Unbounce launches AI-powered landing page analyzer after 8 years of training

Trying to work out how to improve your landing page’s conversion rate is difficult at best. While a select few experts use a data-only approach, the process is fairly subjective. Like being an art critic. Or estimating the chances of Donald Trump’s impeachment.

Today, Unbounce — the landing page company — has released Landing Page Analyzer, a free tool that uses eight years of training data combined with artificial intelligence to tell you how well any landing page is performing, and why.

What Unbounce’s analyzer measures, and what it doesn’t, is of particular interest. On seeing the tool in action, SEO expert and Moz founder Rand Fishkin commented, “I’ve never seen a page analysis tool that’s focused on optimization. This can be hugely helpful for folks who want to quickly check that they’ve nailed the basics of landing page optimization and accessibility.”

Unbounce has previously published a report that summarizes the 75 million pieces of data it has been collecting on landing pages, noting what works and what doesn’t (we discussed this during an episode of VB Engage). Now it has released a tool to provide live feedback, rather than expecting marketers to read through that report, understand it, and apply the lessons to their landing pages.

The Analyzer measures nine distinct performance categories. For example, it takes into account page speed, which has become increasingly important thanks to Google’s algorithm changes over the years. It measures performance rankings and compares them to industry benchmarks so that you can see how you stack up against your peers. Mobile experience is important, especially since the introduction of the mobile index. The Analyzer also takes into account copy analysis, overall design, SEO factors, trust and security, message matching (checking if the message is in line with your general theme), and social tags.

“When it comes to the AI, we know due to our research that certain copy lengths matter a lot,” Carl Schmidt, CTO at Unbounce, told me. “When we say that your copy is too long, there’s a high probability that our advice is going to bear out.”

Any website can be run through the tool, including that of your competition. Determining what you’re doing well, and what ranking other websites receive, is easy. You simply enter a URL, wait a few seconds, and the results appear. That simplicity masks a much more complex process behind the scenes, where AI steps in to determine what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s ugly about the website you’re analyzing.

The tool doesn’t yet perform complete natural language processing, but it understands how particular words affect conversion. That means that the tool won’t right now pick up on the subtleties of language, such as when you’re promoting scarcity — a tactic that definitely moves the needle.

“We’re not constructing sentences for you or doing any grammatical analysis right now,” Schmidt said. “That will be the next step. We are, however, performing some sentiment analysis to help with copy recommendations.”

The tool itself is free of charge and available from Unbounce’s website today — Unbounce will ask for your email address in return for using the product. The data that the company has been collecting on its own platform for the past eight years is feeding the current iteration, and the more people that use it, the more it will learn from those pages to improve the recommendations.