, projective techniques, and recall tests. Performing these pre-tests ensures less spend is lost when it comes to activation.
Running an online ad campaign is costly. This is a different version of the Paypal for Business ad used to test the level of persuasiveness in the copy. What appeal has been dropped? Let us know in the comments section at the end of the post.
But the proof is in the pudding and nothing beats solid AB Testing to prove you with the metrics you need to define what’s really working. If you are looking to learn about testing persuasive copy, our blog is packed with articles that explain how to do this in detail. Check them out:
Or you can take our CRO Course and become a conversion specialist. Or if you’d rather have an experienced conversion agency power boost your online marketing spend and turn more of your ad clicks into revenue, check out our CRO for Advertising solutions.
Practical Ways to Make Your Copy More Persuasive
Testing is critical, but before you even launch, it helps to understand the proven persuasive levers you can pull. Here are some actionable ways to approach your ad copy, inspired by what works across industries:
1. Solve a Real Problem Get specific about the annoying problems your product solves. People want solutions that make life easier—lean into that in your copy.
2. Let Your Customers Do the Talking Consider including a customer review or testimonial in your ad. If you have a killer quote, sometimes the best copy is simply letting your happiest customer speak for you.
3. Build Community and FOMO Appeal to your audience’s desire to belong or their fear of missing out. For some markets (think fashion or exclusive launches), this can be a powerful motivator.
4. Highlight Cost Savings If your product is more affordable than the competition—or saves people money—make that benefit crystal clear. A logical, numbers-driven appeal works wonders for budget-conscious buyers.
5. Evoke Emotion and Comfort Don’t underestimate the power of emotion. Sometimes, showing the comfort, fun, or even laziness your product enables (think cozy bedding or a Netflix marathon) can win hearts.
6. Address Competitor Weaknesses Listen to what people dislike about competitors, then position your solution as the answer. (Tread lightly here; keep it classy.)
7. Use Social Proof and Influencers If trusted experts or influencers love your product, don’t be shy about it. Social proof builds credibility and trust—just make sure it’s relevant to your audience.
8. Tackle Objections Head-On Address common concerns directly in your copy. If people worry about shipping times, product durability, or ease of use, show them how you’ve solved it.
9. Showcase the Numbers Brag about how many satisfied customers you have—“Trusted by over 2 million runners”—for instant credibility.
10. Keep It Simple and Relatable Sometimes, the most persuasive copy is the simplest: “Keeps you dry on rainy days.” Tap into universal needs and make the benefit obvious.
11. Make the Unfamiliar, Familiar If your product is new or innovative, draw comparisons that make it less intimidating. Help your audience feel at home with your offer.
12. Offer a Plethora of Options For products with variety (like pizza delivery or customizable apparel), highlight the range and play to people’s desire for choice and instant gratification.
13. Humanize Your Brand Show off the people behind your products. Authenticity matters—customers want to know real people are creating what they buy.
By combining rigorous testing with these persuasive techniques, you’ll have a much stronger chance of crafting ad copy that not only resonates, but converts.
And as we promised an article about compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising, let’s dive into them!
Why Is Persuasive Copy Crucial to Online Ads
Let’s assume you have the right ad placement, defined the perfect audience, and have properly identified what your audience responds to. After all, persuasive ad copy in and of itself is not the only factor that weighs in on a campaign’s success.
Is your ad copy missing the mark? Has your click through rate hit a new low?
We all want our online ads to influence our audience in such a way that they are inclined to click to call or click to buy from our website. But, what makes copy this convincing? Sometimes, actual examples of persuasive copy can guide us in crafting our own click-worthy online ads.
Making the Unfamiliar, Familiar: Easing Audience Anxiety
Let’s face it: trying something new, even if it’s just a different orange juice or a SaaS tool can give people pause. This is where truly persuasive ad copy can shine. The secret? Bridge the gap between the unknown and the familiar.
Here’s how effective ads do it:
Use relatable situations and language: If you know your audience doesn’t like surprises, show them how your product slots right into their routine. Maybe it streamlines a daily task or upgrades something they’re already doing.
Address common hesitations head-on: Acknowledge that new products can be intimidating, but highlight features, benefits, or guarantees that remove the risk. Think of “30-day money-back guarantee” or “trusted by thousands around the world.”
Leverage social proof and testimonials: Nothing inspires confidence like seeing that other people—especially those similar to your target audience—have already made the leap and loved it.
At its core, persuasive advertising doesn’t just introduce a product. It reassures people that making the switch is easy, comfortable, and, in the end, just another step toward something better.
The Power of Authenticity: Why User-Generated Content Wins in Persuasive Online Ads
What makes an ad truly stand out in a sea of polished, overly-scripted promotions? Increasingly, it’s authenticity, and that’s where user-generated content (UGC) or ads styled to feel “real” enter the picture.
Ads that mimic the look and feel of content from everyday people (think influencers, loyal customers, or even your neighbor with an eye for a good burrito deal) have a certain trustworthiness. When potential customers see a peer getting real benefits, like saving money meal after meal, it sends a powerful signal: “This could be you.” Not only do these relatable stories demonstrate how a product works, but they also weave logic and credibility together.
In short, authenticity replaces skepticism with possibility. Suddenly, your product isn’t just another sales pitch. It’s an everyday hack, a savvy move already in play by people just like your audience. Not coincidentally, research shows that real voices and honest experiences increase click-through rates and conversions.
If you want your ad copy to truly persuade, lean into authentic storytelling, especially if your product can be shown improving real lives (and, let’s be honest, real bank accounts). When your audience sees someone they trust enjoying real savings, their defenses go down and their curiosity (and likelihood to click) shoots up.
Celebrities, Influencers, and the Power of Social Proof in Ads
Let’s talk about the not-so-secret weapon in persuasive ad copy: celebrity endorsements and influencer partnerships. Why do they work so well? It’s simple—the right personality gives your message that trust turbo-boost and plenty of personality, making even the most skeptical scroller stop and take notice.
When a household name or recognizable face champions your product, you’re instantly borrowing some of their credibility and likeability. But you don’t have to recruit a global pop star to pull this off. Partnering with the right influencer—especially those with a dedicated, engaged fanbase—injects your brand with authenticity while still tapping into that all-important social proof.
Want to do this the smart way?
Pick people with genuine enthusiasm for what you offer, not just a big follower count.
Keep it on-brand. Matching the influencer’s vibe and storytelling style to your message makes everything feel seamless.
Leverage relatability. Micro-influencers often have niche audiences who trust them more than megastars.
Encourage storytelling over hard-selling. Simple anecdotes, “a day in the life” posts, or even self-aware humor make ads feel less like ads and more like a friendly recommendation.
Use in-content cues. For example, having the influencer narrate or demonstrate, weaving product use naturally into their own world.
Both big-name celebrities and social media personalities can bring that extra push to your campaigns, whether it’s emotional appeal, humor, or simple trust-building through association. Combine this with a persuasive offer or memorable copy, and you’ve got an ad your audience won’t soon forget.
Internal Campaigns: Turning Team Spirit into Persuasive Gold
Now, here’s a fun twist: persuasive copy isn’t just for charming your external audience. Some of the savviest ads out there never hit Facebook or Google, but instead rally the people closest to your brand: your employees, contributors, and internal collaborators.
Why does this matter? When you celebrate the people behind the curtain, you do more than foster company pride—you’re also stealthily marketing to the outside world. A campaign that spotlights your team’s dedication or unique journeys shows prospects and customers that your brand is powered by real folks with real stories. It’s authenticity with a side of persuasion.
The Ripple Effect of “Feel-Good” Internal Ads
Builds trust: Showcasing your team humanizes your brand.
Inspires action: Potential staff and contributors see you value your people—suddenly, joining your ranks looks pretty appealing.
Sparks conversation: Happy, engaged teams turn into powerful brand advocates, both online and off.
Whether you’re toasting your engineers at Apple for the latest iOS wizardry or shining a light on the Starbucks baristas who keep your community caffeinated, internal campaigns have the power to persuade at scale. So next time you’re drafting ad copy, take a quick left turn into your office break room—your most compelling message may be waiting by the coffee machine.
Compelling Examples of Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
A genius way to apply emotion to a SaaS service on a Facebook ad for Litmus & dotmailer.
Examples of persuasive copy in online advertising help illustrate the concept.
Appeal to logic or logos works quite nicely for the auto insurance industry. I wonder what would happen to these click-through rates (CTRs) if they added some emotional arguments to the ad copy.
Auto insurance appeal to logic examples. They all look alike. Which one would you click on?
Finding examples of persuasive copy in advertising is simple if there is a Google Guarantee available. Not an easy addition to your online ads but worth every penny. All the credibility you want in a single line.
Building credibility through the Google Guarantee.
Ethos and logos appeal for this Facebook ad campaign.
Ethos appeal.
Lower the guilt with a logical argument. Less fat and less calories than your biggest competitor: McDonald’s french fries. How is that for an attention-getting example of persuasive copy?
Burger King fries ad copy. Stop clicking the button and keep reading!
Why does this work?
This type of persuasive copy goes straight for the logical appeal—what Aristotle would call logos. Instead of trying to tug at your heartstrings, it gives you a reasoned, quantifiable benefit: fewer calories and less guilt. It’s simple, direct, and effective for anyone who wants to make better decisions but doesn’t want to completely give up fast food fries.
How can you use this approach?
If your product or service genuinely outperforms the competition on price, health, or savings, don’t be shy about showing the numbers. For example, if your meal has 30% fewer calories, or your subscription saves customers $10 a month compared to the leading brand, say it plainly. Shoppers love seeing instant, tangible benefits—especially when it helps them justify their craving or purchase.
Appeal to the rational mind, and you’ll find your copy not only grabs attention but makes clicking “Buy Now” feel like the smart thing to do.
Of course #FOMO is an emotion! This compelling example of persuasive copy in online advertising proves it! Almost depleted iPhone battery coupled with “Last Chance to Buy T&C Tickets” An example from a Digital Marketer Facebook ads campaign.
Appeal to emotion iPhone battery Facebook Ad example from Digital Marketer.
Why These Ads Work
What’s the secret behind all these examples? Each one pinpoints a specific concern or desire of its audience—credibility, trust, guilt, urgency—and addresses it head-on. The Google Guarantee ad puts all doubts to rest in just a few words, leveraging instant credibility. The Burger King fries campaign removes the guilt barrier by offering a logical, healthier alternative, while the Digital Marketer ad taps into the universal fear of missing out (and, let’s be honest, that low-battery anxiety we all know too well).
How to Apply This to Your Ads
Start by identifying a key problem, worry, or hope your audience has about your product or service. Is it safety? Social proof? Value? Show them that their concern is a non-issue—or better yet, that choosing you gives them a unique advantage. The most persuasive ads don’t just push a product; they dissolve obstacles and make the choice feel obvious.
Searching for click-worthy examples of persuasive copy for your Facebook lead generation campaign? A winner. Hands-down. No big emotional commitment. Only 8 hours for $500 and you get rid of those pesky projects.
Lead generation ad example targeting homeowners looking to start projects.
IBM Watson understands that their audience responds to reason. And that some may be ready to buy. The free trial is a highly persuasive method to get them to click on their ad.
IBM Watson “free trial” a persuasive element of their offer.
This online ad for WD40 is all about persuading through pathos. You will need some WD40 to unstuck that scroll bar.
Humor, sex and curiosity are all emotional appeals.
Every once in a while, you run across an ad that you just can’t forget. Trident’s Facebook ad that appeals to emotions or pathos through some quirky logic as I am sure deodorant won’t taste like spearmint either.
Example of emotional and logical appeal in persuasive copy for Trident’s online ads.
Although they usually resort to logic and ethos – 4 out of 5 dentists recommend – to craft persuasive copy.
Trident Coupons: Save money, prevent stains.
Sandwich delivery ads leverage a mix of ethos or credibility (reviews, how many served), logical (pricing and selection) and emotional (fresh, good, smells, comfort) elements. Definitely great examples of persuasive copy in PPC ads.
Why it works: These sandwich delivery ads go beyond just shouting “delicious subs here!” They tap into what truly convinces someone to click. Ethos is established through trust signals like star ratings and customer testimonials (“thousands served”), helping ease skepticism. The logical angle comes through in clear, upfront pricing, speedy delivery times, and the variety of options that remove barriers for anyone who’s hungry and indecisive. And of course, the emotional strings are pulled with sensory words: “fresh-baked,” “warm,” “craving satisfied.” Few things are as persuasive as the promise of immediate comfort food delivered to your door.
How to do it: Consider who trusts your product and why. If you’re a sandwich shop, highlight the sheer number of happy customers or showcase glowing reviews from actual local diners. Sprinkle in mouthwatering descriptions to spark cravings. The most persuasive ads combine credibility (“Voted #1 by locals”), logic (“$5 footlongs, delivered in 30 minutes or less”), and emotion (“Satisfy your hunger fast, fresh, and just the way you like it”). This well-rounded approach earns the click and the lunch order.
Sandwich delivery ads.
But why do these work so well? These ads don’t rely on just one tactic: they’re a buffet of persuasion. Showcasing reviews, highlighting how many sandwiches have been delivered, and tempting with fresh, comforting language, they hit every persuasion button in the book. Including a real customer review or sharing that “Over 1 million sandwiches delivered” gives your offer immediate social proof. When people see that others have trusted (and enjoyed) your product, they’re more likely to trust you, too.
Want to replicate this success? Make your value proposition personal and clear. Let your customers speak for you by weaving in their testimonials, or feature stats about your happy (and well-fed) clientele. The more tangible your credibility, the more irresistible your ad.
Pizza delivery examples of persuasive copy for Google Ads. One relies on logical and ethos vs emotional appeal.
Logical and ethos vs emotional appeal for pizza delivery Google Ads.
Notice how one pizza ad leans on logic and trust—think “Voted #1 by locals” or “Delivered hot in 30 minutes, guaranteed”—while the other serves up mouthwatering emotion (“Melted cheese, fresh from the oven!”). Both approaches work, but combining a logical promise with a dash of emotional flavor is the secret sauce.
Nike sneakers Google Ads: These are not Nike stores, so they lack the brand’s built in credibility. Therefore, they use pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews and the on time delivery percentage.
Pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews that give credibility and the on-time delivery percentage.
It’s a classic move: If you don’t have instant brand recognition, borrow trust by leading with customer reviews (“Rated 4.9/5 by 10,000 sneakerheads”) and impressive delivery stats. Shoppers see others like them have had a great experience, and suddenly, your offer feels safer—and a lot more enticing.
How to make this work for you:
Think about your main audience. Are you delivering to busy parents, late-night students, or sneaker collectors?
Boast about who already trusts you. “Trusted by thousands of locals” or “The choice of marathon runners everywhere” is simple, but persuasive.
Don’t just tell—show. Use real reviews or stats to back up your claims and let your customers do the talking.
In short, persuasive ad copy isn’t about choosing ethos, logos, or pathos—it’s about blending them for irresistible appeal.
The Nike Official store, is all about logical persuasion of product availability with some additional credibility elements as message support.
Nike official store Google ad.
PPC ad copywriting for a mobile ad with emotional appeal. Click to call the luxury location of your choice.
PPC ad for best NYC hotels. Luxury, of course.
This ad doesn’t just sell a room. It sells a feeling. The promise of luxury, comfort, and exclusivity is right at your fingertips (or thumb, in this case). Instead of simply listing amenities, the copy invites you to imagine yourself sinking into plush bedding, gazing at skyline views, or lounging in a spa robe. No need to ever leave your oasis in the city.
Why it works
The emotional pull here is all about indulgence and escape. The ad taps into the daydream of finding a hotel so perfect, you’d rather stay in than explore outside. The call-to-action is immediate and personal: “Click to call the luxury location of your choice.” You’re not just booking a room, you’re claiming your spot in a world of comfort.
How to use this approach
To channel this kind of persuasive power, let your ad copy paint a scene. Focus on the lush experience, the feeling of being pampered, and the effortless connection. One tap, and you’re transported from ordinary to extraordinary. Highlighting the emotional benefits, rather than just the features, makes your offer irresistible to anyone craving a touch of luxury.
So many persuasive reasons for that mileage traveler in you. Capital One Venture card uses ethos on their YouTube and TV ads but not on their Google Ads. Here it’s all facts
Capital One Venture card uses logos or logical appeal to persuade to click on this PPC ad.
In a recent conversation, Brian Massey and Andy Crestodina explored the shifting landscape of digital marketing as Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes the “third partner” in the relationship between brands and customers. This shift is fundamentally changing the purpose of a website—from a destination for human eyes to a critical knowledge source for AI training.
As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini increasingly act as “sales reps” or agents for your brand, the strategy for building and maintaining a digital presence must evolve. Here is the breakdown of how to adapt your website for this new era.
The New Role of Your Website
For decades, websites were built for search engines (SEO) and humans (CRO). Today, a third audience has emerged: AI LLMs (Large Language Models).
AI as a Sales Rep: AI helps users decide if a brand is a good option by ingesting data from across the web.
Knowledge Sources: Your website is your best chance to tell your full story—who you serve, how well you do it, and your specific credentials—because it is the only digital property where you have unlimited space to provide data to AI knowledge sources.
The Conversion Trap: While AI traffic may be a small percentage of total visitors today, these users often arrive “further down the funnel” because they have already had long conversations with the AI about their specific goals and context.
Actionable Steps: How to Optimize for AI and Humans
To remain competitive, marketers must “plug holes” in the data AI currently has about their brands.
1. Prioritize Extreme Clarity and Detail
If you were making a page specifically for an AI bot, you would prioritize maximum information over user experience (UX). While you shouldn’t puke “sitemap.xml” onto your homepage, you should ensure your sales and service pages are packed with specific data.
List Proof Points as Text: Don’t rely solely on images or trust seals. AI crawlers may not “see” the pixels of an award badge, so you should list these credentials as text to ensure they are ingested into the training data.
Define Your “Who” and “How”: Clearly state who you do work for, what the outcomes are, and the credentials of those doing the work.
2. Ditch the Generic Assets
AI learns nothing from generic marketing fluff.
Kill the Stock Photos: Brian Massey has long argued against stock photos, but now there is a “moral high ground”: happy people laughing at a laptop tells AI nothing about your brand’s unique value.
Stop Trying to Please Everyone: The mistake many marketers make is being too broad. Use your content to disqualify the wrong prospects and better qualify the right ones.
