Instapage Review

Detailed Reviews

Instapage is a web-based application that lets users create and publish landing pages without the need to write a single line of code. Unlike other platforms, it doesn’t care much about other lead generation tools & forms and stays focused on landing pages. It comes with almost all the features and properties that can help the user create the most appropriate and effective landing pages for any campaign.

Pros

• Three ways to create a landing page.
• Plenty of landing page templates for all use cases.
• Extremely precise drag and drop editor.
• Creates responsive pages.
• Instablocks help retain a consistent pattern across several landing pages.
• A/B testing helps make improvements in the landing pages.
• AMP (Accelerate Mobile Pages) helps create better ranking landing pages for mobile browsers.

Cons

• They could’ve provided more control over split testing metrics.

Introduction

Landing pages have become a norm for pretty much any online campaign. Somehow, having a website is not enough to get visitors to respond positively to the call-to-action.

A website is supposed to contain all the information there can be about the service or the product. The better websites are not only aesthetically pleasing but also provide valuable and engaging content to the user.

While one should try to create websites with such characteristics, these don’t turn out to be the ideal avenues when it comes to inviting the user to take some action.

Landing pages, on the other hand, don’t need to be loaded with all the information and details, and they are among the best option when you want the visitor to do something in favor of the campaign.

Ideally, landing pages don’t contain any information that may deter a user from the decided course of action. There aren’t any unnecessary links or buttons that would take the user away from the landing page, and all the emphasis is on the call-to-action.

Creating one such landing page might be a difficult task for someone who isn’t aware of the characteristics of a landing page or doesn’t know how to code. There are plenty of tools and applications available out there which help one create some of the most efficient landing pages without the need for any such knowledge of concepts or coding.

Instapage is one such platform that focusses solely on landing pages. One may find a lot of landing page builders that bring in other kinds of lead generation tools in the mix. Such a situation may end up confusing some users, but it won’t be the case on this platform.

If there is something that can help you improve the landing page or the campaign, then it is highly likely that this platform will have that feature.

This review is going to be all about inspecting and exploring such features on this tool. We will go through entire processes right from the point of creating a page to publishing it. We will find out how easy or difficult it is to create a landing page using the editor on this one.

Building the landing page

Let’s get right to the thing which matters the most. Back in the days, one needed to be proficient in coding to create landing pages.

Even though builders such as Instapage and Leadpages have negated such a need, there are still a lot of factors that rank one builder above another.

Instapage comes with a comprehensive page builder, capable of satisfying most needs of the user trying to create landing pages. They take care of all the stages of the website building process and make sure you don’t run out of options at any time.

They serve you with three options when you start building a page. A standard page is the one that you will need for most of your campaigns. It comes with various features and analytics options. These will pave the way for you to build a landing page just like you imagined.

AMP page is what you will need if your target audience is browsing content on mobile devices. These pages are built such that they don’t take much time to load on a mobile browser and provide a much better user experience.

We will get into the details of AMP pages in a later section of the review.

The third option is probably something that you have not yet encountered on landing page builders. You can upload an Instapage file and get one of the existing ones for you to play with.

Such a feature can turn out to be extremely useful in case you want to stop the subscription and have plans of getting back on the platform after some time. Agencies can also benefit from this feature, as they can use the same file for different client accounts.

Sea of templates

Instapage provides the user with a lot of high-quality landing page templates. All of these templates are designed to improve the chances of the visitor responding positively to the call to action.

We have come across a lot of builders that provide nothing of essence when it comes to the template options. All the listed layouts on Instapage help even the novice marketers come up with landing pages that mean business.

The platform allows the user to browse the different layouts under different use cases. You can have landing page templates specifically for travel booking, event registration, asset download, trial sign up, and so much more.

Each category gives due importance to the relevant call to action and makes the job a lot easier for the user. It’s entirely up to you if you want to use the template for the purpose specified under categorization.

If you find a “Webinar Registration” page aesthetically pleasing, you can always use it for a waitlist page or any other thing you want.

It is nearly impossible for one not to find the kind of landing page design they are looking for in this sea of options. There is something for everyone.

