Instapage Review

Simply put, Instapage is a tool or a service that will allow you to create landing pages for your website quickly. Though it offers a lot of other features, its main functionality lies with landing page creation.

Since landing or splash pages are mostly used for lead conversion, these pages have always been held in high regard. After all, landing pages are the first pages any visitor would see when they visit your website. And statistics back these claims too.

A landing page that is targeted and tested correctly can quickly boost conversion by 300%. The higher the number of different landing pages, the more chances the site could turn the leads into sales. There is also a landing page standard that every online marketer should know, and optimizing your landing pages is where Instapage’s strength seems to lie.

As an online marketer, you’re not expected to have expert-level knowledge of website development codes. What Instapage does is remove your need for a website developer (or at least when it comes to landing page creation and management). It allows you to create, personalize, and experiment with your landing pages so you can boost your sales and your conversion rates.

Instapage is a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor, which means that you’d be able to see how the finished product would look like in real-time. You have to drag a page element or a widget and drop it onto the page. How you see the page is exactly how your visitors would see the page as well.

Most WYSIWYG editors are straightforward to use, and Instapage is no different. It takes some getting used to, but Instapage is very easy to learn, use, and set up, even for someone who doesn’t have much experience with website development. It doesn’t require users to have the technical knowledge to create functional, high-converting landing pages.

Thanks to the powerful drag-and-drop editor and the ready-to-use and easy-to-customize templates, setting up landing pages and setting up different post-click experiences can be done even without technical know-how. Since it also shows you how the page would look like in real-time, you have to switch between desktop and mobile views to see exactly what your visitors will be seeing.

Instapage has a lot of competitors, so it needs to offer something a little different to stand out from the crowd. So, before the Instapage review of the service, here are some of its key features:

Landing Pages

The first and foremost feature of Instapage is landing page creation. Landing pages made with Instapage are mobile-responsive, personalized, and conversion-optimized.

Developing a landing page is a handful more than an online marketer’s job description. But with Instapage, it would be possible to make your own landing page without the help of an expert developer.

• The drag-and-drop editor uses Instablocks™ to create responsive and functional landing pages
• Global blocks to eliminate the need to define global elements over and over again; update thousands of pages with a single click of a button
• Block templates make landing page creation faster and easier, with reusable and customizable blocks

Personalization

Personalization is another one of Instapage’s main features. With this feature, you can show different screens to different users to better target their individual ad interactions and preferences. In other words, its primary focus is on 1:1 ad to page personalization.

• Set different ad groups and landing pages for different types of users depending on whatever data point you wish
• Increase the relevance of the screens that you show to different users by using separate copies for each landing page
• With analytics, test and find out which screens are your best performers, and which of your audience segments are your best bet when it comes to conversion

How you personalize your users’ experiences is 100% up to you. In Instapage, this experience is also known as post-click.

It’s the same as marketing automation, with just one significant difference. Instead of sending out a personalized email or newsletter based on a user’s preference or behavior, post-click sends the user themselves to the personalized site experience.

AdMap™

As online consumers, we expect our online experience to always be personalized. When we click on an ad, we expect the next page to show us exactly what we need. That’s what AdMap™ is all about.

Landing pages convert leads into sales, but a user’s experience on the subsequent pages you lead them on to can still change a lot. AdMap™ helps you personalize this experience. With this feature, you can connect your pages to relevant ads, customizing a certain user’s experience.

You can manage your ad campaigns, ad groups, and similar user experiences all in one place. It can also be synchronized both ways, so you can make changes either on your ad platform or your Instapage settings and see it updated on both ends simultaneously.

Experimentation

How do your visitors behave when they go to your site? How do you know which page elements or ad groups are doing their jobs? This is what Experimentation by Instapage can help you with.

Experimentation allows you to test each and every ad campaign, landing page, or even a single page element and learn how they perform. Heatmaps will show you how users interact with every single element on any landing page. To help visualize your user’s experience, Experimentation will show you:

• Mouse clicks – Which items create more interaction
• Mouse movements – Which elements attract more visitors
• Scroll depth – How your landing pages retain visitor interest

With Experimentation, you’d be able to see how each ad or user experience variation is performing. You can see visitor counts, conversion rates, cost-per-visitor, and even cost-per-acquisition. You can test all of these as much as you’d like, as A/B testing, optimization, or the whole Experimentation experience is unlimited.

Page Speed

• In 2017, the average user will wait around 1-3 seconds before leaving a site that has not or has just partially loaded
• In 2020, the average user will wait less than 2 seconds for a page to fully load
• Around 45% of users will leave a site if it hasn’t been responsive for 2 seconds
• About 90% of users will leave a website if it hasn’t been responsive for approximately 4 seconds

Four seconds seem like a short time for all those page elements to load, doesn’t it? An average website will take about 20 seconds to load fully, and a user’s expectation certainly doesn’t match with what sites can realistically offer.

