In the event you’re a time-strapped marketer, you in all probability usually ask your self: “Ought to I spend extra time perfecting the written copy or tweaking the visible design of my touchdown web page?”
Designing a touchdown web page may be daunting. If it’s not your space of experience, making your touchdown web page look the half turns into time-consuming and irritating—even costly, significantly when you want a designer to do the heavy lifting for you. Many entrepreneurs wrestle for hours, days, or weeks as a result of they’ve been informed design is likely one of the most vital components in relation to touchdown web page efficiency.
However simply how necessary is design? Does it affect your conversion fee sufficient to warrant all that further work? How does design stack up towards different key components like copy?
These are a number of the questions we requested ourselves right here at Unbounce. In any case, we’re all about conversion intelligence: Combining your advertising and marketing experience with machine studying so you may make knowledgeable choices based mostly on the most recent out there knowledge—and get essentially the most conversion bang to your buck.


With that in thoughts, our knowledge staff got down to perceive exactly how touchdown web page conversion charges are affected by design and duplicate.
And what did we be taught? Design isn’t as necessary as you may suppose.
How Did We Get Our Information?
Earlier than diving into the outcomes, let’s chat in regards to the knowledge we used and the way we went about our analysis.
At Unbounce, we’re fortunate to have greater than a decade’s price of touchdown web page knowledge totaling billions of particular person conversions. For our design evaluation, we checked out 36,928 English language web page variants lively between March 2019 and March 2020.
We took snapshots of those touchdown pages and educated varied image-based studying fashions to foretell their conversion charges. To judge copy, we extracted the written content material of every touchdown web page. We educated a machine-learning mannequin (or, to get a lil nerdy, a deep learning-based pure language mannequin) to foretell conversion charges from the copy of every web page.
To match the relative significance of copy versus design on touchdown web page conversion charges, we created a brand new predictive mannequin by combining the outcomes of the very best performing image- and copy-based fashions. We did this throughout all 36,928 pages in our dataset and averaged the contributions to provide us the “relative significance of design” and “relative significance of copy.”
Editor’s be aware: For the consultants, all values quoted are on a holdout check set consisting of 10% of the dataset.
So, How Does Design Stack Up In opposition to Copy?
Because it seems, design is probably not as impactful—or as worthy of stressing about—as you might suppose. Our outcomes confirmed copy has twice the relative significance in comparison with design.


You’re in all probability questioning if this outcome holds up throughout totally different industries. There’s gotta be some industries the place design is extra necessary to the viewers, proper?
Nope. Doesn’t appear to be it.


Verify this out: We cut up our pages into 16 totally different industries and plotted the outcomes. The chart above exhibits the significance of copy to the general mannequin prediction. We will see that the median by no means dips underneath 65-70%. This confirms that, throughout all industries, copy has twice the relative affect to transform over design (which ranks at 30-35%).
Wanna brush up in your digital advertising and marketing expertise? Get important ideas, methods, and insights for copy, design, and extra with these useful sources:
Increasing This Analysis with Sensible Builder
We analyzed our knowledge utilizing a complete picture of the web page, not by every attribute. We imagine it’d be attention-grabbing to analyze design additional—based mostly on every visible component—to give you extra particular design insights. The excellent news is that now that we’ve launched Smart Builder, we’ll quickly have the ability to do exactly that.
New knowledge gathered via Sensible Builder will allow us to inform you what elements of your web page design resonate with every of your visitors segments, letting you optimize for particular audiences. Then you definately’ll have the ability to create new variants based mostly on these insights and activate Smart Traffic to maximise conversion potential for every customer. Fairly neat, huh?
That’s conversion intelligence at work. Not solely does Sensible Builder can help you create the proper web page and part parts based mostly in your business, viewers, and marketing campaign objectives in only a few minutes, but it surely additionally gives AI insights and suggestions that will help you launch higher-converting touchdown pages.
Keep in mind: Design Issues, however Copy is Key
Let’s loop again to the unique query: How a lot consideration must you give design and duplicate if you build landing pages?
Our evaluation clearly exhibits design isn’t the principle driver for web page efficiency, however we’re not saying design doesn’t matter. An ideal lookin’ web page will nonetheless enhance your conversion fee—simply in all probability not as a lot as you may suppose. If design is one thing you wrestle with, strive making a web page with Sensible Builder and let our dynamic layouts do the exhausting be just right for you.
In the event you actually wish to increase your conversions, we advocate specializing in perfecting your copy to seize the viewers you’re focusing on.
“However Unbounce, I hate writing copy.” Hey, we hear ya. Smart Copy (our new AI-powered content material generator) can provide you a bunch of high-converting ideas based mostly in your business and the kind of content material you want. Then take it a step additional by incorporating just a few copy modifications in your touchdown web page variants and letting Sensible Site visitors direct your prospects to the one the place they’ll be most definitely to transform.