Text Formatting and Highlights in Landing Page Copy
Learn to format headlines, adjust line height, and highlight copy with alternate colors and strikethrough to reinforce your offer and boost scannability.
Why text formatting sells (or kills) your page
Copy formatting is what makes the visitor's eye stop on the right word. Adjusting line height, highlighting sections in an alternate color, and striking through the anchor price guide the reading and reinforce the offer without the person having to read everything. A sales page isn't read word for word: it's scanned. And what decides what they read first is how you formatted it.
Anyone who runs offers knows: a headline broken up well, with the promise in yellow and the old price struck through in red, converts differently than a gray wall of running text. It's not decoration. It's visual hierarchy working in favor of the offer.
How to edit your headline and subheadline
The headline is the first filter. If it doesn't hold the person, the rest of the page doesn't exist for them. Write the promise straight, and treat the subheadline as the argument that backs up that promise.
When you edit, you touch three things: font size, alignment, and text weight. Big title, smaller subheadline, and the difference between the two already creates hierarchy. The eye figures out on its own what's primary and what's support.
Alignment has four options and each one has its moment:
- Centered works well for a top headline, when the text is short and you want impact
- Left is the default for a long text block, because the Western eye reads left to right and tires less
- Right almost never pays off in copy, use it with care
- Justified gives the paragraph a straight edge on both sides, but it can open up ugly gaps between words on a narrow screen
Rule of thumb: centered headline, left-aligned body text. Test before you justify.
Line height: the tweak nobody looks at that makes a difference
When you paste text and it ends up with huge gaps between lines, the problem is the line height. The default value sometimes leaves the paragraph too spaced out, making it look like the sentences aren't talking to each other.
The fix is simple: lower the value. Set it to 1.3 and the text pulls together, gets compact, and looks like a solid block. This helps most in subheadlines and argument paragraphs, where you want the reader to feel the text as one unit, not as loose sentences.
Be careful not to squeeze too tight. Below 1.2 the lines start running into each other and reading feels suffocated. Between 1.3 and 1.5 is the safe range for most cases.
How to highlight words with an alternate color
Highlighting a word is one of the fastest ways to tell the visitor's brain: look here, this matters. You take the core benefit, the name of the method, the word that carries the promise, and throw it in a color that contrasts with the rest.
The highlight works with a tag around the section. You put the marker before and after the word you want to mark, and it takes on the alternate color you set. Picked yellow? The word comes out yellow in the middle of white text. Simple and visible.
What you control in the highlight:
- Alternate color (the color of the marked word)
- Background color of the section, if you want a highlighter effect instead of just colored letters
- Font size, to enlarge the highlighted word
- Text color and background color of the whole block
You can even swap the solid color for a gradient, going from one color to another within the same word. It looks nice in a headline, but hold back: too much gradient clutters and hurts readability.
A common mistake is highlighting everything. If half the sentence is in yellow, nothing is highlighted. Pick one or two words per block. The highlight lives on the contrast with what's normal around it.
Strikethrough on the anchor price
Price anchoring is a Direct Response classic: show the high value struck through, then the real value. The strikethrough is what creates the feeling of a discount. Without it, the new price is just a number. With it, it becomes savings.
In the price structure you usually have two containers: the anchor value (the expensive one, struck through) and the final value (what the person actually pays). You go into each one and edit.
The strikethrough effect is also a tag. You put two dashes before and two dashes after the value. So --299-- comes out as 299 with a line cutting through the number. That classic "from 299 for only 149."
You can make it more aggressive by painting the strikethrough red. Then the combination of tags changes: you use the red alternate color and join the two dashes with an equals sign. The order matters. If you flip the markers, the effect won't work. Get the sequence right and the number shows up struck through and red at the same time, reinforcing the idea of a price you no longer pay.
Set it up like this: old price struck through in red, new price big and highlighted. The eye goes straight to the contrast between the two.
Fonts: title, text, and button don't have to match
In styles you swap the fonts for each part of the page separately: title, body text, and button. It doesn't all have to be the same family.
The setup that works:
- Title with a font that has more personality or weight, to grab attention
- Body text with a clean, readable font, nothing fancy, because the person is going to read a lot there
- The button can have a different font to make the call to action stand out
Want a font just on the button? Go into the button's style and change it there, without touching the rest. It's the kind of detail that separates an amateur page from one that looks professional.
One rule that holds up: two or three fonts max across the whole page. More than that turns into visual chaos and the visitor's brain burns energy decoding instead of reading the offer.
The work behind scaling this across many pages and campaigns
Formatting one polished page is one thing. The problem shows up when you have ten offers, each with its own page and its own campaigns, and you need to push all of it to Meta without messing up naming, audiences, or structure. That's when the pretty page formatting doesn't save you from the grunt work of setting up campaign after campaign.
That's the scenario where the publishing part becomes the bottleneck. Operators running high volume tend to lean on this step with platforms like DirectAds to standardize naming across accounts, precisely because setting up 80 campaigns by hand is where human error shows up: wrong name, wrong audience, ad set duplicated in the wrong place. You format the page once. The campaigns you push every week.
Takeaways
- Lower the line height to 1.3 when the text comes out too spaced and starts looking like loose sentences
- Highlight one or two words per block with an alternate color, never the whole sentence, or the contrast dies
- Use the strikethrough with two dashes before and after on the anchor price, and get the tag order right to make it red
- Separate the fonts for title, text, and button, but keep it to two or three families across the whole page
Frequently asked questions
What's the ideal line height for landing page copy?
Between 1.3 and 1.5 for most cases. Below 1.2 the lines run into each other and reading suffocates. Drop to 1.3 when the text comes out with too much space between sentences.
How do I do the strikethrough price effect?
It's a tag: put two dashes before and two dashes after the value. To make it struck through and red at the same time, you combine the red alternate color with the two dashes and the equals sign, in the right order. If you flip the sequence, the effect won't show.
Can I use a background color instead of just coloring the word?
You can. In the highlight you control the letter color and background color separately. If you want a highlighter effect, apply the color to the section's background. If you just want the word colored, change the text's alternate color.
How many fonts should I use on a sales page?
Two or three max. One for the title, one for the body text, and if you want to make the button stand out, a third just for that. More than that clutters and tires the reader.
Is it worth putting a gradient on text?
On a short headline it can look good. In body text, avoid it: gradient hurts readability and long reading gets tiring. Use it sparingly and always test on a phone screen first.
