I recently had the opportunity to see Tim Ash, Landing Page Optimization Guru, speak at the Austin SEO meet-up and he was amazing. He truly is a genius when it comes to Landing Page Optimization and getting clients to buy-in the need for testing. During his introduction, Tim explained the biggest issue in getting client’s or anyone to buy-in on landing page testing is simply due to how we see our own sites or “babies”. See the issue, is most people see their landing pages like this:
How we see our landing pages:
How are visitor’s see our landing pages:
This perception can single handedly be the biggest obstacle in getting any landing page testing in place. Most see their pages and current conversion rates as the optimal level, however to quote Tim Ash one last time “its your users who decide which landing page performs best”. Actions speak loudest and testing/tracking the landing pages is a must. Once you are able to first admit that your baby could use some work, then you are on the path to recovery. There are a ton of tools out there that can help you analyze the on-site behavior of your users from analytics to heat-maps. A landing page engine like Google’s website optimizer will also allow you to set-up either A/B or Multivariate testing then the tool takes control of how pages get served, tracking and reporting of performance and optimization of pages using the best combination of variables. The point being is that your user’s won’t tell you what pages perform best unless you give them options.
Before all is done, you must first admit….MY BABY IS UGLY!!!
Recently I was working on a project with a client who runs an ecommerce site. We were running PPC only for this client however our findings in PPC led us to discover a bigger problem, the client had issues converting traffic into sales. Working with our team, we were able to trouble shoot where people were falling in the Conversion Funnel, the process of which a visitor turns into a sale. The way we were able to pin point the trouble area was to break the process into three parts:
- Browser Conversion: turning a visitor into a browser, or someone who views the product pages
- Shopper Conversion: turning a Browser into a shopper, one who adds the product to the cart
- Buyer Conversion: turning a shopper into a buyer or customer, one who makes a purchase
The reason it is important to break your conversion process into smaller groups is that it will allow you to diagnose where your problem areas are and understand what remedies are needed to improve the process. I will break each of these ares down into more detail in the next few days so stayed tuned…..