What is landing page?
A landing page is a page that visitors “land” on when they:
- Click on a link or an ad for your website
- Type your web address directly into browser
The goal of a landing page is to:
- Provide users with targeted information that is related to their search
- Keep visitors on the page by making it easy for them to find exactly what they are looking for
- Answer any questions they may have
- Make it incredibly easy to take a desired action such as buy a product, download information, or fill out a form.
When a user takes a desired action, this is known as a “conversion“.
Landing page components
A landing page is a critical element in producing conversions. After reaching your landing page, a user typically decides whether or not to stay within several seconds. Research shows that the majority of visitors need a compelling reason to stay on a website or they will leave. Therefore, it’s critical that a landing page make a good first impression and inspire action. The effectiveness of landing page components such as the headline, prominent graphics, promotional text, and the call to action will have a tremendous impact on your conversion rate.
But how do you design an effective landing page? You need to tweak the landing page components so that they are as effective as possible. The bad news is that there is no magic formula for accomplishing this. But the great news is that Google Website Optimizer can show you exactly which landing pages cause the greatest number of visitors to take action.
Multivariate Testing Tools
Multivariate testing tools such as like Optimost, Sitespect.com, ConversionMultiplier.com, and Offermatica.com have been available for some time. However, most of these multivariate testing tools are incredibly complex and designed for giant websites like Amazon.com, not the small and medium sized website with a few thousand unique visitors per day. Additionally, these types of multivariate test tools can start at around $5000 per month for basic features. Guess how much Google Website Optimizer costs? Believe it or not, it’s FREE!
Using Google’s Website Optimizer tool, you can perform an experiment that will test different combinations of your landing page components. This is known as “multivariate testing.” For example, which attention grabbing headline will result in the best ROI?
- “2006 Bikes are now in stock!”
- “2006 Bikes Selling Out Fast!”
- “Make this bike yours!”
Which of these images produces the best ROI? Which promotional text works the best? Which call to action? When you have a few versions of each landing page component, the task of determining which combination performs the best becomes very complicated:
Headlines
x 3 Graphics
x 3 promo texts
x 3 call to action
= 81 versions – Wow!
Which image should we use: a product image, a photo of a person, or company graphic?
In the past, web designers would choose the image that they liked best. But basing critical decisions about landing page element on one person’s opinion is not a systematic approach to creating a highly effective website.
Website Optimizer makes it easy to create an experiment to test these variations and keep track of results.
Google Website Optimizer Methodology & Steps:
- Decide which page and which sections of the page you would like to test
- Input the URLs of your landing page and your conversion page into Website Optimizer
- Website Optimizer will have instructions on how to properly tag your test and conversion page with code
- Once you have followed all of the steps, use Website Optimizer’s tools to review different combinations of your page before the experiment goes live on your site
- Begin the experiment and Website Optimizer will begin collecting data
- Analyze the results: Website Optimizer will keep track of which combinations lead to the most conversions and also how each variation performed. You can then see which combination produced the highest ROI
You will see landing page statistics
And you will see which page combination performed the best
These reports will give you the information you need to make critical decisions about creating the best-performing landing page possible. By testing combinations of your landing page, you can determine which strategy works best for:
- Retaining your customers
- Turning clicks into conversions
- Increasing ROI
Website Optimizer Checklist
- Design your experiment by choosing which page and sections you would like to test
- Follow the instructions in the signup process to properly tag your tested page with code
- Create your page section variations
- Preview your settings
- Begin running the experiment
- Analyze your results
- Send your extra ROI checks made payable to Mark at systematicseo.com. Just kidding 🙂 But I thought to slip it in anyway
You can learn more by watching Google Intructional video
