Landing Pages & CRO

A campaign can hit every target on impressions and clicks and still lose money, because the page it sends people to was never built to convert them. That is where landing pages and CRO sit: the point where paid media and web development meet. We build the page the traffic lands on, then we keep testing it against what visitors do.

This is also where most marketing spend quietly leaks away. A client can raise a budget, improve targeting and lower cost per click, and still see enquiries stay flat, because the page after the click was never the problem anyone looked at. Conversion optimisation is the discipline of treating that page as seriously as the campaign that sends traffic to it: measured, tested and changed on evidence rather than on opinion about what looks good.

The landing page sprint

Most landing pages fail before a single visitor arrives, because they were built to look right rather than to convert a specific audience doing a specific thing. We run a fixed five day sprint instead of an open-ended build.

• Day 1, brief. One offer, one audience, one action. We agree what the page has to prove in the first screen and what counts as a conversion, whether that is a form fill, a call booked or a purchase.
• Days 2 to 4, build. Copy, layout and tracking built together, not copy handed to a designer afterwards. The page is built against the campaign it will receive traffic from, so the message on the ad and the message on the page match.
• Day 5, test and launch. We check the page loads fast on mobile, that every form and tracking event fires, and that the analytics setup will tell us what worked once traffic starts arriving.

The build is five working days from sign-off of the brief. What happens after launch is where conversion optimisation earns its name: watching how the page performs against real traffic and changing what does not work.

CRO audits

If you already have a landing page or site that is underperforming, we audit it before we touch anything. A CRO audit looks at where visitors drop off, what is competing for attention above the fold, whether the form is longer than it needs to be, and whether the page answers the question the ad or search result promised. We prioritise fixes by expected impact, not by what is easiest to change first.

Most audits find the same handful of problems. The headline promises something the page does not deliver above the fold, so a visitor has to scroll to find out if they are in the right place. The call to action changes wording between the ad, the page and the confirmation step, so a visitor stops trusting the process halfway through. Or the page was built for desktop and simply resized for mobile, rather than designed for the smaller screen most paid traffic arrives on. We name each problem specifically, show you the evidence behind it, and rank the fixes by what is likely to move conversion rate rather than what is quickest to ship.

Where we can, we test a change rather than assert it. That means running a change against a control for long enough to see a real difference, and being honest when there is not enough traffic through a page to test reliably. In that case we recommend a direct fix instead of a test that would take months to read cleanly.

Speed fixes

A slow page loses visitors before they read a word of your copy. We check load time on mobile first, since that is where most paid traffic lands, and separate what is a hosting or caching problem from what is a page-weight problem: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, fonts loaded before anything visible on screen. We fix what is costing conversions rather than chasing a speed score for its own sake.

Terrier’s own site was rebuilt on WordPress and its mobile speed score moved from 78 to 100 as part of that rebuild. That is the kind of fix we look for first on a client’s landing pages too: not a cosmetic change, but one that removes seconds from the time a visitor waits before the page is even usable.

Forms and booking flows

The form or booking flow is usually the last thing anyone tests, and the first thing that loses a visitor who was ready to convert. We look at field count, whether validation errors are clear, whether a booking calendar shows availability without extra clicks, and whether the confirmation step actually confirms. On the Keogh Practice site we built the patient triage page and its intake form flow, designed so a patient can describe symptoms and book in one pass rather than filling a form and waiting for a callback to find out if it was even the right form.

The same questions apply whatever the industry. A visitor who has decided to enquire should not be asked for information you do not need at that stage, should not hit a validation error with no explanation of what to fix, and should not be left unsure whether their booking actually went through. Each of those is a point where a ready buyer becomes a lost one, and each is fixable without a full rebuild.

Event tracking and attribution

A landing page is only as useful as the data it sends back. We set up event tracking on forms, calls and bookings so you can see which page, which traffic source and which version of the copy produced a conversion rather than a click that went nowhere. Where a client’s paid media and analytics need to talk to each other, we set that connection up as part of the build rather than leaving it as a gap to find later.

Why this sits with development and paid media together

A media team can get you cheaper clicks. It cannot fix a landing page that loses half its visitors before the form even loads. We run both under one roof, so the page a campaign sends people to is built by the same team that manages the paid media spend, rather than handed off between agencies who each blame the other when conversion rate does not move.

In practice this means the brief for a landing page and the brief for the campaign sending it traffic are written together, not passed from one team to another after the ads are already live. The audience the page is built for is the audience the campaign is targeting, the offer on the page matches the offer in the ad, and the tracking on both sides feeds the same report. When conversion rate moves, or does not, we can say why, because we set up the page and the campaign to be read together from the start.

What it costs

Landing pages start from £950 excluding VAT for a single page built to the sprint above. Ongoing testing, form changes and speed work run on a development retainer, from £600 a month. Both bands are on the web development pricing page. There is no minimum term, 60 days’ notice, at any point. A CRO audit on an existing page is scoped once we have seen the page and its traffic, since the work depends on how much data there is to read.