Instapage Review : A Comprehensive Landing Page Builder You Will Love

I was looking at different landing page builders and thought I would put in my findings of Instapage in this Instapage review. Landing pages are an essential part of most digital marketing campaigns and particularly for businesses investing in paid search, the success of campaigns are often highly dependent on landing pages. While conversion optimization takes the center stage in any landing page development, the ability to quickly create and test multiple landing pages is also a key challenge for most marketer.

While I have not been a big fan of landing page builders myself, the need to scale my campaigns quickly and create custom landing pages for each of my service offerings kind of pushed me to explore the options and glad that I did so.

I was looking at some of the leading landing page builders today – Instapage is one that I tried long back and was not at all happy with the platform but then I read a few positive Instapage reviews again today and decided to give the platform a shot. Lo and behold, in less than 15 minutes I had a test landing page live on my site ( including 7-8 minutes I had to spend to figure out the WordPress Integration process).

From whatever, I have seen so far Instapage looks like a must have a platform if you need landing pages  – it’s quick, efficient and has all the features required for an enterprise-grade landing page builder. Here’s my review of Instapage –

My Instapage Review – What I liked in this Landing Page Builder

Wide Choice of Templates
The wide variety of inbuilt templates makes it extremely easy to put up a page quickly with minimal modifications. The landing pages are also classified by the most common campaign purposes like – Lead generation, Click-Through, Webinars, Ebooks, Events etc, which makes it easier to find the right type of landing pages you need.

You can also design your own templates from scratch on the platform using the various pre-built modules or even import your existing landing page templates.

The other advantage with Instapage is that there is a huge variety of Instapage templates available to buy in Themeforest – so in case your needs are not satisfied with their template library ( which is very unlikely), you can buy and import a template from Themeforest.

Landing Page Content Module

Collaboration on Landing Page Templates
A very well thought, amazing feature if you are working with multiple team or clients. While you are building the templates you might want to get it reviewed by your designer, copywriters or even the client. There is a “Comment Mode” in which you can share your templates preview and they can mark specific parts of the template and provide feedback and comments about the same. I haven’t come across any other landing page builder so far offering such a smooth user experience in this front.

Mobile Responsive Landing Page Builder
While the built-in landing page templates are all mobile responsive, Instapage also offers the option for your to customize the mobile version of the landing page separately, to ensure your user gets the most optimized experience, irrespective of their device.

Built in A/B Testing
An obvious but very useful feature. Instapage have A/B testing built-in that allows for better campaign optimization. There is also a feature for dynamic text replacement, that can further help in improving user experience through better relevance to your user’s search query.

Forms & Lead Capture Mechanisms
Well, this is a landing page platform, so obviously forms and lead capturing will get a lot of focus. But besides the general customizable form builder that almost every landing page builder offers there is some unique value proposition that Instapage has.

If you need to use a complex form with lots of fields, Instapage allows you to break it down into multi-step forms, improving user experience and facilitating conversions.

You can take advantage of Instapage’s over 2 million landing page network and have the forms pre-populate user information where available, giving a solid boost to your conversion rate.

Leads are also automatically backed up and can be exported from your dashboard, Every time you get a lead it is also sent to your email, allowing you to immediately act on it.

One form can have multiple integrations, allowing you to push your data to multiple systems like CRM and email marketing systems at the same time.

Built-in Integrations
Digital campaigns today are beyond single touch points and that’s a primary reason why landing pages often needs one or more integration. Landing pages need to be integrated with CRM, email marketing system, marketing automation tools, advertising solutions etc. Instapage has a lot of this inbuilt. It has inbuilt integration with most common tools including Salesforce, Zoho, Marketo, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Adwords, Facebook Ads, Aweber,Mailchimp, ConstantContact, GetResponse, Google Analytics, GTM, Kissmetrics and several more .
Also, Instapage works with Zapier which opens up a wide variety of other integrations with the platform.

Ease of Publishing
Publishing the Instapage landing pages is extremely easy. I simply loved this feature. It also has extremely easy integration with common platforms like WordPress and Drupal and doesn’t require any technical / coding expertise.

