Are you looking for an honest 2023 Unbounce review?
You’re in the right place.
As our marketing agency leader, I tasked myself with checking out Unbounce to see if it’d be a good fit for our company.
All the features Unbounce offered (especially their Google Ad PPC features) looked amazing, and I was intrigued. I was also impressed with some of Unbounce’s most prominent clients: Canon, New Balance, LinkedIn, and Amazon.
Yet, my enthusiasm for Unbounce started to dwindle as I began writing internal operating manuals for our team on how to use the tool.
You’ll see exactly what happened with my Unbounce experience, what I liked & disliked, the affordable pricing, and more.
Table of Contents
What Is Unbounce?
Unbounce is a veteran landing page platform founded by Rick Perreault in 2009. The landing page software helps small business owners and marketing and advertising teams create landing pages from scratch and provide beautiful landing page templates optimized for conversions.
Additionally, you can add popups and sticky headers to your web page to increase your ROI, conversion rates on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Unbounce prides itself in being easy to use because you don’t need to know HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. to have landing pages that convert. You’ll discover if this holds true if you read this article in full.
Why Online Entrepreneurs and Agencies Use Unbounce
Online business owners and marketing teams like Unbounce because it’s an easy-to-use landing page builder, the number of unique templates Unbounce offers, the dynamic text replacement feature, and the speed at which you can deploy them for advertising campaigns.
Fast Landing Pages
Small businesses or agencies that offer search engine marketing (i.e., Google Ads) or social media ads (i.e., Facebook ads) for clients love Unbounce landing pages because they can easily re-brand Unbounce templates to their clienteles branding.
Landing Page Split Testing
Unbounce makes it easy to conduct an A B test for any landing page you create on the platform. And they don’t restrict the number of split tests you can run on your pages.
This is an important feature for digital marketing because the chances of you creating a business landing page with excellent conversion rates the first time is rare.
You need to be able to split test. 50% of traffic should go to variation A, and 50% should go to variation B. Luckily, Unbounce makes running an A B test easy to implement.
After some time and data accumulation, your team will be able to determine the statistical winner, and it’s recommended that you continue A/B testing to get the best landing page possible for conversions.
Unbounce Is a Conversion-Focused Program
In 2023, there are lots of landing page builders entering the market, but what separates Unbounce from others is its focus on conversions.
Trackable conversions in Unbounce are phone calls and form submissions. To enhance the ability to convert website visitors into leads (and customers), Unbounce allows you to enable pop-ups and sticky bars on your landing pages. Along with AI optimization features which we’ll discuss in a bit.
Unbounce Is Affordable
Quite frankly, if you’re not as picky as I am when it comes to lead-gen landing pages, Unbounce hits the mark with having an easy-to-use drag and drop builder, templates, and conversion tracking capabilities.
Compared to other software, Unbounce offers competitive pricing (especially for custom domains – agencies with multiple clients will love this).
Unbounce Pros and Cons
This section differentiates our review article from the other Unbounce reviews you may have come across. Here are some honest pros and cons.
Pros
- Allows you to build and deploy landing pages quickly
- Let’s you quickly set up A B testing for your pages
- Conversion-friendly tracking of calls, clicks, and more
- A landing page builder that makes customizing easy (everything is drag and drop) for desktop and mobile-friendly
- Beautiful landing page templates included (plus third-party templates from vendors like ThemeForest)
- Excellent customer support
- Affordable pricing
- AMP Pages are treated just like any other page
Cons
- No grid restrictions can be troublesome for some users
- Steep learning curve if you want to go beyond basic customization
- Adding text and box shadows requires you to have a decent grasp of CSS
- No icon library (their icon library are icon images which you can not change colors for – alternatively, you can import your own icons, which is another hassle)
- You can not add custom classes to page elements, which makes implementing certain page changes a hassle
- The dynamic text replacement is not a simple feature to understand
- No native options for creating a sticky header with anchor link menu element (their sticky header can’t do this)
As you can see from the cons section above, some landing page customization requires some nerdy elbow grease.