3. Shift Your SEO Strategy
The “crash in click-through rates” for top-of-funnel informational queries means that optimizing articles for generic keywords is less sustainable.
Focus on Commercial Intent: Double down on optimizing sales and service pages for traditional search and AI, where visitors still have “visit website intent”.
Write for Humans (and Personality): AI can recognize brand personality and humor. Don’t “ring out the cleverness” of your writing; instead, let your brand’s unique voice act as a “culture fit” for potential clients.
4. Feed the AI Beyond Your Website
AI training data isn’t just pulled from your domain; it’s pulled from everywhere.
The “Podcast Pitch”: Because Google (which owns YouTube) has access to video transcripts, any podcast or video appearance is a training opportunity. Always give your clear “pitch” during recorded interviews to ensure that language is ingested and associated with your brand.
Utilize Other Channels: Since Google is less likely to promote your informational articles today, focus on email, social media, and platforms like LinkedIn or YouTube to reach your audience and train AI models simultaneously.
Finding the “Weakest Link”
Ultimately, marketing should still start from the bottom up. Before worrying about ranking for a new informational keyword, Andy Crestodina recommends looking at the end of the conversion chain.
Optimize CTAs: Higher click-through rates on calls to action offer immediate value.
Fix Contact Forms: Use data to find and eliminate friction in your final contact steps.
The digital landscape is moving toward a hybrid model where AI handles the “deep research” and humans make the final connection based on trust and brand experience. By treating your website as a rich data source for AI today, you ensure you are the brand recommended tomorrow.
Taking a cue from Andy’s own suggestion during the interview to “give it to a tool that synthesizes or summarizes it for us,” this blog post was generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) using the full transcript of the conversation between Brian Massey and Andy Crestodina.
Checklist: AI-Friendly Website Elements
Use this checklist to ensure your “AI sales reps” have the best information to recommend your brand.
1. Essential Brand Data (The “Who, How, and Why”)
Detailed “Who We Serve”: Explicitly list your target industries and customer types in plain text.
Specific Outcomes: Describe the exact results you achieve (e.g., “reduced churn by 20%”) rather than using generic marketing fluff.
Credentials as Text: Don’t just show award logos; list awards, certifications, and years of experience as crawlable text.
Author Bios: Include detailed bios for your team with links to LinkedIn or other publications to establish authority.
2. Conversational & Structural Clarity
Direct Answers Top-of-Page: Place the main answer to a query within the first 50–60 words of a section.
Extreme Clarity: Abandon “clever” copywriting in favor of high-detail language that defines concepts clearly.
TL;DR / Key Takeaway Blocks: Add short summaries at the top or bottom of long sections to make them easy for AI to synthesize.
FAQ Sections: Use real customer questions as headings to capture long-tail AI queries.
3. Technical “Machine-Readable” Elements
Logical Heading Hierarchy: Use only one H1 per page, followed by properly nested H2 and H3 tags.
Here is a list of questions you may — and should — ask before you choose the best conversion optimization consultant for your online business.
Maybe you have exhausted your resources or maybe you’d rather have CRO experts maximize your profits. Whatever your situation, it’s time to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business, whether it’s eCommerce, lead gen or subscription website.
But how do you know which optimization professional is the best? Better yet, how do you know which one is the best fit for your needs?
1. How Much will a Conversion Optimization Consultant Cost me?
Small conversion rate optimization firms can be found for as little as $2,500 per month to run tests. For a full team approach, expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per month. Enterprise-focused firms will charge up to $50,000 per month.
Agencies that specialize in search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media and media buying are adding conversion optimization services to their line card for a small fee because clients, like you, are asking for it.
Keep in mind, these agencies are not necessarily conversion specialists. They may be able to run AB ests, but the small fee they charge isn’t likely to impact your bottom line.
Know what you buy into.
When it’s time to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business, you have to understand what their offer actually is.
Do you know how your conversion rate optimization consultant measures success? A great question to ask when you are trying to choose the agency that best fits your website needs.
2. When Will I Start to See Positive Results and a Good Return on Investment
There are two main determinants of your ROI from conversion optimization:
The average value of a conversion (transaction or lead).
The number of conversions you have each month.
The more you make on each conversion, the more you will profit from increases in your conversion rate. The more conversions you have each month, the more ideas you’ll be able to A/B test during that month.
Having said that, conversion optimization is an ongoing process, so it’s important to choose a consultant that can give you ongoing improvements in your conversion rates. After all, their job is to increase your revenues.
To find the answer to this question, ask the consultant about:
Their experence, especially with companies similar to yours
The number of ideas they will be able to work through
Their process for choosing good ideas to test
3. Do I Need to Have My Own Resources? How Much Time Will I Have to Invest in This Project?
This will depend on the type of engagement you are looking for. For example, at Conversion Sciences, we offer our clients a couple of service options.
If they prefer to hand over the conversion rate optimization portion to us, we furnish them with a full CRO team. No company resources needed. Just plan to spend an hour with your conversion consultant each week on an ongoing basis and a bit more while we learn about your online business. Learn more about our Fully-Managed CRO Services here.
If they have an internal conversion team already in place, or they don’t have sufficient traffic to warrant full-time engagement, our clients can opt for our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit. This gives them a thorough analysis of their customer journey that they can use to develop their own experiments.
Our advice: Always ask this question. It will help you better compare and find the best CRO consultant for your website.
4. How Will You Measure Success?
This is a great question that can separate the wheat from the chaff. Let’s explain.
The best answer a CRO consultant can give you is, “We will improve bottom-line metrics such as leads generated, transactions, or subscribers and that’s how we will measure success.”
With this approach, the conversion consultant is incentivized to look at the bottom line as their measure of success. It also aligns the conversion consultant goals with your business goals.
Be careful of optimizing for secondary measures, such as clicks to a page with a form, bounce rate, the time visitors spend on your site or the number of pages they visit on average. It’s possible to improve these numbers without improving bottom-line metrics such as leads generated, transactions, or subscribers.
5. Can You Guarantee Results or a Conversion Rate Increase?
You may be evaluating conversion rate optimization companies that offers a guarantee as well as agencies that work for a percentage of the increased revenue.
While these seem like very tempting offers, they can give you very different experiences over time.
The most extreme guarantee is a pay-for-performance arrangement that boils down to, “I get a cut of your revenues.” On the plus side, the consultant doesn’t get paid if they don’t deliver higher revenues. On the downside, they may get credit for your own in-house promotions, which could raise your costs.
Another thing to remember is that, as revenues increase, this approach leads to higher monthly fees. If your conversion rates improve significantly, that’s good. But it means your consultant is getting paid very high fees. This can make you feel like you’re paying too much.
A variation to this is to pay your consultant only for revenue growth. However, if there is a period in which revenues do not grow, your consultant will be incentivized to pull resources away from your business just when you need them most.
Pay-for-performance may look good up-front. It has a built-in guarantee that reduces the risk of hiring a consultant you’re unfamiliar with. But we have found that it does little to properly align your goals with your consultant.
Would you like a better solution?
Consider asking the conversion consultant to continue working for free if a predetermined goal is not met in a set timeframe.
For example, if they can’t demonstrate a 10% increase in revenue in six months, they keep working for free. When they hit the results, they can start billing you again.
6. How Well Do You Know My Industry / Technology / Platform / Distribution Channel / Market?
If there’s one thing that testing teaches us very quickly, it’s that there is no such thing as a “magic formula.” Ideas that work for similar sites may not work on your audience. Every audience is different.
A conversion optimization consultant that has worked with a number of your competitors will have a playbook of ideas to consider. Many of these ideas never would have occurred to a team with less experience in your industry. If the consultant also know your website platform and technology, their learning curve will be limited mostly to your product, service or business brand.
Having said that, industry experience can also be a hindrance. If the conversion consultant is overly familiar with websites in your industry, they may not be able to look at your site with fresh eyes — a key advantage of external vendors.
All-in-all, a disciplined optimization process will work in any industry. Ask the consultant for some examples of novel ideas that are specific to your industry, but make sure they have a proven, repeatable process.
Before you pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business, decide whether you are looking for a fresh pair of eyes, or for somebody that can quickly catch up and contribute as if they had always been a part of your team.
7. Can You Share Some Case Studies?
A case study will help you understand how the consultant helped other businesses improve conversion rates in lead generation, sales or subscriptions. If a case study shows giant performance gains, take it with a grain of salt. This can happen for you, but not always.
A consultant should be able to show you their case studies, but it’s a good idea to ask to speak with their clients as well.
The consultant will likely refer you to clients they’ve had success with, but it gives you a chance to ask about situations in which your conversion consultant struggled.
How a consultant deals with adversity is as important as how they behave when things are good.
Should your CRO agency guarantee results or a conversion rate Increase?
8. How Will You Get to Know My Target Audience and What Is Your Process Like?
Successful conversion consultants will tell you that they let the data tell them about your audience. Your analytics data, surveys, reviews, and chat transcripts can reveal many issues with your website. If that is not enough, they will also use surveys, session recordings, heatmap reports, and A/B testing.
Any other answer from a CRO consultant could demonstrate that they do not have the optimization experience needed to perform the job.
Getting to know your target audience will be one of the first steps in the CRO process, but it’s important to underestand their entire process. If it isn’t outlined on their website, ask them to explain it to you.
In particular, you’ll want to know how much of your time will be spent supporting the on-boarding process and if there are any additional fees for software or special ad-hoc work.
9. Do You Do Split Testing or Can You Implement Personalized AI-Powered Experiences to My Visitors?
An experienced conversion rate optimization consultant will be well versed on every optimization technique and tool available and will recommend the one that is the best fit for your business.
Stay away from anyone who tries to steer you towards a single solution. For example, be wary of consultants that focus on A/B testing only. Many ideas can be validated or discarded without an A/B test. Ask about online panels, session recordings, heatmap reports, and eye-tracking studies for alternatives.
The most important aspect of experimenting is the choice of ideas to focus on. Since it is easier to generate ideas than to test them, it’s important that the consultant have a process for evaluating and ranking ideas based on expected ROI.
There are a number of standardized ways to rank ideas. The most common framework is ICE, which stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. It helps collect and rank all of the ideas that come up when starting a conversion rate optimization project.
Consultants who rely primarily on heuristics, or best practices, rely on their own experience to decide what to test. This makes them little better than you at picking what to test.
Asking how they prioritize test ideas will weed out the weakest prospective vendors. After all, a solid understanding of methodologies demonstrates the kind of professionalism you are looking for.
11. What Would You Like to Know About Our Company?
Good conversion optimizers will have lots of answers to this question.
They will be ravenous for any data you have, including things like chat transcripts, marketing research, surveys, personas, reviews, advertising data and more. That’s because conversion consultants are uniquely able to turn your existing research into test hypotheses.
Be suspicious of a consultant that doesn’t want to know more about YOUR business. Optimization professionals have inquisitive minds and they always want to know more. By giving them a chance to ask you questions, you can evaluate their curious nature and mental process.
12. Do the People I’ll Be Working With Have Strong Optimization Experience?
More than likely, you’ll have a chance to speak to the top people on the consultant’s team. But it’s important to know who will be assigned to your account.
Are they experienced? How many years?
If they are juniors, what type of supervision will the consultant provide?
Does the person overseeing a junior optimizer have strategic marketing experiencee?
Conversion optimization is a challenging field. This is not a set of skills that is easy to teach in the classroom — which is why the consultant’s process matters.
Your consultant should be able to articulate a repeatable, proven process that has a history of positive results.
13. How Soon Will I See Results?
You will find a wide range of minimum engagements in the marketplace of CRO consultants. Some will take a chance and work with you on a month-to-month basis. Others will require a commitment of three months or more, up to twelve months.
If a consultant asks for no minimum, you should nevertheless ask them for a reasonable timeframe in which you can evaluate their results, a time at which they should be able to defend their performance.
The month-to-month consultant may be willing to take a chance on your website, but you can’t afford the loss of time if their gamble doesn’t pay off. Hold them to a timeframe, but we recommend giving them four months or more.
Most A/B tests are inconclusive. Beware of those who promise results within a short timeframe. CRO consultants should share previous and similar experiences, but they won’t be able to make claims about your returns until they start working with you.
Keep in mind, estimates and experience aren’t promises of future performance. No two websites or businesses are completely alike. The optimizers working on your website will need to gather and analyze lots of data before they can set realistic expectations.
14. Do You Work With the Tools We Own or Can Afford?
If you have already invested in conversion optimization tools, mention this in your first conversation. You will want your consultant to know you expect them to use your tools proficiently, or to have experience with similar tools from different vendors.
As far as affordability goes, we live in a golden age of marketing tools. There are many options at many price points. The consultant should be able to help you choose a tool that fits their needs and your budget.
Note: Most conversion consultants will give you a better return on your investment in optimization tools.
Here is a list of questions you may – and should – ask before you choose the best conversion optimization consultant for your online business.
In 2025, this questions goes to the top of the list. How are you using AI and how will you help me use AI to not get left behind?
15. What Is the Consultant’s Testing Philosophy?
Each consultant will have a testing philosophy. Some favor scientific rigor. Others favor quick decisions. Here are some questions to ask them, with the answers you will want to hear.
How long do AB tests take?
No AB test should be stopped before two full weeks have passed. If you have a high volume of conversions, one week may be acceptable, but no less. Read our AB testing guide here.
Will you stop a variation if it looks really negative?
Most conversion consultants will monitor tests and stop any variations that seem to be underperforming to avoid lost sales and fewer leads.
Do you let tests overlap?
If your prospective conversion consultant plans to run tests on multiple pages of your site, there is a risk of polluting the data and making bad calls. They should be able to keep visitors from one test getting into other tests on your site.
How do you do quality assurance on tests?
The tools used by a conversion consultant give them sweeping powers to alter your site. It is surprisingly easy to break your website with these tools. A thorough Quality Assurance (QA) process includes testing on multiple devices and involves several people before changes go live.
What kind of post-test analysis do you do?
Even if a test finishes and there is no winning variation, your conversion consultant can learn important things from the data.
Their knowledge of analytics will allow them to see how the test impacted other segments of your audience.
For example, it is common for an idea to impact desktop and mobile visitors very differently. The same is true for new visitors versus returning visitors.
This is called “post-test” analysis. It allows you to get even more value from every A/B test. This should be part of their capability.
Can you perform multivariate tests?
If you have a high-volume site, multivariate testing is a way to work through many design changes, discovering what combination is most impactful for a given website.
Multivariate testing is not appropriate for most businesses.
However, you should ask about the newer generation of AI-driven multivariate testing that uses machine learning to personalize your website in real time.
How to Pick a Conversion Optimization Consultant for Your Online Business
Final word of advice: no matter who you choose, make sure the consultant you hire is the one that is able to deliver on the strategy you need.
The best CRO agencies will tell you if they are unable to help you and may even recommend alternative solutions to your business problem.
Use these questions when you’re ready to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business. Who knows? It may even be us!
Emotions drive conversions — and in this episode of Intended Consequences, Brian Massey sits down with Joe Putnam, founder of Conversion Engine, to explore how top-performing ecommerce brands are using AI CRO strategies to scale faster, test better, and connect more deeply with their customers.
You’ll hear how Joe’s team analyzes customer reviews at scale to uncover emotional triggers, how they test ad angles that competitors often miss, and why a “boots that hurt” campaign might not be the golden angle you think it is.
Why Emotions Still Win in Marketing (Even for Practical Products)
“People buy with emotion and justify with logic,” Joe explains — and it’s not just for luxury brands like BMW.
From cowboy boots to baby products, emotional triggers like trust, belonging, pride, and joy show up in customer language all the time. Even in seemingly utilitarian products like closet storage or bathroom scales, people make decisions based on how they feel about the product, not just what it does.
The key is knowing which emotional buttons to push, and that’s where AI CRO strategies come into play.
Finding Emotional Patterns
Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying the emotions behind the words people use — especially in product reviews, support tickets, and social comments.
Traditionally, marketers had to manually scan hundreds of reviews to pick up on these emotional patterns. Today, Joe’s team uses ChatGPT and other AI tools to streamline this process:
“We copy and paste hundreds of reviews into ChatGPT and ask it to do an emotional sentiment analysis,” Joe says. “What problems are being solved? What are people feeling? What language are they using?”
AI CRO strategies like this quickly surface pain points, unique selling propositions, and emotional value statements that can power ad copy, email campaigns, and landing pages.
Building an Emotional Connection
Once the team has pulled emotional themes from the reviews, they organize them into distinct messaging angles — each one reflecting a different emotional trigger. These angles might include:
Trust & security: “I know these will last. Worth every penny.”
Belonging: “I feel like I’m part of a community.”
Confidence: “I walk taller when I wear these boots.”
Joy & reward: “I bought these for myself as a gift. It felt amazing.”
Instead of just running ads that say, “Tired of boots that hurt?” over and over, Joe’s team builds multiple ads targeting different emotional angles. Then, they let the data reveal which message resonates most with the brand’s audience.
Takeaway: You’re probably underutilizing your customer reviews. With the right prompt, AI can uncover 3–5 powerful emotional angles you may have never tested.
Does AI-led Sentiment Analysis Work for All Products?
Yes, even for “boring” or utilitarian products. Joe explains:
“Whether you’re selling cowboy boots or closet storage, you’re always trying to tap into emotion. It might be fear, trust, anxiety, or satisfaction. But emotion is there. And when you find the right one, your results improve.”
Some products might lean into pride or aspiration. Others might connect through relief or peace of mind. In every case, the emotional experience is as important as the feature set.
Why AI Doesn’t Replace the Marketer
Let’s be clear: AI isn’t doing the job for you — it’s helping you do your job better.
Joe emphasizes that AI CRO strategies are a shortcut to better ideas, not a replacement for judgment:
“You still need human intelligence to decide which angles are worth testing, which copy resonates, and which ideas are off-brand. AI gives us more clay to mold — but we still have to be the sculptor.”
AI may generate seven ad angles. But maybe only two of them are good. With a trained marketing team, you can spot the winners, test them faster, and scale what works.
The best ads in the world can fail if the landing page doesn’t match the emotional promise.
One mistake Joe often sees: sending all ad traffic to the same product listing or category page, regardless of the ad’s message.
Instead, he recommends:
Creating custom landing pages for different ad angles.
