When COVID-19 sent Radar’s customers into cost-cutting mode, the team sought to create a product that would allow its customers to save money. After talking to customers, it became clear that they were spending an arm and a leg on Google’s commoditized geocoding APIs, a capability that Radar could easily productize.

The team knew competing with Google wouldn’t be easy, so they launched a highly competitive offering - 100k API calls for free. To test the new offering, the marketing team at Radar launched paid search ads to capture visitors looking for competitive APIs from Google and other companies.

When these ads launched, the team saw a lot of impressions and clicks, but very few conversions.

The team knew they had a compelling offering - who can beat free? And people were searching for very similar offerings from other companies. So why weren’t they converting?

The team had an idea: If they could personalize their landing page experience for visitors who were searching for “Google Maps API” keywords, and demonstrate that Radar was essentially the same thing (for free), it would boost conversions.

Understand search volume

Use Google’s Keyword Planner to understand which competitors your target market is actually searching for, and understand the search volume and expected cost-per-click. This helps you focus your research on the competitors that matter.

Understand the competitive landscape

The Radar team set out to do research on the top competitors, based on search volume and cost per click (CPC). The goal was to understand what differentiates Radar from each competitor, and the result was a succinct “why us” statement for each competitor.

Apply your competitive research to the product landing page

The Radar team used Mutiny to change their product page headlines to talk about the unique competitive differentiation that Radar offers versus the competitor that the user searched for.For example, if someone searched for the term “google maps API alternative", the team changed the page headline from a generic one to: “The best Google Maps API alternative” and they changed the subhead to talk about the leading differentiator: price.

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.