However, if you are one of those who like to take the matter into their own hands, Instapage won’t disappoint you. You can choose a blank page and build your landing page from scratch.

We are impressed by the quality of layout options that are on offer. It is one of the indicators of how good the platform is when it comes to creating landing pages.

One of the best editors

Instapage provides you an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. It turns out to be useful whether you want to make some changes in the layout you picked or if you want to create an entirely new one on your own.

The most advantageous feature of this editor is that you can adjust the positions of widgets and elements precisely to your liking.

Unlike other drag-and-drop editors, elements just don’t fall into specified spaces when you drop them on the canvas. On this platform, a widget will stay exactly where you leave it.

It also doesn’t mean that creating symmetry or alignment between elements is going to be a difficult task on Instapage. Guidelines appear automatically as you hover the widget over a region.

This single feature makes the editor a lot more advanced compared to what you will see on other landing page builders. It adds a lot more flexibility and functionality to the whole process.

However, this is not it. There are a lot of other features that make it a lot easier for the user to edit the landing pages on this tool.

You get different widgets on the left panel that you can include on the canvas. Some of the widget options are headline, form, button, paragraph, image, circle, line, timer, etc. You can place them anywhere and in any position you want on the canvas.

You can select the individual elements to get the customization options for them and introduce the necessary changes. There are plenty of font options to choose from, and you also get a ton of free stock images to add a lot of professional-looking pictures on your landing page.

Instapage gives you all the right resources with enough options in each case.

You can also overlap the different widgets if you want. The ease of placing the elements wherever you want makes the entire page building process a lot more fun.

If you want to introduce changes in the page settings, then there is the right-side panel for you. It allows you to deal with everything ranging from analytics settings and page background to fonts and HTML/CSS for the page.

You can explore the individual options and set up the page the way you want it to be.

Takes care of page responsiveness

You don’t know if the visitor will view your landing page on a desktop or a mobile device. The share of people using mobile browsers is increasing day by day, but the presence of desktop users can’t be neglected at the same time.

This situation demands the marketer to be prepared for the use of any device by the user. The landing page should be such that it works equally well on both mobile and desktop devices.

All the landing page templates on Instapage are designed such that the pages are responsive. You can get a preview of the page for how it will look on different screens.

In case you don’t find the element sitting in well with the available screen, you can make the changes then and there only. The different preview modes make life a lot easier for the user.

Usually, there won’t much need to make a lot of changes for the different preview modes since everything sits in perfectly, as one switches from the desktop to mobile screen.

Get more efficient with Instablocks

There can be quite some sections of a landing page that you might have on all the landing pages you create. If it’s an agency, then it is highly likely that a lot of sections are repeated across landing pages they create.

It only makes sense to repeat a section on various pages if it works well for the audience. Instapage provides the user with an easier and efficient way to replicate sections of landing pages again and again.

The platform gives the user an option to insert Instablocks on pages. You can consider these as ready-made sections, which you can add to the page if it goes well with its theme.

There are several readily available templates for different sections of any landing page. There are ones for headers, a call to action, steps, testimonials, and so on.

These Instablock templates allow you to save a lot of time while managing campaigns and to have some consistency on all the pages you create.

One can use either the available blocks or create custom ones. Creating a new Instablock is a simple enough task. All you need to do is select the “Create new block” option, mark the space on the page where you want to add this block, and use the editor to fill it with all the elements and widgets you want in the block.

You can then access the same block next time you create a landing page on the platform. It’s up to you if you want to use the block as it is or want to customize it for the current page.

Using Instablocks is a smart way to get more productive and create better quality landing pages at a much higher pace.

Multiple ways to publish

Instapage provides the user with multiple avenues when it comes to publishing the landing page. Once you are done using the editor and customizing the landing page, you can go to the publishing section.

It will give you four options to publish the landing page. The first one is to publish the landing page through a custom domain. Most of the users are going to go for this one. The process is fairly simple, and there isn’t much to it.

The next method is to go the WordPress route. WordPress is, without a doubt, one of the preferred ways of users for creating websites. You can easily download a WordPress plugin for Instapage and make sure all your landing pages go live without much of a problem.