Since more than 60% of all online traffic now comes from mobile devices, optimizing your web pages to load faster in mobile devices should be a priority. With Instapage’s AMP and the Thor Render Engine™, your websites will load at lightning-fast speeds at all screen sizes, allowing you to keep your visitors engaged and interested.

Visual Collaboration

Instapage’s Visual Collaboration gives you, your teammates, and stakeholders a one-stop-shop for all updates, feedbacks, and even revisions. You can collaborate with your teammates and make sure that all stakeholders are up to date and on the same page. Share screens and files to stakeholders in a secure platform for approval, revisions, edits, and all kinds of feedback to speed up the process and reduce delays in the development.

Connect Instapage to your website, webpage, or any marketing campaign to manage your Instapage post-click experience and boost your site’s ROI. The following platforms are available for easy Instapage integrations:

• Advertising – Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Perfect Audience
• Analytics – Google Analytics, Heap, Mixpanel
• E-commerce – Shopify, PayPal, Venmo
• Email Marketing – MailChimp, Campaign Monitor
• Live Chat – LiveChat, ZenDesk
• Others – WordPress, Drupal, Google Fonts, GoToWebinar

For a complete list, you can visit Instapage’s integration page by clicking here.

As you may have noticed, Instapage can be integrated with a lot of different tools. However, a star was taken off because it is not that easy to integrate Instapage with all of these tools.

The integration of some tools can prove to be more challenging than the integration of others. While some tools like WordPress, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads, can be integrated with a few clicks of a button, some others can be less straightforward. Some users reported having problems with integration after updates, causing users to miss some traffic.

Instapage offers a wide variety of templates for a wide range of use cases. Instapage templates make it easy to create landing pages for different parts of the website. You can effortlessly create landing pages for product sales and promotions, trials, downloads, registrations, inquiries, and even bookings and appointments.

You can customize ready-to-use templates or even make your own from scratch. The site can be as minimalist or as image-heavy as you’d like. The only guarantee is that all of them are mobile-optimized, scalable, and built for conversion.

While the official site itself tallies the number of customizable templates at around 100, many Instapage reviews over the web tally them at more than 200 templates. These templates, along with the InstaBlocks™, have garnered positive reviews as they were said to be very easy to customize and were pretty much ready to use out of the box.

You can update elements in real-time and even move them all around the page. Since Instapage elements can be layered, this means you can combine elements, giving you even more control over your page elements. Other editors will only allow you to set alignments, but the Instapage editor allows movement of blocks, widgets, texts, and all page elements down to the pixel.

Like with all other website development tools, you’d want to make sure that customer support for the software would be excellent, at least. Since you expect your web traffic and lead conversion tools to be up and running 24/7, you’d also want support to be available 24/7.

Instapage customer support is only available from Mondays to Fridays. It means that should you have a technical problem on the weekend, and it would have to wait until Monday before it gets sorted out. Weekdays technical support is great at least, as backed by the many Instapage reviews online that are available as of the moment. The live chat support is said to be quick to respond to requests, and those on the support team are at least adequate to handle technical requests as well.

The site’s Help Center deals surprisingly well with a lot of technical concerns, so a large number of users wouldn’t even need expert support. From building landing pages, to publishing, to integration, and account management, there are lots of Help Center content that should be able to help you out. Peer support is also available online during times when expert support may not be available.

Paid monthly, Instapage prices start from $199. Paid annually, this price drops down to $149 per month. It offers all the basic features of the tool. Enterprise plan prices are customized to fit the needs of the company, but an enterprise plan offers a wider variety of features, of course.

Visual collaborations, 1:1 ad to page personalization, page migration services, and ad spend conversion are some enterprise features not available to business plan users.

If you’ve read another Instapage review online, you probably already know that they’ve recently changed their prices. From $79/month, it went up to $199/month, and a lot of people are not happy about the change. But even with the recent pricing changes, we’d still give Instapage a thumbs up. Many other landing page builders and platforms updated their prices when 2020 started, so it’s highly possible that Instapage only did to compete with the other platforms’ prices.

It’s a definite yes from us here for Instapage. The pros outweigh the cons with this one, and we’re, of course, saying this even with the $199/month price tag because the ROI is high enough here. Its easy-to-use landing page builder and the precision that it offers as a WYSIWYG editor has that wow factor. It’s rare to see this level of accuracy especially with an online tool.

More and more beautiful templates are also added to the library as time goes by, so there would always be more to choose from. Any additions to the templates are integrated seamlessly, so there is never a problem with branding. The flexibility offered by Instapage is yet another reason why they’re getting our thumbs up.

And while most other platforms offer features like what Instapage’s Experimentation does (A/B testing and analytics), Instapage is the only platform that provides heatmaps. The heatmaps are a great way to visualize how users behave when they visit the site. It’s almost like sitting beside a visitor and being shown exactly how they’re using your website.

There’s also that bonus of getting real-time support from the live chat support option. Add all of these up, and what you get is an excellent web development tool that allows you to create functional, high-conversion landing pages.