If you're spending your ad budget on lower-funnel traffic and driving it to any other store page than a custom landing page... you're simply wasting money. Using a solid custom landing page helps you shorten the customer journey, remove unnecessary distractions, and keep visitors' focus on a single, most important goal - conversion. And this results in a significant decrease of your cost per acquisition and increased margins
I analyze landing pages and ecommerce stores on a daily basis (and share the teardowns here). After having analyzed a TON of them, here are some of the key elements high-converting pages have in common:
That assumes you have the basics in place, such as quality images, clean design relevant to the product and audience, customer reviews, press mentions, and UGC images.
I suggest to also read the more detailed write-up of ecommerce landing page best practices.
Most advertising platforms (Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.) are transparent about what ads their advertisers run. Knowing this, you can easily check all their ads and the landing pages your competitors drive traffic to. For example, if you visit your competitor's Facebook page, you can go to the 'Page transparency' section on the left-hand side, click 'See all', then go to 'Ads from this Page', and click the 'Go to Ad Library' button. This way, you'll see all their active ads. And if you click any of them, you'll be able to see the landing pages they're using. And other ad platforms have similar resources available.
The quickest way to find them is by browsing curated landing page swipe files like this one. While you could browse through all the ad libraries, this would be a very inefficient process.
First, I collected a list of the fastest-growing DTC brands from Nexxtbrand. Then, scraped their Facebook page URLs, and used the approach described above (in an automated way) to collect all the URLs their ads lead to. As I learned at this point, out of the almost 3,500 brands I analyzed, only less than 200 drove paid social traffic to a custom landing page. That's less than 6%! With this filtered down list, I used a script that visited all the landing pages in mobile view, and took their screenshots. And that's how this ecommerce landing page swipe file was born.
Whenever you see an interesting landing page, ad, email, or any other asset that you'd like to use as inspiration later, you should save it in your personal ecommerce swipe file. The simplest way is to use a swipe file software like Foreplay as it keeps the assets organized and ad links never expire. Also, it gives you access to a huge library of assets saved by other ecommerce marketers and founders.