Instapage Review – Is it a long term landing page solution?

When I first started building landing pages for my digital marketing campaigns, I’ll admit, it was a bit of a hack job. Luckily Google Adwords was far more affordable back then, otherwise there’s no way I would have made it to where I am today. My conversion rates were abysmal. As I developed and expanded, my landing pages became behemoths on the back-end. Slow loading times drove customers away, and implementing campaign-wide improvements was a nightmare. If only I had access to a platform like Instapage back then, things would have been much different.

Powering millions of landing pages around the internet, Instapage is an all-in-one landing page solution that makes it incredibly easy to achieve high conversion rates. In fact, the company estimates an average conversion rate of 22% for landing pages built on their platform at the time of writing this article. Instapage makes it easy to maximize the ROI from your Adwords or Facebook Ads campaigns. Launch conversion-ready landing pages fully-optimized for mobile in a matter of days, no developer required.

Am I wearing rose-colored glasses, or is this the real deal? We’ll revisit this question in a bit.

Landing Pages

Features

Instapage has a ton of features to offer, but its landing page builder is at the core of its functionality. In my early days I never would have imagined having the power to create a post-click experience for each and every ad in my campaigns in a scalable manner, but the Instapage landing page builder turns this dream into a reality.

It doesn’t take much hands-on experience with these types of digital marketing campaigns to recognize that you’ll be using similar blocks of content time and time again.

Instapage offers two powerful tools, Instablocks™ and Global Blocks, to allow you to quickly scale with page blocks.

Using Instablocks™, you can either choose from their extensive library of predesigned content blocks, or build your own from the ground up and save them for later use. You can even create sophisticated forms for opt-ins when your landing page calls for them.

The landing page builder goes one step further by offering what Instapage refers to as Global Blocks. With Global Blocks you can make changes as you develop your landing pages. And, your saved change can be applied to all pages that utilize the global block. This makes updating thousands of pages fast and effective – you save time and avoid potential manual errors.

A/B Testing

You can reap the benefits of basic conversion rate by implementing the optimization principals in Instapage templated blocks. If you want to drive your conversions through the roof, you would want to conduct A/B testing. Instapage offers integrated heat maps and A/B testing so that you can see what resonates best with your visitors.

A/B testing starts with heat maps, which allow you to see where and how your visitors are interacting with your pages. The Instapage heat maps track and display where your visitors move their mouse cursers, where they click, and how far down the page they scroll so that you can determine which elements of your page are most likely to benefit from optimization.

When the time comes to initiate your A/B testing you can create variations of your pages, set your campaign goals, and allocate the traffic shares to each of your page variations. You can then view the results of the testing in the analytics dashboard in real time or set specific time windows to determine which variations result in the highest conversions.

The analytics dashboard allows you to visualize what is working best for visitors on both desktop and mobile devices.

Integration

The Instapage platform makes it easy to integrate with other applications used in your marketing operations. Many of the integrations are native, making the transition and communication seamless.

You can also connect quite a few non-native applications via Zapier and Webhooks, or integrate virtually any number of applications as you need using custom code, HTML, or JavaScript.

For example, you can publish your landing pages directly to your WordPress website. Or, simply create a record with your website’s hosting company to point to the page on Instapage’s server. You can also collect data submitted in your landing page forms to your customer database and send your important lead data to Salesforce or Infusionsoft.

If you utilize email marketing automation, Instapage can interface directly with HubSpot or Autopilot to make sure your direct marketing is delivering a relevant and consistent message to your visitors, and gauge how effective your email marketing efforts are.

Of course, you can also integrate Instapage with your analytics tool of choice to track the traffic going to each of your landing pages, where the traffic for each page is coming from, and determine which sources of traffic are providing you with the highest ROI.

Integrated Collaboration

Instapage also provides you the tools to collaborate in real time with team members, clients, and external stakeholders. Instapage visual collaboration makes easy to work with all parties in one central location, rather than bouncing back and forth through emails and messaging systems where inputs can easily get buried and overlooked.

To collaborate, all you have to do is click on a specific element of the landing page and leave comments for others to review and respond to. Comments are threaded directly on the landing page, and you can notify team members when they are mentioned with an automatically generated email. You can invite others to view the landing pages by the same manner, or by sharing a private link.

