Whether you’re driving paid traffic or organic traffic to your website, landing pages are an essential part of the equation. They make it possible to capture contact information and measure the success of your campaigns.
The question isn’t whether you should use a landing page builder but which one will be the best choice. In this Unbounce review, you’ll get a firsthand look at what it brings to the table and whether or not it’s a solid landing page tool.
Unbounce overview
Unbounce was founded by half a dozen people (yes, more than the starting lineup of a basketball team) in 2009 when landing page software wasn’t yet a thing. Since that time, it’s grown into one of the most popular tools in the industry for both small businesses and enterprise companies.
This Unbounce review will help you understand whether the millions in revenue, fifteen thousand customers, and scores of employees is due to a solid product or just good marketing.
Unbounce features
Unbounce has a number of core features that’ll make it straightforward to create high-converting landing pages. It also has a few that are unique to the platform. Let’s look at each one in turn.
Landing page builder
The landing page builder is the most important part of the entire equation. Unbounce keeps it simple while providing multiple options to make each page your own.
When you start the process of creating a landing page, there are 4 options to choose from:
- Landing pages
- Popups
- Sticky Bards
- AMP
At the same time, you can choose to use a template or start building your pages from scratch. The only gripe I have with this area is that it felt too small for my screen and that things were being forced to fit – nothing major.
Within the page builder itself, there are quite a few options to choose from including:
- Sections
- Boxes
- Text
- Forms
- Buttons
- Images
- Videos
- Lightbox button
- Custom HTML
Both Leadpages and Instapage seem to have more elements than Unbounce but there’s still enough there to build all but the most complicated pages.
I like the Unbounce builder because it allows for true drag and drop placement of elements. Leadpages gives you the ability you to drag and drop but elements snap into place on the page. With Unbounce, you can move elements exactly where you want them – down to the pixel.
You also have complete control over how the mobile version of your page looks. If you want to create a different experience for mobile and desktop visitors then it’s well within your power.
It’s not the easiest builder to use but it’s also not overly complicated. It did take me a while to figure out how to publish pages. I had to leave the builder and go to the overview section before I could publish which is similar to Instapage.
The overview section is also where you integrate your email marketing service, CRM, or whatever other tools you want to connect to Unbounce.
Popups and floating bars
Floating bars and popups are a new addition to the Unbounce family. The team refers to it as two new products but I call it something they should have done a long time ago.
There are over 50 templates but they’re a bit hit and miss. Some look amazing while others look basic. The good thing is that you have control over every part of the popup or floating bar and they’re edited using the same interface as the landing pages.
The difference is the size of the canvas you have to work with and a few of the options you have with landing pages are missing such as the lightbox button. If you play around with the templates, you’ll be able to make amazing popups that’ll turn browsers into leads.
Split testing
As I’m sure you’re well aware, split testing is an essential part of creating digital campaigns. There’s no telling what will yield the best results so instead of guessing, test it.
Unboucne allows you to do basic A/B testing as well as multivariate testing.
While creating your initial landing page, you can go ahead and build multiple variants and tweak them. From the overview screen of the landing page, you can click on the option labeled “A/B Test” which gives you the option to split incoming traffic between multiple pages.
Once selected, you can choose to add variants from the additional variants you’ve already created, start a new page from scratch, or choose a template.
Once you’ve gotten everything set up, traffic will be split between the pages evenly. Publish it and see how each page is performing with a graph view and a column view.
Smart traffic™
A proprietary feature of Unbounce is known as Smart Traffic™. It’s split testing with the help of artificial intelligence.
Once you’ve selected the variations you want to use, just like you do when creating a normal A/B test, Unbounce will send visitors to the page where they’re most likely to convert. It does this by looking at the unique attributes of each visitor (it doesn’t explain what that means) and pairs them with the right pages.
As long as you set your conversion goals to link clicks, form submissions, or button clicks then the AI engine can get to work. It starts routing visitors to the ideal page and optimizing with fewer than 100 total visitors.
Conversion tracking
There are multiple ways you can track conversions with Unbounce. Of course, you can use forms on the page or button clicks. You can also track external conversions by using a script embedded on the thank you page.
