"Our paid team was doing an amazing job at generating traffic. But optimizing at the ad level can only get you so far,” explained Yash Godiwala.

Yash is part of Ramp's Growth Innovation team, a team dedicated to looking 8-12 months in the future to test new growth programs before scaling them fully. While talking with his Paid Ads team, he realized that there was an opportunity to generate more leads by optimizing the post-click experience on the landing page. "Now more than ever given uncertain markets, we want each dollar to be used to its fullest."

Instead of spending more on ads to increase the volume of leads, Yash wanted to see if he could make the existing traffic more valuable.

Ramp also runs with a very lean team, so every hour spent on growth projects must be incredibly impactful. “We think about growth with an impact over effort mindset. When we find a tactic that gets us results quickly, we double down on it. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible to optimize everything.”

At the time, Ramp was running dozens of ad campaigns targeted at different customer personas. Yash’s hypothesis was that personalizing the landing page based on the persona would lead to higher conversion rates and more leads without spending any more money on ads. 

For this growth hypothesis to be successful, he needed a quick and simple way to personalize dozens of these landing pages to show relevant copy to each visitor without sinking tons of time into manually building each page.

"We already know what the visitors want to see because they clicked an ad with a specific offer and creative. Rather than spending more effort towards optimizing the ad or the ad targeting, he could see a much larger impact by instead optimizing the landing page based on the target persona and the ad that was shown."

Change H1 to better match the persona and their most important value proposition

One of Ramp’s paid campaigns targeted small businesses owners, but the landing page they were sent to didn’t focus on what that persona cared most about. 

Yash’s team knew that no annual fees was a key value proposition for that persona. Yash wanted to see if literally calling out the value proposition word-for-word in the header copy could help improve the conversion rates of the landing page by explicitly stating what matters most.  

He changed the H1 header to “Cards that cost nothing” and the subheader to read “Save time and money with Ramp’s #1 business credit card.”

Yash wanted to see if changing the header of the landing page to be more specific to the most important value proposition of the small business persona.

By changing the verbiage to specifically call out the value proposition most important to this persona, he saw more than 50% increase in conversion rate on this specific page.

Yash had this to say: “Start by first understanding the goal of the campaign. Who is the target audience, what’s the offer of the ad, and what value proposition is the most important to that audience. Use that information to personalize your landing page headers to match the ad.”

Use UTM parameters to match target audiences with personalized landing page

Because Ramp’s dedicated paid growth team is continually adding and removing ads based on their performance, matching a landing page to an ad set is easier said than done. A single change in the ad copy can completely change the context, requiring the landing page to be updated as well.

“With paid ads, you know exactly what the visitor wants to see. If the ad says: 'Ramp for Startups', then the landing page had better mention startups and what Ramp can do for them.”

To keep the ads and the associated landing pages organized, Yash used the UTM parameters generated for each ad as the unique identifier to pair with a landing page.

What's Yash's secret to keeping all those parameters in order? “The key is well architected UTMs and keeping the tracking doc with all the UTMs accurate and up-to-date.”

Always be Iterating - pretty doesn't always win

“When you run a test like this, you want to be able to identify whether it was a personalization win, or a generic win. Knowing that will allow you to continue to go deeper and test new things without messing up the change that brought you a win in the first place.”

Yash also recommends doing research to gauge whether a persona does or doesn't enjoy hyper-personalized landing content.

“Some industries are less receptive to seeing their name called out on a landing page. Once you see that in a test result, take note of it and work with your product marketing team to update your messaging.” 

Ramp has also found success in doing less to accomplish more: “We try to straddle the line between aesthetics and performance.” said Yash, “And we’ve found time and time again that pretty doesn’t always perform.

Learn from Fabien David at Notion how to personalize landing pages based on campaign (UTM), prioritize what to test based on your data, and the importance of starting small and testing quickly.