Reinforcing the same emotional message from ad to landing page.
Using customer language throughout the copy and CTA.
“If the ad is about personal pride or reward, make sure the landing page reflects that. That emotional consistency is what drives higher conversions.”
Mistakes to Avoid with AI and CRO
While AI can be powerful, it’s not infallible. Joe warns of a few key pitfalls:
❌ Mistake 1: Believing Every Insight is Gold
Not every insight generated by AI deserves to be tested. Use your experience and brand knowledge to filter the noise.
❌ Mistake 2: Ignoring the Landing Page
Even strong ads will underperform if the landing page doesn’t deliver on the emotional promise of the creative.
❌ Mistake 3: Over-engineering Prompts
You don’t need “prompt engineering” skills to make this work. Start simple:
“Conduct emotional sentiment analysis on these reviews.”
Let the AI do the heavy lifting — then dig deeper based on what it returns.
Quickstart Guide: How to Use AI in Your Ecommerce Ad Strategy
If you want to try this for your brand, here’s a simple way to get started:
Collect Reviews – Grab 100–200 reviews from your product pages or Amazon listings.
Drop into ChatGPT (or your AI of choice) – Use a prompt like, “Analyze these for emotional sentiment. What feelings are customers expressing? What problems are they solving? What language repeats?”
Extract Emotional Angles – Look for clusters: trust, pride, satisfaction, relief, identity, etc.
Translate into Messaging Pillars – Create 3–5 core messaging angles that represent your product’s emotional impact.
Test in Ads and Landing Pages – Build multiple creatives — each aligned with a different pillar — and track which one drives the most engagement and conversions.
Final Thoughts: Emotions Scale. AI Speeds It Up.
The secret to ecommerce success isn’t just in your product specs. It’s in the emotional response you trigger. And now, thanks to AI, you can discover those responses faster than ever.
As Joe Putnam puts it:
“AI doesn’t give you the final product. But it gets you 80% of the way there — and helps you uncover ideas you wouldn’t find on your own.”
In this episode of Intended Consequences, Brian Massey sits down with Deborah O’Malley, founder of GuessTheTest.com, to explore the fast-changing world of AI in experimentation — from A/B testing myths to the ways AI is already changing how digital marketers approach conversion optimization.
And yes, they really do debate whether AI will kill our creativity.
Deborah pulls no punches: “People are still testing button colors and headlines when they should be testing concepts.”
That’s one of the many interesting misconceptions about experimentation. But as she explains, the most valuable insights come from big, bold tests — especially ones that challenge your brand’s assumptions. And with the arrival of generative AI, we now have the ability to scale those tests like never before.
How AI in Experimentation Is Changing the Game
AI isn’t just writing headlines — it’s redesigning the entire optimization process. Deborah and Brian explore a few critical shifts:
1. Faster Hypothesis Generation
AI can instantly produce dozens of test ideas based on your existing content, analytics, or competitor sites. This helps marketers and CRO pros move from analysis paralysis to active testing — fast.
“You can use AI to brainstorm variations you’d never think of on your own,” Deborah explains. “That means more creative testing… not less.”
2. Pattern Recognition at Scale
While most human optimizers rely on gut instinct or anecdotal evidence, AI can spot trends in user behavior across massive datasets. That means smarter test prioritization, better personalization, and tighter feedback loops.
3. Test Ideas From Outside Your Echo Chamber
AI doesn’t share your brand biases — and that’s a good thing. By using tools like ChatGPT to simulate how different personas react to your copy or design, you can explore radically new angles without waiting for an actual test to finish.
From “Interesting” to “Impactful”
One of Deborah’s boldest claims: We should stop chasing ‘interesting’ test results.
Why? Because what’s interesting isn’t always what moves the needle.
“You want tests that are valid, repeatable, and drive real business results. That’s where AI can help — it brings a level of objectivity and scale that humans alone can’t match.”
In other words, AI in experimentation isn’t replacing us — it’s upgrading us.
Want to Test Better? Start Here.
Whether you’re a CRO veteran or just getting started with testing, this episode is packed with practical insights:
✅ Which A/B tests are still worth running ✅ How to think beyond copy tweaks and start testing experiences ✅ Why generative AI might be your best brainstorming partner ✅ And how to avoid common pitfalls that make test results meaningless
And don’t worry — it’s not all tech talk. Deborah and Brian also cover the human side of experimentation, from internal politics to the fear of failure.
Final Thoughts: Embrace AI in Your Testing Workflow
This episode challenges us to move past the superficial and start building testing programs that matter. Whether you’re optimizing landing pages, ecommerce funnels, or entire customer journeys, AI in experimentation is the lever that can help you scale faster and learn deeper — without sacrificing creativity.
“When used well, AI becomes the co-pilot of every test you run,” Brian says. “It accelerates creativity, supports analysis, and helps you ask better questions — the real key to CRO.”
A high-converting landing page looks deceptively simple, but if you’ve made online offers, you know how hard it can be to get the results you’re looking for.
In this guide, we talk about how to optimize a landing page for peak performance, why it matters, landing page best practices, and key strategies for improving your landing page copy, design, and overall performance.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is the page in any campaign — ad, email, social media post, or website link — that “catches” the clicks generated. For a Google Shopping Ad, the product page is the landing page. For a SaaS business, a standalone web page may be developed that promotes the product, service, or offer.
Landing pages are powerful because they are designed to deliver on the promise made and encourage visitors to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper.
The success of a marketing campaign is as dependent on the landing page as it is the ad creative.
To keep the promise made in the ad, email, social post, or link that preceded the page.
To ask your visitor to do something.
If you don’t know the promise that is being made that brings visitors to the page, you are building some other kind of page.
If you are putting any information on the page that does not make the visitor feel more comfortable and confident in the offer, you are building some other kind of page.
Landing page optimization is the process of fine-tuning a landing page’s content and design to maximize its ability to convert visitors into leads or customers. Landing page optimization should adhere to five core guidelines:
Keep the promise: The landing page should align with the message and value proposition presented in the ad or link that led the visitor to the page.
Craft a compelling offer: The landing page should clearly communicate the offer or benefit that visitors will receive in exchange for their action.
Design for conversions: The layout, design, and copy on the landing page should be optimized to guide visitors through the content on the page and make it clear that they are being asked to do something. The layout should establish a clear visual hierarchy that pulls a visitor’s eyes through the messaging. This includes using persuasive copywriting, relevant images, and clear call-to-actions while minimizing confusion.
Promote trust and credibility: The landing page should build trust by displaying customer testimonials, reviews, or other forms of social proof. It should also ensure that the page is secure and error-free.
Track and analyze: Using analytics tools, the optimizer will monitor the performance of the landing page and identify areas for improvement. Split testing can be used to test different elements of the landing page and determine what works best for the target audience.
Why Landing Page Optimization Matters Now, More than Ever
It’s more challenging than ever to get your message in front of your best customers. Landing page optimization helps you identify the issues that keep your offers from converting while improving their conversion rate.
These issues in particular are impacting the effectiveness of most landing pages:
Steady increase in search ad costs
More noise in social news feeds
Rising user expectations
Increasing competition in digital spaces
Advancements in technology
Rising user expectations
The average conversion rate for landing pages across all industries is 5.89%, according to HubSpot. Wordstream’s estimate is lower, at 2.35%, with only the top 25% of brands hitting 5.31% or more. Meanwhile, 10% is considered a good conversion rate.
Regardless of the true average, there’s a pretty deep disparity between a good conversion rate and the conversion rate most marketers are achieving. From our experience, that boils down to trust.
People buy from brands they know, like and trust. Many landing pages focus almost exclusively on their offer. This “all-about-me” approach kills trust.
That’s why, when optimizing landing pages, marketers need to ensure the page communicates credibility and trust.
Increasing competition in digital spaces
The digital economy has radically increased the competitive landscape for most businesses. Within this landscape, there are some things we can control and some we cannot.
What we can’t control are the things that our competitors influence, such as ad auctions and SEO.
The cost of Google Ads is trending up, pricing out many brands. According to the 2024 Google Ads Benchmark:
Cost per click increased for 86% of industries.
Conversion rates decreased for 12 out of 23 industries.
Cost per lead increased for 19 out of 23 industries.
Social media platforms have designed their algorithms to devalue most commercial posts so that businesses must advertise. And these ads no longer deliver “cheap” clicks.
The #1 result in Google’s search results gets 27.6% of organic search traffic. Competition for this is heavy.
What we can control are the assets we build for our digital businesses.
Our email lists
Our SMS lists
Our landing pages and websites
These assets cannot be taken from you. Investing in them creates a barrier that your competition cannot take away by bidding more.
Improving your conversion rates by 10% has the same effect on your business as reducing cost per ad click by 10%. Both decrease your acquisition costs by 10%, but one of these strategies is in your control and the other is not.
Your competitive edge comes from your ability to provide an effective user experience.
Does investing a portion of your ad spend in your landing experiences make sense?
Research by Forrester found that delivering excellent experiences directly impacts a business’s bottom line:
36% higher growth rates
1.9 times the return on ad spend
1.9 times higher average order value
It’s only through the conversion optimization process that companies are able to improve the user experience and refine their messaging. By providing better data, it helps brands adapt to changing trends and consumer behaviors, raising credibility and trust in the eyes of potential customers.
Advancements in technology
Technological advances like AI and machine learning (ML) are revolutionizing the way landing page optimization is done. They enhance the functionality of CRO tools by providing additional insights, task automation, and optimization opportunities. And they are able to identify opportunities that human analysts might miss, leading to more effective CRO strategies.
Here are a few benefits we’ve seen from AI and ML technology:
Enhancing Personalization: AI-powered tools analyze user behavior, demographics, and preferences to create personalized landing pages that resonate with each individual.
Automating Optimization: Machine learning (ML) algorithms can automatically test and adjust landing page elements, such as content, images, and call-to-actions. They do this in real-time, making optimization efforts more efficient and giving them better outcomes.
Leveraging Predictive Analytics: AI models predict which landing page variations are likely to perform best for specific audience segments, allowing marketers to make data-driven decisions faster.
Delivering Better Customer Experiences: With AI and ML, marketers can create landing pages that are tailored to the individual needs and desires of each visitor, providing a seamless and engaging user experience that increases customer satisfaction and conversion rates.
Key Elements of an Optimized Landing Page
Landing Page Element 1: A clear and compelling offer
Visitors should know at a glance what the offer is and whether it’s right for them. The value proposition should establish two things very quickly:
That the visitor is in the right place for the problem they are trying to solve.
That there is a good reason for them to continue exploring the site.
Landing Page Element 2: Relevant and persuasive copy
The landing page should use conversion copywriting techniques to showcase the value proposition, benefits of the offer, and the value of taking action. The copy must:
Resonate with the target audience (but not everyone else)
Offer intrinsic value for engaging with the page and extrinsic value for taking action
Highlight the offer and everything it includes
Make it a no-brainer to take action
Landing Page Element 3: High-quality visuals
Your message isn’t just conveyed through words. Your text and images work together to convey your message. That being the case, a landing page should use high-quality images and videos to convey additional layers of meaning. These visuals should:
Support the offer visually
Make the page more engaging
Lead the visitor’s eye to important information
Captions are as important as headlines. Write captions below photos and graphics that explain why you chose that image for the reader. If you can’t come up with a good reason, the image shouldn’t be on the page.
Avoid stock photos and lifestyle images. This pandering may not be effective for our ever-smarter audiences.
Landing Page Element 4: A strong call to action (CTA)
The call to action is the reason a landing page exists — it should be easy to understand, easy to see, and easy to respond to.
A web form is the most common way for visitors to take action on a site. This can be the product selector on an ecommerce product page or simply a button to take visitors to the next step. Optimizers know that the call to action — be it a form, button, or calendar — should be very visible to visitors. It should be clear what is being asked of the visitor and what will happen if they take that action.
Calling the visitor to action is best done with active verbs: buy, order, download, call. We’ll talk more about urgency in a moment, but you can add subtle urgency to your CTA simply by adding words like “now.”
A strong CTA includes an action word and subtle urgency
A strong CTA includes an action word and subtle urgency
Calls to action are most effective when they are truthful. Am I actually going to get a quote when I complete this form, or am I going to get a call from a helpful salesperson? “Get an instant quote” is a good choice for the former, and “Request a quote” is appropriate for the latter. For guidance on creating CTAs that work, ask about our lead generation services.
Landing Page Element 5: Social proof
Social proof is a technique that uses the actions of others to influence the behavior of your visitors. It can be created in a variety of ways: number of happy customers, client logos, awards, and trust elements, for instance.
Management consulting firm Kearney reports that consumers typically make purchases based on recommendations from both friends / family and online reviews. That’s why many high-converting landing pages include testimonials or reviews from satisfied customers.
Landing Page Element 6: Urgency and Risk Reversal
The landing page should create a sense of urgency to encourage visitors to take action immediately. At the same time, it can relieve the visitor’s anxiety by taking risk out of the equation.
As we just mentioned, you can add subtle urgency with the word “now” in your call to action. But you can also create urgency with limited-time discounts or fast-action bonuses, or by mentioning the risks of not acting now.
If you are going to provide a money-back guarantee, warranty, or generous return policy, be specific in your description.
For instance, AppSumo drives action by placing a time limit on their offers. Products are steeply discounted and may never be available at the listed price again. They juxtapose this with a 60-day money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
AppSumo uses urgency and a strong guarantee to drive action
Landing Page Element 7: Mobile friendliness
It’s vital that landing pages are easy to read and engage with on a mobile device.
61.21% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices.
The average consumer spends 4 hours and 37 minutes looking at their phone screen every day.
82% of online buyers purchased a product they found on social media while using their mobile phone.
Here’s how to ensure your landing pages are mobile-friendly:
Above-the-fold content should be prioritized.
Copy and forms should be concise.
The page should be responsive.
Page load time should be less than 3 seconds, and ideally less than 1 second.
A word about page design: The design of a page will communicate credibility. A professional design delivers a subconscious message that this company is serious and credible. However, self-serving copy, unclear calls to action, lack of social proof, or broken mobile pages will instantly undo even the most competent of designs. Don’t focus on the design. Focus on the content.
Landing Page Optimization Process
As we’ve discussed, optimizing a landing page is about making incremental improvements in the page’s conversion rate. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t a linear process with a clear beginning and end.
Landing page optimization is an ongoing process of gathering insights, creating hypotheses, experimenting and testing, and evaluating results. For simplicity’s sake, we’ve broken the process into four stages. In reality, these stages may overlap, and you’ll likely be running multiple tests at the same time.
Stage 1: Conduct Research
How is the page currently performing?
Gather data from analytics, surveys, and user testing to identify areas for improvement.
Analyze ad campaigns and email offers to understand the promises made to visitors.
Define the goals and target audience for the landing page.
Stage 2: Identify Areas for Improvement
Review the landing page design, copy, and overall user experience.
Use heat maps, click tracking, and scroll tracking to identify areas of high and low engagement.
Conduct customer research to narrow design choices..
Stage 3: Implement Changes
Make incremental changes. If you can, design an experiment, such as an A/B test.
Prioritize changes that address the most critical issues first.
Collaborate with designers and copywriters to implement the changes effectively.
Stage 4: Evaluate Results
Track “bottom-line” metrics such as purchase rates, form completion rates, and checkout abandonment rates.
Use analytics and testing to measure the impact of the changes.
Make further adjustments based on the evaluation results to continuously improve the landing page performance.
Rinse and Repeat
Good conversion rates require a continuous process of experimentation, monitoring, and analysis that lead to small improvements over time.
Just remember, optimization decisions are data-driven, not opinion-based. By using data to guide optimization efforts, optimizers are able to design tests that continually improve conversion rates.
Best Practices for Well-Optimized Landing Pages
As marketers, we gravitate toward “best practices” for whatever strategy we’re employing. So before we dive too deeply into best practices, let’s be clear: The tactics that work for one brand and audience will differ from what works for another brand and audience, even if they’re in the same industry or serving the same audience.
Most best practices are just a starting point for conversion optimizers. But there are a few landing page optimization best practices that never change. In particular:
Keeping your pages audience-centric
Minimizing opportunities for visitors to navigate away from the page
A/B testing
Audience-Centric Pages
A well-optimized landing page offers is all about your audience — not your brand or product. The language, visuals, and messaging should be tailored to a unique audience and speak to their specific pain points and desires.
Done right, the landing page will make visitors feel seen and understood. Because it expresses their pain points better than they can, they sense that you have expertise in the area. This builds trust, and they begin to trust that your offer will work for them.
This landing page by #samsales speaks directly to the struggling salesperson. It acknowledges that salespeople dread prospecting and explains why it’s such a challenge. It then offers the solution: a playbook with everything the salesperson needs to prospect like a pro.
That’s likely enough to drive sales, but this landing page also answers the biggest objection: Is this product right for me? The answer doesn’t just share some of the specific information available in the guide. It also expresses the relief salespeople feel when they get this information.
An effective landing page keeps the focus on the audience, their desires, and their goals. Make sure your pages:
Clearly address visitors’ motivations, pains, and interests
Use their vocabulary, feelings, and knowledge level
Answer key objections before they become a hindrance to conversion
Focused Navigation
To increase conversions, a landing page should be stripped of any element that could distract visitors from the action they’re being asked to take. That includes navigation options.
Avoid using your website’s standard navigation scheme. Replace it with a navigation that supports the offer on your landing page. In many cases, the landing page doesn’t need navigation. Without unnecessary navigation, the landing page can focus the visitor’s attention on the primary call to action. This reduces confusion about the message and offer. It also encourages your visitors to stay on the page and take the desired action.
Yuppiechef tested two variations of their Wedding Registry landing page, one with navigation and one without. The variation with no navigation delivered twice as many conversions, and the conversion rate jumped from 3% to 6%.
Removing navigation and links reduces the number of choices available to visitors. This lowers the likelihood of them navigating off the page and raises the odds that they’ll take action.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a landing page to determine which one performs better. This is a science-based approach to optimization that ensures the page continues to convert well.
It’s important to keep these A/B testing best practices in mind:
Ensure you have enough conversions: A/B testing requires a sufficient flow of conversions if the test is to reach statistical significance before you reach old age. Use a free test calculator to see if you have enough traffic and conversions on a page.
Define relevant metrics: Before you launch the test, establish the specific metrics you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of the landing pages. Compare rates, such as revenue per visitor, purchase rate, or form completion rate.
