‘Best practice’ learning promotes placing the primary CTA (call-to-action) for your landing page near the top of the page, above the fold. At face value, this seems logical, right? You want visitors to complete the primary goal for the page, which means following your CTA.
However, there are several reasons why this basic recommendation isn’t necessarily true or accurate:
1. The ‘fold’ is a myth
The mind-numbing variety of devices (it’s estimated there are about 6,500 and counting!) means that the fold is not a fixed entity and depends entirely on the device type accessing your landing page.
2. Your CTA should be placed where an action is most likely to be taken
New visitors to your landing page may not know who you are and what you do. These people are less likely to be willing to commit to an action immediately as they need to know that you are reliable and trustworthy. Therefore, expecting them to take action as soon as they land might actually put them off staying on your landing page – it can seem like an over-zealous salesperson.
3. Putting the CTA above the fold could detract from important content
When you need to persuade visitors and address their potential barriers to conversion, you need persuasive copy to take main stage. A prominent CTA could detract from visitors seeing/reading this copy and adversely affect their likelihood to take action.
In this blog post I look at different options for placing your primary CTA and provide case studies of good and bad to help illustrate the impact of positioning.
A caveat I need to point out – without access to the web analytics data behind these landing pages, I can’t validate my analysis. My evaluation is based on my own experience of optimising landing pages and the wealth of case study material I have read over the years. Still, it would be foolish to claim to be 100% right….
I’m going to focus on 3 key factors. There are, inevitably, more but in my experience these are the 3 that you should focus on:
Not every landing page is designed to generate leads or convert to sale. Some landing pages are created to educate customers and promote brand awareness. Therefore, the CTA placement needs to match the goal of the webpage – if you want people to read content, don’t distract them with a CTA that will take them away from the page. Instead, use the CTA to take them to the next level e.g. contact form for a follow-up call.
Example landing page where goal is form completion - Square
Technology start-ups commonly use simple landing pages with a prominent CTA at the top of the page, so it’s visible on most browser sizes.
Evaluation
Example landing page where goal is education & conversion - Econsultancy
Econsultancy offers a wide range of products and services. They recently changed their Membership landing page to long form, breaking up the copy into different sections to promote USPs. Between each section the primary CTA is promoted. You can see from the image below just how long the page really is!
Evaluation
Does it work?
Yes and no. It is successful in communicating the value and benefits of membership but the page still makes the visitor work hard to get all the relevant content. Is enforced scrolling using a "squeeze page" the best approach? From experience, we don’t think so, but that’s not to say it can’t be if additional techniques like HTML quick links or expanding content blocks (accordion JavaScript) are used to make it easier to navigate.
Why are people visiting your landing page? It’s an essential question to ask yourself. The answer will help you determine what they will expect when they get there. For example, if you have sent an email campaign asking for people to take action, then you need to make it easy for them to take this action on the landing page.
The good: example charity landing page encouraging visitors to take action - Avaaz
Evaluation
The good: example landing page to promote a software download – OpenOffice
Open Office has a different challenge – it needs to convince visitors that its software is a suitable free alternative for MS office. It uses persuasive copy and reassuring messages to entice visitors and visual techniques such as down arrows to indicate there is more content available.
Evaluation
The bad: example landing page to promote a range of services – Club Wembley
Club Wembley is the hospitality arm of Wembley Stadium. Hospitality is meant to be exciting, fun, potentially glamorous. Take a peek at the landing page below and tell me what your first impression is.
If your reaction was anything like mine, you’ll have been left completely underwhelmed. The audience intent when searching for hospitality packages is to be inspired and reassured that the investment will deliver the desired experience. Club Wembley fails to inspire visitors, instead providing a landing page that make it hard to know where to go next.
Evaluation
If the product/service you offer is a complex (e.g. B2B technology services), then a shallow landing page where the CTA is immediately in view as the page downloads may not be the best solution.
Why?
Visitors need to understand your value proposition and USPs before they are willing to take their interest further. If you don’t know what is being offered and why it’s relevant, how can you commit to an action? Placing the CTA before this point of certainty has been reached can actually put people off.
However, if your offer is straight forward, then providing too much content can actually confuse visitors and obscure the CTA. Make the page as simple as possible with key information and then focus attention on the CTA.
Example of non-complex offer - Unbounce
Evaluation
Example of non-complex offer – Eden
Evaluation
This landing page was tested against an alternative version where the form was lower down the page – this version increased business leads by 179% [Source: Whichtestwon.com – requires membership to view full case study].
Example of complex offer – Ariba e-procurement solutions
Evaluation
If we look at this landing page in a range of browser sizes, the issue with the CTA is further compounded:
I love Matt Kersley's Responsive Design tool for evaluating landing pages in a variety of browser sizes.
Example of simplifying a landing page to improve results – Baked & Delicious
In the example below, the goal was to increase subscriptions for the magazine. The existing landing page (version A) was long and had lots of competing CTAs, including a contact form and magazine preview. Version B was designed to streamline content and focus on the primary CTA of subscription.
Which version do you think performed the best? Answers below…
And the winner is…
Surprise, surprise, Version B increased clicks to the next stage by 31.4% and increased final subscription by 17.2% [Source: Whichtestwon.com – requires membership to view full case study].
My key take-away for you regarding CTA placement on landing pages is this: put the CTA where you think your visitors would most expect/need it.
The goal is to make your landing page easy to use and take action on – so think about visitor intent before deciding the optimal layout. And make sure you test – there is no reason not to do basic AB tests even if you don’t have a specialist testing tool. Look at Google Analytics Content Experiments and do some basic testing to learn how it can help you improve landing page performance.
So what do you think? What’s your experience of placing CTAs on landing pages? What has worked for you?
Please drop by and share your comments and experience – we welcome everyone’s opinion and it’s good to debate because there really is no ‘right’ answer, as illustrated by the case studies in this post.
We recommend reading KISSmetric’s excellent blog “Why The Fold Is A Myth – And Where To Actually Put Your Calls To Action”.
For a critique of 15 landing pages and why they do/don’t work well for conversion, take a peek at James Gardner’s post on Unbounce, “15 Landing Page Examples Analyzed for Conversion (By a Honey Badger)”.
And take a leaf through Smart Insights' own good practice guide "Creating high-converting landing pages" that I recently helped update.
Thanks, James
By James Gurd
James is an Ecommerce consultant and owner of Digital Juggler, an E-commerce and Digital Marketing consultancy helping retailers develop, execute and evolve E-commerce strategies and optimise their digital channel. With a background as a Head of E-commerce and also agency side as Head of Client Development, he has experienced life on both sides of the fence. He has helped companies like A&N Media, Sweaty Betty and Smythson to manage RFP/ITT proposals. and been lead consultant on high profile projects for Econsultancy, Salmon and Greenwich Consulting. He is a guest blogger for Econsultancy, for whom he also writes best practice guides, regularly contributes to industry events and co-hosts #ecomchat, a weekly Twitter chat for e-commerce knowledge sharing. For e-commerce advice and support, connect with James on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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