It’s not a problem for me (I can hang). Still, as an agency owner who was writing SOPs for our marketing team to start using Unbounce for future digital marketing campaigns potentially, I began to dislike Unbounce’s inconveniences when compared to other platforms.
On a better note, building landing pages on Unbounce that are simple and built to convert is something Unbounce does really well (especially for email lead generation). And you can’t beat the price.
That said, for more complex lead gen funnels, with less coding complexity, we’re sticking to what we use. Before we get into that, let’s cover the features in detail.
Unbounce Landing Page Features
Unbounce is more than your average run-of-the-mill landing page builder. I’ll go over its more sophisticated features as well. Features that help it stand out among its competitors.
The Unbounce features, ranging from basic to advanced, are as follows:
- Landing Pages – Whether you’re creating a new landing page from scratch or you’re using one of Unbounce’s many landing page designs, they’re easy to build and deploy.
- Pop-Ups and Sticky Bars – Pop-ups and Sticky Bars, annoying as they may be at times, works to reel in leads and boost conversion rate.
- Lead Form Builder – Drag and drop landing page forms to where you need them to appear and configure its settings to your liking.
- A/B Testing – Test landing page variants against each other to see which page can score better leads for your business.
- Smart Traffic – Unbounce’s very own AI-powered technology marketing tool sends traffic to the page Unbounce has determined most likely to convert visitors.
- Dynamic Text Replacement – match the web visitors’ user intent by showing them specific text on your landing page to boost conversions.
- Analytics and Reporting – Make smart and cost-effective decisions based on conversion data
- AMP Landing Pages – Create AMP landing pages that load much faster than traditional mobile version pages.
Landing Pages
Take a look at the land page builder below. The building blocks are on the left-hand side, the page and block element settings are on the right, and other settings are on the top and bottom of the page.
The page below was created from an Unbounce template, and I didn’t have to use coding skills whatsoever.
Landing Page Features Overview
- Drag and Drop Functionality: Add, subtract, and/or make your landing pages pixel perfect with a few clicks.
- 100 Landing Page Templates to Choose From: Use pre-built high converting pages or start from scratch on a blank canvas.
- Super Easy Copy & Paste Options: Like an element you created? You can copy and paste elements through your pages quickly, or copy them onto another landing page.
- Clone Existing Pages: Once you have a winning landing page, you can easily clone it in mere minutes to be used in other campaigns.
- Create and Publish on WordPress: Unbounce allows users to publish their designs on their WordPress sites, which is useful for users who don’t want to use a new domain (or subdomain).
- Full Control Freedom: There are no restrictions on your actions within Unbounce’s page builder. Unlike other page builders that are grid restricted, you get full control.
With minimal trial and error, just about anyone will find it easy to create & customize landing pages with Unbounce. With 100+ templates at your disposal, it’s easy to get started, make the page fit your needs, and start generating leads for your business.
The amount of control Unbounce gives its users is liberating if you’re coming from a grid-based marketing software. It’s a WYSIWYG editor. Although this is good for some landing page software customers, it can be a con for others when it comes to landing page creation.
PopUps and Sticky Bars
As annoying as some people may find PopUps and Sticky Bars that follow you while scrolling on a page, they work. Marketers have discovered they can improve their conversions by adding these elements to their pages.
Popup and Sticky Bar Features Overview
- Drag-and-Drop Builders: Pop up, and sticky bars in Unbounce have their own builders.
- Pop-Up Templates: Unbounce provides you with popup templates too.
- Managing Triggers & Targeting: You can assign pop-ups and sticky bars to one or as many pages as you want and when and how they’ll appear to the web visitor. You can also include dynamic text replacement to these elements.
- A/B Test Your Call to Actions: A popup and sticky bar will usually contain a call to action, but just like landing pages, you won’t know if another variation could’ve worked better. Luckily, Unbounce offers testing features for these elements too.