Establish a testing framework: Choose your preferred method of experimentation — A/B testing or multivariate testing. A/B testing compares two or more versions of a page, while multivariate testing involves varying multiple elements simultaneously. Multivariate testing requires a large amount of traffic.
Implement the changes: Create two (or more) versions of the landing page, each with different elements or content. Ensure that the changes align with your hypotheses or research about what might improve performance.
Drive traffic to the landing pages: To generate insights into user behavior and expectations, optimizers direct a sample of visitors to each version of the landing page. The sample size must be large enough to provide statistically significant results.
Collect and analyze data: Use analytics tools to track the performance of each landing page and gather data on the relevant metrics. Analyze the results to identify which version performs better based on the pre-defined metrics.
Make data-driven decisions: Based on the analysis, determine which version of the landing page has a higher conversion rate or other desired outcome. Consider implementing the more effective version or conducting further testing to refine the results.
Landing Page Optimization Strategies
The best conversion rates are only achieved through ongoing optimization. That’s why optimizers adopt a culture of experimentation and testing. Here are eight landing page optimization strategies they rely on to get maximum results.
1. Keep the Promise
A landing page’s primary purpose is to fulfill the expectations set by the link or advertisement that led visitors to the page. Failing to keep that promise makes people feel cheated, like you’ve broken a promise or bait-and-switched them. This can lead to distrust and high exit rates.
To avoid this, it’s crucial to ensure that the landing page’s offer aligns precisely with the promise made in the ad or link. Use similar language. Highlight the same benefits. Avoid any discrepancies that could confuse or disappoint visitors.
Segment does a good job of keeping its promise in this email-to-landing page sequence. Notice that everything feels consistent, from the color of the button to the way the problem is expressed.
By keeping the promise made in the previous funnel step, landing pages can build trust, enhance the user experience, and increase the likelihood that visitors will take the desired action.
2. Use a Descriptive Call to Action (CTA)
A descriptive call to action is an essential element on any landing page. It guides visitors towards the intended action and explicitly asks them to perform it.
A good example is the Segment landing page above. The CTA is clearly stated in the title of the form: “Register to Watch Recording.” The button, which stands out in green, then repeats the action this landing page is asking for: REGISTER.
Clear CTA on Segment’s landing page
To be effective, the call to action should be prominently displayed on the landing page, using visual cues such as contrasting colors, bold fonts, or eye-catching graphics. It should also be placed strategically to ensure that visitors can easily locate and engage with it. (We’ll talk about your options for CTA placement in a minute.)
For now, just realize that without a strong CTA, the landing page won’t work. And by optimizing the call to action, landing pages can increase conversion rates and drive more profitable outcomes.
3. Optimize Copy and Design
Optimizing landing pages requires a collaboration between copywriters, designers, and optimizers. Designers can provide valuable input on the visual presentation, while copywriters ensure that the messaging is clear, compelling, and aligned with the overall goals of the landing page.
Clear and Persuasive Copy
Well-crafted copy plays a vital role in landing page optimization. It helps to establish credibility, build trust, and address visitors’ concerns. Keep these copywriting tips top of mind:
Matching the ad: Align the landing page copy with the message and language used in the advertisement or promotion that brought the visitor to the page.
Addressing objections: Anticipate and address potential objections or questions the visitor may have.
Using persuasive language: Employ persuasive writing techniques to encourage visitors to take the desired action, such as highlighting the benefits, creating a sense of urgency, or using social proof.
Effective Design
The design of a landing page directly influences its visual appeal, user experience, and overall effectiveness. Key design considerations include:
Relevance to the offer: Use images, graphics, and layout to visually reinforce the landing page’s offer and value proposition.
Guiding the eye: Create visual cues, such as contrasting colors, bold fonts, and whitespace, to guide the visitor’s attention towards the most important elements of the page.
Minimizing distractions: Avoid unnecessary clutter or extraneous elements that can hinder the visitor’s focus and detract from the desired action.
4. Include Social Proof and Credibility
Social proof and credibility help to build trust between the visitor and the brand, and increase the likelihood that visitors will take the desired action. This is why landing pages often include trust symbols, such as logos of well-known brands or security seals.
Squirrly shows social proof on their landing page with this banner just under the fold:
Social proof on Squirrly’s lifetime deal landing page
Social proof on Squirrly’s lifetime deal landing page
It builds trust quickly by telling us that 200,000+ websites are using the tool, which has earned 4- and 5-star ratings on three reputable sites. It also shows a series of awards from G2.
5. Use Different Landing Page Types
Depending on your offer, you might need to adjust the layout of your landing page by moving the call to action. Here are four places to put your calls to action and their purpose:
Top Hat
The top hat places a call-to-action above the page’s content. Its purpose: to grab the reader’s attention and promote the offer even before they read the content.
Here’s how Airbnb does it. You can’t miss this call to action, and to ensure you don’t, it stays visible as you scroll through the page.
Pressure Release
When visitors don’t find what they want on the page, they scroll back to the top of the page to find the information they need: phone numbers, shopping cart links, calls to action, and the search bar. By placing these items in the upper right corner of the page, you make them impossible to miss, and in the process, release the pressure felt by your visitors.
This landing page by Imperial Ghostwriting is a good example. The top of the page has a three-way CTA — button, email, and phone number — for anyone who’s ready to take action.
Because it’s so close to the headline, the brain connects this call to action with the offer. But because it’s in the banner at the top of the page, it doesn’t disrupt the visual impact of the page.
Dripping Pan
The dripping pan is a call-to-action at the bottom of the page, giving visitors one last chance to take action. A visitor that has read the entire page is probably more likely to take action. Make it easy for them.
This landing page by Clifford Ghostwriting is a good example. The yellow box at the bottom of the page gives one final push to take action and includes a phone number to talk with an expert right away.
Coffee Breaks
The coffee break places in-line calls to action throughout the content of the page. This engages the reader and allows them to take action at whatever point they’re ready, without disrupting their reading flow.
This approach works well on a long-form landing page, like this one from DigitalMarketer. The call to action is strategically repeated throughout the page so it’s easy for people to take action, no matter where they are on the page.
Of course, there are other options as well. Here are some other landing page types that suit different purposes:
Wheelie Popper: A scroll-triggered pop-up that appears when a visitor has scrolled a certain percentage of the page.
Jilted Lovers: An exit-intent pop-up that appears when a visitor is about to leave the page.
Inliner: An inline call-to-action that is placed within the content of a landing page.
Compass: A call-to-action that is placed in the sidebar of a landing page.
6. Ask for Necessary Information Only
People are wary about sharing their personal information online. Even a simple request for the visitor’s email address can create a barrier and discourage them from taking action. It’s critical to keep this in mind when asking for personal information.
To combat this, consider each piece of information being requested in the landing page form, and only include fields that are absolutely necessary for the specific landing page’s purpose.
According to Google, the majority of mobile sites are still too slow and bloated to meet user’s expectations. Their research shows that:
As the number of page elements (text, titles, and images) increase, the probability of conversion drops 95%.
As the page load time increases from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.
Adopt a mobile-first design approach to ensure your landing page is accessible, easy to navigate, and visually appealing on smaller screens.
8. Test and Iterate
The ongoing process of experimentation and testing allows you to collect valuable data and insights that improve future optimization efforts. This provides:
Higher Conversion Rates: Iterative testing helps identify areas for improvement, such as headlines, images, call-to-actions, and form designs, leading to increased conversion rates.
Data-Driven Optimization: Accurate data allows optimizers to generate real insights into customers and their expectations. Through experimentation and testing, they gain quantifiable data that support decision-making based on actual results rather than assumptions.
Identification of User Pain Points: By testing different variations, you can identify specific elements or content that create friction or obstacles for users, allowing you to address these pain points and improve the user experience.
Reduced Abandonment: By identifying and addressing potential barriers to conversion, testing helps reduce abandonment rates and increases the likelihood of users completing desired actions.
Increased ROI: Effective landing pages contribute to increased return on investment (ROI) by optimizing conversions and driving more qualified leads or sales.
Accelerate Your Conversion Journey: Key Steps Forward
Landing page optimization is a foundational strategy in digital marketing, unlocking increased conversions, enhanced user experience, and improved return on investment. But it requires a data-driven, scientific approach.
How to Filter Bot Traffic in Google Analytics With Ask Advisor
Web AnalyticsGet an immediate lift in your conversion rate without changing anything.
We can raise your conversion rate in about ten minutes.
You will not run a test. You will not change a headline, move a button, or ask a developer for anything.
Your conversion rate will go up, and the new number will be more honest than the old one.
Most of the internet is not people anymore.
The bot traffic problem we keep finding in client accounts
Automated traffic passed human traffic in 2024 and has kept climbing.
The 2026 Bad Bot Report puts automated traffic at more than 53% of all web traffic. Bad bots alone account for 40%.
The newer pressure comes from language models. Cloudflare handles something like 50 billion AI crawler requests a day, and some of that is aimed at you.
We see some version of it in most of our clients’ data.
It costs real money. Roughly $63 billion in global ad spend went to invalid traffic last year, and about one in twelve of your paid clicks is not a person.
It also quietly wrecks your tests. Bots have no preferences, so they land in both variants and convert at zero in both.
That drags the two arms toward each other. Enough of them and a real winner reads as a tie. Our guide to A/B testing statistics covers why.
So you get a slower answer, a wrong cost per acquisition, and a quarter of decisions that were slightly off in a direction nobody could see.
What sellable traffic means
Your conversion rate is a fraction. Conversions on top, sessions on the bottom.
Nearly every dollar you spend on optimization goes to the top of that fraction. Better copy, faster pages, cleaner forms.
Almost nobody audits the bottom.
Sellable traffic is the share of your sessions that could plausibly buy from you. Not sessions that did buy. Sessions that were capable of it.
A bot cannot buy from you.
Neither can your developer testing checkout. Or the job applicant reading your careers page. Or the customer logging in to track last week’s order. Or the student in a country you do not ship to.
They are all sitting in your denominator right now, making your conversion rate look worse than it is.
On one specialty ecommerce site we audited, ninety percent of the sessions in the denominator were machines.
The site reported a 0.28% conversion rate. The real rate was 2.6%, which is about where a site like that should be.
That number also fixes your test schedules. Hand a duration calculator gross sessions when a third of them are machines, and every test runs a third longer than your plan says.
The button in Google Analytics you have probably never pressed
There is an icon in the upper right of your GA4 interface that opens a chat window.
It is called Ask Advisor. Google folded its earlier Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor tools into this one assistant, so you may still see the old names around.
Most marketers we talk to have not clicked it. A few clicked it, asked something vague, got something vague back, and never returned.
It is free. It is already in your account. No API key, no developer, no credit card.
What it needs is a real question.
One thing Google does not document is the size of the box. The input caps at 2019 characters.
I found that by pasting progressively longer prompts until it broke, which is a dull afternoon I am happy to have spent on your behalf.
The prompt below is 1,905 characters. It fits with room to spare, and the reason it reads so tersely is that ceiling.
Use Ask Advisor to audit your GA4 traffic
This is the prompt we use. It is yours.
Open GA4, click the Ask Advisor icon, and paste it in.
No email gate, no download form, no upsell.
Two things make the next five minutes go better.
Ask Advisor has no copy or save button, and copying the report destroys the formatting. That is why step 8 asks for Markdown. If you forget, a second message saying “display the report as Markdown” converts what it already wrote.
The 2019 cap applies to each message, not the whole conversation. So spend a second message on your business.
Ours would say: our office is in Austin, our staging site is staging.example.com, and we cannot ship outside North America.
The report gets noticeably better for it.
The segments, and how you know
The report walks your traffic layer by layer. Here is how to find bot traffic in Google Analytics, and how to tell the report got it right.
How to identify bot traffic in Google Analytics
Most bots never reach GA4, because they do not run JavaScript. The ones that do are the ones worth finding.
The prompt asks for daily spikes far above your median arriving as Direct with no landing page. It asks for data center cities, which is why Ashburn, Council Bluffs, Boardman, Columbus and Dublin are in there.
Not many people live in a data center.
Then it asks for your top screen resolutions, which is the tell that rarely gets checked.
On that specialty ecommerce site, 11.8 million sessions arrived at 1600×1600. Zero purchases, 3.8 seconds each, 0.33 pages per session.
On Google’s own demo store, 129,929 sessions arrived at 1024×1024.
Screens are not square.
No monitor, laptop, tablet or phone ships with a 1:1 aspect ratio. A large block of sessions sharing one perfectly square resolution is a machine running a default that came out of the box.
We found that by asking one follow-up question: what are the most common screen resolutions of the bots you detected? 99.7% of a 130,000 session block shared a single impossible resolution.
That one number is a far more durable filter than the parameter that first exposed them.
How to exclude internal traffic from GA4
Your own team is in your analytics. Office cities, staging hostnames, localhost, QA paths, self referrals, and the person who has visited your pricing page four hundred times.
Our favorite example is not from a client. It is from Google.
Their public demo property flags direct traffic from Mountain View converting at 32%, roughly ten times the site average, and identifies it as internal Google employee traffic.
One of the most scrutinized GA4 properties in the world has its own staff in the numbers. Yours probably does too.
The other five
Logged-in pages are the tricky one. On a subscription product, /login and /account are existing customers and belong out. On ecommerce sites, they are part of the buying funnel. That same audit showed /checkout/Review converting at 72.1%, so a rule that stripped account pages would have deleted the best traffic on the site.
Blog and informational traffic are interested in the articles, not necessarily your offering.
Support, careers, press and legal are small until a hiring push or a news mention.
Order tracking and returns look like normal traffic in every report you already run.
Post-conversion traffic is the one to check by hand. If your conversion event fires on the thank-you page, removing those sessions pulls them out of the denominator but leaves their conversions in the numerator. That inflates your rate twice.
The check: when you remove a segment, your conversion count may fall a little. If the numerator never moves, look at your event configuration.
The guardrail, which runs in both directions
Never remove a segment that converts at a normal rate. If your blog brings in real leads, the blog stays in the calculation.
On one lead generation audit, blog traffic ran about 6,000 sessions and 90 genuine leads at a 1.5% conversion rate. Ask Advisor flagged it, checked it, and kept it. That is the right answer.
A segment can also convert too well.
On that same audit, a referral from ahrefs.com produced 17 leads from 19 sessions. Traffic from South Korea produced 224 leads from 272 sessions.
Those are machines filling out your forms.
Segments converting at normal rate are kept. If the conversion rate is essentially zero, look closer. Segments converting impossibly well also warrant a closer look.
You can tell Ask Advisor which to keep and which to exclude from reports, segments, audiences, and comparisons. Once you build these, the decisions are locked in. See “How to exclude bot traffic from Google Analytics for good” below.
How to calculate your real conversion rate, and why you should read the report
We ran this exact prompt against Google’s public demo property so you can reproduce it.
It went from 330,798 gross sessions to 134,961 sellable. Only 40.8% of their traffic was sellable. That takes the conversion rate from 1.04% to 2.50%.
Nearly sixty percent of Google’s own demo data cannot buy anything.
The report got one thing wrong, and it is worth checking for in yours.
It removed 46,560 sessions using the filter “countries with conversion rate under 0.5%,” then reported that conversion had improved.
That is circular. It cut the worst-converting traffic and took credit for the lift. We put those sessions back.
A country comes out because you cannot ship there, not because it converts poorly.
So read the filters, not just the totals. The report is a first draft, and you are still the analyst.
How to exclude bot traffic from Google Analytics for good
Once the report exists, you have an assistant that already knows what your junk traffic looks like.
Send this second prompt to turn the analysis into something you can reuse.
The comparison is the fastest. The audience is the one your team will still be using next quarter. The exploration segment is where the funnel work happens.
From there it will also write your internal traffic exclusion, the IP filter and traffic_type parameter and why the change is not retroactive, a data filter that keeps staging out of production, and the developer brief for whatever instrumentation problem it found.
Excluding traffic from a report is not the same as blocking it at your firewall. For reports, the friendly bots come out too. Googlebot cannot buy anything, so out it goes. For filtering, friendly bots go back in. Block Googlebot and you leave the index.
Going deeper
Everything above is free and complete.
Ask Advisor has limits. It cannot remember, so next month you paste the prompt again. It cannot reach Tag Manager to fix what it finds. It cannot be scheduled. It caps at 2019 characters, and it sees one property.
A Google Analytics MCP server gets past all of that and connects your analytics to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini for free. Setup took me 45 minutes of OAuth and credentials, and I am a computer science major. Give yourself more time.
The other option is EverOpt, which is what we use.
I have an affiliate relationship with EverOpt. I recommend it because it changed how we do analytics, and I would tell you about it either way.
It talks to the Google APIs directly instead of through an MCP server, so the model writes queries rather than reading tables, which means fewer hallucinations. It remembers your exclusions, supports Tag Manager, and emails you a weekly brief.
The long form version of this prompt is on the Pocket Conversion Scientist page with the rest of them.
When the number is bad and somebody has to act on it
Sometimes you run this and the news is good. Your rate was better than you thought, and your denominator was lying.
Sometimes your sellable conversion rate is genuinely low, on genuinely qualified traffic, and now you know it.
That is our work. Our conversion rate optimization audit starts where this article ends, and a Conversion Scientist runs the tests that move the number that matters.
Either way, go press the button. It is free, it is already in your account, and it takes ten minutes.
Your conversion rate is about to go up, and this time you will be able to defend it.
Much of this post was generated by an LLM from our presentation Using AI to Chat with your Online Business. It was edited by a human.
Sources
Using AI to Chat with your Online Business
Web AnalyticsStop building GA4 reports. Conversational analytics lets digital marketers ask plain-English questions of their data and get answers. Free prompt kit inside.
This is the third presentation in our Pocket Conversion Scientist® series.
Your Website Knows More About Your Prospects Than You Think
You just can’t hear it yet.
Every session, every channel, every dropped form, every product page that converts at 0.8% when it should be at 3%. It’s all in your analytics right now.
The problem isn’t the data. It’s how we’ve been accessing it.
Building reports takes time. And even when you do it, you get numbers. Not answers.
I’ve been doing CRO since 2007. We’ve built scorecards, dashboards, custom Google Sheets that pull from the API. We’re pretty sophisticated about this. But nothing has changed our analysis the way this has.
