One page, one job
A campaign landing page should ask for one thing. Every extra link is an exit you built yourself.
Your launch page has a signup button. Also a nav bar, a blog link, a Discord invite, an X icon, a changelog and a footer with 30 links. Congratulations: you built a page with one goal and 35 exits.
Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner’s conversion-centered design framework calls this the attention ratio: the number of things you can do on a page versus the number of things you should do. For a campaign landing page, the target is 1:1. When Unbounce analyzed over 20,000 lead-gen landing pages for the original 2013 framework, conversion rates tended to fall as the number of links rose. Unbounce admits that isn’t true in every case, and says a homepage can reasonably have lots of links because visitors arrive with different goals. Its own homepage sits around 20:1.
So the rule is for pages with one job: an ad destination, a launch page, a waitlist, a webinar signup. Remove the navigation, the social icons and the side quests, and make every button on the page lead to the same next step.
The example
- Instead of
- “Launch page: top nav, blog, Discord, X, GitHub, pricing, signup button and a 30-link footer”
- Try
- “Launch page: logo, headline, demo GIF and one “Join the waitlist” button, repeated at the bottom”
Before you flush
Count every clickable thing on your main landing page, then remove or hide everything that doesn’t lead to its one goal.