If you want to make your marketing campaigns more effective, then you’ll need to make you campaign assets more relevant.
One of the best ways to accomplish this goal is to tie campaigns to a text replacement landing page.
This will allow you to change up the content on your landing pages depending on the traffic source, which will likely lead to higher conversion rates and a bigger return on investment from your marketing spend.
In this guide, we’ll go over everything you need to know about text replacement landing pages and show off some real life examples. We’ll also discuss powerful alternatives to simple text replacement landing pages that enable marketers to add deeper personalization to their campaign pages.
What Is a Text Replacement Landing Page?
First off, let’s start by defining what a landing page is.
A landing page is a page that was designed for the sole purpose of receiving traffic from a specific marketing campaign. So, when someone clicks through to your site from a marketing link, they’ll be directed to a dedicated page rather than just your homepage or one of your default product or service pages.
That means you’ll be able to tailor your content for the exact offer that you’re making in your marketing campaign. For example, if your campaign is focused on a 50% off deal for certain items, the relevant discount and qualifying items can be featured prominently on your landing page.
This will help keep the visitor focused on why they went to your site in the first place, increasing the odds that they’ll actually take advantage of your offer and make a purchase.
A text replacement landing page takes this level of personalization even further. As you may have been able to guess from its name, these types of landing pages feature headings, CTA button labels, or other text that changes in certain situations.
Essentially, this allows you to speak directly to many different groups of visitors with the same landing page.
Another benefit of text replacement landing pages is that they can save you a lot of time.
The other way to create this kind of effect would be to develop entirely new landing pages for each audience segment you’re targeting — but with text replacement landing pages, you’ll only need to make minor adjustments to one single page.
Of course, it still takes more time to create a text replacement landing page than a static landing page that shows the exact same content to everyone.
It’s worth noting that not every landing page needs to be a text replacement landing page. There are certainly many scenarios where it makes sense to at least try out text replacement, but there’s no need to force it.
As with every marketing strategy, you should take a moment to weigh the pros and cons before you invest any of your time and effort.
What Are Text Replacement Landing Pages Used For?
There are many potential uses for a text replacement landing page, including:
- Search ads: It’s especially important to have a high conversion rate for your pay per click (PPC) ads, as each of these visits to your site will cost you. You can adjust the content on your text replacement landing page to reflect the messaging in your ad, providing these visitors with a seamless transition as they navigate from the search engine to your website.
- Sponsored posts: If you’re using a sponsored post on a social media platform to generate traffic to your store, you could use a text replacement landing page to provide these visitors with a more seamless transition to your site as well. For example, if you’ve set up an influencer marketing campaign, you could use text replacement to feature a positive quote from the influencer on your landing page.
- Organic search: Is your landing page getting a lot of organic search traffic? If so, which keywords are leading the most visitors to your page? You can use this information to provide visitors from this source with a more personalized experience.
- Geolocation: The beauty of ecommerce is that it allows even smaller stores with limited resources to serve customers from all across the country — and even all around the world. But you need to account for the fact that different regions have different customs and consumer preferences. And if a decent portion of your customer base speaks a different language, you should strongly consider providing them with manually translated content, as automatic translations are often inaccurate. A text replacement landing page will allow you to do exactly that.
- Time-limited offers: Is your landing page tied to an offer that expires at a certain time? If so, you can use text replacement to design two sets of content — one for before your offer expires, and one for after. The pre-expiration text can talk up the value of your offer, while you can use the post-expiration text to highlight other selling points for your brand to help convince the visitor to make a purchase anyway.
- Sales funnel: You may want to use different messages for visitors who are in different stages of your sales funnel (e.g., the text on a CTA button that reads “Sign up” for first-time visitors could instead read “Upgrade” for existing customers).
Do Text Replacement Landing Pages Convert?
Text replacement landing pages have successfully been used by many merchants to help improve their conversion rates.
For example, the email marketing platform Campaign Monitor found that even a subtle change in their landing page text could significantly affect marketing performance.
They started using dynamic text to match the exact verb used in the search query that led visitors to a key landing page (i.e., visitors who searched “design on-brand emails” were shown a heading that read “Design stunning emails”, while those who searched “make on-brand emails” were shown a heading that read “Make stunning emails”). This led to an increase in the page’s conversion rate of 31.4%.
Here’s another example — ConvertFlow designed a landing page for the general search term “popups” with text that would adjust according to the visitor’s specific search (“Shopify popups”, “popup software”, etc.). Reassuring the visitor that they are in the right place for what they’re looking for helped this landing page reach an exceptional conversion rate of 25.4%.