An option for Drupal is something that we don’t see very often on such builders, but there is one on Instapage. If you are one of the Drupal users, then you can follow the almost same procedure as it was in the case of WordPress users. A simple plugin will let you synchronize things between the platform and your website.

Finally, there is a demo page option. If you want to test the water before making the page go live, then you have this mode at your service. You can publish the landing page on one of their sub-domains and see if everything is working fine.

All these different options to publish the page add a lot of flexibility to the entire process and take care of the needs of most of the users.

A/B testing

Creating a landing page is not enough to have a successful campaign. You need to make sure that the landing pages you created are getting positive results from the audience as well.

There can be certain nuances that can either turn off the user from responding to the call to action or might compel them to react positively to it.

One of the best ways to find out which strategy, design, content, etc. works best for the page is to make the page go live and then assess how it performs with a given attribute.

Split testing or A/B testing allows the user to publish different variations of the same page such that they are delivered to viewers randomly. You can then have a look at the stats as to which page is doing better than the rest and remove the others.

Carrying out split testing on Instapage is as simple as it sounds. You can create as many variants of the page as you want and introduce any number of changes in the variants as you may please.

In our opinion, the best way to carry out split testing is to change only one thing at a time in the subsequent variants of the test subject, which is the landing page in this case.

It will allow you to identify exactly what is it that is making a page perform better or poor. If you make the two test pages entirely different, then you won’t be able to map the driving factor for the difference in conversion rates.

On the other hand, if you know precisely what is working in favor of the campaign, you can use the learnings in the next landing page you create without the need to carry out any more A/B testing.

Instapage only lets you create multiple variants under split testing. You don’t get to have a say as to what should be the traffic distribution for the variants or specify the duration for which you want it to conduct the test.

You get to see the stats for the test pages. You can always pick out a winner solely based on the better conversion rates. We will discuss more on the kind of stats you get to see on this platform in a later section of the review.

Instapage is among those few landing page builders who make sure that users don’t find it too daunting of a task to imply A/B testing. All that the user needs to do is create variants, and the tool takes care of the rest.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

A landing page would often take longer to load on a mobile device because of the content-rich nature of the page and also somewhat because these landing pages are not designed specifically for mobile devices.

And as we all know that netizens are not so patient anymore. Longer loading times will always lead to higher bounce rate. If the page doesn’t show up fast enough, then it is highly likely that the viewer is not going to stay on the website waiting for it to load.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMPs are the solution that is now helping webmasters achieve faster loading times, even on mobile devices. There are a lot of factors that differentiate a regular web page from an AMP and help it load comparatively faster.

The page architecture and overall size of the page have got a lot to do with its better responsiveness on mobile devices. It uses a simpler coding language, which reduces the overall loading time of the page.

Apart from shorter loading times, there are a lot many advantages of AMPs. Search engines rank them higher compared to usual pages for results on mobile pages. So, you not only get to have a better user experience but also much better chances of visitors reaching your page.

Instapage allows users to create such AMPs on the platform. It takes care of all the guidelines that one needs to follow for an accelerated mobile page when you select the mode before you start creating a landing page.

Creating an AMP is a lot like creating the ones for a desktop. You can place in Instablocks, use widgets the same way as you did for usual pages, etc. You can also have split testing implied for these pages.

When it comes to publishing, you can have the page go live either on your custom domain or through WordPress. It is the tool that takes care of all the AMP recommendations. Meanwhile you focus on creating a better-quality landing page.

However, the feature is only available for the Enterprise subscription plan. And there is no denying the fact that it can propel the campaign in the right direction.

Team collaboration

This landing page builder has proved itself to be a great software for team and agencies. Various features make it a walk in the park to collaborate with others while building landing pages.

Even if you are a lone wolf, Instapage ensures that you do not run into roadblocks when trying to involve others in your projects.

It provides users with a conducive work environment where they can easily share ideas and collaborate.

It starts by creating a team. You can invite others to join the team. Once you have a team in place, all of you can work collectively to build awesome landing pages.

Instapage allows team members to create hotspots on landing pages while building them. These are to add comments or attract team members’ attention toward something specific.

You can leave messages addressed to individuals, and there is also a provision to mark the hotspots as resolved once the issue is addressed.

