How to Uncover Hidden, High-Converting Landing Pages
like a super secret spy
Hey, real quick. Turns out Elon hates links of any kind and Substack just hates Twitter. And now I’m stuck in the middle of their tussle which means spreading this newsletter has gotten harder. So if you like this post please send it to a friend!
Sometimes all you need is a little bit of inspiration. Something that sparks an idea. Something to get you out of that creative rut.
Of course that's why earlier this week I announced my Conversion Optimized Design swipe file (if you want it, simply reply to this email and let me know. Will have it ready this week!).
Although that's not going to be enough for you.
Sure I have decent taste and believe I can curate good design. But is it going to be relevant to your store or your client? I can't promise that.
What you really need is an easy way to source that inspiration for yourself.
I'm sure you know how to do this for ads (facebook library), emails (just subscribe), and product pages (....) but there's something thats not so easy to find — landing pages.
Often hidden from the public you need to do some detective work to uncover these.
Luckily, it can actually be pretty easy.
Method 1/3 – Shopify is Required to Leak This Data
hismile has been the butt of my jokes plenty of times in the past.
Their blatant FTC violations may be off putting but you can't deny they are doing every little thing they can to increase conversions.
I'm never going to go as hard as them but I am interested in figuring out what they're doing behind closed doors... so I started digging.
When you take a look at their facebook ads library you can see most of their ads link to product pages.
If they're not using a lot of landing pages in their ads library that tells me they probably aren't making a lot of landing pages with a tool like unbounce. (this would likely mean they're using a subdomain like get.hismile or try.hismile... but more on that in method #2)
So I assume they have to have at least a couple pages built natively in Shopify. And that's where the snooping starts.
I'll spare you the details but Google recommends every website have a sitemap file. The sitemap basically tells google where to find the pages on your website. It makes Google's job of crawling your site easier, and ensures you get all of your pages indexed.
Because its important for SEO, Shopify automatically generates a `sitemap.xml` file for every store. And lucky for us, it couldn't be easier to find!
All you have to do is add /sitemap.xml to the end of a store's URL.
You can try it yourself by clicking this link which will take you to hismile's sitemap.
But this is only a few links.. so its not doing us any good. What we're looking for is that /sitemap_pages_1.xml link. If you're familiar with Shopify you know all 'pages' start with the /pages/ folder.
This link tells google where to find a full list of those pages. Try it here.
And just like that we have a full list of every page on the Shopify store. This won't show us pages on subdomains like try.hismile (again, next section) but there's still plenty to work with here.
This part is pretty manual but I just read the urls and look for keywords that sound interesting. For example, this one sounds interesting to me:
hmmm… Deal of the day you say?
Don't worry if you haven't been following along here's a link to the page.
And wow... that didn't disappoint.
If I thought hismile was putting the pressure on before this is just insane.
Thinking about it, you can see why they don't link to this in any of their ads. This has to be a last ditch offer that they send via email to customers who haven’t bought for a while.
I'm not sure if this is inspiration for something you should do or what not to do but I love this find nonetheless.
You can do this for pretty much any DTC brand.
Just take your favorite Shopify store URL and add this bit of text. Tell me you don't find something interesting:
Method 2/3 - Using Advanced Google Features
You probably know a brand that has a killer marketing team thats always trying new things.
For me, that brand is Kettle & Fire. They've had a strong analytics/CRO team from the very beginning.
So lets take a look at their facebook ads library (you're probably sensing a trend here, this is my favorite starting place)
After hovering over some of the links in their ads I notice that they're using a subdomain try.kettleandfire.
Now my next step could be to endlessly scroll the ads library, hover over every link, and hope to find all of the landing pages they use.
But that is a pain in the ass. So, instead, we're going to dig in using an advanced google feature in hopes of finding a full list.
Okay maybe I exaggerated by calling this 'advanced' but there's the trick. If you include site: and then enter a website, google will only respond with links to that website.
What makes this great for us is that technically speaking a subdomain is an entirely separate website from your primary domain (www.kettle...). That means we only get results with try.kettle... which as you can imagine... are all landing pages!
I know you're probably curious like me so I did a little digging. They use Webflow to make all of their landing pages 👀
Now instead of clicking through all of those ad manager links we have a list of 86 different landing pages Kettle & Fire uses to run their marketing. (here’s a link to test it out yourself)
It only takes a few seconds to find something here. Just look at these titles:
Interesting.. it seems they have a recurring format. When you click into one of those pages (follow along with me here) you'll see that they're all in the same format except the page content is personalized to the influencer.
When you work with an influencer chances are you don't have a page personalized for every one of them. Just think of how much more effective this landing page is than someone being sent to your home page with a discount code in hand.
Not to mention the page is really well designed! More inspiration!
Method 3/3: ….
Okay so there is a third method but it’s complicated and I think it would bore you. The method relies on using a premium SEO Spider tool to speed up what we did with google + shopify so you’re not missing out on much. You can go down that rabbit hole if you want.
Maybe the real third method is to just wait for me to do the hard work for you with the swipe file. It’s taking longer than expected to ship it because I honestly didn’t expect how many people would be interested in it and I’m feeling a bit of pressure to make it good.
That being said I told you I would have the file over to you by the end of the week so I will keep that promise. Even if its not in top shape.
If you haven't already gotten access, make sure you’re subscribed and then just reply to this email to get it.
Final thing: feedback is appreciated! You can email me here or tweet at me here