Your first attempt at designing a landing page isn’t going to be perfect. It may be good enough to generate conversions, but there’s always room for improvement. When enhancements can mean significant gains in your business’s bottom line, you should always consider landing page optimization.

Landing page optimization refers to the process of improving elements on a landing page to boost conversions. It involves a structured system of data collection, analysis, and experimentation methods like A/B testing and multivariate testing.

Unlike most web pages, a landing page stands alone, separate from your website’s navigation. Its only purpose is to convert a visitor into a lead or sale. Signups, downloads, purchases, and subscriptions are all goal actions that a landing page may attempt to elicit, and landing page optimization works to improve the rate at which they occur.

Landing pages are the workhorses of your digital marketing presence. By converting visitors to leads and sales, they turn anonymous traffic into sales opportunities and revenue.

While this is essential in any circumstance, it’s even more vital when you consider landing pages largely aim to convert paid traffic. As part of paid advertising campaigns, a successful landing page doesn’t only drive revenue—it also keeps you from wasting valuable budget by optimizing your ad spend.

Diagnosing landing page problems isn’t as simple as pointing to an element and saying, “Let’s test this!” It involves a more precise process that enables its users to be confident that what they’re optimizing will have a measurable effect on the page’s goal.

A/B testing and multivariate testing are two of the best-known methods of identifying ways to optimize your landing pages. They involve testing multiple pages against each other by driving traffic to each and seeing which produces the best result.

A/B testing is ideal for finding the global maximum (the best general page design for accomplishing your goal), and multivariate testing is best for finding the local maximum (the most optimal combination of specific elements on the winning version of your general page).

Though they differ in what they test, the general structure of the testing process is very similar:

Landing pages consist of many elements, and the combinations they can form are endless. So, what should you test? Headlines? Images? CTAs?

All these are fair game. But you should never test an element at random, or because someone else told you it was worth testing. What’s worthwhile for another company’s campaign may not be beneficial for yours. Make sure you have a reason for testing rooted in your own observations.

It’s also crucial to remember that, when choosing an aspect of your page to test, you’re trying to maximize your return on investment. Should you be testing elements of little significance like button colors or text size? Probably not. These aren’t likely to result in meaningful changes to your campaign.

The elements you choose to test should be ones that will have a drastic effect on visitors:

These are only a few examples of things that can meaningfully affect your conversion rate. But just as vital as knowing what to test is knowing what not to test. For example, you wouldn’t try center-aligned text because this makes reading hard for visitors. And you wouldn’t shape your buttons like stars because they would be unrecognizable. Some best practices on the web aren’t worth testing because they’re not likely to produce a positive result.

That’s not to say there’s never a time or place to test best practices. Just because somebody else has done it one way doesn’t mean it’s the right approach for you. But if you’re going to test established principles of the web, you had better have a good reason to think they need changing.

Landing page optimization is a powerful process for adding to your bottom line. But, before you test, it’s essential to be realistic about what you want to accomplish.

Landing page optimization isn’t always the best way to improve a campaign. Targeting parameters, traffic sources, ads, etc., all play a part in your campaign’s success. And sometimes you’re better off spending your resources on optimizing these.

Doing landing page optimization before you’ve honed your targeting is like trying to walk before you can crawl. Make sure that when you start landing page optimization, you’re confident it will move the needle more than other tactics.

Ready to start landing page optimization? Get a demo of Instapage to find out how you can use its heat maps, analytics, and built-in experimentation to optimize your landing pages faster.