Overview
Invesco QQQ's NCAA campaign landing page was getting millions of dollars of traffic and bouncing most of it. I ran a research project, rebuilt the messaging around performance, and redesigned the page for conversion.
+58%
Engagement
+40%
Conversion rate
The challenge
A multi-million-dollar campaign was funneling everyone to one page, and the page wasn't holding them.
Invesco QQQ is the official ETF of the NCAA. Twice a year, around March Madness and the Final Four, it runs a flagship campaign built on brand awareness and financial education for retail investors. National TV, digital, experiential, all of it pointing to a single landing page.
After the March Madness 2023 activation, I was asked to fix that page. Bounce rates were high, engagement and conversion were low, and the spend pouring in upstream made every lost visitor expensive. I worked alongside the brand team, compliance, and our agency partners to turn it around.
The approach
I started with three hypotheses, and the hard one was messaging, not design.
I had three bets on what would move the page:
- Optimize the site design for conversion.
- Pivot the messaging from brand to performance.
- Showcase the innovation behind the companies inside QQQ.
Design changes were easy to align on. Messaging was the fight. A pivot from brand to performance needed buy-in from the brand team, approval from the NCAA, and a compliance sign-off on every claim. To make that case, I couldn't just have an opinion. So I ran a research project, surveying retail investors directly.
The research told a clear story. Retail investors:
- Overwhelmingly preferred performance-focused messaging over brand messaging.
- Recognized the S&P 500 far more than the Nasdaq-100.
- Were drawn to the technology and innovation inside QQQ.
That gave me the evidence to take into every approval conversation.
What I changed
I rebuilt the page around three things investors actually responded to.
- Compared QQQ performance directly against the S&P 500. Investors knew the S&P 500 and barely knew the Nasdaq-100, so I put the two side by side. Juxtaposing them gave people a reference point to contextualize QQQ's outperformance instead of asking them to judge a number in a vacuum. It became the second-highest-converting section on the page.
- Highlighted the top QQQ companies. Most investors recognized the companies inside QQQ without recognizing QQQ itself. So I leaned on the names they already trusted and used them as social proof for the fund that holds them.
- Showed innovation exposure through QQQ. This was the constraint-heavy one. Compliance wouldn't let me cherry-pick sector returns, so I couldn't point at a hot category and show its gains. Instead I highlighted the overall market-size growth of QQQ's key growth sectors, which let the page allude to the upside without making a return claim. It became the most-engaged section on the page.
The results
The rebuilt messaging and design drove a 58% lift in engagement and a 40% lift in conversion rate on a page that millions of campaign dollars were already feeding.
The bigger payoff was what came after. These learnings carried over to the core microsite and other projects, and they were part of a 25-point increase in overall site NPS during my time there. The page stopped being the place the campaign leaked and became the place it landed.