Three Sure-Fire Steps every Search Marketer should take in Landing Page Optimisation - Step 3 Test, Measure, Refine & Improve
August 20, 2007
Ok you now have lots of tasty ingredients to make that killer landing page and you’re finally ready to go!
Its float or sink time, so sail that page into the unknown land of your customers’ persona, sit back and enjoy the ride.
The ride maybe fruitful and fun or insanely gloomy ““ it’s often a case of living’ ‘n’ learning, although destiny is firmly in your hands ““ you just have to reach out and grab it. The magic landing page formula comes to those who test, measure, refine and improve.
How to measure?
A great place to start is with the actual conversion rate for the page in reaching the desired action.
Lets’ look at the maths:
Conversion rate = (number of visitors who reach a desired action/total number of visitors) * 100
It surprises me that many companies do not know their own conversion rate for key pages that make up their conversion funnel or that there is such a lack of clarity as to whether an increase in sales has resulted from an increase in visitors or landing page enhancements.
A / B Testing
A/B testing is a simple an effective testing procedure that can be used in landing page optimisation in deducing which elements play a pivotal role in maximising conversion rates. You can test single variables such as a headlines, testimonials or images against each other in order to see the best performer.
A / B testing can be very effective over time, although it requires a variety of single variables to be tested in single file and can be quite time consuming.
You may like to checkout the Marketing Experiments explanation of A/B Testing for a more in depth look.
Multivariable Testing
Multivariable testing on the other hand allows for multiple variables to be tested in one go and a great example of this is through AdWords Website Optimizer. Again Marketing Experiments provide a detailed overview of this, which I highly recommend.
What about non-action pages?
Well not every page has an action that is as easy to measure such as a sale, registration or a specified next step. This is where a good analytics package comes in handy and Avinash describes four key metrics that are readily available in Google Analytics ““ Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit & Depth of Visit. These metrics can give some real insight into how engaging a visitor finds your site and provide a useful tool in measuring landing page effectiveness.
In summary, as with many things related to online marketing you should assume nothing and test everything - the proof really is in the pudding! Decide what you want to measure and strive to improve.
Remember it’s your visitors’ actions and wants that really count and not necessarily what you think they want or worse still what your creative teams believes is in this season!
Step 1 Understand Your Visitors’ Persona
Step 2 Gain Permission and take the Visitor to the Next Desired Action
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5 Responses to “Three Sure-Fire Steps every Search Marketer should take in Landing Page Optimisation - Step 3 Test, Measure, Refine & Improve”
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Measure, Refine & Improve !!!
Really valuable article ….
Thanks.
Glad you found it useful!
Excellent article, your dead right without stewardship you will never know.
Its just finding those accurate tools to enable this.
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Very useful post.
The post clearly gives an idea about various testing strategies to be followed to get an better Conversion Rate. Considering the points mentioned in the post and if any one design the site. The ROI will be great!
Thanks for the wonderful post.