Smart Traffic – Is it the Future of Landing Page Optimization?

A/B testing, although effective, can be frustrating to a marketer with limited resources. It is definitely a great tool but involves a  complex and time-consuming process. Time-bound marketing will not achieve the required ROIs with A/B testing. Why so? Well, because  A/B testing works fine when the traffic on the landing page is heavy but what if you want to optimize a landing page with light to moderate traffic?

This is one of the major problems that small and medium-sized businesses or SMBs face. For such a situation, you need a landing page optimization tool that gives your customers a class apart landing page experience, which is not just personalized but also decreases the buying decision time. This requires a little more than a human touch. 

Almost 48% of growing businesses are willing to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology in boosting their business, but 53% admit to having budget restraints stopping them to adopt AI technology.

Then, ‘Smart traffic’ happened and paved the path for making this technology accessible to the common marketer. This has not just been the game-changer for landing page conversions but has reserved a place for AI in the near future.

What is Smart Traffic?

‘Smart traffic’ was launched on November 20, 2019, as Unbounce’s landing page product. Now AI was being used for large businesses before smart traffic. Leveling the ground for small and medium businesses by leveraging access to AI optimization in landing pages was the sole purpose of this initiative. Its AI-powered algorithm personalizes landing pages and delivers a unique and relevant landing page experience by targeting individual leads.

The AI takes just 50 visits to machine learn the pattern and churns out 20% more conversion than A/B testing results. During their scrupulous beta testing, Unbounce found out that smart traffic was capable of converting faster, better, and most importantly with fewer visitors.

Smart traffic is the gateway to smashing the discrimination of access to the best technology irrespective of an SMBs background, budget, or headcount.

How does Smart Traffic work?

Smart traffic uses a contextual multi-armed bandit theory of probability to derive the most relevant landing page variant to unique visitors. Smart traffic is always learning and delivers high conversion with as little as 50 visitors and 30 visitors when you add a page variant. 

This indicates that a continuous use of smart traffic will ensure better results and higher conversion. The data that works as the pixie dust in this scenario are mainly these attributes that match every visitor with the right landing page variant. These attributes are what the algorithm focuses on:

• Source– The path the visitor took to reach the landing page- whether it was a link sent via email or if the visitor found the way in through social media, and so on.

• Location– The proximity of the visitor, their accessibility to the brand, and how the customer might want to reach out.

• Device– If the person is accessing the landing page via desktop, tablet, mobile, etc. This affects the complete approach of targeting the audience with the right landing page design.

• Customer Journey– If they are not introduced to the brand or if they have an abandoned cart waiting, Smart traffic knows it all. As Smart traffic vendors to even the first time visitors, unlike A/B testing which requires tons of traffic to optimize a landing page, everyone who visits your brand is offered a deal they can’t turn down.

• Trigger– If the customer has added something to a wishlist or has subscribed to a particular list; smart traffic would learn the buyer’s persona, their trigger pattern, and show related pages accordingly.

3 Steps to the future of landing page optimization

It must have been clear by now that although A/B tests have saved us for a long time in the past and present of marketing, its “one-size-fits-all” agenda fails at times. This becomes natural when each and every brand is unique and so are their visitors. Then why not deliver content that is relevant to each one of them? This is where smart traffic makes an entry with a formula to the future of landing page optimization, that too in 3 easy steps:

• Create Variants

Experiment with the design, copy, CTA, or any element you want to tweak and add them as variants of your page. You can start with just 2 variants of your landing page and add more variants by replicating them and testing out various elements.

• Set goals

Only when you set conversion goals, there is accountability of how smart traffic navigates you to a better-optimized landing page and conversion traffic.

• Turn on Smart Traffic

Once you turn on smart traffic on your custom domain, it will start matching your visitors to your landing page with Unbounce’s machine learning algorithm. After you publish your variants of the page, the AI-powered formula is applied almost instantly to leverage the content that is most relevant.

Pros and Cons of using Smart Traffic

Pros

• AI-powered

Although A/B testing is valued by marketers, at least 42% of marketers in a survey admitted that it is not that user-friendly. With smart traffic, your major hassle with complex testing options is eradicated with the help of artificial intelligence.

• Best conversion rates proven

Only a marketer would understand how much hard work, investment, and resources you need to employ in order to achieve your conversion goal. During its BETA testing, smart traffic had proven to convert 20% more on an average compared to A/B testing. For a growing business, such surges in the conversion rate lay the foundation for better connections and develop the brand.

• Speedy results

As the optimization threshold is just 30-50 visitors per variant, you are bound to get quick results, unlike other common testing tools.

• Eliminates Assumptions

With smart traffic, you know what each customer is looking for; this removes the question of assuming a customer’s persona and hoping they would convert. The best part is, if a variant is not fulfilling its purpose, the visitor is automatically redirected to the next best-optimized option. 

• More power to SMB 

This revolution of introducing artificial intelligence to be made available to SMBs has opened up opportunities to growing businesses and medium businesses, breaking the technological discrimination that artificial intelligence was for the bigger players.

Cons

• Smart traffic is not supported in AMP, Sticky bars and Pop-Ups
• This machine-learning algorithm is only available for custom domains, for now
• External tracking is not available in Smart traffic
• Domain changes demand the page be unpublished, only to be republished and reactivate smart traffic again

Wrap Up

Smart traffic is for smart marketers, who would prefer to unravel their customer persona and deliver resonating content rather than assume and hope for the best with traditional testing methods. Once you attract the right traffic to your website, and witness how artificial intelligence has enhanced the performance of your paid as well as organic campaigns, we assure you, there will be no looking back.