Consider Congruence

Congruence is particularly relevant when designing landing pages, but its driving principles can be used when designing pages throughout a website. According to Unbounce, Congruence refers to

The alignment of every landing page element with your single campaign goal. Congruence is a high-level conversion-centered design principle. If a piece of copy or image on your page isn’t aligned with your campaign, it’s going to cause friction and hurt your conversion rate.

When designing landing pages, Unbounce proposes scoring a page based on the congruence of its individual elements with the goal that consumers should achieve. We saw that landing pages typically possess some core elements—a unique selling proposition, a hero shot, a benefit statement, social proofing, and a link, which is typically a call to action. These core elements are usually implemented in page elements, such as headlines, sub headlines, pictures, introduction paragraphs, bullet points, and links. An easy way to evaluate the congruence of a webpage with its goal is to build a scoring sheet for each of these elements. Take the landing page shown in Figure 8.19 as an example.

Figure 8.19 Congruence Example

Now let’s see how each element of the landing page is performing. The first question to ask is, What is the goal that consumers need to achieve on that page? In this case, it is to download the white paper. Hence, all elements of this page should be talking about the white paper. The headline and subheadline should offer some unique selling proposition associated with the white paper. The hero shot should be white-paper related. The benefits, in this case explained in a short paragraph and bullet points, should explain what the consumer will get by downloading the white paper. The call to action should be white-paper related. And so on. Figure 8.20 shows an analysis of the webpage (text version here). How are each of these elements performing?

Figure 8.20 Landing Page Evaluation

Generally, pretty badly: The headline is not aligned with the white paper, the intro and benefits are not white-paper related, the testimonial relates to the product rather than the white paper, and so on.

To optimize this page, the firm should transform each individual element to better represent the goal of this page.