When Fabien “Fab” David joined Notion, it was already a rapidly-growing startup. His job? Build on that organic momentum, meaningfully scaling the company’s paid advertising efforts and building market share. 

Fab started out by launching segmented campaigns across paid search, Facebook, LinkedIn, and display. But he quickly realized a big problem: not only was the company’s main landing page for their campaigns not originally designed for paid traffic, but he also had no ability to personalize page copy based on the ads users saw.

Notion is an amazing product that has a ton of different use cases, from project management to wikis and document sharing. And while Fab had campaigns expertly segmented across these use cases by persona, his landing page was generic. This meant that conversion rate wasn’t as high as the team knew it could be, and Fab was determined to fix that.

The original, non-optimized landing page Fab was using in campaigns. The language was generic compared to his campaign assets, which were customized by industry and use case.

Fab needed a landing page that would quickly demonstrate value and show relevancy to the ad that brought a user to Notion’s site in the first place. And shrinking attention spans meant he needed it to make an impression fast.

“Most traffic is on mobile. So you're not working with five seconds of someone’s attention span, you're working with three seconds max. That’s all they’ll take to make the call on whether something is relevant or not. So you have to throw everything at your landing page experience to make it convert as much as possible. Otherwise you’re just wasting money.”

Fab believed that Notion could increase conversion rates for app sign ups by:

1. Creating a new landing page template, specifically built with paid traffic in mind

2. Dynamically personalizing that new page based on the specific ad that a user saw

He wanted to build a strategy around the people behind the click. He wanted landing pages that spoke directly to the visitor's needs.

Research what works

First up: Fab wanted to get a better sense of how other companies were designing their paid landing pages to inform how the team built their new template.

“I looked around at competitors in the space. I also refreshed myself on what I knew in terms of best practices for a paid landing page. Then I sketched out what I wanted my new template to look like.”

A single CTA. Simple language and minimal site navigation. A headline that elicits an emotional response and speaks to a specific pain point. These were all things Fab saw and liked—and what he wanted to reproduce for Notion’s own paid landing page template.

Create a template

To create a template, the team first simplified one of their existing page designs, removing most of the screenshots and gifs they’d been using and adding the key elements he liked from his research.

This is what they ended up with for their new landing page:

Notion's new paid landing page, featuring simplified content and navigation, and a single CTA. The template page copy was still generic and didn't speak to all use cases.

Build a personalization plan that scales

Fab knew that he would eventually want to scale landing page personalization to all channels and ads, so he decided to use Mutiny to build out and measure the impact of his experiments.

“I wanted to move faster. There was a real sense of urgency to get to a better place where we could really scale the program. And I knew that using something that was out of the box would be a lot quicker than going through all of the iterations of wireframing with our engineering team for every new page.”

Prioritize the first ads to pilot

Fab was running a lot of ads across several channels, so he needed to prioritize which ads and audiences to create personalized experiences for first.

As any good performance marketer would, he turned to his data. In Mutiny, he saw that display, search, and Facebook presented the largest opportunities for impact, as these channels drove the most traffic to the site:

Example of report Fab used in Mutiny, with sample (dummy) data

For each of these top channels, Fab looked at what ads or keywords were driving the most volume of traffic to the site.

For example, for paid search, he examined top keywords and saw that wikis and project management were two popular non-branded search terms - a perfect place to start.

Personalize your page

The next step: create personalized versions of the page based on the ad a visitor clicked on. Fab achieved this by dynamically personalizing the headline and hero image in Mutiny based on a user’s UTM parameters. 

For example, let's say a user went to Google and searched for a "wiki" related search term, and clicked through on Notion's paid search ad at the top:

For these visitors, Fab personalized his paid landing page to show content that was relevant to Notion's wiki use case, like this:

Never. Stop. Testing. 

Once Fab started to see strong results with his personalized experiments, he started to test out new formats for the page itself, as well. For example, with so much of their traffic coming from mobile, Fab wanted to test a shortened version of the paid landing page for all mobile visitors, knowing that the “above the fold” portion of the page was most important. 

Using Mutiny’s banners, he added a pinned CTA once a visitor scrolled to the 50% mark of the page, to make signing up easier on a long-scroll page.

Learn from Yash Godiwala at Ramp how to choose what growth projects to prioritize, how to keep track of all your ads and messaging, and double the efficiency of your ads.