By setting up your own text replacement landing pages, you should be able to see similar results for your store as well.
Text Replacement Landing Page Examples
To help give you an even better idea of how you can implement this strategy, let’s analyze a two text replacement landing pages that are currently active on live ecommerce sites:
Wine.com
Wine.com offers another example of how you can use text replacement landing pages to support your localization efforts. On the landing page for their personalized wine club, there’s a banner at the top of the screen that promotes a discount code. 
But if the visitor is located in a state that Wine.com is not allowed to ship to, this default banner text is swapped out for a message informing them that they will not be able to place an order. 
This usage of text replacement helps Wine.com maintain compliance with state regulations while also encouraging visitors to place an order whenever they are legally allowed to do so.
Displate
The wall art company Displate is highly active in influencer marketing. They have sponsorships with many different social media personalities, which all link back to different versions of the same landing page. Followers of YouTuber Eddy Burback will see this version of the page:
While those who landed on the page through a sponsorship with one of GG Talent Group’s creators will see this version:
Also, notice how Displate goes one step further and shows visitors a curated list of products picked out by the influencers themselves — this sort of extra effort can help take your influencer marketing campaigns to the next level and generate many more conversions.
How To Get Started Using Text Replacement Landing Pages
Ready to create a text replacement landing page? In the table below, you’ll find some helpful tips for each stage of the process:
| Stage | Tips |
| Before you write a single word | • First, you’ll need to make sure that you have all the tools you need to build, publish, and evaluate your text replacement landing page. Shogun provides everything you need for this project (more on that below). • Carefully consider your goals for the campaign. Are you trying to directly generate more sales, or are you going for a more secondary goal like newsletter signups or customer feedback? This will inform what would be the best approach to take when designing your landing page. |
| Writing your text (and replacement text) | • You should write your off-page content (the text for your paid search ad, sponsored post, or whatever else may be directing visitors to your site) and on-page content for your landing page at the same time. This will help ensure that everything matches up, which is one of the main points of creating a text replacement landing page in the first place. • Remember that another one of the key benefits of text replacement landing pages is that they save time, so don’t get too caught up in replacing the text on the page. This method works best when you’re only tweaking a phrase here and there (or translating content into a different language) — otherwise, you might as well just design separate landing pages. |
| Designing the page | • In addition to your written content, pay attention to the visual content and overall design of the page as well. You should follow all of the established best practices for landing page design, such as limiting navigation options and making the CTA button especially prominent — this will keep the visitor focused on completing whatever action it is that you want them to take for your campaign. • One common problem to look out for is whether the length of certain text replacement options is throwing off the formatting of your landing page. Indeed, a heading or description that looks fine on one version of the page might have an awkward line break on another. Review how each version of the page will look when published, and try resizing the text if you run into any variants with such formatting issues. |
| After the campaign | • What did you learn from your campaign? If one set of replacement text performed much better than the others, then maybe this is the type of language you should be featuring most prominently in future campaigns. And if there was a set of replacement text that performed much worse, you should consider just dropping this language from your future campaigns entirely. |
Text Replacement Landing Page Alternatives
Traditionally, the technical process used to create text replacement landing pages involved setting up different URL tags for each version of the page.
For example, one version of the text replacement landing page might have a URL like “www.store.com/marketing?platform=Shopify” and a main heading that read “Best Marketing Platform for Shopify”, while another version could have a URL of ‘“www.store.com/marketing?platform=BigCommerce” along with an alternate heading of “Best Marketing Platform for BigCommerce”.
You would just plug in whichever URL you need for each marketing link and have it direct the visitor to separate page variants as needed.
But there are now several alternative methods available for building something similar to a “traditional” text replacement landing page. In fact, Shogun makes it possible to create all sorts of personalized experiences for your store.
Here’s how it works — Shogun’s visual editor provides you with all the tools you need to make custom landing pages (as well as any other type of page) for your online storefront. And inside the visual editor, you’ll find a Personalization feature that you can use to publish extra versions of a page that are only shown to certain segments of your audience. In addition to URL and UTM tags, this tool allows you to set the following conditions for your audience segments:
- Physical location of the visitor
- Whether the visitor has been to your site before
- The date, day of the week, or time of day
For each of these scenarios, you can set it up so that different types of visitors are directed to different versions of your landing page without messing with the URL at all. This makes it much easier to create your own text replacement landing pages and access the benefits of this powerful digital marketing tool.