You can now have a plain-English conversation with your analytics data.
Ask it what’s wrong. Ask it what’s working. Ask it why that traffic channel dropped off in March. It will tell you.
Here’s how we do it, and how you can start.
Why Most AI Website Tools Get This Backwards
The AI tools pitching you right now have this backwards.
They look at your website and hand you a list of things to fix. I’ve tried a number of them. We haven’t adopted any.
Here’s why. They skip your data. They start with your pages, not your analytics. So what they give you is best practices dressed up as personalized recommendations.
That’s a problem.
A page that’s performing well is a dangerous page to change. There are more ways to hurt it than help it. If you’re testing ideas that aren’t grounded in your actual data, you’re guessing.
Conversational analytics starts where we start. With the data.
How to Connect AI to Your Google Analytics
There are two ways to connect a language model to Google Analytics.
The first is an MCP server. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s essentially an API that’s designed for AI to use. Once connected, your language model can query your analytics directly.
Google provides instructions for setting this up. Allocate about 45 minutes. It involves granting credentials and OAuth setup, which gets a little nervifying if you’re not a developer. My advice: paste Google’s guide into your AI and have it walk you through each step.
MeasureU has also published setup guides for Mac and Windows if you want more hand-holding.
The second option is EverOpt, and it’s what we use.
EverOpt connects via the Google APIs directly, which means fewer hallucinations. Most AI tools read a table and fill in the gaps with pattern matching. EverOpt generates JSON and SQL to pull the actual numbers. That’s a meaningful difference when you’re making decisions based on the output.
It also has memory, a daily or weekly briefing agent, and supports Tag Manager, PostHog, and Convert.com.
The Three Prompts That Get You Started
We’ve put together three prompts that get you started.
Here’s what each one does.
The first is the Business Health Audit.
Tell the AI to act as a CRO and business intelligence leader. Ask it to deliver a plain-language health report on your analytics. Tell it not to change anything yet.
It will figure out what kind of business you are just from the data. Then it will tell you which traffic channels are performing, which aren’t, and drill down to the specific campaigns or products causing problems.
The output is a rich report. Read it in full. Or paste it into your ongoing business AI and let it start building strategy from there.
The second prompt is Sellable Traffic.
Not all of your visitors are trying to buy anything.
Bots, AI scrapers, blog readers, existing customers logging in, internal employees — they inflate your session count and suppress your conversion rate. This prompt identifies and removes them so you’re working with numbers that actually mean something.
In one example, removing invalid traffic moved a site’s conversion rate from 3.2% to 3.6%. Without changing a single page.
Once the AI identifies what to exclude, tell it to remember those exclusions for all future analyses. In EverOpt, it saves that to memory and applies the filter automatically.
The third prompt is the Weekly Brief.
Most digital marketers don’t check their analytics every week. This prompt fixes that without requiring you to go anywhere.
Set it to compare 90-day trends against the last 7 days. Ask it to flag traffic channel changes, conversion rate shifts, form abandonment rates, and 404 errors. In EverOpt, paste the prompt into the briefing feature, set your cadence, and it emails you the report.
One of our client briefs flagged a spike in SMS conversions we never would have caught manually. Now we know what drove it, and we can do more of it.
What to Ask Once You’re Connected
Once you’re connected, the questions you can ask are limited only by what’s in your data.
Build funnels. Graph trends. Diagnose why a channel underperformed last month. Examine any A/B tests running on the site.
You can even ask why a variation won or lost. Paste in screenshots of both and the AI will help you build hypotheses. That “why” question has always been the hard one. It still is. But now you have a place to start.
Tell it to interview you about your business. The more context it has, the sharper the analysis gets.
Go Have a Conversation With Your Data
I was a little reluctant to put this together.
This has become a real competitive advantage for us at Conversion Sciences. Being able to walk into a client conversation with an inventory plan or a traffic diagnosis that most agencies don’t even think to produce. That changes the conversation.
But we’ve decided to give away the good stuff.
You’ve got the setup. You’ve got the prompts.
Go have a conversation with your data.
Get the free prompt kit at conversion.science/ad+lp.
RESOURCES
Conversational Analytics Prompt Kit
Connecting AI to Your Analytics
Google MCP Setup
Measure U Guides
Download the Mac Guide
Download the Windows Guide
EverOpt
Get EverOpt
*Affiliate Link
YouTube Video
Conversion Sciences: https://conversionsciences.com
Pocket Conversion Scientist Series
Using AI to Generate Copy that Converts
Ad + Landing Page Alignment
Your Ads Are Making Promises Your Landing Page Experience Doesn’t Keep
Advertising CROThere is a fundamental disconnect in our organizations that is showing up in our ad campaigns.
One team creates and manages the ads, Meta ads, Google ads, Bing ads. The landing pages from which the ad team chooses were created by another team, the web team.
The ad team has one priority: increase traffic and demand that generates revenue. The web team has a number of goals, most of which involve publishing pages.
These goals are not aligned.
How bad can things get?
We pulled the ad portfolios of dozens of brands and compared them to the landing pages that serve those ads link. We were surprised that so many brands had serious alignment issues:
Here are some of the things I cover in my presentation, which you can watch on YouTube.
Why does ad spend keep rising while conversion rate stays flat?
Because the ad makes a promise (an offer, a headline, a specific claim) that the landing page doesn’t keep, so no amount of extra spend fixes a ceiling caused by the page itself.
What is the Ad Alignment Report?
An AI-generated audit that pulls a client’s full ad portfolio, matches every ad to the landing page it points to, and flags where the offer, headline, or design don’t line up.
What does a 4.7-to-1 ad-to-landing-page ratio actually mean for a business?
It means nearly five different ads, each with a different promise — different offers, headlines, calls to action — are all dumping traffic onto the same page. It’s difficult to create a single landing page that can support so many ads and still have a high conversion rate.
The larger the ad-to-landing-page ratio, the more likely your ad spend is being wasted on misalignment.
Why do so many ads land on the homepage instead of a dedicated page?
Because building and maintaining a landing page for every ad is more work than most teams can keep up with. When the website has no good alternatives, the homepage is chosen by the ad team.
Unfortunately, the homepage isn’t designed to convert ad traffic. It serves many kinds of visitors and can’t speak to any single ad’s specific promise.
What are “The Ten Alignments”?
The ten factors a landing page should match from its ad:
These are the five that matter most.
Add to these:
These add extra connections for those who click on the ads.
Does every alignment factor matter equally?
The first five (offer, headline, CTA, trust/proof, product) carry most of the weight. Get those wrong and the visitor’s trust breaks before the smaller details even register.
Why do social ads and search ads need different alignment strategies?
Because social ads interrupt someone who wasn’t looking for you, while search ads meet intent someone already had. The landing page has to pick up the conversation differently in each case.
What happens when an ad’s specific offer never appears on the landing page?
The visitor who clicked specifically for that offer, like AVE’s “4 Months Free,” arrives to find no trace of it and has no reason to trust the rest of the page.
Why does a headline mismatch hurt more than it seems like it should?
It removes the visitor’s confirmation that they landed in the right place, so instead of reading on, they’re left wondering if they clicked the wrong link.
Why does tone matter as much as offer or headline?
Because a warm, personal ad voice followed by a clinical form-heavy page creates a jarring shift at the exact moment trust needs reinforcing, and visitors disengage from that whiplash.
Can this alignment work actually be automated?
Yes. AI trained on landing page best practices can generate a matching page for each ad’s specific offer, headline, and tone, which is what the AVE and Careforth “Safe at Home” rebuilds demonstrate.
What do you do once a landing page is already well aligned?
Test a differentiators band (trust signals placed above the fold) or a Good-Better-Best pricing ladder that anchors value with a high first price, both shown on Uline’s pages.
How should a business manage alignment across dozens or hundreds of landing pages?
Either use personalization and A/B testing tools to adjust the page per visit for smaller portfolios, or generate aligned pages with AI and route ad traffic automatically for larger ones.
Why does this matter more now than it used to?
Because Google’s AI and Performance Max now factor landing page quality into ad delivery itself, so a weak page doesn’t just lose conversions anymore, it quietly drags down the ads pointing to it too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ad-to-landing-page alignment?
Ad-to-landing-page alignment is how closely a landing page matches the offer, headline, and promise made in the ad that sent the visitor there. When the ad and the page tell different stories, visitors lose the sense that they landed in the right place and leave before converting.
Why do my ads convert but my landing page doesn’t?
Usually because the landing page doesn’t keep the specific promise the ad made. A generic homepage or product grid can’t speak to five different ad offers at once, so most visitors arrive expecting something the page never delivers.
What is message match in PPC advertising?
Message match is the practice of echoing an ad’s exact headline, offer, and value proposition on the landing page it links to. It’s one of the core inputs Google uses to score landing page experience, which directly affects Quality Score and cost per click.
Why doesn’t my ad’s offer show up on my landing page?
This usually happens when ad copy and landing page copy are created separately, often by different teams. Without a shared alignment check across the ad portfolio, an offer like “4 months free” can vanish entirely by the time a visitor lands.
What are the most important elements to align between an ad and a landing page?
The five highest-impact factors are the offer, the headline, the call to action, trust and proof, and the product or service featured. Together these carry most of the alignment score. Image, brand, tone, URL, and color refine it further.
Should every ad have its own landing page?
Not necessarily one-to-one, but a portfolio where dozens of ads all route to a single homepage is a strong signal of misalignment. A useful benchmark is your ad-to-landing-page ratio. Anything close to 5:1 usually means most ads are landing somewhere generic.
How does landing page alignment affect Google Ads Quality Score?
Landing page experience is one of three components of Quality Score, alongside expected click-through rate and ad relevance. A page that doesn’t match its ad’s message can raise cost per click even when the ad itself performs well.
Can AI generate landing pages that automatically match each ad?
Yes. AI trained on landing page best practices can generate a page variant for each ad’s specific offer, headline, and tone, then route that ad’s traffic to its matching page automatically. This is especially useful for portfolios too large to manage by hand.
RESOURCES
YouTube Video
Download the slides
Conversion Sciences: https://conversionsciences.com
Last webinar: Using AI to Generate Copy that Converts
Using AI to Generate Copy that Converts
Landing Page OptimizationAudio Podcast
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
AI can write website copy that outperforms 80% of what is online today.
You just have to teach it who it is writing for.
In this episode of Intended Consequences, Conversion Sciences founder Brian Massey shows you how to use AI to generate website copy that actually converts.
The secret is not a better prompt.
It is writing for the four ways people make buying decisions.
You will learn the Modes of Research framework, first published in “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark,” and how to map it onto Myers-Briggs types so any language model speaks your language.
Then you will watch live rewrites that turn flat, jargon-filled copy into messaging built for Competitive, Methodical, Spontaneous, and Humanist visitors.
By the end you can build your own AI messaging agent in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and let it do the rewriting for you.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
CHAPTERS
00:00 Why AI copy beats 80% of website copy
01:30 Styrofoam copy and the conversion ceiling
02:40 How our own biases sabotage copywriting
04:10 ICPs and the four-persona problem
05:40 Corner cases: copy big enough to A/B test
06:00 The 4 Modes of Research framework
06:50 Competitive and Methodical buyers
08:00 Spontaneous and Humanist buyers
09:30 Placing copy on the page by buyer mode
10:30 Why language models beat humans at this
11:20 Myers-Briggs as a shared language with AI
14:00 The simple prompt to train your chatbot
15:00 Generating personas from a URL (Calm.com)
17:40 Rewriting copy for each mode, live
24:00 B2B example: HR services, CHRO vs CFO
29:50 Laying out multiple voices on one page
31:00 Q&A: getting your team to trust AI copy
33:20 Building your own AI messaging agent
38:00 What is next: ad and landing page alignment
38:50 Q&A: CTAs, ad frequency, and brand salience
RESOURCES
Download the slides | Get the Cheat Sheet
Messaging skills and full prompts: AI Messaging Skills
Conversion Sciences: https://conversionsciences.com
Book: “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark” by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg: https://conversci.com/catbark
Roy H. Williams and the Wizard Academy: https://www.wizardacademy.org
Subscribe for more on conversion optimization, AI, and the experiments behind what actually works.
20 Compelling Examples of Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
Advertising CRO, Persuasion ScienceThe world of digital marketing makes it super easy for you to reach your target audience. But you have to whip up a mighty persuasive online ad if you want your prospects to click on yours. Persuasion is one of our CRO Agency secret weapons. It is layered into so much of what we do and is often the difference between beginners and conversion optimization experts.
In this post, we’ll review the definition of persuasive copy, how to make sure it works, and show you compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
Appeal to logic emotion and credibility all in one. Check out these click worthy examples of persuasive copy in online advertising.
What is Persuasive Copy
Persuasive copy can be defined as an argument that elicits a desired action from a relevant audience. Easier said than done, right?
Aristotle explained what constitutes persuasive copy best in his rhetorical appeals or ‘modes for persuasion’. Let’s keep in mind that his goal was to make his oratory (his presentations) more persuasive. And in doing so, he identified three types of persuasion appeals that are as valid today as they were back then.
Not everybody makes a decision about a specific product or service based on the same argument. Purchasing a lipstick could be more of an impulse buy and an appeal to pathos or emotion may be the right call. Adding an appeal to reason such as “Free Shipping” may seal the deal and get you the click you desperately want.
The key is recognizing that different types of persuasive copy resonate with different people—and even the same person, depending on the context. For example, a tired commuter might see an ad for cozy bedding that simply says, “Go back to bed”—and instantly feel a yearning for comfort and rest. It’s not just clever copywriting; it’s a masterclass in tapping into universal desires with brutal simplicity.
Why This Matters
Everyone brings their own motivations and objections to the buying journey. Your job as a copywriter is to identify which core benefit or emotional trigger will speak directly to your audience in the moment. Does your product offer a universal good—comfort, convenience, a boost in confidence? Highlight that.
By combining these appeals or focusing on the one that matches your buyer’s mindset, you make your ad copy far more persuasive. Test different approaches and let your audience’s response guide your optimization.
What Makes an Ad Truly Persuasive?
Persuasive ads are fundamentally designed to spark a specific action, usually a purchase. Think back to those persuasive essays from school: the goal was always to convince your reader of something. Persuasive advertising works in much the same way, aiming to nudge your audience toward the checkout, the signup, or the phone call.
And here’s the kicker: persuasion isn’t just for one channel. Whether you’re crafting a headline for a digital campaign, scripting a radio spot, designing a billboard, or writing a snappy PPC ad, the principles remain the same. Across every medium, the best ads use a blend of logic, emotion, and credibility to win over their audience.
Let’s assume you have the right ad placement, defined the perfect audience, and have properly identified what your audience responds to. After all, persuasive ad copy in and of itself is not the only factor that weighs in on a campaign’s success.
We all want our online ads to influence our audience in such a way that they are inclined to click to call or click to buy from our website. But, what makes copy this convincing? Sometimes, actual examples of persuasive copy can guide us in crafting our own click-worthy online ads.
Learning from the Best
To really master persuasive copywriting, it’s worth looking at successful ads across different platforms. Whether it’s the emotional tug of a charity billboard, the logical lure of a “limited time offer” in a digital ad, or the credibility of a testimonial-packed print campaign, top-performing ads often blend these elements seamlessly.
So, how can you apply these time-tested techniques to your own ads? By understanding your audience, leveraging Aristotle’s three appeals, and studying real-world examples, you’ll be one step closer to writing persuasive ad copy that actually gets results.
An example of emotionally persuasive copy in this Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs.”
Avon color trend nail polish, Fairytale collection. The copy reads: “Until your prince charming shows up have fun with the frogs”. Why is this a prime example of persuasive copy in advertising? The famous Prince Charming in other countries, like Brazil and Italy, is called the “Blue Prince”, royal blue blood and all. So, until the blue one shows up, have fun with the rest of the colors. Clever emotional argument to leave the guilt behind and have fun now. If the shoe fits. ;)
But what about those times when you’re not just selling color, but also convenience and irresistible options? Take, for example, a pizza delivery ad that recognizes your hunger and meets it with a smorgasbord of cheesy bites, timely deals, and endless combos to choose from. These ads don’t just rely on one persuasive angle, they layer convenience (“delivered to your door”), urgency (“limited-time offer”), and variety (so many toppings, so little time).
For many (read: anyone with an appetite), this approach makes the click almost inevitable. The lesson? Sometimes, people want a simple fix for a simple problem, but when options and indulgence are on the table, don’t hold back. Play to those cravings—hunger, desire, even FOMO—and show how your product solves the problem in style.
Fortunately for most of us, developing persuasive copy is not an art but a data driven process. And as such, it can be tested.
How to Test Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
As investment in digital advertising increases, it becomes essential to figure out what really works. Ad copy testing can be executed pre-campaign launch or while the campaign is live.
Some methods for online ad copy pre-testing may include focus groups, projective techniques, and recall tests. Performing these pre-tests ensures less spend is lost when it comes to activation.
Running an online ad campaign is costly. This is a different version of the Paypal for Business ad used to test the level of persuasiveness in the copy. What appeal has been dropped? Let us know in the comments section at the end of the post.
But the proof is in the pudding and nothing beats solid AB Testing to prove you with the metrics you need to define what’s really working. If you are looking to learn about testing persuasive copy, our blog is packed with articles that explain how to do this in detail. Check them out:
Or you can take our CRO Course and become a conversion specialist. Or if you’d rather have an experienced conversion agency power boost your online marketing spend and turn more of your ad clicks into revenue, check out our CRO for Advertising solutions.
Practical Ways to Make Your Copy More Persuasive
Testing is critical, but before you even launch, it helps to understand the proven persuasive levers you can pull. Here are some actionable ways to approach your ad copy, inspired by what works across industries:
1. Solve a Real Problem
Get specific about the annoying problems your product solves. People want solutions that make life easier—lean into that in your copy.
2. Let Your Customers Do the Talking
Consider including a customer review or testimonial in your ad. If you have a killer quote, sometimes the best copy is simply letting your happiest customer speak for you.
3. Build Community and FOMO
Appeal to your audience’s desire to belong or their fear of missing out. For some markets (think fashion or exclusive launches), this can be a powerful motivator.
4. Highlight Cost Savings
If your product is more affordable than the competition—or saves people money—make that benefit crystal clear. A logical, numbers-driven appeal works wonders for budget-conscious buyers.
