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Part I: Understanding Landing Page Optimization
All of us have our own unique perspectives and biases when dealing with landing page optimization and testing. The knowledge and belief systems that you bring to these processes will largely determine your success. As you study the topic of landing page optimization, you first have to get the right perspective. Part I of this book lays this groundwork. Leave all of your assumptions at the door, and letâs get started. Part I consists of the following chapters:
Chapter 1 Setting the Stage
Chapter 2 Understanding Your Landing Pages
Chapter 3 The MatrixâMoving People to Act
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Chapter 1
Setting the Stage
Life is like a sewerâŚwhat you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
âTom Lehrer, American humorist, singer, and songwriter
What is a landing page? What does one look like from your perspective? How does it fit into the overall marketing picture? Can you convince every single web visitor to take the desired action on your page? Are you devoting enough attention to your landing page? Is it the right kind of attention?
This chapter examines these questions and sets the stage for understanding landing page optimization.
Chapter Contents
- What Is a Landing Page?
- A Few Precious Moments Online
- Your Baby Is Ugly
- Your Website Visitors: The Real Landing Page Experts
- Understanding the Bigger Online Marketing Picture
- The Myth of Perfect Conversion
What Is a Landing Page?
In a nutshell, a landing page is any webpage on which an Internet visitor first arrives on their way to an important action that you want them to take on your site. The landing page can be part of your main website, or a stand-alone page designed specifically to receive traffic from an online marketing campaign.
Strictly speaking, it is not just the landing page that you should be optimizing, but rather the whole path from the landing page to important conversion actions (such as purchases, form-fills, or downloads) often happening somewhere deeper in your website.
So why pay so much attention to landing pages and important conversion paths instead of optimizing the whole website?
The famous 80/20 rule applies perfectly hereâlanding pages and paths represent your business-critical activities. They are the drivers of revenue and business efficiency. They are the âmoneyâ pages.
Of course if you plan to redesign your website from a clean slate, you should rethink everything and do so with conversion improvement primarily in mind. This kind of âbest-practicesâ website blueprint approach has consistently resulted in significant performance improvements for SiteTunersâ clients. But you will naturally find that only a few pages (or page templates) on the site require special thought, work, and care. These are the ones to focus onâthe rest are merely supporting pages.
A Few Precious Moments Online
The following is a story that helps to paint a picture of why itâs essential to focus on improving and optimizing landing pages.
Imagine that you are in charge of online marketing for your organization and the launch of its first website.
You have slaved for months to tune and optimize your campaigns. Countless hours and days have passed in a blur. You have created great pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, bought additional banners and exposure on related websites, optimized your site for organic search engines, set up dedicated Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, created a powerful affiliate program with effective incentives, and set up the website analytics needed to track visitor behavior in real time.
You are standing by with a powerful series of e-mail follow-ups that will be sent to prospects or customers who respond to your initial offer or leave their contact information on your site. This approach should significantly increase the lifetime value of the relationship with your website visitor.
You feel pretty confident of the success that your marketing efforts will bring. Your website launches, and you log on to your web analytics tool to check what your visitors are doing. Much to your dismay, the first visitor arrivesâand leaves in half a second. The next one lands on your site, clicks another link, and is gone as well. More and more visitors flash byâa virtual flood. Yet only a tiny percentage will take the action that you would like them to take.
Timâs Online Shopping Adventure
I was looking to buy a new camcorder online. First I used the Web to gather information about desirable features. Then I researched appropriate models. After deciding on the one for me, I invested hours of my time making sure that I bought the best possible one. I started looking for a place to buy it by typing the specific camcorder model name into a search engine. I got back a page of search results and began investigating the promising ones.
As I clicked on each link in my mission-oriented âhunterâ mode, I looked in vain for intangibles that would cause me to stick around. One site was too cluttered with confusing links and options; another featured obnoxious colors and was plastered with banner ads; the next looked too cheesy and unprofessional. Other websitesâ failings were subtler: I could not readily tell the depth of their product or brand selection, and could not see at a glance which models were most popular or well received. I gave them a little more of my time and attention, but ultimately abandoned them as well. Click, backtrack, click, backtrack, click, backtrackâand so it wentâŚuntil I found a company that was just right, and I bought my camcorder from them.
Sound familiar? The fact is that most of the companies that I had briefly visited sold the model that I wanted, had it in stock for quick shipping, and were in a similar price range. So why did one particular company get my money whereas most of the others got just a second of my attention? Helping to unravel this puzzle is what this book is all about. We want to make sure that your company is the one that is experienced as âjust rightâ (or at least the best of the available choices) by more of your website visitors.
Itâs hard to figure out what went wrong since you only have your website visitorsâ fleeting attention for a split second. There is a lot that you do not know, including
- Who they are
- How they found you
- What they are thinking or feeling
- Why the vast majority of them leave so soon, without buying or âconvertingâ in some other fashion
Luckily for you (and your job), you arenât the only one to be left in the dark. This type of situation plays out on thousands of new or redesigned websites and landing pages every month. This is because websites are usually built or designed with little thought for the visitor experience, and conversion rate optimization typically takes a back seat both to the visual design of the website and to driving traffic.
All of your hard work comes down to the few precious moments that your visitor spends on your page. During this fleeting interaction, all of your tools of persuasion need to be brought to bear in a powerful yet subtle fashion to achieve the desired result. This book will arm you step by step with all the important tools that you will need.
Your Baby Is Ugly
This book is not simply about learning new skills. It is about changing your relationship to your website and its visitors. Like a parent, you are probably very proud of your creation but you probably canât see it objectively. But letâs get one thing straight. Itâs going to be painful to hear, but itâs true.
Your baby is ugly.
Your landing page has significant and fundamental problems that affect its business performance.
Letâs clarify. When we say âugly,â we donât just mean that it is lacking in artistic appeal (it may actually be very âprettyâ). We are talking about the whole host of gross and subtle elements that contribute to your visitorâs suboptimal total experienceâoften without your knowledge.
You are probably much invested in your role as a competent online marketing professional and are justifiably proud of your skills and experience. Other people in your organization are paying you for this knowledge and expect you to know what you are doing.
But letâs take a look at the reality of the situation. Conversion rate optimization is a complicated activity requiring diverse skill sets. You are more than likely not trained in all the important skill sets necessary to become a world-class website optimizer.
Some of these skill sets include
