Oli Gardner Unbounce Co-Founder Shares Best Landing Page Optimization Tricks

“If you can’t communicate clearly in the first few seconds, you’re going to lose to someone else.” 🎯

At SMXL in Milan, I met Oli Gardner, one of six co-founders of Unbounce, the landing page platform. He corrected me right away: he’s not the CEO. 🎙️

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• 🚀 Six co-founders, one double-sided problem
• ✏️ Sketching to think clearly
• 📉 The A/B test that cost three months
• 🎯 Clarity, context and attention
• 🎤 How speaking changed his life

🎥 Watch the full episode:

🚀 Six Co-founders, One Double-Sided Problem

About nine years earlier, CEO Rick Perreault and five others who’d worked together on and off saw the same problem everywhere: marketers wanted landing pages but relied on developers, who didn’t want to build them. They validated the need, quit their jobs and started Unbounce. That was the day Oli became a marketer. 🚀

Unbounce had about 170 people, with HQ in Vancouver and a small office in Berlin, and had raised less than C$1 million in total from friends and family, a small angel round and a small Series A. For another landing page expert, read Oliver Kenyon’s interview. 🔗

✏️ Sketching to Think Clearly

His recent favorite read was a sketching workbook by Dan Roam, about using sketches to think more clearly and communicate visually. “I live on a whiteboard.” ✏️

Sketching creates authentic visuals, unlike stock images, and changes how your brain works, so your communication gets clearer with practice.

📉 The A/B Test That Cost Three Months

Unbounce tested a benefits block below the pricing grid. The test flatlined, so they left it in. Six weeks later, signups had dropped and nobody knew why. 📉

The block had pushed the free signup option, for people who just wanted to kick the tires, about 350 pixels down, so nobody saw it. It took three months to recover. The lesson: annotate every change in Google Analytics so you can see what happened on a given day and undo it. For more on experiments, read Rohan Chaubey’s interview. 🔗

🎯 Clarity, Context and Attention

There are no silver bullets, but three principles matter. Clarity: people open several ads in tabs and comparison shop, so your headline, subhead and hero image must explain your value instantly. Run a five-second test: show a screenshot for five seconds, then ask what you do. 🎯

Context: deliver on the ad’s promise with tight message match. Generic homepages fail for specific ads. Attention: a campaign has one goal, so remove links that take people off the page. Unbounce’s data shows more exit links mean lower conversions. Useful features: dynamic text replacement to match keywords across many ads, AMP pages for speed, and a free landing page analyzer that checks copy, readability and page speed, and even compresses big images. For an e-commerce growth story, read Alex Micol’s interview. 🔗

🎤 How Speaking Changed His Life

Oli was terrified of speaking at first, fearing someone would ask how he knew anything. In five years, nobody did. Speaking changed him professionally and personally: he made great friends on the road, and met his wife when she attended his talk in Las Vegas. 🎤

Early on, they worked 16-hour days. Now he advises the marketing team, writes content and speaks. Family comes first, especially with his first child due in April. For a personal brand built on stage, read how I met Grant Cardone. 🔗

📝 Key Takeaways From the Oli Gardner Interview

• 🎯 Communicate your value in five seconds
• 🔗 Match the landing page to the ad
• 🚪 Remove links that lead off the page
• 📝 Annotate every change in Google Analytics
• 🎤 Face your fear of speaking

❓ FAQs About Oli Gardner

Who is Oli Gardner?

One of six co-founders of Unbounce, the landing page platform, and a well-known conversion speaker.

What are Oli Gardner’s three landing page principles?

Clarity, context (message match) and attention (removing distractions).

What is a five-second test?

Show people a screenshot for five seconds, then ask what you do. If few know, you have a clarity problem.

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Would your landing page pass the five-second test? Tell me in the comments. 💬

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