5. Evoke Emotion and Comfort
Don’t underestimate the power of emotion. Sometimes, showing the comfort, fun, or even laziness your product enables (think cozy bedding or a Netflix marathon) can win hearts.
6. Address Competitor Weaknesses
Listen to what people dislike about competitors, then position your solution as the answer. (Tread lightly here; keep it classy.)
7. Use Social Proof and Influencers
If trusted experts or influencers love your product, don’t be shy about it. Social proof builds credibility and trust—just make sure it’s relevant to your audience.
8. Tackle Objections Head-On
Address common concerns directly in your copy. If people worry about shipping times, product durability, or ease of use, show them how you’ve solved it.
9. Showcase the Numbers
Brag about how many satisfied customers you have—“Trusted by over 2 million runners”—for instant credibility.
10. Keep It Simple and Relatable
Sometimes, the most persuasive copy is the simplest: “Keeps you dry on rainy days.” Tap into universal needs and make the benefit obvious.
11. Make the Unfamiliar, Familiar
If your product is new or innovative, draw comparisons that make it less intimidating. Help your audience feel at home with your offer.
12. Offer a Plethora of Options
For products with variety (like pizza delivery or customizable apparel), highlight the range and play to people’s desire for choice and instant gratification.
13. Humanize Your Brand
Show off the people behind your products. Authenticity matters—customers want to know real people are creating what they buy.
By combining rigorous testing with these persuasive techniques, you’ll have a much stronger chance of crafting ad copy that not only resonates, but converts.
And as we promised an article about compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising, let’s dive into them!
Why Is Persuasive Copy Crucial to Online Ads
Let’s assume you have the right ad placement, defined the perfect audience, and have properly identified what your audience responds to. After all, persuasive ad copy in and of itself is not the only factor that weighs in on a campaign’s success.
We all want our online ads to influence our audience in such a way that they are inclined to click to call or click to buy from our website. But, what makes copy this convincing? Sometimes, actual examples of persuasive copy can guide us in crafting our own click-worthy online ads.
Making the Unfamiliar, Familiar: Easing Audience Anxiety
Let’s face it: trying something new, even if it’s just a different orange juice or a SaaS tool can give people pause. This is where truly persuasive ad copy can shine. The secret? Bridge the gap between the unknown and the familiar.
Here’s how effective ads do it:
At its core, persuasive advertising doesn’t just introduce a product. It reassures people that making the switch is easy, comfortable, and, in the end, just another step toward something better.
The Power of Authenticity: Why User-Generated Content Wins in Persuasive Online Ads
What makes an ad truly stand out in a sea of polished, overly-scripted promotions? Increasingly, it’s authenticity, and that’s where user-generated content (UGC) or ads styled to feel “real” enter the picture.
Ads that mimic the look and feel of content from everyday people (think influencers, loyal customers, or even your neighbor with an eye for a good burrito deal) have a certain trustworthiness. When potential customers see a peer getting real benefits, like saving money meal after meal, it sends a powerful signal: “This could be you.” Not only do these relatable stories demonstrate how a product works, but they also weave logic and credibility together.
In short, authenticity replaces skepticism with possibility. Suddenly, your product isn’t just another sales pitch. It’s an everyday hack, a savvy move already in play by people just like your audience. Not coincidentally, research shows that real voices and honest experiences increase click-through rates and conversions.
If you want your ad copy to truly persuade, lean into authentic storytelling, especially if your product can be shown improving real lives (and, let’s be honest, real bank accounts). When your audience sees someone they trust enjoying real savings, their defenses go down and their curiosity (and likelihood to click) shoots up.
Celebrities, Influencers, and the Power of Social Proof in Ads
Let’s talk about the not-so-secret weapon in persuasive ad copy: celebrity endorsements and influencer partnerships. Why do they work so well? It’s simple—the right personality gives your message that trust turbo-boost and plenty of personality, making even the most skeptical scroller stop and take notice.
When a household name or recognizable face champions your product, you’re instantly borrowing some of their credibility and likeability. But you don’t have to recruit a global pop star to pull this off. Partnering with the right influencer—especially those with a dedicated, engaged fanbase—injects your brand with authenticity while still tapping into that all-important social proof.
Want to do this the smart way?
Both big-name celebrities and social media personalities can bring that extra push to your campaigns, whether it’s emotional appeal, humor, or simple trust-building through association. Combine this with a persuasive offer or memorable copy, and you’ve got an ad your audience won’t soon forget.
Internal Campaigns: Turning Team Spirit into Persuasive Gold
Now, here’s a fun twist: persuasive copy isn’t just for charming your external audience. Some of the savviest ads out there never hit Facebook or Google, but instead rally the people closest to your brand: your employees, contributors, and internal collaborators.
Why does this matter? When you celebrate the people behind the curtain, you do more than foster company pride—you’re also stealthily marketing to the outside world. A campaign that spotlights your team’s dedication or unique journeys shows prospects and customers that your brand is powered by real folks with real stories. It’s authenticity with a side of persuasion.
The Ripple Effect of “Feel-Good” Internal Ads
Whether you’re toasting your engineers at Apple for the latest iOS wizardry or shining a light on the Starbucks baristas who keep your community caffeinated, internal campaigns have the power to persuade at scale. So next time you’re drafting ad copy, take a quick left turn into your office break room—your most compelling message may be waiting by the coffee machine.
Compelling Examples of Persuasive Copy in Online Advertising
A genius way to apply emotion to a SaaS service on a Facebook ad for Litmus & dotmailer.
Examples of persuasive copy in online advertising help illustrate the concept.
Appeal to logic or logos works quite nicely for the auto insurance industry. I wonder what would happen to these click-through rates (CTRs) if they added some emotional arguments to the ad copy.
Auto insurance appeal to logic examples. They all look alike. Which one would you click on?
Finding examples of persuasive copy in advertising is simple if there is a Google Guarantee available. Not an easy addition to your online ads but worth every penny. All the credibility you want in a single line.
Building credibility through the Google Guarantee.
Ethos and logos appeal for this Facebook ad campaign.
Ethos appeal.
Lower the guilt with a logical argument. Less fat and less calories than your biggest competitor: McDonald’s french fries. How is that for an attention-getting example of persuasive copy?
Burger King fries ad copy. Stop clicking the button and keep reading!
Why does this work?
This type of persuasive copy goes straight for the logical appeal—what Aristotle would call logos. Instead of trying to tug at your heartstrings, it gives you a reasoned, quantifiable benefit: fewer calories and less guilt. It’s simple, direct, and effective for anyone who wants to make better decisions but doesn’t want to completely give up fast food fries.
How can you use this approach?
If your product or service genuinely outperforms the competition on price, health, or savings, don’t be shy about showing the numbers. For example, if your meal has 30% fewer calories, or your subscription saves customers $10 a month compared to the leading brand, say it plainly. Shoppers love seeing instant, tangible benefits—especially when it helps them justify their craving or purchase.
Appeal to the rational mind, and you’ll find your copy not only grabs attention but makes clicking “Buy Now” feel like the smart thing to do.
Of course #FOMO is an emotion! This compelling example of persuasive copy in online advertising proves it! Almost depleted iPhone battery coupled with “Last Chance to Buy T&C Tickets” An example from a Digital Marketer Facebook ads campaign.
Appeal to emotion iPhone battery Facebook Ad example from Digital Marketer.
Why These Ads Work
What’s the secret behind all these examples? Each one pinpoints a specific concern or desire of its audience—credibility, trust, guilt, urgency—and addresses it head-on. The Google Guarantee ad puts all doubts to rest in just a few words, leveraging instant credibility. The Burger King fries campaign removes the guilt barrier by offering a logical, healthier alternative, while the Digital Marketer ad taps into the universal fear of missing out (and, let’s be honest, that low-battery anxiety we all know too well).
How to Apply This to Your Ads
Start by identifying a key problem, worry, or hope your audience has about your product or service. Is it safety? Social proof? Value? Show them that their concern is a non-issue—or better yet, that choosing you gives them a unique advantage. The most persuasive ads don’t just push a product; they dissolve obstacles and make the choice feel obvious.
Searching for click-worthy examples of persuasive copy for your Facebook lead generation campaign? A winner. Hands-down. No big emotional commitment. Only 8 hours for $500 and you get rid of those pesky projects.
Lead generation ad example targeting homeowners looking to start projects.
IBM Watson understands that their audience responds to reason. And that some may be ready to buy. The free trial is a highly persuasive method to get them to click on their ad.
IBM Watson “free trial” a persuasive element of their offer.
This online ad for WD40 is all about persuading through pathos. You will need some WD40 to unstuck that scroll bar.
Humor, sex and curiosity are all emotional appeals.
Every once in a while, you run across an ad that you just can’t forget. Trident’s Facebook ad that appeals to emotions or pathos through some quirky logic as I am sure deodorant won’t taste like spearmint either.
Example of emotional and logical appeal in persuasive copy for Trident’s online ads.
Although they usually resort to logic and ethos – 4 out of 5 dentists recommend – to craft persuasive copy.
Trident Coupons: Save money, prevent stains.
Sandwich delivery ads leverage a mix of ethos or credibility (reviews, how many served), logical (pricing and selection) and emotional (fresh, good, smells, comfort) elements. Definitely great examples of persuasive copy in PPC ads.
Why it works:
These sandwich delivery ads go beyond just shouting “delicious subs here!” They tap into what truly convinces someone to click. Ethos is established through trust signals like star ratings and customer testimonials (“thousands served”), helping ease skepticism. The logical angle comes through in clear, upfront pricing, speedy delivery times, and the variety of options that remove barriers for anyone who’s hungry and indecisive. And of course, the emotional strings are pulled with sensory words: “fresh-baked,” “warm,” “craving satisfied.” Few things are as persuasive as the promise of immediate comfort food delivered to your door.
How to do it:
Consider who trusts your product and why. If you’re a sandwich shop, highlight the sheer number of happy customers or showcase glowing reviews from actual local diners. Sprinkle in mouthwatering descriptions to spark cravings. The most persuasive ads combine credibility (“Voted #1 by locals”), logic (“$5 footlongs, delivered in 30 minutes or less”), and emotion (“Satisfy your hunger fast, fresh, and just the way you like it”). This well-rounded approach earns the click and the lunch order.
Sandwich delivery ads.
But why do these work so well? These ads don’t rely on just one tactic: they’re a buffet of persuasion. Showcasing reviews, highlighting how many sandwiches have been delivered, and tempting with fresh, comforting language, they hit every persuasion button in the book. Including a real customer review or sharing that “Over 1 million sandwiches delivered” gives your offer immediate social proof. When people see that others have trusted (and enjoyed) your product, they’re more likely to trust you, too.
Want to replicate this success? Make your value proposition personal and clear. Let your customers speak for you by weaving in their testimonials, or feature stats about your happy (and well-fed) clientele. The more tangible your credibility, the more irresistible your ad.
Pizza delivery examples of persuasive copy for Google Ads. One relies on logical and ethos vs emotional appeal.
Logical and ethos vs emotional appeal for pizza delivery Google Ads.
Notice how one pizza ad leans on logic and trust—think “Voted #1 by locals” or “Delivered hot in 30 minutes, guaranteed”—while the other serves up mouthwatering emotion (“Melted cheese, fresh from the oven!”). Both approaches work, but combining a logical promise with a dash of emotional flavor is the secret sauce.
Nike sneakers Google Ads: These are not Nike stores, so they lack the brand’s built in credibility. Therefore, they use pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews and the on time delivery percentage.
Pathos or emotional persuasion on the headline and ethos appeal on the body via the rating reviews that give credibility and the on-time delivery percentage.
It’s a classic move: If you don’t have instant brand recognition, borrow trust by leading with customer reviews (“Rated 4.9/5 by 10,000 sneakerheads”) and impressive delivery stats. Shoppers see others like them have had a great experience, and suddenly, your offer feels safer—and a lot more enticing.
How to make this work for you:
In short, persuasive ad copy isn’t about choosing ethos, logos, or pathos—it’s about blending them for irresistible appeal.
The Nike Official store, is all about logical persuasion of product availability with some additional credibility elements as message support.
Nike official store Google ad.
PPC ad copywriting for a mobile ad with emotional appeal. Click to call the luxury location of your choice.
PPC ad for best NYC hotels. Luxury, of course.
This ad doesn’t just sell a room. It sells a feeling. The promise of luxury, comfort, and exclusivity is right at your fingertips (or thumb, in this case). Instead of simply listing amenities, the copy invites you to imagine yourself sinking into plush bedding, gazing at skyline views, or lounging in a spa robe. No need to ever leave your oasis in the city.
Why it works
The emotional pull here is all about indulgence and escape. The ad taps into the daydream of finding a hotel so perfect, you’d rather stay in than explore outside. The call-to-action is immediate and personal: “Click to call the luxury location of your choice.” You’re not just booking a room, you’re claiming your spot in a world of comfort.
How to use this approach
To channel this kind of persuasive power, let your ad copy paint a scene. Focus on the lush experience, the feeling of being pampered, and the effortless connection. One tap, and you’re transported from ordinary to extraordinary. Highlighting the emotional benefits, rather than just the features, makes your offer irresistible to anyone craving a touch of luxury.
So many persuasive reasons for that mileage traveler in you. Capital One Venture card uses ethos on their YouTube and TV ads but not on their Google Ads. Here it’s all facts
Capital One Venture card uses logos or logical appeal to persuade to click on this PPC ad.
I hope you found inspiration and ideas on these compelling examples of persuasive copy in online advertising. Now, discover how to Make Testimonials More Persuasive or sign-up to receive our weekly newsletter. Packed with great conversion optimization tips.
AI: Why Your Website is Now a Training Tool
Artificial Intelligence, UncategorizedPodcast: Play in new window | Download
In a recent conversation, Brian Massey and Andy Crestodina explored the shifting landscape of digital marketing as Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes the “third partner” in the relationship between brands and customers. This shift is fundamentally changing the purpose of a website—from a destination for human eyes to a critical knowledge source for AI training.
As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini increasingly act as “sales reps” or agents for your brand, the strategy for building and maintaining a digital presence must evolve. Here is the breakdown of how to adapt your website for this new era.
The New Role of Your Website
For decades, websites were built for search engines (SEO) and humans (CRO). Today, a third audience has emerged: AI LLMs (Large Language Models).
Actionable Steps: How to Optimize for AI and Humans
To remain competitive, marketers must “plug holes” in the data AI currently has about their brands.
1. Prioritize Extreme Clarity and Detail
If you were making a page specifically for an AI bot, you would prioritize maximum information over user experience (UX). While you shouldn’t puke “sitemap.xml” onto your homepage, you should ensure your sales and service pages are packed with specific data.
2. Ditch the Generic Assets
AI learns nothing from generic marketing fluff.
3. Shift Your SEO Strategy
The “crash in click-through rates” for top-of-funnel informational queries means that optimizing articles for generic keywords is less sustainable.
4. Feed the AI Beyond Your Website
AI training data isn’t just pulled from your domain; it’s pulled from everywhere.
Finding the “Weakest Link”
Ultimately, marketing should still start from the bottom up. Before worrying about ranking for a new informational keyword, Andy Crestodina recommends looking at the end of the conversion chain.
The digital landscape is moving toward a hybrid model where AI handles the “deep research” and humans make the final connection based on trust and brand experience. By treating your website as a rich data source for AI today, you ensure you are the brand recommended tomorrow.
Taking a cue from Andy’s own suggestion during the interview to “give it to a tool that synthesizes or summarizes it for us,” this blog post was generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) using the full transcript of the conversation between Brian Massey and Andy Crestodina.
Checklist: AI-Friendly Website Elements
Use this checklist to ensure your “AI sales reps” have the best information to recommend your brand.
1. Essential Brand Data (The “Who, How, and Why”)
2. Conversational & Structural Clarity
3. Technical “Machine-Readable” Elements
<main>,<article>, and<section>so AI knows which parts are primary.4. Brand Personality Training
Links
Video Podcast
Orbit Media Studios
Oliver Emberton
How to Pick a Conversion Optimization Consultant for your Online Business
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationMaybe you have exhausted your resources or maybe you’d rather have CRO experts maximize your profits. Whatever your situation, it’s time to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business, whether it’s eCommerce, lead gen or subscription website.
But how do you know which optimization professional is the best? Better yet, how do you know which one is the best fit for your needs?
Here are 14 key questions to consider when choosing our prospective conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency. Buckle up because here we go!
1. How Much will a Conversion Optimization Consultant Cost me?
Small conversion rate optimization firms can be found for as little as $2,500 per month to run tests. For a full team approach, expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per month. Enterprise-focused firms will charge up to $50,000 per month.
Agencies that specialize in search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media and media buying are adding conversion optimization services to their line card for a small fee because clients, like you, are asking for it.
Keep in mind, these agencies are not necessarily conversion specialists. They may be able to run AB ests, but the small fee they charge isn’t likely to impact your bottom line.
Know what you buy into.
When it’s time to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business, you have to understand what their offer actually is.
Do you know how your conversion rate optimization consultant measures success? A great question to ask when you are trying to choose the agency that best fits your website needs.
2. When Will I Start to See Positive Results and a Good Return on Investment
There are two main determinants of your ROI from conversion optimization:
The more you make on each conversion, the more you will profit from increases in your conversion rate. The more conversions you have each month, the more ideas you’ll be able to A/B test during that month.
Your consultant should be able to help you estimate the relative return on your CRO investment.
Having said that, conversion optimization is an ongoing process, so it’s important to choose a consultant that can give you ongoing improvements in your conversion rates. After all, their job is to increase your revenues.
To find the answer to this question, ask the consultant about:
3. Do I Need to Have My Own Resources? How Much Time Will I Have to Invest in This Project?
This will depend on the type of engagement you are looking for. For example, at Conversion Sciences, we offer our clients a couple of service options.
If they prefer to hand over the conversion rate optimization portion to us, we furnish them with a full CRO team. No company resources needed. Just plan to spend an hour with your conversion consultant each week on an ongoing basis and a bit more while we learn about your online business. Learn more about our Fully-Managed CRO Services here.
If they have an internal conversion team already in place, or they don’t have sufficient traffic to warrant full-time engagement, our clients can opt for our Conversion Rate Optimization Audit. This gives them a thorough analysis of their customer journey that they can use to develop their own experiments.
