I make a lot of landing pages for my clients (read more about why landing pages are important here). Most of my clients have at least 2 and some have as many as 8 or 10 and I am constantly creating new pages to track the effectiveness of various pay-per-click marketing campaigns that we test (LinkedIn, Adwords, Facebook, Yelp, etc.). So, I wanted to be sure to find a really exceptional landing page software provider. As a marketing professional, there are some features that I considered to be must-haves in this kind of software. They are (in no particular order):
- An easy, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG design interface (even though I know HTML and CSS).
- Existing design templates to work off (since I’m a marketer, not a designer).
- Built-in A/B testing with easily measured results.
- Integration with 3rd-party email clients.
- Custom domain names for my clients for each landing page (i.e., try.mydomain.com)
- Complete form customization for each page.
- Google Analytics tracking code integration.
- HTML editing capability.
- Mobile-friendly design availability.
- A reasonable price.
After doing many weeks of research and trying a few free trials, I was able to narrow down to what I think is the very best vendor: Unbounce.
What I Love About Unbounce
Not only is their product easy-to-use, it has every one of the features I considered to be most critical. A/B Testing is really easy. You can create new versions of a page or copy existing version and make changes. You assign the percentage of traffic you want the pages to have and Unbounce tracks the visitors and conversions for you. And you can reset the stats at any time. Unfortuntely, however, it isn’t easy to show the various versions to a client unless you pay to add clients to your account. But its cool that the function is at least available.
The design interface is drag-and-drop so its very simple to add parts of a page or move them around. And the pages looks just as you expect them to when you view them in a browser. They have several fonts and colors you can pick easily, but you can also set custom colors if you are trying to match a brand. And you can always look at the HTML for any element to help you get it just the way you want it. You can completely customize the forms – adding new fields, moving them around, setting which ones are required, changing the labels and the colors of the text and the box outlines, customizing the submit button text, etc. I’ve never wanted to do something with the form and been unable to.
I have done integrations with MailChimp and Constant Contact so far and both were very easy. They have a wizard which walked me through the whole process. And now, when I copy a page to make another version, they ask me if I want to copy the integrations as well. I was able to select the list to use on each and what to use for my email confirmation.
Landing pages can Google Analytics and Google Adwords tracking code through a customer JavaScript feature. Plus, with Google Analytics, you can track conversions (although this took a bit of research on their site). And they recently rolled out an additional feature that lets you have a library of scripts for each custom domain you manage. Although this feature has some limitations, it has saved me a lot of time in setting up new landing pages for customers.
You have control over all the alt text for images and the page meta data, as well as the ability to customize the form submission page. This makes it easy to have a link to the main site or a downloadable file if you want. And you can customize the domain name to use and URL for each page very easily.
For client management, they have 2 features. If you pay more, you can have client accounts that allow them to log in and see their landing pages. I haven’t played with this yet. They also have groups for landing pages which helps me find all the landing pages for a client easily.
I’ve been using Unbounce for several months now and I can say that their support has also been excellent.
The Research
If you are interested in the details of my research, see a table which compares the tools below. The information may change over time, however, so if you know of any mistakes or another provider I should review, please let me know in the comments.
Here are the tools I compared:
- Unbounce
- LeadPages
- Get Response Landing pages
- Kickoff Labs
- LivePages
- Lander
- LeadSquared
- PageWiz
- InstaPage
- Landingi
- ClickThroo
Download the comparison here in an Excel file (so you can sort it yourself if you want).
