Clearly define the goal of your landing pages
Before you can start building your landing page, you must define exactly what you want your visitors to do. The goal, or conversion objective of your landing page should completely drive the development of the page.
To identify the conversion objective, ask yourself, “What do I want visitors to do when they see my landing page?”
Landing page objectives may include:
- increase sales
- create or update customer information base
- gain subscribers
- execute a viral marketing campaign
Whatever it is you want visitors to do, it’s imperative that your landing page be clear, easy-to-read and focused on the conversion objective. Can you have more than one goal?
The Landing Page Optimization Handbook by Invesp Consulting recommends caution. While your site can have multiple conversion objectives, you should have one primary goal for each landing page. Otherwise, your conversion rates will drop as focus is lost.
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Best Practice Testing
No matter how good you think your landing page is – TEST IT! Here are a few of our best practices guidelines for testing:
- Have a techie in marketing – somebody who understands the Google technology and how your site works
- Have your techie go through Google’s Adwords training program.
- Test big things first (page design, headlines, long vs. short) before little things (color of buttons, size of text)
- Test high-volume pages and apply those lessons to low-volume pages
- Limit your tests to pages that get traffic from a common source – e.g., a Google Adwords campaign
- Keep your tests simple
- Test “distracting” links, like “free sample issue”
- Consider the ROI of the entire process, not just a single page
- Keep records of your tests and take screenshots of everything
- Share what you learn with the email marketers and web designers
- Use your web-analytics data to uncover high-impact pages or user paths to test
- First, Choose your goal. Then, decide which elements to test
- Know which metrics will be used to declare a winner and make sure you can get those numbers
Every element on your page must be evaluated as it relates to the primary goal. Find the elements that divert the visitor’s attention from the conversion goal and correct them.
Once established, test the winner. If the long page beats the short page, you can still improve it. It’s an iterative process that never ends.
Our mantra is “optimize and test again.” If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.
Learn more about landing page optimization at the next Mequoda Summit. Download The Landing Page Optimization Handbook by Invesp Consulting.
