
While your paid ad strategy may drive traffic, it's your landing pages that ultimately convert curious searchers into loyal customers. Instapage tested whether a dedicated landing page converted better than a brand’s homepage and found that the landing page almost tripled the conversion rate.
But crafting a high-converting landing page isn’t a simple feat. Its purpose is to continue your conversation with potential customers who come to your site from paid ads. This requires a thoughtful approach to every element on your landing page and the psychology behind it.
Today, we’re sharing copy, design, and personalization tips to help you craft high-converting landing pages that align with your customer journey.
Understanding what motivates, influences, and even frustrates potential customers is key to building a landing page that resonates deeply. User experience principles can help you create effective landing pages in multiple ways, and Nielsen Norman Group lists the following as some of the top considerations:
People often see only what they immediately notice. Use visual design principles like scale, hierarchy, and contrast to make the most important information stand out on the page.
You can also use Gestalt Principles to clearly define which landing page elements go together. For example, use a colored background or border to tie your hero section together.
Offer the right information at the right time to simplify decision-making.
Humans can only store about seven pieces of information in their short-term memory—and this is forgotten in about 20 seconds. Users also tend to satisfice, or settle for something that may not be an optimal choice but meets basic needs.
Improve recall and reduce information overload by focusing only on the essential elements customers require to make decisions.
Users take actions that seem most likely to meet their needs. Provide clear context with link anchor text to help them take the right actions—and use the Gutenberg Principle to understand where users’ eyes travel as they view your web page and ensure that conversion elements fall in that viewing pattern.
Messaging is everything. The best landing pages speak directly to your target audience with user-specific copy that’s clear, concise, and persuasive.
Many people mistakenly think this means copywriting needs to be overly logical and boring. But it can be true to your brand voice—and the most effective copywriting appeals to emotion.
Here are seven tips for using ecommerce copy to convert your landing page visitors:
Without research, your landing page will likely try to address all potential customers. But this approach isn’t effective. When you try to convert everyone, you end up converting no one.
Qualitative research tells you what your target audience truly cares about. It uncovers the questions, concerns, needs, and wants your copy must address in order for users to convert.
Take these two high-converting landing pages that SplitBase designed, for example:


Tovala’s landing page uses clear, benefits-oriented copy. (Source: Tovala)
Powerful copy focuses on benefits rather than features.
If your product solves a specific problem, your copy should help potential customers understand what not solving that problem feels like. At the same time, it should express how much better their lives could be if they use your product to solve their pain point.
Gartner recommends using the headline and a subheading or short paragraph to highlight your product’s value proposition.

OSEA’s product landing page uses the AIDA copywriting framework to convert customers. (Source: OSEA)
Not sure how to structure your landing page copy, or even what to write? Copywriting formulas like problem, agitate, solution (PAS) or attention, interest, desire, action (AIDA) are proven to motivate users to convert. Use these frameworks across your entire landing page, in individual sections, or even within sentences.

Done, an ADHD support solution, matches its Instagram ad copy to the linked landing page. (Source: Instagram and Done)
If you’re building a landing page for a specific ad, make sure the landing page copy matches both the ad and the call to action (CTA) or featured product. Every mismatched click is money you paid for and then wasted. Contentsquare's 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark found the cost of a single visit rose 9% last year, a 30% climb over three years, so your landing page needs to pick up exactly where the ad left off.
This is especially key for creating listicle landing pages. These read like content, so your ad should look like it’s promoting an article rather than selling your product.

Asystem’s landing page headline uses three words to convey the product’s benefits. (Source: Asystem)
Reduce clutter, remove unnecessary words, and keep only what is meaningful. This is especially crucial for your headline and subheadline.
Concision takes practice, so it’s important to rely on a good editor, whether you’re writing your own landing page copy or you’ve hired someone else to do it.

NeuroMD uses “Get Relief: Start 60-Day Trial” as a CTA to invite users to take action. (Source: NeuroMD)
Your CTAs should be action-oriented and clear. Some examples of this include:
Experiment with different CTA language, A/B test your landing page designs, and check metrics like bounce rate, click-through rate, and average order value to see which version converts best.