There are limitations with this approach because there’s only one generic script so the last page a visitor landed on before hitting the confirmation page will be attributed with the conversion.
This means that you may not be able to measure conversions accurately from a multi-touch funnel that uses multiple domains but it’s much better than nothing.
AMP pages
For a long time, AMP (Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages) has been a problem for conversion marketers because it strips away most elements and leaves a bare-bones page. This is good for speed but bad for generating leads.
Unbounce has found a way to give you the best of both worlds. Lightning-fast AMP pages that can still turn visitors into leads and customers.
Unbounce templates
Unbounce has over 100 landing page templates to choose from in a variety of industry categories. All of the page templates are professional-looking but the popup templates could use a bit of work.
There’s also a Themeforest marketplace where you can access a few hundred more templates to use with Unbounce.
Some categories seem to be underrepresented like SaaS landing pages which only has three available. Other categories like lead generation have many templates to choose from. They’re just a starting point so I wouldn’t worry too much about them if you have an idea of what you want to build.
Unbounce integrations
I was unpleasantly surprised by the number of native integrations Unbounce has. It connects with Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, and a few others. In total, there are less than ten native email marketing and CRM integrations.
If the tool you’re using isn’t represented, the only other way to connect is through Zapier.
It seems like Unbounce has abandoned responsibility for building these integrations. Instead, they’re relying on Zapier which is a third party tool that a customer would have to pay another subscription fee to access.
I have a software company and basic integrations that send contact information to email marketing services take a few days to build at most.
Unbounce pricing
Update: Unbounce has done away with its original pricing plans and added what it refers to as conversion focused plans. There are now four pricing tiers:
- Launch $80/m ($72/m when paid yearly)
- Optimize $120/m ($108/m when paid yearly)
- Accelerate $200/m ($180/m when paid yearly)
- Scale $300/m ($270/m when paid yearly)
You can view the old pricing here:
- Essential $99/m ($79/m when paid yearly)
- Premium $199 ($159/m when paid yearly)
- Enterprise $499+/m ($399+/m when paid yearly)
Previously, the plans were limited by the number of landing pages, floating bars, and popups. Now, the plans are limited by the number of conversions you get and monthly visitors.
I'm not sure if this is the best route. Previously, you had access to 500,000 visitors and with an average conversion rate of 10%, you could get up to 50,000 conversions. Now, you're limited to 500 conversions on the entry level plan and 3,000 conversions on the highest plan.
I will give them props for removing the limits on the number of pages and popups you can create. I found that odd and mentioned it when I first wrote this review.
Ease of use
Unbounce isn’t the easiest tool to use. While it does share a demo when you first sign up, the builder can get confusing for a beginner.
Once you do figure out how to use the builder, the page creation process will move smoothly for you. If you’ve used any other landing page builder in the past then you’ll be right at home once you understand the nuances of the platform.
All in all, it’s a straightforward tool that you can learn in an afternoon while building your first page.
Unbounce Review – Pros and Cons
Pros
- Solid landing page builder
- Ability to use AI to optimize conversions
- AMP pages to boost conversions
- Large amount of templates for landing pages
- Allows you to build popups and sticky bars
Cons
- Many of the popup templates are poorly designed
- Seems to be lagging behind competitors when it comes to features
- Doesn’t have many native integrations
Customer support
While I’ve not had many interactions with its customer support, it gets high marks across the internet. I was able to figure out everything I needed from the knowledgebase. That’s actually a good thing on the support side because it means the documentation is thoughtful and well made.
It provides the following types of support.
- Phone support
- Email support
- Live chat support
- A comprehensive blog about conversion optimization
- A community forum users have access to
Unbounce Review Verdict
Unbounce is a solid landing page tool that does the basics well, there’s no denying that. It provides the tools you need to whip up professional-looking landing pages in minutes. The interface takes some getting used to but I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s complicated.
The Smart Traffic feature that takes advantage of AI is something worth considering and the conversion tracking makes it possible to get insights into external events. The support is good, the knowledge base is comprehensive, and the software is glitch-free.
In the end, I feel like it’s a bit pricy for what it offers to users. There are no WOW features. With that being said, it’s a landing page builder that you can’t go wrong with so if you have the resources then it’s a great choice.