Our advice: Always ask this question. It will help you better compare and find the best CRO consultant for your website.
4. How Will You Measure Success?
This is a great question that can separate the wheat from the chaff. Let’s explain.
With this approach, the conversion consultant is incentivized to look at the bottom line as their measure of success. It also aligns the conversion consultant goals with your business goals.
Be careful of optimizing for secondary measures, such as clicks to a page with a form, bounce rate, the time visitors spend on your site or the number of pages they visit on average. It’s possible to improve these numbers without improving bottom-line metrics such as leads generated, transactions, or subscribers.
5. Can You Guarantee Results or a Conversion Rate Increase?
You may be evaluating conversion rate optimization companies that offers a guarantee as well as agencies that work for a percentage of the increased revenue.
While these seem like very tempting offers, they can give you very different experiences over time.
The most extreme guarantee is a pay-for-performance arrangement that boils down to, “I get a cut of your revenues.” On the plus side, the consultant doesn’t get paid if they don’t deliver higher revenues. On the downside, they may get credit for your own in-house promotions, which could raise your costs.
Another thing to remember is that, as revenues increase, this approach leads to higher monthly fees. If your conversion rates improve significantly, that’s good. But it means your consultant is getting paid very high fees. This can make you feel like you’re paying too much.
A variation to this is to pay your consultant only for revenue growth. However, if there is a period in which revenues do not grow, your consultant will be incentivized to pull resources away from your business just when you need them most.
Pay-for-performance may look good up-front. It has a built-in guarantee that reduces the risk of hiring a consultant you’re unfamiliar with. But we have found that it does little to properly align your goals with your consultant.
Would you like a better solution?
Consider asking the conversion consultant to continue working for free if a predetermined goal is not met in a set timeframe.
For example, if they can’t demonstrate a 10% increase in revenue in six months, they keep working for free. When they hit the results, they can start billing you again.
6. How Well Do You Know My Industry / Technology / Platform / Distribution Channel / Market?
If there’s one thing that testing teaches us very quickly, it’s that there is no such thing as a “magic formula.” Ideas that work for similar sites may not work on your audience. Every audience is different.
A conversion optimization consultant that has worked with a number of your competitors will have a playbook of ideas to consider. Many of these ideas never would have occurred to a team with less experience in your industry. If the consultant also know your website platform and technology, their learning curve will be limited mostly to your product, service or business brand.
Having said that, industry experience can also be a hindrance. If the conversion consultant is overly familiar with websites in your industry, they may not be able to look at your site with fresh eyes — a key advantage of external vendors.
All-in-all, a disciplined optimization process will work in any industry. Ask the consultant for some examples of novel ideas that are specific to your industry, but make sure they have a proven, repeatable process.
7. Can You Share Some Case Studies?
A case study will help you understand how the consultant helped other businesses improve conversion rates in lead generation, sales or subscriptions. If a case study shows giant performance gains, take it with a grain of salt. This can happen for you, but not always.
A consultant should be able to show you their case studies, but it’s a good idea to ask to speak with their clients as well.
The consultant will likely refer you to clients they’ve had success with, but it gives you a chance to ask about situations in which your conversion consultant struggled.
Should your CRO agency guarantee results or a conversion rate Increase?
8. How Will You Get to Know My Target Audience and What Is Your Process Like?
Successful conversion consultants will tell you that they let the data tell them about your audience. Your analytics data, surveys, reviews, and chat transcripts can reveal many issues with your website. If that is not enough, they will also use surveys, session recordings, heatmap reports, and A/B testing.
Any other answer from a CRO consultant could demonstrate that they do not have the optimization experience needed to perform the job.
Getting to know your target audience will be one of the first steps in the CRO process, but it’s important to underestand their entire process. If it isn’t outlined on their website, ask them to explain it to you.
In particular, you’ll want to know how much of your time will be spent supporting the on-boarding process and if there are any additional fees for software or special ad-hoc work.
9. Do You Do Split Testing or Can You Implement Personalized AI-Powered Experiences to My Visitors?
An experienced conversion rate optimization consultant will be well versed on every optimization technique and tool available and will recommend the one that is the best fit for your business.
Stay away from anyone who tries to steer you towards a single solution. For example, be wary of consultants that focus on A/B testing only. Many ideas can be validated or discarded without an A/B test. Ask about online panels, session recordings, heatmap reports, and eye-tracking studies for alternatives.
10. How Do You Know What to Optimize First?
The most important aspect of experimenting is the choice of ideas to focus on. Since it is easier to generate ideas than to test them, it’s important that the consultant have a process for evaluating and ranking ideas based on expected ROI.
There are a number of standardized ways to rank ideas. The most common framework is ICE, which stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. It helps collect and rank all of the ideas that come up when starting a conversion rate optimization project.
Consultants who rely primarily on heuristics, or best practices, rely on their own experience to decide what to test. This makes them little better than you at picking what to test.
Asking how they prioritize test ideas will weed out the weakest prospective vendors. After all, a solid understanding of methodologies demonstrates the kind of professionalism you are looking for.
11. What Would You Like to Know About Our Company?
Good conversion optimizers will have lots of answers to this question.
They will be ravenous for any data you have, including things like chat transcripts, marketing research, surveys, personas, reviews, advertising data and more. That’s because conversion consultants are uniquely able to turn your existing research into test hypotheses.
Be suspicious of a consultant that doesn’t want to know more about YOUR business. Optimization professionals have inquisitive minds and they always want to know more. By giving them a chance to ask you questions, you can evaluate their curious nature and mental process.
12. Do the People I’ll Be Working With Have Strong Optimization Experience?
More than likely, you’ll have a chance to speak to the top people on the consultant’s team. But it’s important to know who will be assigned to your account.
Conversion optimization is a challenging field. This is not a set of skills that is easy to teach in the classroom — which is why the consultant’s process matters.
Your consultant should be able to articulate a repeatable, proven process that has a history of positive results.
13. How Soon Will I See Results?
You will find a wide range of minimum engagements in the marketplace of CRO consultants. Some will take a chance and work with you on a month-to-month basis. Others will require a commitment of three months or more, up to twelve months.
If a consultant asks for no minimum, you should nevertheless ask them for a reasonable timeframe in which you can evaluate their results, a time at which they should be able to defend their performance.
The month-to-month consultant may be willing to take a chance on your website, but you can’t afford the loss of time if their gamble doesn’t pay off. Hold them to a timeframe, but we recommend giving them four months or more.
Most A/B tests are inconclusive. Beware of those who promise results within a short timeframe. CRO consultants should share previous and similar experiences, but they won’t be able to make claims about your returns until they start working with you.
Keep in mind, estimates and experience aren’t promises of future performance. No two websites or businesses are completely alike. The optimizers working on your website will need to gather and analyze lots of data before they can set realistic expectations.
14. Do You Work With the Tools We Own or Can Afford?
If you have already invested in conversion optimization tools, mention this in your first conversation. You will want your consultant to know you expect them to use your tools proficiently, or to have experience with similar tools from different vendors.
As far as affordability goes, we live in a golden age of marketing tools. There are many options at many price points. The consultant should be able to help you choose a tool that fits their needs and your budget.
Note: Most conversion consultants will give you a better return on your investment in optimization tools.
Here is a list of questions you may – and should – ask before you choose the best conversion optimization consultant for your online business.
In 2025, this questions goes to the top of the list. How are you using AI and how will you help me use AI to not get left behind?
15. What Is the Consultant’s Testing Philosophy?
Each consultant will have a testing philosophy. Some favor scientific rigor. Others favor quick decisions. Here are some questions to ask them, with the answers you will want to hear.
How long do AB tests take?
No AB test should be stopped before two full weeks have passed. If you have a high volume of conversions, one week may be acceptable, but no less. Read our AB testing guide here.
Will you stop a variation if it looks really negative?
Most conversion consultants will monitor tests and stop any variations that seem to be underperforming to avoid lost sales and fewer leads.
Do you let tests overlap?
If your prospective conversion consultant plans to run tests on multiple pages of your site, there is a risk of polluting the data and making bad calls. They should be able to keep visitors from one test getting into other tests on your site.
How do you do quality assurance on tests?
The tools used by a conversion consultant give them sweeping powers to alter your site. It is surprisingly easy to break your website with these tools. A thorough Quality Assurance (QA) process includes testing on multiple devices and involves several people before changes go live.
What kind of post-test analysis do you do?
Even if a test finishes and there is no winning variation, your conversion consultant can learn important things from the data.
Their knowledge of analytics will allow them to see how the test impacted other segments of your audience.
For example, it is common for an idea to impact desktop and mobile visitors very differently. The same is true for new visitors versus returning visitors.
This is called “post-test” analysis. It allows you to get even more value from every A/B test. This should be part of their capability.
Can you perform multivariate tests?
If you have a high-volume site, multivariate testing is a way to work through many design changes, discovering what combination is most impactful for a given website.
Multivariate testing is not appropriate for most businesses.
However, you should ask about the newer generation of AI-driven multivariate testing that uses machine learning to personalize your website in real time.
How to Pick a Conversion Optimization Consultant for Your Online Business
Final word of advice: no matter who you choose, make sure the consultant you hire is the one that is able to deliver on the strategy you need.
The best CRO agencies will tell you if they are unable to help you and may even recommend alternative solutions to your business problem.
Use these questions when you’re ready to pick a conversion optimization consultant for your online business. Who knows? It may even be us!
Beyond Data: How ChatGPT Uncovers Emotions to Fuel Effective Ad Concepts with Joe Putnam [Podcast]
Ecommerce CROEmotions drive conversions — and in this episode of Intended Consequences, Brian Massey sits down with Joe Putnam, founder of Conversion Engine, to explore how top-performing ecommerce brands are using AI CRO strategies to scale faster, test better, and connect more deeply with their customers.
You’ll hear how Joe’s team analyzes customer reviews at scale to uncover emotional triggers, how they test ad angles that competitors often miss, and why a “boots that hurt” campaign might not be the golden angle you think it is.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Ready to improve your ecommerce site’s performance? Learn more about Conversion Science’s fully-managed Ecommerce Optimization Services.
Why Emotions Still Win in Marketing (Even for Practical Products)
“People buy with emotion and justify with logic,” Joe explains — and it’s not just for luxury brands like BMW.
From cowboy boots to baby products, emotional triggers like trust, belonging, pride, and joy show up in customer language all the time. Even in seemingly utilitarian products like closet storage or bathroom scales, people make decisions based on how they feel about the product, not just what it does.
The key is knowing which emotional buttons to push, and that’s where AI CRO strategies come into play.
Finding Emotional Patterns
Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying the emotions behind the words people use — especially in product reviews, support tickets, and social comments.
Traditionally, marketers had to manually scan hundreds of reviews to pick up on these emotional patterns. Today, Joe’s team uses ChatGPT and other AI tools to streamline this process:
“We copy and paste hundreds of reviews into ChatGPT and ask it to do an emotional sentiment analysis,” Joe says. “What problems are being solved? What are people feeling? What language are they using?”
AI CRO strategies like this quickly surface pain points, unique selling propositions, and emotional value statements that can power ad copy, email campaigns, and landing pages.
Building an Emotional Connection
Once the team has pulled emotional themes from the reviews, they organize them into distinct messaging angles — each one reflecting a different emotional trigger. These angles might include:
Instead of just running ads that say, “Tired of boots that hurt?” over and over, Joe’s team builds multiple ads targeting different emotional angles. Then, they let the data reveal which message resonates most with the brand’s audience.
Takeaway: You’re probably underutilizing your customer reviews. With the right prompt, AI can uncover 3–5 powerful emotional angles you may have never tested.
Does AI-led Sentiment Analysis Work for All Products?
Yes, even for “boring” or utilitarian products. Joe explains:
“Whether you’re selling cowboy boots or closet storage, you’re always trying to tap into emotion. It might be fear, trust, anxiety, or satisfaction. But emotion is there. And when you find the right one, your results improve.”
Some products might lean into pride or aspiration. Others might connect through relief or peace of mind. In every case, the emotional experience is as important as the feature set.
Why AI Doesn’t Replace the Marketer
Let’s be clear: AI isn’t doing the job for you — it’s helping you do your job better.
Joe emphasizes that AI CRO strategies are a shortcut to better ideas, not a replacement for judgment:
“You still need human intelligence to decide which angles are worth testing, which copy resonates, and which ideas are off-brand. AI gives us more clay to mold — but we still have to be the sculptor.”
AI may generate seven ad angles. But maybe only two of them are good. With a trained marketing team, you can spot the winners, test them faster, and scale what works.
Additional Reading: How to Seamlessly Integrate AI Marketing Into Your Strategy
The Role of Landing Pages in Emotional Alignment
The best ads in the world can fail if the landing page doesn’t match the emotional promise.
One mistake Joe often sees: sending all ad traffic to the same product listing or category page, regardless of the ad’s message.
Instead, he recommends:
“If the ad is about personal pride or reward, make sure the landing page reflects that. That emotional consistency is what drives higher conversions.”
Mistakes to Avoid with AI and CRO
While AI can be powerful, it’s not infallible. Joe warns of a few key pitfalls:
❌ Mistake 1: Believing Every Insight is Gold
Not every insight generated by AI deserves to be tested. Use your experience and brand knowledge to filter the noise.
❌ Mistake 2: Ignoring the Landing Page
Even strong ads will underperform if the landing page doesn’t deliver on the emotional promise of the creative.
❌ Mistake 3: Over-engineering Prompts
You don’t need “prompt engineering” skills to make this work. Start simple:
“Conduct emotional sentiment analysis on these reviews.”
Let the AI do the heavy lifting — then dig deeper based on what it returns.
Quickstart Guide: How to Use AI in Your Ecommerce Ad Strategy
If you want to try this for your brand, here’s a simple way to get started:
Final Thoughts: Emotions Scale. AI Speeds It Up.
The secret to ecommerce success isn’t just in your product specs. It’s in the emotional response you trigger. And now, thanks to AI, you can discover those responses faster than ever.
As Joe Putnam puts it:
“AI doesn’t give you the final product. But it gets you 80% of the way there — and helps you uncover ideas you wouldn’t find on your own.”
Want help turning sentiment analysis into high-converting campaigns? 🔬 Talk to a Conversion Scientist
The End of Interesting: AI in Experimentation with Deborah O’Malley [Podcast]
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingIn this episode of Intended Consequences, Brian Massey sits down with Deborah O’Malley, founder of GuessTheTest.com, to explore the fast-changing world of AI in experimentation — from A/B testing myths to the ways AI is already changing how digital marketers approach conversion optimization.
And yes, they really do debate whether AI will kill our creativity.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Ready to improve your site’s performance? Learn more about Conversion Science’s Optimization Services.
Are You Running the Wrong A/B Tests?
Deborah pulls no punches: “People are still testing button colors and headlines when they should be testing concepts.”
That’s one of the many interesting misconceptions about experimentation. But as she explains, the most valuable insights come from big, bold tests — especially ones that challenge your brand’s assumptions. And with the arrival of generative AI, we now have the ability to scale those tests like never before.
How AI in Experimentation Is Changing the Game
AI isn’t just writing headlines — it’s redesigning the entire optimization process. Deborah and Brian explore a few critical shifts:
1. Faster Hypothesis Generation
AI can instantly produce dozens of test ideas based on your existing content, analytics, or competitor sites. This helps marketers and CRO pros move from analysis paralysis to active testing — fast.
“You can use AI to brainstorm variations you’d never think of on your own,” Deborah explains. “That means more creative testing… not less.”
2. Pattern Recognition at Scale
While most human optimizers rely on gut instinct or anecdotal evidence, AI can spot trends in user behavior across massive datasets. That means smarter test prioritization, better personalization, and tighter feedback loops.
3. Test Ideas From Outside Your Echo Chamber
AI doesn’t share your brand biases — and that’s a good thing. By using tools like ChatGPT to simulate how different personas react to your copy or design, you can explore radically new angles without waiting for an actual test to finish.
From “Interesting” to “Impactful”
One of Deborah’s boldest claims: We should stop chasing ‘interesting’ test results.
Why? Because what’s interesting isn’t always what moves the needle.
“You want tests that are valid, repeatable, and drive real business results. That’s where AI can help — it brings a level of objectivity and scale that humans alone can’t match.”
In other words, AI in experimentation isn’t replacing us — it’s upgrading us.
Want to Test Better? Start Here.
Whether you’re a CRO veteran or just getting started with testing, this episode is packed with practical insights:
✅ Which A/B tests are still worth running
✅ How to think beyond copy tweaks and start testing experiences
✅ Why generative AI might be your best brainstorming partner
✅ And how to avoid common pitfalls that make test results meaningless
And don’t worry — it’s not all tech talk. Deborah and Brian also cover the human side of experimentation, from internal politics to the fear of failure.
Learn more about conversion-focused web design and redesign that achieves better results faster.
Final Thoughts: Embrace AI in Your Testing Workflow
This episode challenges us to move past the superficial and start building testing programs that matter. Whether you’re optimizing landing pages, ecommerce funnels, or entire customer journeys, AI in experimentation is the lever that can help you scale faster and learn deeper — without sacrificing creativity.
“When used well, AI becomes the co-pilot of every test you run,” Brian says. “It accelerates creativity, supports analysis, and helps you ask better questions — the real key to CRO.”
Want to improve your testing strategy?
💡 Talk to a Conversion Scientist and start testing what actually matters.
🔬 Learn about our fully-managed Conversion Optimization Services
Links
ABtesting.ai
LinkedIn: How to actually use AI to improve your site
Notion: AI-Driven Experimentation Tools
A Comprehensive Guide to Landing Page Optimization in 2025
Landing Page OptimizationA high-converting landing page looks deceptively simple, but if you’ve made online offers, you know how hard it can be to get the results you’re looking for.
In this guide, we talk about how to optimize a landing page for peak performance, why it matters, landing page best practices, and key strategies for improving your landing page copy, design, and overall performance.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is the page in any campaign — ad, email, social media post, or website link — that “catches” the clicks generated. For a Google Shopping Ad, the product page is the landing page. For a SaaS business, a standalone web page may be developed that promotes the product, service, or offer.
Landing pages are powerful because they are designed to deliver on the promise made and encourage visitors to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper.
The success of a marketing campaign is as dependent on the landing page as it is the ad creative.
A successful landing page serves two purposes:
If you don’t know the promise that is being made that brings visitors to the page, you are building some other kind of page.