I mainly use software like Unbounce for PPC advertising purposes, so the fact that we can run A/B tests for popups and sticky bars is fantastic. It’s one of Unbounce’s native features that puts them ahead of competitors.
I would recommend including exit-intent popups on your desktop version pages and sticky bars for your mobile pages (although pop-ups work well for paid ad campaigns too).
Lead Form Builder
Any landing page builder that’s worth considering should come with its native form builder tool. You’ll need a form builder if you want to generate leads via form captures.
As you can see from the above image, Unbounce provides standard form fields and makes it incredibly easy to configure.
Whether it’s a basic text field, checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down menu options, you’ll be able to configure your forms and get lead contact information.
Additionally, Unbounce lets you set up account integrations with the following email marketing and CRM platforms (sending leads to):
- Active Campaign
- AWeber
- Constant Contact
- GetResponse
- Hubspot
- GoToWebinar
- Infusionsoft
- Mailchimp
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- Marketo
- And more.
The above integrations are great if you have a follow-up sequence once your leads sign up and email promotion down the line.
If you require a more complex form, you can look into a company called Leadformly, which offers integration with Unbounce.
A/B Testing
Unlike some marketing tools, Unbounce lets you A/B split test your pages, popups, and sticky bars.
Within a matter of minutes, you can begin the process of improving your marketing efforts by testing landing pages.
After enough significant data, you’ll be able to determine which pages are performing best in your campaign monitor that Unbounce provides.
As you can see, Unbounce will ask you about which conversion goals you want to track. This page has both form submissions and a linked phone number that will be tracked within the Unbounce platform. The A/B testing capabilities will measure which page performs best.
Dynamic Text Replacement
As a marketing company that manages Google PPC ads for multiple business types, the Dynamic Text Replacement intrigued me greatly.
It allows you to personalize your search campaigns by matching the copy (i.e., your headline) to the keyword search phrase users typed in Google before clicking on your ad and landing on your page.
Google Ads already offered dynamic keyword insertion for ad copy, but if you wanted your ad pages to do this, you’d have to rely on an advanced tool like Unbounce to get this done.
Imagine how much better visitors will convert when you tailor your pages and pop-up experience to their search intent. This is powerful stuff.
Smart Traffic™
Smart Traffic is Unbounce’s built-in AI tool that helps convert more leads. It’s an alternative method of A/B split testing.
Instead of waiting for enough statistical data, Unbounce will take into account each visitor’s attributes (such as geolocation and device classification and other AI algorithm attributes) to determine which of the two variations will be displayed.
Here are a few things to keep in mind about Smart Traffic:
- Minimum Visits Required: You need at a minimum of 50 visits before it starts kicking in.
- Only Offered on Certain Plans: You can only use this feature on the Optimize plan or up.
- It’s Still New: At the time of writing this, ST is still a relatively new feature and is in beta, but it is another Unbounce tool at your disposal.
Analytics and Reporting
For analytics, you have the choice of using Unbounce’s native reporting tools like their conversion campaign monitor, or you can track your analytics on the Facebook Ad and/or Google Ad manager or via Google Analytics.
For the latter reports, you’ll need to install tracking codes to your Unbounce website(s). Unbounce helps you add unlimited code scripts to your websites via their Script Manager.
AMP Landing Pages
Unbounce was one of the, if not the first, landing page builder to support and offer Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). If you’ve ever clicked on a news outlet site from Facebook, chances are you’ve come across an AMP page. They load lightning fast (page speed averages are 1 second).
Outside of the Unbounce platform, setting up AMP pages is technically challenging and takes a lot of time to implement for beginners. Unbounce removes this struggle by keeping up-to-date with AMP rules.
How Much Does Unbounce Cost?
Unbounce has four core pricing plans.
- Launch – $80 per month
- Optimize – $120 per month
- Accelerate – $200 per month
- Scale – $300 per month
The costs are a great value for money when compared to other rival software in the industry.
Unbounce’s core plans give you access to most of its features across the board (including unlimited landing pages, popups, and sticky bars).
