(Photo by joeltelling)
Chances are you’ve either had to make the decision about approving a website landing page design—or you’ve been part of a meeting where different design versions were presented.
What size should the logo be? Which color should the background be? Which headline is best? Should the submit button be on the left or the right? Opinions vary widely and some participants in the decision may be very vocal. How do you make the decision and whose opinion should you rely upon? Does it matter?
Let’s take a step back.
The effectiveness of your landing page has a direct impact on your website conversions, that is, whatever action you want your visitors to take after you’ve directed them to the page—it could be downloading a white paper, subscribing to a mailing list, signing up for a webinar, or whatever.
A landing page is a page where traffic arrives or “lands” on your website. It can be your home page, but is often an “interior” page—a services description page, a content page, or another page. You send traffic to a landing page from sources such as a link in a blog post, a link in an email or enewsletter, a pay per click (PPC) campaign, or a social networking site (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook), for example.
An Affordable (Free) Tool for Testing & Optimization
Because visitors are directed to the page to take an action (which is measureable), such as completing a form, landing pages are prime candidates for optimization and testing. In the past, this might have meant engaging a research firm and spending big bucks, but with Google’s free Website Optimizer, testing and optimization are well within reach of all of us.
If you are somewhat web savvy and have access to your website’s source code (or your IT department does), you can take advantage of this powerful tool. Or, if you don’t have the time or inclination to do it yourself, you can hire someone to run the testing for you. (Google has “authorized consultants” you can hire.)
And, as David Booth warned in his recent Google-sponsored (free) webinar, Planning and Running Your First Experiment with Website Optimizer, if you’re not testing your landing pages you’re leaving money on the table.
“One test is worth a thousand expert opinions.” – Tex Johnston, Boeing
Relying on opinions—whether those of the CEO, marketing director, or a consultant—to determine which landing page design to use, will not yield the best result. Test your landing pages to determine which version, if any, outperforms others.
It’s Easy to Get Started
But where to start? What to test? My blog post Are Your Landing Pages Turning Clients Away will give you some ideas. In addition, Booth suggests you consider the following:
- Use your website analytics to identify weak areas of your website, for example, pages with high bounce rates
- Optimize your top landing pages, for example, those that get the most visits and those that feed high-value conversions
Testing your landing pages will help you make the most of the traffic you already attract to your website by improving your conversion rates—whether the conversion you’re looking for is a white paper download, a newsletter sign-up, event registration, etc. With the Website Optimizer you can do simple A/B split testing (testing two or more complete versions of one page), as well as more complex multivariate testing (testing a combination of variables on a page).
As an example, Booth shares the case of Morningstar, the investment research firm. They tested landing page elements, including header image, headline, and background color. Their multivariate test of these three variables identified the combination that improved conversions by a whopping 47.2%. And while most results won’t be that large, the fact remains that by making slight adjustments to your landing pages, you may improve your conversions—and your bottom line.
