How do you keep a customer's interest once they've clicked on an advertisement? This is where many marketing campaigns lose steam. To increase sales and consumer engagement, the person needs to be interested in the content they see. That's where landing pages come in.
Landing pages are unique website pages that can be attached to advertisements and email campaigns. When a person clicks a link, they'll be brought to a page with specific content regarding that ad. This makes them much more likely to perform actions like buying products or opting in to subscriber lists.
If you don't have a coding background, the idea of creating landing pages might be intimidating. But with a landing page builder, you don't need technical expertise. Two of the most popular landing page creators are Instapage and Unbounce.
Each gives you access to multiple features that increase conversion rates and return-on-investment. Because they look so similar at a glance, I've reviewed the key differences so you can choose the best system for you.
Overview of Unbounce and Instapage
Shared Features
Unique Unbounce Features
Unique Instapage Features
Templates
Unbounce
Unbounce comes with about 125 landing page templates available for free. In addition, you get access to the Themeforest marketplace, which has hundreds more templates available for purchase.
Templates are tagged with different categories, allowing you to find designs optimized for your specific industry or marketing tool. In addition, you can create thank you pages, consumer information forms, and subscriber opt-in forms.
For those who want to create customized templates without one of the presets, Unbounce comes with that capability.
Instapage
Instapage is host to over 200 templates. Each design is geared toward a specific purpose, made to display after a user takes a certain action.
Some of the template categories include:
Winner: Instapage
Both services offer a number of pre-categorized templates that can be customized with different elements. However, Instapage comes with a much higher number of free templates, along with more industry-specific and action-specific categories.
Integrations
Unbounce
Unbounce is built to work with more than forty of the most popular third party applications for marketers. In addition, the platform is compatible with Zapier, which allows for more than sixty additional program integrations.
You can use third party programs to automate and simplify a variety of tasks. Unbounce has support for services in these categories:
Instapage
Instapage also comes with more than forty program integrations plus Zapier's 60+. Each of the service categories includes multiple specific systems to choose from.
The Instapage categories cover:
Winner: Instapage
Both services can integrate with many different programs, allowing you to complete actions without switching interfaces. Instapage has just a slight edge because of the way every category has multiple different programs. This allows users a greater range of flexibility when choosing the third party tools to help them.
Reporting and Analytics
Unbounce
Every plan comes with unlimited A/B variable testing that can be integrated with Google Analytics software.
The A/B reporting is some of the easiest to understand. Each variable is displayed side by side, with statistics about engagement beside them. You'll be told at a glance how many visitors and conversions each variation had, plus the total conversion rate.
It's a basic tool that's easy to use, but it doesn't have advanced reporting capabilities.
Instapage
Instapage also integrates with Google Analytics and offers unlimited A/B testing. However, the data reporting is more comprehensive and usable. The interface can be a little more confusing if you're not sure how to interpret the data.
Your analytics page shows statistics for engagement with both the desktop and mobile versions of each variant.
With the Filters menu, you can view data regarding specific demographics or other marketing-related subsections. If you're trying to engage with a particular part of your consumer base, the ability to break down your information is vital.
You can also download reports and easily switch between pages for different variations.
One of the most important features of the Instapage analytics program is that you can set your own parameters regarding conversions. The default is to count conversions as every link click and form submission. But you can adjust the user actions that you consider important converting behavior.
You can also view a Performance graph, which is a visual representation about the number of visitors, the number of conversions, and the number of users who navigated away without interacting.
Reports can be customized based on the page, timeframe, demographic, variation, and type of device viewed. You can also export the reports as .xlsx, .cvs, or .txt documents to save them in offline storage areas.
Winner: Instapage
In addition to offering all the basic data from Unbounce, Instapage has a huge number of customization and exporting options for generating your reports.
Pros and Cons of Unbounce
Pros
Cons
Pros and Cons of Instapage
Pros
Cons
Final Thoughts: Which is Better?
Both of these programs provide comprehensive features to create and publish high-converting landing pages without any hand coding. The best one for you really depends on how useful you find the different setups. Unbounce is best for intermediate developers, while Instapage is optimized for people without a technical background.
Unbounce is the go-to option if you're on a budget, want the most inexpensive basic feature package, have enough technical background to navigate the interface, and don't mind sacrificing some data and analytics reporting tools.
Instapage is a little more expensive, but it also comes with more comprehensive features. You get access to real-time reporting and analytics regarding various marketing tool performances. In addition, the A/B split variation testing is more helpful than most other testing setups, which allows you to optimize your campaigns further.