If you are putting any information on the page that does not make the visitor feel more comfortable and confident in the offer, you are building some other kind of page.
Learn more about landing page optimization in Conversion Sciences’ Landing Page Optimization Course.
What Is Landing Page Optimization?
Landing page optimization is the process of fine-tuning a landing page’s content and design to maximize its ability to convert visitors into leads or customers. Landing page optimization should adhere to five core guidelines:
Keep the promise: The landing page should align with the message and value proposition presented in the ad or link that led the visitor to the page.
Craft a compelling offer: The landing page should clearly communicate the offer or benefit that visitors will receive in exchange for their action.
Design for conversions: The layout, design, and copy on the landing page should be optimized to guide visitors through the content on the page and make it clear that they are being asked to do something. The layout should establish a clear visual hierarchy that pulls a visitor’s eyes through the messaging. This includes using persuasive copywriting, relevant images, and clear call-to-actions while minimizing confusion.
Promote trust and credibility: The landing page should build trust by displaying customer testimonials, reviews, or other forms of social proof. It should also ensure that the page is secure and error-free.
Track and analyze: Using analytics tools, the optimizer will monitor the performance of the landing page and identify areas for improvement. Split testing can be used to test different elements of the landing page and determine what works best for the target audience.
There’s a craft to designing high performing landing pages. Read our top landing page best practices here.
Why Landing Page Optimization Matters Now, More than Ever
It’s more challenging than ever to get your message in front of your best customers. Landing page optimization helps you identify the issues that keep your offers from converting while improving their conversion rate.
These issues in particular are impacting the effectiveness of most landing pages:
Rising user expectations
The average conversion rate for landing pages across all industries is 5.89%, according to HubSpot. Wordstream’s estimate is lower, at 2.35%, with only the top 25% of brands hitting 5.31% or more. Meanwhile, 10% is considered a good conversion rate.
Regardless of the true average, there’s a pretty deep disparity between a good conversion rate and the conversion rate most marketers are achieving. From our experience, that boils down to trust.
People buy from brands they know, like and trust. Many landing pages focus almost exclusively on their offer. This “all-about-me” approach kills trust.
That’s why, when optimizing landing pages, marketers need to ensure the page communicates credibility and trust.
Increasing competition in digital spaces
The digital economy has radically increased the competitive landscape for most businesses. Within this landscape, there are some things we can control and some we cannot.
What we can’t control are the things that our competitors influence, such as ad auctions and SEO.
The cost of Google Ads is trending up, pricing out many brands. According to the 2024 Google Ads Benchmark:
Social media platforms have designed their algorithms to devalue most commercial posts so that businesses must advertise. And these ads no longer deliver “cheap” clicks.
The #1 result in Google’s search results gets 27.6% of organic search traffic. Competition for this is heavy.
What we can control are the assets we build for our digital businesses.
These assets cannot be taken from you. Investing in them creates a barrier that your competition cannot take away by bidding more.
Improving your conversion rates by 10% has the same effect on your business as reducing cost per ad click by 10%. Both decrease your acquisition costs by 10%, but one of these strategies is in your control and the other is not.
Your competitive edge comes from your ability to provide an effective user experience.
Does investing a portion of your ad spend in your landing experiences make sense?
Research by Forrester found that delivering excellent experiences directly impacts a business’s bottom line:
It’s only through the conversion optimization process that companies are able to improve the user experience and refine their messaging. By providing better data, it helps brands adapt to changing trends and consumer behaviors, raising credibility and trust in the eyes of potential customers.
Advancements in technology
Technological advances like AI and machine learning (ML) are revolutionizing the way landing page optimization is done. They enhance the functionality of CRO tools by providing additional insights, task automation, and optimization opportunities. And they are able to identify opportunities that human analysts might miss, leading to more effective CRO strategies.
Here are a few benefits we’ve seen from AI and ML technology:
Enhancing Personalization: AI-powered tools analyze user behavior, demographics, and preferences to create personalized landing pages that resonate with each individual.
Automating Optimization: Machine learning (ML) algorithms can automatically test and adjust landing page elements, such as content, images, and call-to-actions. They do this in real-time, making optimization efforts more efficient and giving them better outcomes.
Leveraging Predictive Analytics: AI models predict which landing page variations are likely to perform best for specific audience segments, allowing marketers to make data-driven decisions faster.
Delivering Better Customer Experiences: With AI and ML, marketers can create landing pages that are tailored to the individual needs and desires of each visitor, providing a seamless and engaging user experience that increases customer satisfaction and conversion rates.
Key Elements of an Optimized Landing Page
Landing Page Element 1: A clear and compelling offer
Visitors should know at a glance what the offer is and whether it’s right for them. The value proposition should establish two things very quickly:
Landing Page Element 2: Relevant and persuasive copy
The landing page should use conversion copywriting techniques to showcase the value proposition, benefits of the offer, and the value of taking action. The copy must:
Landing Page Element 3: High-quality visuals
Your message isn’t just conveyed through words. Your text and images work together to convey your message. That being the case, a landing page should use high-quality images and videos to convey additional layers of meaning. These visuals should:
Captions are as important as headlines. Write captions below photos and graphics that explain why you chose that image for the reader. If you can’t come up with a good reason, the image shouldn’t be on the page.
Avoid stock photos and lifestyle images. This pandering may not be effective for our ever-smarter audiences.
Landing Page Element 4: A strong call to action (CTA)
The call to action is the reason a landing page exists — it should be easy to understand, easy to see, and easy to respond to.
A web form is the most common way for visitors to take action on a site. This can be the product selector on an ecommerce product page or simply a button to take visitors to the next step. Optimizers know that the call to action — be it a form, button, or calendar — should be very visible to visitors. It should be clear what is being asked of the visitor and what will happen if they take that action.
Calling the visitor to action is best done with active verbs: buy, order, download, call. We’ll talk more about urgency in a moment, but you can add subtle urgency to your CTA simply by adding words like “now.”
A strong CTA includes an action word and subtle urgency
A strong CTA includes an action word and subtle urgency
Calls to action are most effective when they are truthful. Am I actually going to get a quote when I complete this form, or am I going to get a call from a helpful salesperson? “Get an instant quote” is a good choice for the former, and “Request a quote” is appropriate for the latter. For guidance on creating CTAs that work, ask about our lead generation services.
Landing Page Element 5: Social proof
Social proof is a technique that uses the actions of others to influence the behavior of your visitors. It can be created in a variety of ways: number of happy customers, client logos, awards, and trust elements, for instance.
Management consulting firm Kearney reports that consumers typically make purchases based on recommendations from both friends / family and online reviews. That’s why many high-converting landing pages include testimonials or reviews from satisfied customers.
Landing Page Element 6: Urgency and Risk Reversal
The landing page should create a sense of urgency to encourage visitors to take action immediately. At the same time, it can relieve the visitor’s anxiety by taking risk out of the equation.
As we just mentioned, you can add subtle urgency with the word “now” in your call to action. But you can also create urgency with limited-time discounts or fast-action bonuses, or by mentioning the risks of not acting now.
If you are going to provide a money-back guarantee, warranty, or generous return policy, be specific in your description.
For instance, AppSumo drives action by placing a time limit on their offers. Products are steeply discounted and may never be available at the listed price again. They juxtapose this with a 60-day money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
AppSumo uses urgency and a strong guarantee to drive action
Landing Page Element 7: Mobile friendliness
It’s vital that landing pages are easy to read and engage with on a mobile device.
Here’s how to ensure your landing pages are mobile-friendly:
A word about page design: The design of a page will communicate credibility. A professional design delivers a subconscious message that this company is serious and credible. However, self-serving copy, unclear calls to action, lack of social proof, or broken mobile pages will instantly undo even the most competent of designs. Don’t focus on the design. Focus on the content.
Landing Page Optimization Process
As we’ve discussed, optimizing a landing page is about making incremental improvements in the page’s conversion rate. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t a linear process with a clear beginning and end.
Landing page optimization is an ongoing process of gathering insights, creating hypotheses, experimenting and testing, and evaluating results. For simplicity’s sake, we’ve broken the process into four stages. In reality, these stages may overlap, and you’ll likely be running multiple tests at the same time.
Stage 1: Conduct Research
How is the page currently performing?
Stage 2: Identify Areas for Improvement
Stage 3: Implement Changes
Stage 4: Evaluate Results
Rinse and Repeat
Good conversion rates require a continuous process of experimentation, monitoring, and analysis that lead to small improvements over time.
Just remember, optimization decisions are data-driven, not opinion-based. By using data to guide optimization efforts, optimizers are able to design tests that continually improve conversion rates.
Best Practices for Well-Optimized Landing Pages
As marketers, we gravitate toward “best practices” for whatever strategy we’re employing. So before we dive too deeply into best practices, let’s be clear: The tactics that work for one brand and audience will differ from what works for another brand and audience, even if they’re in the same industry or serving the same audience.
Most best practices are just a starting point for conversion optimizers. But there are a few landing page optimization best practices that never change. In particular:
Audience-Centric Pages
A well-optimized landing page offers is all about your audience — not your brand or product. The language, visuals, and messaging should be tailored to a unique audience and speak to their specific pain points and desires.
Done right, the landing page will make visitors feel seen and understood. Because it expresses their pain points better than they can, they sense that you have expertise in the area. This builds trust, and they begin to trust that your offer will work for them.
This landing page by #samsales speaks directly to the struggling salesperson. It acknowledges that salespeople dread prospecting and explains why it’s such a challenge. It then offers the solution: a playbook with everything the salesperson needs to prospect like a pro.
That’s likely enough to drive sales, but this landing page also answers the biggest objection: Is this product right for me? The answer doesn’t just share some of the specific information available in the guide. It also expresses the relief salespeople feel when they get this information.
An effective landing page keeps the focus on the audience, their desires, and their goals. Make sure your pages:
Focused Navigation
To increase conversions, a landing page should be stripped of any element that could distract visitors from the action they’re being asked to take. That includes navigation options.
Avoid using your website’s standard navigation scheme. Replace it with a navigation that supports the offer on your landing page. In many cases, the landing page doesn’t need navigation. Without unnecessary navigation, the landing page can focus the visitor’s attention on the primary call to action. This reduces confusion about the message and offer. It also encourages your visitors to stay on the page and take the desired action.
Yuppiechef tested two variations of their Wedding Registry landing page, one with navigation and one without. The variation with no navigation delivered twice as many conversions, and the conversion rate jumped from 3% to 6%.
Removing navigation and links reduces the number of choices available to visitors. This lowers the likelihood of them navigating off the page and raises the odds that they’ll take action.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a landing page to determine which one performs better. This is a science-based approach to optimization that ensures the page continues to convert well.
It’s important to keep these A/B testing best practices in mind:
Ensure you have enough conversions: A/B testing requires a sufficient flow of conversions if the test is to reach statistical significance before you reach old age. Use a free test calculator to see if you have enough traffic and conversions on a page.
Define relevant metrics: Before you launch the test, establish the specific metrics you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of the landing pages. Compare rates, such as revenue per visitor, purchase rate, or form completion rate.
Establish a testing framework: Choose your preferred method of experimentation — A/B testing or multivariate testing. A/B testing compares two or more versions of a page, while multivariate testing involves varying multiple elements simultaneously. Multivariate testing requires a large amount of traffic.
Implement the changes: Create two (or more) versions of the landing page, each with different elements or content. Ensure that the changes align with your hypotheses or research about what might improve performance.
Drive traffic to the landing pages: To generate insights into user behavior and expectations, optimizers direct a sample of visitors to each version of the landing page. The sample size must be large enough to provide statistically significant results.
Collect and analyze data: Use analytics tools to track the performance of each landing page and gather data on the relevant metrics. Analyze the results to identify which version performs better based on the pre-defined metrics.
Make data-driven decisions: Based on the analysis, determine which version of the landing page has a higher conversion rate or other desired outcome. Consider implementing the more effective version or conducting further testing to refine the results.
Landing Page Optimization Strategies
The best conversion rates are only achieved through ongoing optimization. That’s why optimizers adopt a culture of experimentation and testing. Here are eight landing page optimization strategies they rely on to get maximum results.
1. Keep the Promise
A landing page’s primary purpose is to fulfill the expectations set by the link or advertisement that led visitors to the page. Failing to keep that promise makes people feel cheated, like you’ve broken a promise or bait-and-switched them. This can lead to distrust and high exit rates.
To avoid this, it’s crucial to ensure that the landing page’s offer aligns precisely with the promise made in the ad or link. Use similar language. Highlight the same benefits. Avoid any discrepancies that could confuse or disappoint visitors.
Segment does a good job of keeping its promise in this email-to-landing page sequence. Notice that everything feels consistent, from the color of the button to the way the problem is expressed.
By keeping the promise made in the previous funnel step, landing pages can build trust, enhance the user experience, and increase the likelihood that visitors will take the desired action.
2. Use a Descriptive Call to Action (CTA)
A descriptive call to action is an essential element on any landing page. It guides visitors towards the intended action and explicitly asks them to perform it.
A good example is the Segment landing page above. The CTA is clearly stated in the title of the form: “Register to Watch Recording.” The button, which stands out in green, then repeats the action this landing page is asking for: REGISTER.
Clear CTA on Segment’s landing page
To be effective, the call to action should be prominently displayed on the landing page, using visual cues such as contrasting colors, bold fonts, or eye-catching graphics. It should also be placed strategically to ensure that visitors can easily locate and engage with it. (We’ll talk about your options for CTA placement in a minute.)
For now, just realize that without a strong CTA, the landing page won’t work. And by optimizing the call to action, landing pages can increase conversion rates and drive more profitable outcomes.
3. Optimize Copy and Design
Optimizing landing pages requires a collaboration between copywriters, designers, and optimizers. Designers can provide valuable input on the visual presentation, while copywriters ensure that the messaging is clear, compelling, and aligned with the overall goals of the landing page.
Clear and Persuasive Copy
Well-crafted copy plays a vital role in landing page optimization. It helps to establish credibility, build trust, and address visitors’ concerns. Keep these copywriting tips top of mind:
Effective Design
The design of a landing page directly influences its visual appeal, user experience, and overall effectiveness. Key design considerations include:
4. Include Social Proof and Credibility
Social proof and credibility help to build trust between the visitor and the brand, and increase the likelihood that visitors will take the desired action. This is why landing pages often include trust symbols, such as logos of well-known brands or security seals.
Squirrly shows social proof on their landing page with this banner just under the fold:
Social proof on Squirrly’s lifetime deal landing page
Social proof on Squirrly’s lifetime deal landing page
It builds trust quickly by telling us that 200,000+ websites are using the tool, which has earned 4- and 5-star ratings on three reputable sites. It also shows a series of awards from G2.
5. Use Different Landing Page Types
Depending on your offer, you might need to adjust the layout of your landing page by moving the call to action. Here are four places to put your calls to action and their purpose:
Top Hat
The top hat places a call-to-action above the page’s content. Its purpose: to grab the reader’s attention and promote the offer even before they read the content.
Here’s how Airbnb does it. You can’t miss this call to action, and to ensure you don’t, it stays visible as you scroll through the page.
Pressure Release
When visitors don’t find what they want on the page, they scroll back to the top of the page to find the information they need: phone numbers, shopping cart links, calls to action, and the search bar. By placing these items in the upper right corner of the page, you make them impossible to miss, and in the process, release the pressure felt by your visitors.
This landing page by Imperial Ghostwriting is a good example. The top of the page has a three-way CTA — button, email, and phone number — for anyone who’s ready to take action.
Because it’s so close to the headline, the brain connects this call to action with the offer. But because it’s in the banner at the top of the page, it doesn’t disrupt the visual impact of the page.
Dripping Pan
The dripping pan is a call-to-action at the bottom of the page, giving visitors one last chance to take action. A visitor that has read the entire page is probably more likely to take action. Make it easy for them.
This landing page by Clifford Ghostwriting is a good example. The yellow box at the bottom of the page gives one final push to take action and includes a phone number to talk with an expert right away.
Coffee Breaks
The coffee break places in-line calls to action throughout the content of the page. This engages the reader and allows them to take action at whatever point they’re ready, without disrupting their reading flow.
This approach works well on a long-form landing page, like this one from DigitalMarketer. The call to action is strategically repeated throughout the page so it’s easy for people to take action, no matter where they are on the page.
Of course, there are other options as well. Here are some other landing page types that suit different purposes:
6. Ask for Necessary Information Only
People are wary about sharing their personal information online. Even a simple request for the visitor’s email address can create a barrier and discourage them from taking action. It’s critical to keep this in mind when asking for personal information.
To combat this, consider each piece of information being requested in the landing page form, and only include fields that are absolutely necessary for the specific landing page’s purpose.
Learn more about designing effective landing page forms.
7. Optimize for Mobile Devices
According to Google, the majority of mobile sites are still too slow and bloated to meet user’s expectations. Their research shows that:
Adopt a mobile-first design approach to ensure your landing page is accessible, easy to navigate, and visually appealing on smaller screens.
8. Test and Iterate
The ongoing process of experimentation and testing allows you to collect valuable data and insights that improve future optimization efforts. This provides:
Higher Conversion Rates: Iterative testing helps identify areas for improvement, such as headlines, images, call-to-actions, and form designs, leading to increased conversion rates.
Data-Driven Optimization: Accurate data allows optimizers to generate real insights into customers and their expectations. Through experimentation and testing, they gain quantifiable data that support decision-making based on actual results rather than assumptions.
Identification of User Pain Points: By testing different variations, you can identify specific elements or content that create friction or obstacles for users, allowing you to address these pain points and improve the user experience.
Reduced Abandonment: By identifying and addressing potential barriers to conversion, testing helps reduce abandonment rates and increases the likelihood of users completing desired actions.
Increased ROI: Effective landing pages contribute to increased return on investment (ROI) by optimizing conversions and driving more qualified leads or sales.
Accelerate Your Conversion Journey: Key Steps Forward
Landing page optimization is a foundational strategy in digital marketing, unlocking increased conversions, enhanced user experience, and improved return on investment. But it requires a data-driven, scientific approach.
Looking for conversion rate optimization services that pay for themselves? Conversion Sciences is unlike other conversion rate optimization agencies — we use the scientific method to identify and fix underperforming landing pages.
Contact us today to talk with our experienced full-service team of Conversion Scientists.