Canine wellness brand Reggie adds a sense of urgency to its landing page offer with a countdown timer and special discount. (Source: Reggie)
Use copy and imagery to create a sense of urgency or scarcity. As Search Engine Journal says, if your target audience doesn’t feel the need to buy your product now, they’ll likely delay making a purchase. This increases the chances they forget about your product.
Of course, this tactic is best used in moderation. If you overdo it, the sense of urgency begins to feel less genuine—as do your offers.
Your high-converting landing page design should support your messaging, create trust, and position your brand. At the end of the day, a beautiful web page design can augment well-crafted messaging, but even the most beautiful design can’t make up for unhelpful copy or a poor user experience.
That said, here are six landing page design elements that can improve conversions:

Sakara uses a high-quality, colorful image to draw attention to its nutrition-focused meal plan product. (Source: Sakara)
Your hero section is your first impression. This means imagery is critical to grab your target audience’s attention, introduce them to your product, and show them how it works.
As you build and test your landing page, optimize your hero section first. Use data like scrollmaps to see whether users travel from the hero section to your Add to Cart section. If your scrollmaps indicate a major drop-off at your hero section, you likely need to iterate on its design.

Sunbasket’s landing page navigation doesn’t distract users from converting but offers just enough for those who want to dig further into the brand’s offerings. (Source: Sunbasket)
Landing page navigation is a hotly debated topic. Some argue that a navigation header causes users to leave your landing page without converting. Others argue that navigation gives users the autonomy to freely move around websites.
Ultimately, whether or not you should include landing page navigation depends on your target audience and goals. The only way to tell for sure is to do your landing page research.

Fragrance brand Oakcha uses icons to bring attention to its products’ key features. (Source: Oakcha)
Icons act like directional cues to highlight key information. Using universally recognized shapes can also add clarity.
In the example above, fragrance brand Oakcha uses an image of a rabbit alongside the text “vegan and cruelty free.” This matches the logo used by the Leaping Bunny Program, which is globally recognized to represent cruelty-free products.

Juna, a wellness brand, uses white space to group related items together and create a logical flow of information. (Source: Juna)
White space draws users’ attention to your landing page’s most critical elements. It also reduces cognitive load by removing clutter and improving readability.
Pro tip: Landing pages with long-form content especially benefit from a liberal use of white space. SplitBase used white space to improve the readability of beauty brand Laura Geller’s landing page, which yielded a 43% boost in conversions.

PrettyLitter, a maker of specialty cat litter, uses contrasting colors to ensure that users see its hero image, headline, and CTA. (Source: PrettyLitter)
One conversion rate optimization myth that somehow persists is that the color of your CTA button is important. In reality, the color doesn’t matter as much as how well the button stands out from the rest of your landing page content.
Contrast helps you lead potential customers from your hero image to your headline and your CTA button. If your button blends in, it becomes difficult to find and requires more effort from users to convert.

HighKey shares customer reviews and media logos to validate its claims that its cookies are delicious. (Source: HighKey)
Successful landing pages use social proof to build trust and convert visitors. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 85% of consumers are more likely to use a business after reading positive reviews, and 93% say they've made a purchase after reading reviews.
The following types of social proof can boost your landing page conversion rates:
Personalization is essential to increase conversions. HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing report found that 93% of marketers say personalization improves their leads or purchases.
The most essential forms of ecommerce personalization are customized copy, imagery, and offers. These should all reflect the ad that led your potential customers to your site, as well as the behaviors linked to the channel they came from. This applies to all channels, including social media and search. After all, ads and landing pages are like PB&J—they’re better together.
For example, if customers visit your landing page from a TikTok ad, they’re likely to be impatient and have a shorter attention span. This means your landing page needs snappier copy and eye-catching visuals.
Your paid ads can only take you so far. Once potential customers click, it’s up to your landing page to motivate them to buy.
Using a landing page template or one-size-fits-all framework won’t cut it. You need a data-driven approach to craft high-converting landing pages that resonate with your audience. Contact SplitBase to begin optimizing your landing pages for the best possible customer experience.
There's no universal benchmark worth chasing, because conversion rates swing widely by traffic source, price point, and offer. A page converting cold TikTok traffic at 2% might be outperforming a page converting branded search at 8%. Benchmark against your own baseline, then test your way up from there.
A product page lives in your store's navigation and has to serve every visitor, from first-time browsers to repeat buyers. A landing page is built for one audience, one offer, and one action, usually tied to a specific ad or campaign. That focus is why dedicated landing pages tend to out-convert product pages for paid traffic.
As long as it takes to answer your visitors' questions and overcome their objections, and no longer. Considered purchases and higher price points usually need longer pages, while impulse-friendly products convert with less. Your customer research will tell you which camp your audience falls into.
One per distinct audience or campaign angle, at minimum. If you're sending prospecting, retargeting, and email traffic to the same page, you're forcing three very different mindsets through one message. Start with dedicated pages for your highest-spend campaigns and expand from there.
Compare it against your other pages and your acquisition costs, not against industry averages. If your cost per acquisition from a page keeps climbing while ad performance holds steady, the page is usually the leak. Scrollmaps, session recordings, and on-page polls will show you where visitors drop off and why.