The platform allows users to introduce real-time changes to pages, so that team members don’t need to wait for it to update. It helps save a lot of time and keep confusion at bay.

Another useful feature is that you can share landing pages even with people who are not a member of the team. This makes it easier to get a review of the landing page from the clients or a third-party opinion if you feel stuck somewhere.

There is no need to worry about any unauthorized viewing of the landing page when sharing it with clients. Instapage keeps everything secure and safe while sharing.

 There is a messaging section within the tool, which makes it easier for the team members to communicate with one other.

There isn’t much that you will miss while collaborating with your team on this platform.

Analytics and tracking

Numbers become important when it comes to analyzing the performance of a landing page. Almost all the landing page builders come with an analytics section. It helps you get a concrete idea of how the landing page fares against various parameters.

While there is hardly ever any question on the credibility of the data, the tool must provide you a deep insight into everything that’s happening around the page.

Apart from page builders, there is also the option to use third-party analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.

These tools are much more sophisticated and comprehensive when it comes to mining out the information related to page performance.

You can add the tracking id of these analytics tools to monitor the different statistics related to the landing page. There are plenty of options for the kind of tool you want to use for the trade.

Landing pages can be created for a whole range of purposes. It can be to get submissions, to send visitors to a specific link, etc. Instapage allows you to point out the conversion goal while creating the page itself.

It helps one stay more focused on the goal, and you also get the analytics results according to the conversion goal you select.

If we move on to the analytics section of Instapage, there is plenty of data for one to work around with. You will find the usual information, such as the number of visitors, conversions, conversion rates, etc.

The platform also breaks it down for you in terms of the cost of the page and user experience. You can have a better look at your ROI. The charts help understand the trends better, and the freedom to adjust the timeline of stats allows you to be more or less specific.

Instapage allows the user to link the advertisement account with the tool. Once you do that, you will get some more substantial stats in the analytics section. It will tell you how many conversions you are getting for every penny you invest in advertisement.

There is enough data for one to monitor and manage the pages better. One doesn’t need to be an expert in the field to understand and then interpret the information displayed in the section, as well.

Integrations

Standalones are pretty much obsolete these days when it comes to digital marketing and related fields. There is so much to the entire process that it is very difficult for a single platform to take care of all of it.

And even if there is a tool out there capable of doing everything, personal preferences might interfere with it. Let’s say your landing page builder comes with email marketing capabilities. But what if you prefer using other software such as MailChimp or MailerLite for email automation?

Instapage focusses only on letting the user create landing pages, and for everything else, it comes with a ton of integration options.

We already discussed some integration options that were available for analytics tools. Apart from that, Instapage gives you the option of direct integration of various marketing automation and email automation tools.

If you do not find the integration option of your choice, then Zapier integration might come in handy. It increases the number of integration options exponentially.

The tool allows one to manage CSS/HTML for pages. This can also be one of the ways that you may use to create integrations and automation.

Analytics and email automation are the two major use cases that one may relate with landing pages, and Instapage took enough care of both the sections in their integration options.

Conclusion

For a landing page builder, Instapage is extremely focused on the task at hand. It deals with absolutely nothing, but things related to landing pages. There are no distractions whatsoever.

If we start with the page building process, the ease of use of their drag-and-drop editor and its pinpoint accuracy makes it very simple for one to customize the pages. One can also not complain about the widget front.

The tool provides enough templates to take care of almost all the use cases, and you can also create things on your own with the blank template.

Instablocks help one get more efficient at the page building process while split testing helps the user steer the campaign in the right direction.

Accelerated Mobile Pages come as a bonus as they help reduce bounce rate and help increase search engine rankings, as well. One doesn’t usually see this feature on landing page builders.

It should not be much of an issue to coordinate with team members and clients while working on the platform. The changes get updated in real-time across the accounts, and you don’t need to wait much.

The integration options help with multiple fronts of campaign management. You can have better analytics, email management, automation, etc. with all the integration options available at one’s disposal.

We are impressed by the overall state of things on Instapage. The sheer focus on landing pages makes it such a powerful tool. If you are looking for a landing page builder, then this tool is worth a shot.