The most significant differences between the Unbounce pricing plans are the number of conversions, visitors, and connected domains.
The “Connected Domain” is an important note to make if you plan on using Unbounce to create landing pages as a digital marketing agency. Each client will need a custom domain (or subdomain), so take the # of connected domains into account when considering an Unbounce plan.
For a more detailed explanation of precisely what you get in each plan (i.e., users, client sub-accounts, AMP landing pages, & more), read our Unbounce Pricing Plan Comparison article.
If you’re interested in Unbounce, we’ve secured a deal with them. Our readers get 20% off on all Unbounce plans.
Tutorial: How to Use Unbounce
Until I make my Unbounce tutorial video, the following YouTube video will explain and demonstrate how this tool works.
We Almost Switched to Unbounce
Before considering Unbounce as our agency’s primary landing page builder, we used Clickfunnels (it’s more of a sales funnel builder).
As our digital marketing agency started to get more local clients in different industries with different conversion goals, we wanted an equivalent easy-to-use platform that offered mobile responsive landing page template options.
Unbounce offers some excellent looking landing page templates for different industries. They offered an easy-to-use landing page editor with some cool features that Clickfunnels can’t do without getting into some code.
Clickfunnels has some decent templates, but when compared to Unbounce… there was no comparison. I had to play around with Unbounce for myself with their free trial.
Long story short, the templates are amazing, and the drag and drop editor is easy to use, BUT there were a lot of technical hassles (hours worth) that I needed to figure out and implement to create equivalent lead generation landing pages as I did in Clickfunnels.
These hassles included little things that Clickfunnels was able to accomplish with just a few clicks. With Unbounce, the SOPs I started to compose started to get complicated.
Here’s an “extra documentation and notes” section I took for our agency’s Unbounce Landing Page Design SOP:
After much deliberation, our marketing team management decided Unbounce would not replace our current software for our clients’ marketing campaigns.
The friction of implementation was too much. We foresaw challenges with future employees efficiently implementing landing pages the way we wanted them done for clients.
For us, we wanted Unbounce to be a software that allowed us to use their templates and create landing pages without needing to implement code.
Editor’s Note: We’ve now switched to using Instapage for our agency.
Our Unbounce Review Final Verdict
As you may have noticed, I wanted Unbounce to be our agency’s solution. We get a lot of paid advertising clients from different industries, and Unbounce was affordable.
However, when it came to the ease of use of the tool, it fell short for us (read again: for us).
As I was writing the SOP, I realized that transferring to a new software was just not in the cards for us right now.
How we design our lead-gen landing pages and funnels would be a pain to implement each time because it required our team to execute custom code and understand support articles inside and out.
Unbounce’s support team was outstanding, on the bright side, when it came to making our experience just like it was with previous tools we’ve used.
It also didn’t help that we were spoiled from past Unbounce alternatives, where everything was handled in one builder (i.e., landing pages, sticky bars, popups, are all handled in one builder and not in separate ones like Unbounce).
Note: I’m still giving Unbounce a second chance with a family member of mine’s business (their templates are that good). It’ll be a Facebook Ad campaign where the conversion goal will be focused on form conversions only.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Unbounce is a great landing page builder and SaaS, but the tool just wasn’t a suitable replacement for our agency.
That doesn’t mean Unbounce won’t be a good fit for you. To be honest, we’re a little picky when it comes to how our pages look and the speed at which our team members can set up a lead-generating funnel for clients.
Unbounce is an excellent tool for people who love how beautiful their templates look, need a robust page builder, and don’t want to get too into the weeds with adding custom element features that require light coding knowledge.
The bottom line is, I can describe my experience with Unbounce until the cows come home, but you won’t know what I mean until you give it a try yourself. Check out Unbounce’s free trial!
Unbounce Alternatives
- Leadpages – See how Unbounce compares to Leadpages in our comparison.
- Instapage – See how Unbounce compares to Instapage in our comparison guide.
Article image credits: Unbounce.com
