You did it. You built a WordPress landing page and started driving AdWords traffic to your site. Now you’re just waiting for the leads to pour in, right? REALITY CHECK: Wrong. You know your product or offering is great. And you know you’re targeting the right people. So why are people going to your landing page but not completing your form? You might be making a few costly mistakes. Here are five ways to fix those errors and boost conversions on your landing page forms:

1. Restate Your Benefit

The goal in conversion rate optimization is to increase motivation and decrease friction. Marketers do a great job reminding visitors of their value proposition, but they completely forget two areas: the form headline and the submit button. When marketers have changed these two things in the past, we’ve seen their conversion rates fly through the roof! For more information on this, check out our Form Conversion Report. Actionable tip: Your form headline should state the benefit that the visitor is getting by filling out your form, like “Get Your FREE Conversion Rate Guide!” The submit button should be one to three words that reflect the headline, like “Get My Guide.”

2. Shorten Your Form

We’ve all been there. Someone in your company wants 300 fields on the form. And every field needs to be filled out. {Head proceed to wall.} {Repeat.} Really long forms just don’t convert very well, which goes back to the motivation versus friction discussion. But form data is valuable, so you don’t want to ask for too little information. So what do you do? There are three tactics that work for solving this problem:

1. Create multi-page forms. We found that multi-page forms had a 44% higher conversion rate than single-page forms. This is a great way to get people to start filling out your form without being intimidated by form length.
2. Remove fields that cause people to leave. A client of ours used our Field Bottlenecks feature to identify which form question caused users to abandon the form. He then removed the field and saw a drastic increase in conversions. Here at Formstack, we used this feature to identify a field that caused 50% of our potential webinar attendees to abandon the signup form—and we quickly changed that.
3. A/B test your forms. That’s right. Don’t make it a debate internally. Just A/B test two variations of your form and see which one wins. And who knows…maybe you can capture more data without it impacting conversion rates. Formstack’s A/B Testing feature allows you to build two variations of your form in less than a minute! And you need just one embed code. We’ll take care of the rest!

3. Ask People Why They Abandoned

The best way to find out why people abandoned is to simply ask them. “Okay, Alex, how do I do that (sarcasm)?” Easy. Use our Partial Submissions feature that captures form data from people who don’t submit, so you can follow up with them to see why they abandoned your form and if they need help. A university client of ours sent a personalized email to everyone who abandoned an inquiry form…AND GOT A 75% RESPONSE RATE. No joke. The university found that prospective students abandoned the form because the students didn’t think they could make the school tour dates. The client made information changes on the website to clear up this confusion...and got prospective students in!

4. Improve Your Landing Page Copy

Let’s go back to the motivation versus friction equation. There are three things that impact motivation: a relevant headline (so visitors know this is for them), social proof (so visitors don’t look stupid pursuing your product or service), and evaluation content (so visitors can see if your product or offering could even work in their environment). So for Formstack, our headline is around high-converting lead forms, we have lots of supporting logos from the 15,000 companies that use us each month, and we have our features and pricing listed out so you know that you can afford us and implement us at your company. Tweak those three elements, and you’ll see your conversion rate go up.For more information on improving your landing page copy, check out our infographic on The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page. It’s been viewed nearly 800,000 times!

5. Get Better Paid Traffic

I saved the best for the last. Sometimes visitors don’t convert because they are the WRONG visitors. Yeah, it happens. And Google wants your ad money, so they don’t mind that you are spending more money than you need to be. As a result, Google’s AdWords and Analytics softwares will tell you how many people filled out your form, but not who they are. So you can’t tell which keywords result in good leads that eventually turn to revenue. Which costs you $$$.Get yourself an attribution software that will show you last paid click, reveal the actual AdWords keyword that converted your lead, and send that data WITH your lead to your CRM. We just built this functionality in Formstack. And one of our customers increased their qualified leads by 600% in one month...without increasing their budget! Mind blowing. But that’s what happens when you look behind the curtain to see which keywords are actually generating revenue.

‍Want to Win Even More? These fixes take minutes, not days. Take your lead conversion to the next level. Check out our free webinar below on A/B Testing Your Way to the Perfect Landing Page.