Extremely Easy to Publish Interface on Instapage

Save on Stock Photos
Instapage also comes with integration with BigStock that makes over 33 Million Royalty free stock photos available to you for use. This is a big savings as in most landing page you will end up using a couple images and the cost can quickly add up.

Expert Design Reviews
Premium Instapage users can take advantage of getting an expert review on their landing pages both in terms of design as well as from a conversion optimization perspective. While you might be a master at optimizing landing pages and the built-in template are also highly optimized, it always helps to have an extra pair of trained eyes on your final design.

Custom Code – Going Under the Hood
While the design-friendly landing page builder offers full customization possibilities for those of us that require specific customizations in JavaScripts, HTML or CSS or needs to work with third-party scripts, Instapage allows all of that. You can drop any third party tags or custom codes into your landing pages as you see fit.

Analytics, HeatMaps, Pixel Tracking & More
Marketing today is completely data-driven and Instapage definitely has a full appreciation of that. Instapage has easy integrations with common analytics tools like Google analytics and platforms like Google Adwords and Facebook ads but besides that there are few other analytics features this landing page builder carries that are worth a mention.

Instapage has HeatMaps built in that shows you how a user is interacting with the different parts of a landing page. This could be critical in placing the different elements in your landing pages and deciding on where the CTA might work best.

If your actual conversion is not happening on the Instapage landing page but on an external page, Instapage provides a drop-in pixel that can be added to any other page to track conversions.

Instapage also has a Tag Manager that makes it easy to add/remove analytics tags and tracking codes from your landing pages without the help of any developer.
The reports are also updated in real time, which is another big plus point.

Thank You Page Templates
A commonly overlooked but very important feature; Instapage provides you good options for setting up on-brand customizable thank you pages. I have personally been a big fan of Thank You page optimization and have seen great benefits from the same – Instapage allows you to take advantage of this too. You can read this case study on How to Optimize Thank You Page Design to Increase User Engagement.

Built for Agencies
Instapage allows creation of sub-accounts that is extremely handy when you are working with multiple clients. You can have one centralized account for the entire agency but create sub-accounts for each of your client. A really well-thought feature – clearly makes it an easy choice for agencies.

Enterprise Grade Platform
The Instapage platform is being used by some of the top brands in the world including the likes of Oracle, Verizon, Autopilot etc To be an enterprise level player, security and stability of the platform becomes a key differentiator and Instapage does a fair job at that too. All visitor interactions are done over SSL providing complete security for visitor data.

To ensure maximum uptime, Instapage uses both Amazon and Google cloud server redundancy, delivering a 99.9999% up-time.

Page load time has been a critical component for both Adwords Quality score as well as for SEO purposes, not to mention it greatly impacts user experience as well. Instapage is delivering extremely fast load time thanks to the global data centers in North America, Europe and Asia as well as the worldwide CDN and advanced image optimization algorithms they use.

Support
When you are on-boarding a new platform, support could be a crucial differentiation. While I personally did not need any support to set up my first landing page, there are ample support options available if you need. There is 24/7 Customer support available, chat and email. Also for their enterprise customers there is a phone support available. However, even before you jump onto the support lines, try searching the Knowledge Base – most of your questions has already been answered there.

Affordable Cost
This Instapage review wouldn’t be complete without talking about the pricing and packages of Instapage. While I have mentioned most of the major features, this Instapage review would remain incomplete if I do not talk about the cost. Instapage pricing starts at $68/month and goes up to $203/month, which is mainly used by marketing teams and agencies to serve their customers. They do have another package for Enterprises, where they offer customized plans and cost. Best of it, they also offer a completely Free 14 day Trial that does not even require credit card information, making it easier for you to get comfortable with the platform before you actually buy.

Now that I am hooked to Instapage, I will play around more with this and also explore some of its advanced features. I am also exploring a few other tools and once I get a good grip on all of them, I might even write review of some of the others or better yet a comparison of couple of the top landing page builders. In the meantime feel free to share your thoughts on Instapage if you have already used them or sign up for a free trial to explore.