The integrated collaboration system also allows you to control who sees which parts of the comment thread by setting permissions, and you can even protect particular landing pages with a password so that you can invite others to view and collaborate on your landing pages in a secure fashion.

Instapage is one of a handful platforms that provide such an advanced collaboration system, making it easy and efficient to streamline your review processes.

Technical Details

All right, enough with the shiny features. It’s time to dig into the nerdy technical details. When you decide to take the dive into Instapage what are you really getting under the hood? There are so many features it offers, but here are some that I think are the most important:

• Instapage ensures fast page load speeds by implementing a dual-cloud CDN (Amazon and Google) and superior image optimization algorithms.
• It also utilizes the Thor Render Engine and verifies landing page load speed using Google PageSpeed Insights.
• Access to over 5,000 fonts Google and Typekit fonts provides you with virtually endless options for defining your brand’s appearance.
• Match your landing page’s sales copy directly to your visitors search using dynamic text replacement so that you can quickly and easily increase your conversions.
• Manage multiple client accounts within one dashboard, and create sub accounts so that your team can work on your client’s pages without sharing confidential login credentials.
• Complete GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance so that you can avoid privacy and security-related legal issues.
• As close to 24/7 uptime as you could ask for – 99.97 up time in first half of 2020.
• Global data centers ensure your content is being delivered from the closest geographical location possible.

Pricing

There’s no question, one of the major sticking points for getting started with any new service for your marketing campaign is pricing. Luckily, you can take Instapage’s Business Plan for a spin to see what it’s all about for 14 days, completely free of charge. If you decide not to opt in for a paid account at the end of the 14 day period your landing pages will simply be unpublished, and you have up to 60 days to sign up for a paid plan to reactivate them should you choose to do so.

The Business Plan gives you access to the bulk of the features discussed here, including their page builder, third-party integrations, heat maps and A/B testing, and more. It allows for up to 30 landing pages and 30,000 unique visitors to your site. You can choose to pay on a monthly basis at a rate of $149/month. There are no startup costs required.

Once your operations start to exceed the limitations of the core Business Plan, you can upgrade to the Enterprise Plan which gives you access to all that Instapage has to offer, and pricing is determined based on your specific needs with the Instapage sales team.

Benefits

• Provide a superior browsing experience for your mobile visitors by creating pages built on Google’s AMP framework. This allows for incredibly fast landing page load times on mobile devices which means not only higher quality metrics for your pages, but also improved conversions at the end of the day. Better yet, you can even convert your existing pages to the AMP framework with relative ease. All you have to do is save your page content to Instablocks and then use them to assemble new AMP pages. Instapage claims to be the only landing page platform that allows you to build on the AMP framework.
• Build mobile-responsive versions of your landing pages simultaneously as you’re assembling the desktop versions to make sure that your visitors are having a great experience regardless of their device. Instapage’s page builder allows you to quickly switch over to the mobile preview so that you can make sure that everything is formatting correctly and make edits as necessary. You can use the built-in grouping and alignment tools to make sure that the elements of your page are staying together as they should and formatting consistently at the intended aspect ratio, regardless of your visitor’s browsing format.
• Rest assured that your data and sensitive customer information are protected when you’re using the Instapage platform. By utilizing Google and Amazon’s cloud based systems, Instapage is able to provide stable service with impressive up times, as well as ensure that there are no holes in the security. Customer lead information is protected in accordance with standards such as HIPAA and never stored as it is being passed to third-party applications. Sensitive customer information is never shared. Furthermore, Instapage provides SSL certificates for all of your domains, making sure the connection between your visitors’ browsers and your websites are legitimate and secure.

Is Instapage a Long Term Solution?

Absolutely! When compared to its competitors, Instapage is a highly customizable platform that gives you the power to update and manage potentially thousands of landing pages at scale. It provides you with the tools you need to develop your landing pages as your brand grows and solidifies its image.

As previously discussed, you can get started with Instapage at a relatively affordable monthly rate. If your team is successful and you begin to outgrow the limitations of the core plan, you can set up a custom plan with the sales team to make sure you have the resources to keep on growing.