Landing pages, as you’re likely well aware, are an essential part of your online marketing mix. The challenge is finding the right landing page tool for your business. It’s a matter of taking the features, pricing, support, and other factors into consideration.
This Instapage review will help you decide if it’s the right tool for you or if you should keep searching.
Instapage Overview
Instapage was founded in 2012 by Tyson Quick as a simple page builder that would help performance marketers get better results from paid campaigns. Today, it has evolved into a suite of tools that makes it possible to quickly build professional-looking landing pages, implement quick tempo testing, and generate more revenue from every marketing campaign.
It makes bold claims about what it can do for every stage of your funnel such as having average conversion rates of 22%. In this Instapage review, we’ll put those claims to the test and use a fine-toothed comb to see if it lives up to the hype.
Instapage features
Instapage has a number of features that make it a solid tool for managing landing pages for different purposes and industries. I’ll go through the key features here to give you an idea of what it can do.
Pixel perfect landing page builder
Many landing page builders fall short because you can’t truly drag and drop elements. Rather, things snap into place once they’re dropped on the page and you’re forced to manage what you have or play around with the padding.
Instapage is different. The landing page builder allows you to drop elements exactly where you’d like and drag them around without resistance. It also has guide lines so you can be sure things are perfectly aligned.
There are multiple elements you can use to build your landing pages such as:
- Instablocks (reusable blocks)
- Headlines
- Paragraphs
- Videos
- Images
- Forms
- Buttons
- Boxes
- Circles
- And more
From within the Instapage landing page builder, you can set up conversion goals based on actions taken on the page or off the page. Set the conversion action as link clicks and form submissions when the conversion occurs on the page. When it happens on a different page, there’s a snippet of code you have to add to the page that signifies the conversion is complete (ie a thank you page).
There are basic fonts, Google fonts, and Adobe fonts. If the ones available aren’t enough then you can upload your own Google and Adobe fonts.
After editing the page, there are a number of options such as integrations, search & social metadata, and third party scripts. For publishing, you can choose WordPress, Drupal, a custom domain, or a test domain.
Taken together, the entire page building experience is thoughtful and simple to finish – even for complete beginners.
A/B testing
A landing page builder is only as good as your ability to test what you’ve created so you can improve over time. Instapage A/B testing is called Experiments.
I like it because it asks you to write out a hypothesis about what you’re testing. It makes you answer the question: what do you think will happen if you make these changes? If you’re new to A/B testing, this prompts you to consider the entire experiment and not spend time on things that won’t end up yielding fruit.
Global Blocks
One issue I’ve run into with landing page builders is having to recreate the same elements over and over again. For example, footer areas or disclaimers that need to be consistent across a website. Instapage Global Blocks remove that problem.
There are a number of default block templates you can insert into your pages to get started. I prefer creating a few key blocks like headers, footers, or special disclaimers and saving them so I can quickly access them. The beauty of global blocks is that if you update them in one place, they’re updated everywhere they’ve been used.
Form builder
Instapage allows you to create basic forms that appear on the page or are hidden behind a button. Additionally, you’re able to create multi-step forms that ask for more information when someone submits the information in the visible fields.
When someone submits a form, there are a number of options available. You can deliver a file directly to a user, show a thank you message, or redirect users to another page. To integrate the form with your email marketing service or CRM, you’ll have to exit the editor and go through the publishing process.
You’re unable to do advanced things with the form builder like create sticky bars, exit popups, etc. For that, you’ll need to integrate with another tool like KyLeads.
Heat maps
Instapage heatmaps are activated by default and will show information on your pages with as little as 15 visitors. There are different heatmaps for mobile and desktop which you can view separately.
When you open the heatmap interface, you’ll see where people have clicked by default but there are three separate views you can access.
- Scroll depth. This shows you how far down the page people get before leaving.
- Clicks. This view shows you what people are clicking on.
- Mouse movement. Shows you where people have spent the most time on your landing page
Each variation of your page has different data associated with it so make sure you’re looking at the right version to get accurate information.
