Landing Page Testing

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Landing pages often determine whether potential users engage further or leave immediately. For product designers and managers, the challenge is evaluating if a page captures attention, communicates the offer clearly, and drives the intended actions.

Landing Page Testing uses a design stack of UX metrics: engagement, comprehension, success, sentiment, and loyalty to measure performance across these areas. This approach replaces subjective opinions with measurable insights.

With these findings, designers and managers can make informed design decisions, prioritize improvements, and demonstrate the impact of changes on business outcomes. For example, testing Salesforce’s CRM landing page revealed strong comprehension but weaknesses in success and loyalty, showing exactly where the design needed attention to better support business goals.

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Define Goals for Your Landing Page Test

A landing page should balance user needs like clarity, relevance, and ease of navigation with business goals such as conversions, sign-ups, and lead generation. Measuring user behavior alongside business impact ensures the landing page delivers for both sides.

Audience

To define user needs, you first need to establish who your audience is. In the case of our Landing Page Testing example, we targeted advertisers, marketers, and other CRM users.

User Needs

As a visitor to a landing page, the top five most important user needs would be:

1. Users need to immediately understand what the page is about and what value is being offered (the page should feel Intuitive).

2. The messaging, visuals, and offer should match the user’s intent or expectations from the ad, email, or search result that brought them there (the content should feel Valuable).

3. Visitors should feel confident in the brand and offer, supported by credible content like testimonials, security badges, or professional design (information should feel Credible).

4. Calls-to-action (CTAs) should be clear and simple, enabling users to sign up, download, or purchase without confusion (the page should be Usable).

5. The page should load quickly, be mobile-friendly, and support accessibility needs for all users (the design should be Accessible).

These five ensure a landing page feels clear, relevant, and credible, making it easy for visitors to decide and act.

Business Goals

Here are the five most important business goals for a landing page:

1. Increase Conversions – Drive more visitors to complete the desired action, such as sign-ups, purchases, or downloads.

2. Lower Acquisition Costs – Improve page effectiveness so marketing dollars (ads, campaigns, etc.) bring in more results per spend.

3. Build Trust in the Brand – Position the brand as reliable and credible, strengthening long-term customer perception.

4. Segment and Qualify Leads – Collect meaningful data (e.g., demographics, interests) to better qualify and target future customers.

5. Encourage Deeper Engagement – Funnel users into the next steps, such as exploring more content, creating an account, or booking a demo.

These goals help the business maximize ROI, improve lead quality, and nurture long-term customer relationships through the landing page.

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Choose Metrics to Test Your Landing Page

For Salesforce’s CRM landing page, a design stack of five UX metrics was chosen to measure how well the page delivers on visitor needs. This stack — Comprehension, Engagement, Success, Sentiment, and Loyalty — was established by mapping the most important user needs of a landing page directly to measurable outcomes:

• Intuitive → Comprehension
  Users need to quickly understand what Salesforce offers. Comprehension measures whether the page clearly communicates the CRM’s value proposition.

• Valuable → Engagement
  The landing page should match the intent of visitors arriving from ads or searches. Engagement tracks whether users interact with the right elements, such as pricing or demo requests, showing if the value is recognized.

• Usable → Success
  CTAs like “Start Subscription” or “Schedule a Demo” must be simple and clear. Success measures whether users can complete these actions without confusion.

• Accessible → Sentiment
  The page should work smoothly across devices and feel easy to use. Sentiment reflects whether visitors describe their experience positively or negatively, indicating if accessibility is being met.

• Credible → Loyalty
  Visitors need confidence in Salesforce as a trusted provider. Loyalty measures whether users would recommend the brand, reflecting the credibility built through the landing page.

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Establish Hunches to Direct Your Testing

Hunches are your informed guesses about where the page might be underperforming or where there’s potential for stronger engagement. These can come from identifying weak spots (like a buried CTA) or spotting opportunities for new strategies (such as emphasizing a product benefit higher on the page).

Questions are how you put those hunches to the test. For each assumption, you create a direct question for users that reveals whether the hunch is correct.

Hunches about Salesforce's Landing Page:

<table xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="min-width: 267px;"><colgroup><col style="width: 217px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"></colgroup><tbody><tr><th colspan="1" rowspan="1" colwidth="217"><p>Hunches</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Questions</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>UX Metric</p></th></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1" colwidth="217"><p>Users may not notice or understand the “Demo Playlist” CTA.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>"Where would you click first on this page?"</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://glare.helio.app/define/ux-metrics/behavioral-metrics/engagement">Engagement</a></p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1" colwidth="217"><p>Users may not notice or understand the “Demo Playlist” CTA.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“Where would you click to find a demo of this product?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://glare.helio.app/define/ux-metrics/behavioral-metrics/success">Success</a></p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1" colwidth="217"><p>The page offering may not immediately communicate Salesforce’s value.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“What do you think this page is offering?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://glare.helio.app/define/ux-metrics/behavioral-metrics/comprehension">Comprehension</a></p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1" colwidth="217"><p>The landing page may not inspire enough trust for users to consider Salesforce credible.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“Would you recommend this company to a colleague?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://glare.helio.app/define/ux-metrics/attitudinal-metrics/loyalty">Loyalty</a></p></td></tr></tbody></table>

By turning hunches into test questions, Salesforce was able to confirm where their landing page performed well (77% comprehension of the offering) and where it struggled (only 49% success in finding the demo).

