OptinMonster vs Unbounce

Optin Campaigns vs. Landing Pages: What’s the Difference?

You may think that optin campaigns and landing pages are the same things. Both increase email signups, inform your audience about cool promotions, and boost overall sales.

In other words, both can be pretty awesome tools. So what’s the difference?

Landing pages are great because they’re informative and come in different forms. You can have:

• Squeeze pages
• Pre-sell pages
• Sales pages
• Product launches
• Demo pages

Or just about anything else that you want to draw specific attention to. They’re given a special place on your website, and you drive traffic to them through either organic content marketing or paid ads.

Optin campaigns are similar, but with a crucial difference: they don’t have a specific URL on your site.

Instead, you can embed optin campaigns on any page of your website and target them to a particular niche in your audience.

So if you want to show a promotion only to your site’s visitors in a specific time zone, for instance, you can do that. Or if you want to show an optin campaign to people who are more engaged with your site, you can do that as well.

How? By setting various triggers to your optin campaign. Something you can’t do with landing pages.

Alright, so now the big question: What does any of this have to do with OptinMonster vs. Unbounce?

In a word, everything.

That’s because Unbounce focuses on creating landing pages for your site. Then they offer a limited amount of optin campaigns as a helpful side product.

OptinMonster does the exact opposite. We specialize in creating optin campaigns to boost conversions. But, those same campaigns can also function as versatile landing pages, too.

More on that in a bit.

Now don’t get us wrong. We don’t think that optin campaigns are necessarily better than landing pages. Again, both are super important to your marketing strategy.

But we do think that optin campaigns are more powerful, offer better targeting, and can still accomplish everything a traditional landing page does.

Ok, so maybe optin campaigns are better. 😉

This is important to understand as we go into our OptinMonster vs. Unbounce review. We need to be clear up front because we’ll be discussing how each software builds your optin campaigns.

Without further ado, let’s get into the good stuff!

Campaign Targeting and Triggers

One of the biggest advantages of optin campaigns is how highly targeted they are. Rather than sending your visitors to a URL, as you would for a landing page, you can show your visitors an optin campaign on any page of your site.

And you can show them to visitors who meet certain criteria. We call those targets and triggers. But there’s a small difference between the two.

Targets refer to something specific about the visitor, such as their location, URL history, or browser page.

Triggers, on the other hand, are a specific action a user takes, such as trying to close the browser or scrolling to a certain percentage of your page.

But both have the same goal: making sure that your optin campaign is getting to the right person at the right time to make the message as effective as possible.

So let’s see how Unbounce’s triggers and targeting features stack up to OptinMonster when it comes to optin campaigns.

Once you’ve created your campaign with Unbounce, you need to enter the URL for the page that you want it to appear on:

Then you can choose from a variety of triggers, including when a visitor:

• Arrives on your page
• Stays on your page for X amount of seconds
• Tries to exit a page
• Scrolls up your page
• Scrolls down you page X percent
• Clicks a specific ID portion of your page’s code

With OptinMonster, however, you can set all of these triggers (except for scrolling up a page) and a lot more. On top of the list of triggers we just saw with Unbounce, you can also set triggers for visitors who:

• Have become inactive on a page
• Have made a purchase
• Clicks a MonsterLink™ (no code required)
• Hover their mouse over a certain object

Ok, so OptinMonster has more triggers. What about targets? Well, we’ve got more of those too. Here’s a list of targets that both companies allow you to use:

• Geolocation
• Page-level targeting
• Current URL paths
• New vs. returning users
• Referral detections
• URL parameters
• Specific cookies
• OS/Browser based targeting
• How often the same user sees your campaign

OptinMonster has many specific targeting options that Unbounce doesn’t feature. Targeting rules offered by OptinMonster include:

• Number of pages viewed
• Past visited URL path
• WordPress tags
• Campaign interactions
• Visitors with adblockers
• URL anchor texts (using MonsterLinks™)
• Device-based targeting
• Ecommerce cart contents
• Ecommerce cart value

Now, to be fair, you can accomplish some of these targets with your Unbounce campaigns if you’re good with code. So keep in mind that we’re only talking about what you can achieve without diving into JavaScript, CSS, or HTML.

An excellent example of this is a comparison of Unbounce’s Click Trigger and OptinMonster’s MonsterLinks™. While both allow you to trigger a campaign for when visitors click a part of your page, Unbounce is more technical to set up.

To do this in Unbounce, you need to enter an ID, CSS selector, or class from your web property. And if you don’t know what any of that means, then you understand why we say it’s harder to do with Unbounce.

OptinMonster’s MonsterLink™ is a matter of copy/pasting a link that we generate and assigning it to any element of your webpage such as a button, an image, or an anchor text.

You can copy this link to your clipboard and add it to email marketing campaigns, social media posts, or in your content.

Again, much simpler.

OptinMonster vs. Unbounce: The Final Word

We started this article by showing how both companies focus on different aspects of lead generation. Unbounce focuses on creating landing pages and landing page templates.

OptinMonster, on the other hand, creates full-service optin campaigns.

So does that mean if you want to build landing pages, you should go with Unbounce? Not necessarily.

With OptinMonster’s fullscreen welcome mats or inline campaigns, you can turn any of our campaigns into a landing page, including a:

• Squeeze page
• Pre-sell page
• Sales page
• Product launch page

The difference? Our fullscreen landing page campaigns are more flexible because they aren’t tied to a specific URL. That means you can target these landing pages to visitors looking at any page on your website. If you want the landing page to be hosted on your site, just use an inline campaign and use the campaign embed code to add it to your site.

So if you have a piece of content that talks about a product, you can trigger your fullscreen campaign to popup when visitors get to that section of the page. Or, you can target only local users for any on-site promotions you’re running.

Or, you can… well, we think you get the point.

You can show these landing pages to the people who need to see them without trying to drive traffic to the URL itself.

This aspect of our campaigns tips the scales toward OptinMonster. And then there’s the pricing aspect.

Unbounce has three plans, all of which charge based on your site’s traffic:

• $79/month for the Essential plan
• $159/month for the Premium plan
• $399+/month for the Enterprise plan

OptinMonster, on the other hand, has 4 plans which charge by campaign impressions:

• $14/month for the Basic plan
• $30/month for the Plus plan
• $47/month for the Pro plan
• $80/month for the Growth plan

Not only is OptinMonster’s pricing more affordable, but it also makes more sense for small to medium-size businesses because we charge by campaign impressions.

It’s a small thing to consider but can have a significant impact on your price, depending on your situation. Here’s the difference in how the pricing models work:

• Charging by traffic means you could pay more even if your campaigns aren’t seen by your audience (because you have visitors who may not trigger your campaign)
• Charging by impressions means your price increases along with the number of people seeing your actual campaigns

So if you’re a smaller or medium-sized business trying to get the best bang for your buck, you want to be charged by impressions, not overall traffic.

The bottom line? You need to remember that both companies were created with different focuses in mind. Unbounce is all about landing pages. OptinMonster is all about optin campaigns, which include the potential for custom landing pages, but don’t focus on it.

That means if you’re looking for a software with:

• More types of campaigns
• More templates
• More options for customizing your campaign
• More targeted campaigns
• More triggers
• More flexibility
• More email integrations
• More functionality with Yes/No campaigns
• Less expensive

Then OptinMonster is clearly the choice for you.

Plus, it’s important to consider that OptinMonster is just better suited for driving traffic, growing your email list, and boosting conversion rates without needing any coding skills.

In other words, you get a lot more 💥 for your 💰.

Interested? Join OptinMonster today and enjoy our 14-day unconditional money-back guarantee.