Nick Sal's HubSpot Inbound Marketing and Consulting Blog

HubSpot customers often asking me for average landing page conversion rate statistics.  "What's a good conversion rate for my industry?"   They hope we can point them to that magic number to shoot for.

My answer, may either excite or disapoint you, depending on your attitude:  Landing page conversion rates are highly subjective.   They depend on a range of factors that each inbound marketer controls themselves such as:

• The visitors being sent to the page (Are there a lot? Are they repeat visitors?  What were they looking at before the page?  Do they match your target persona(s)?)  
• The offer for the landing page itself
• The form configuration:  (How many fields are there?  What types of fields are included i.e. what types of info are you requesting in exchange for the offer?  
• How is the form configured to function? (Are you using Smart fields, progressive profiling, marked fields as required?  What does the 'submit' button copy say?)  
• The copy used: (Headlines, descriptive text, formatting of the text, amount of text?)
• The images on the page: (Size, quality, descriptiveness/attractiveness, positioning on the page) 

Shooting for "industry averages" can be dangerous.   However I do think that if a customer were following the landing page best practices we use most of the time here at HubSpot and that I teach in HubSpot Academy's Introduction to Landing Pages training class, they could expect to convert 20 percent of the non-PPC based traffic they drive to that page*.  

Could they convert more?   Certainly!   But that's a solid first base that most of the customers I train feel is attainable.

HubSpot does publish stats around this type of thing under our annual "State of Inbound Marketing" report and also in the benchmarks portion of the Goals app found in every portal under Settings. 

Screenshot of my HubSpot SMART Goals Setting App which can be found under 'Settings' 

But, all these things said, I would remind HubSpot users that there is no better benchmark than their own past performance of previously published landing pages.   So a better question might be, "What are some of the best practices from current HubSpot users (including ourselves) that can get our own average landing page conversion rate within our portal to 20%+?  We actually have an ebook that walks you through some of our top customer example landing pages and how they got greater than FIFTY PERCENT conversion rates....but you'll have to come to the Landing Page Training class (available within your portal under Academy >> HubSpot Training >> Converting Visitors to Leads >> Landing Pages to get it!  :)

Know what that means?   Get started publishing landing pages and get them out there using promotional tools in your account so we get some juicy performance data to learn from and determine next steps!  :)

I hope this helps - Do you have a different opinion or approach for when people ask for "average" landing page conversion rates? please let me know your thoughts below.

*Why do I say non-PPC?  Only because I have limited experience working with PPC advertising, and my returns on my own campaigns have not been that great.  If anybody reading this is a veteran with PPC, please feel free to contribute your two centers in the comments thread below.   

As marketers we are always on the look out for good web marketing tools that we can use to engage our visitors. As the principal at Scalability Project, a digital inbound marketing agency, I've always been a believer that variety is our strongest tool.

Hubspot Prospects App & Daily Prospects Digest - What you need to know to use it effectively as an inbound marketer:

Hello Hubspotters,
I wanted to share some notes & ideas from a lead generation brainstorm session I had with a recent Hubspot customer who is having trouble thinking of lead generation offers for their elegant but disposable dish ware business targeted towards high end caterers and food vendors.

I sent him some ideas to get them thinking the way we think about offers here at Hubspot.  Hopefully you can read my notes below and benefit from some of these questions + ideas I posed to them as well and put some of these in place in the future:

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• So, your target audience is caterers, food venues, especially stadiums, so understanding who the decision makers (your "target persona") is a critical starting point.  Who is the person who buys your products?  What are their big concerns with running their particular business?  Are they worried about controlling costs?  Quality?  Efficiency?  Do they lose a lot of their glass/china inventory to breakage/theft?  What keeps them up at night? 

• In order to gain your visitor's trust, you should be offering them free content to download that shows you not only understand their problems & goals very intimately, but you can also offer them something to download that can help them in their day.  If you can offer them something that helps them manage their current business/dishware needs better, they will trust you and explore your products afterwards.

• Ideas I'm thinking on this front:  A dish ware inventory management spreadsheet, a short PDF featuring 3-4 catering/concessions managers and their success secrets to running a profitable business, a guide on how to better manage the costs, staff and inventory of your catering/food business ect. 

• How do your product work?  How is it better?  Does it save money?  Does it help the environment?  Does it delight guests?  What can you offer that shows off the benefits of doing it YOUR way versus the alternatives?  Maybe having a down-loadable comparison graph between the costs of your dish ware bundles versus some of the leading alternatives?  Crunch the numbers a bit and put them in a nice comparative matrix that people can register to download!

• Ultimately, you have to DO RESEARCH and CREATE HELPFUL RESOURCES/TOOLS that your target audience/persona is either too lazy or busy to create themselves.  That's all that HubSpot has done - understood the problems and goals of the people we want to sell to, and then offer them free tools/guides to do their job better WITHOUT USING OUR PRODUCT, so that the target customer understands we know our business, we know what the alternatives to our product is out there, and we're willing to help people do better in their job as marketers (which is why we made an easier way to do what our target audience does, just like you guys did with dishware).  But we don't bring that up first, that's something we want our audience to conclude for themselves, like - "Wow, if the stuff they give away for free is this good and helpful, I wonder how good the stuff they charge for is!"

• If none of this resonates with you, just grab a couple people who are your best customers/best prospects and ask them, "If you had a magic lamp, what would you wish for in terms of tools/information/resources to help run your business better?  What would be good enough for you to fill out a form and download from the web?"  Then listen, and try your best to create what they ask for, before your competition does.

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Hope this helps a bit, guys.  You've got great resources on learning.hubspot.com and I'd be happy to add more ideas once you get a few going first! 

Nick Salvatoriello Inbound Marketing Consultant Post a question to the HubSpot Forums Log a support request

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