Robust reporting
Beyond features, one of the most important things with a landing page tool is the ability to access reports about page performance. Yes, you want to see how many people visited the page and the conversion rate but there’s so much more to look at.
By taking advantage of Instapage Integrations with ad platforms, you’re able to see more information such as cost per lead, cost per visitor, and improvement over time. Understand your best traffic sources on a deeper level. Not just how much a click is costing you but how much leads are costing and the quality of the traffic.
Of course, you can break down reports based on date range, mobile vs desktop, and even organic vs paid traffic to get a clear idea of your performance.
Ad optimization
A unique feature of Instapage is the way you can optimize your advertising over time. It has a feature called AdMap which makes it possible to further personalize the experience visitors have. You can see what ads are mapped to what pages, see effectiveness with a post-click score, and link the best ads with the best pages.
It’s possible to manage ads and pages from within Instapage and cut down on the back and forth between platforms. Combined with Instapage A/B testing, this becomes a powerful way to optimize your ads.
Team collaboration and organization
Instapage has created thoughtful team collaboration interface. If you work with a number of freelancers or even clients you can invite them to Instapage and assign different permissions. Based on those permissions, people will be able to edit your pages, comment, or even manage settings within your account.
Instapage templates
With any landing page builder, templates are an important part of the mix. They can help jumpstart your creative juices or give you a proven structure for your own landing pages. All you need to do is update it to match your brand.
Instapage has over 200 landing page templates that span dozens of industries. If you’re having trouble designing your page from scratch then these templates will speed up the process.
Instapage integrations
The other thing that matters with a landing page tool is its ability to play nice with your tech stack. No one wants to spend hours building out a number of landing pages only to realize the tool doesn’t integrate with their CRM or email marketing service.
That’s not an issue with Instapage. It has native integrations with popular tools like ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Intercom, and Zendesk. If parts of your tech stack aren’t represented within the native integration ecosystem then you may still be able to make it work with a Zapier integration.
Instapage Pricing – how much does it cost?
Instapage pricing is split into two tiers.
Business - $199/m or $149/m (billed annually).
Enterprise – custom pricing based on a quote
The business plan comes with the core features you need such as A/B testing, AdMap, global blocks, the Thor Render Engine (speed optimization) and more. The enterprise plan gives you more access to auditing, real-time collaboration, AMP landing pages, and a few more features designed with teams in mind.
Instapage review: Pros and Cons
Pros
- The landing page builder is easy to learn and use – even for a beginner
- You have a lot of flexibility in design because you’re not forced to use grid lines and go through a weird positioning prices by trying to shift something X number of pixels
- Integrates with popular third party tools
- Strong reporting features that give you all the info you need and none of the info you don’t
- Large collection of templates which can be easily edited to match your brand
- Simple and effective A/B testing to increase conversions over time
Cons
- It’s more expensive than many other landing page builders available
- The builder doesn’t get updated often but this can also be construed as a positive because why change what’s working
- Most times, you have to design in desktop then do a lot of editing on mobile to make sure both versions look good
Instapage Customer support
In my experience, the customer support has been solid. The rep was knowledgeable and helped me solved the problem I was experiencing.
Other people have complained that support fell off after the trial period. It seems that those people were more upset with a specific policy of the company rather than the support itself. Namely, you have 24 hours to request a refund after being billed the first time.
Do I agree with that policy? No, but it’s part of the terms and conditions you agree to during the registration process.
Weighing the positive sentiment around support, the negative sentiment, and my own experiences, I believe Instapage support is on the ball most times. There are also multiple ways to access it such as a knowledgebase, videos, and email.
Instapage review verdict
In the end, I believe Instapage is a great landing page builder. It’s been able to create a simple interface that even a complete beginner can use and master in order to build landing pages. It has a wide range of features to create and optimize pages, delivers lightning fast pages, provides simple A/B testing, and more. If your main concern is creating pages that convert then Instapage is a great choice. If price is a major concern then it’s important to know that Instapage is one of the more expensive options available.