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Turn Hunches into Test Questions

Turning these metrics into participant questions transforms design assumptions into measurable signals. Each metric uses a specific question type paired with a clear example:

• Engagement (First-click test)
  Question type: Click test.
  Example: “Where would you click first if you wanted to schedule a demo?”

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• Comprehension (Likert scale)
  Question type: Agreement scale.
  Example: “I understand what this offer includes.” (Strongly Disagree → Strongly Agree)

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• Success (First-click test)
  Question type: Task-based click test.
  Example: “Where would you click to start a subscription?”

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• Sentiment (Multiple-choice impressions)
  Question type: Impression checklist.
  Example: “Which of the following words best describe your impression of this page?” (e.g., Trustworthy, Confusing, Overwhelming, Inspiring)

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• Loyalty (Numerical scale)
  Question type: Likelihood-to-recommend scale (0–10).
  Example: “How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend or colleague?”

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By pairing metrics with direct feedback in this way, landing page performance can be quantified and tied back to user needs and business goals with clarity.

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Calculate UX Metric Scores from User Feedback

For Salesforce’s CRM landing page, the raw data collected from user feedback was converted into UX metric scores on a 0–100% scale. Each metric in the design stack — Engagement, Comprehension, Success, Sentiment, and Loyalty — was scored using formulas specific to the type of question asked. The resulting scores are then evaluated on a common scale:

• Very Good = 90% and above

• Good = 70% to 89%

• Average = 50% to 69%

• Poor = 30% to 49%

• Very Poor = below 30%

Once the individual UX metric scores are calculated, the average of those scores are used to determine the overall score for the user experience.

Here’s how Salesforce’s landing page performed across each metric:

• Engagement (60% — Average): First-click data showed that 60% of users clicked on the intended starting point, placing this score in the Average range.

• Comprehension (77% — Good): Likert scale results showed that 77% of participants agreed they understood the page’s offer, scoring Good.

• Success (49% — Poor): Only 49% of users were able to complete the key task of finding the demo playlist, landing in the Poor range.

• Sentiment (62% — Average): Impressions data produced an Average sentiment score, with both positive and negative descriptors selected.

• Loyalty (53% — Average): Using an NPS-style calculation, just over half of participants fell into promoter categories, yielding an Average score.

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By converting raw test responses into metric scores, Salesforce’s landing page test reveals a balanced but mixed picture: strong comprehension of the offering, but weaker engagement, task success, and loyalty — pointing to opportunities to clarify CTAs and strengthen user trust.

Click here to check out the raw survey data and UX metric scores for Salesforce's landing page.

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Draw Signals from Your Design Stack

Here’s how signals were surfaced from the Salesforce Landing Page test results by following these five steps:

1. Focus on poorly scoring metrics

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   • Success (49%) scored Poor, showing users struggled to complete the “Find Demo Playlist” task.

   • Engagement (60%), Sentiment (62%), and Loyalty (53%) all scored Average, pointing to broader weaknesses in motivating and retaining users.

2. Identify patterns across metrics

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   • While Comprehension (77%) was Good, all other scores clustered around Average or worse. This suggests the value proposition was understood, but the flow from comprehension to action was not smooth, limiting conversions.

3. Determine if user needs are being met
   Since each UX metric maps to a specific user need for the page, the UX metric scores can be used to reveal whether those needs have been met:

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   • Intuitive: Partially met. Users understood the offering, but not the next step.

   • Valuable: Partially met. The content matched intent but didn’t create enough urgency to act.

   • Credible: Not fully met. Average sentiment and loyalty suggest confidence wasn’t fully established.

   • Usable: Not met. The demo task’s low success rate shows CTAs were not clear enough.

   • Accessible: Partially met. First-click Engagement (60%) and Success (49%) show friction in quickly and reliably completing tasks.

4. Compare outcomes to your business goals

   • Increase Conversions: Blocked by poor success in finding the demo playlist.

   • Lower Acquisition Costs: Average engagement means ad spend and campaigns won’t perform as efficiently.

   • Build Trust in the Brand: Average loyalty and sentiment suggest the page is not reinforcing Salesforce’s credibility.

   • Segment and Qualify Leads: Weak success in demo sign-ups limits data collection opportunities.

   • Encourage Deeper Engagement: With users dropping off, fewer move into the funnel to explore content or create accounts.

5. Surface signals & establish a direction

   Signals derived from the data:

   1. The CTA is not clear or motivating → Poor Success and Average Engagement highlight confusion around the path to demo sign-ups.

   2. The page lacks strong credibility cues → Average Sentiment and Loyalty suggest trust in the brand isn’t being reinforced.

   3. Users understand the offer but aren’t acting → Good Comprehension but weak downstream metrics show the message is clear, but not compelling enough to convert.

Direction based on business context:
Given Salesforce’s quarterly goals to grow demo conversions, the roadmap should prioritize:

• Redesigning CTA hierarchy and placement to improve usability and accessibility.

• Adding stronger trust signals (e.g., testimonials, proof points, brand guarantees) to boost credibility.

• Testing new value framing in messaging to turn comprehension into urgency for action.

Based on the signals and design direction, we created an updated version of the design with the expected UX metric improvement:

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The direction is clear: Salesforce's landing page needs stronger CTAs, reinforced credibility, and sharper value framing to turn understanding into conversions while supporting long-term business goals.

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