Life is like a sewer ... what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. -Tom Lehrer, American humorist, singer, and songwriter
What does a landing page look like from your perspective? How does it fit into the overall marketing picture? Can you really convert every single visitor? Are you devoting enough attention to your landing page?
This chapter will examine these questions and set the stage for understanding landing page optimization.
A Few Precious Moments ...
The following is a true story.
Imagine that you are in charge of online marketing for your organization.
You have slaved for months to tune and optimize your campaigns. Countless hours and days have passed in a blur. You have constructed keyword lists, written pay-per-click ad copy, properly set your bid amounts, bought additional banners and exposure on related websites, optimized your site for organic search engines, created a powerful affiliate program with effective incentives, and set up the website analytics needed to track the return on your investment in real time.
You are standing by with a powerful series of e-mails that will be sent to prospects or customers who respond to your initial offer or leave their contact information on your site. This should significantly increase the lifetime value of the relationship with your website visitor.
The first visitor arrives-and 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 by-a virtual flood. Yet only a tiny percentage will take the action that you would like them to take. What's wrong?
It's hard to figure it out:
You have their fleeting attention for a split second.
You don't know who they are.
You don't know what they are thinking or feeling.
You don't know why the vast majority of them leave so soon, empty-handed.
It seems like a hopeless situation. You are forever doomed to suffer from the poor marketing program economics that result from a low website conversion rate.
But all is not lost. This book is about those few precious moments, and what you can do to make them count.
You can (within the limits of ethics and accuracy) represent yourself in any way that you want on the Internet. Your landing page is not written on stone tablets. In fact, it is the most ethereal of objects-a set of bits that resides on a computer hard disk that is accessible to the whole world. No one is forcing you to use the particular colors, page layout, pictures, sales copy, call-to-action, or headlines that comprise your landing page now.
You are as free as an artist in front of a blank canvas. Maybe you will create a masterpiece that will move most people who see it. Maybe you will create bland and uninspired mush that will bore and turn away everyone. This freedom can be both energizing and scary at the same time.
The promise of better performing landing pages is often tempered by a fear of making things worse than they already are. How are you to know in advance what will or won't work better? Yet you are supposed to be the "expert." Shouldn't your landing page already be perfect based on your extensive online marketing experience? What if your landing page design knowledge was exposed as nothing more than pompous subjective posturing and guesswork?
Don't be afraid. You actually have access to a real expert-in fact, thousands of them. You are interacting with them daily already, but you have mostly ignored their advice to date.
You may never be able to answer why a specific person did or did not respond to your landing page. But there are ways to determine what your website visitors respond to. In fact, landing page optimization can be viewed as a giant online marketing laboratory where your experimental subjects voluntarily participate in your tests without being asked. Their very actions (or inactions) expose them, and allow you to improve your appeal to a similar population of people.
Websites have three desirable properties as a testing laboratory. Let's look at these in turn:
High data rates Many websites have significant traffic rates. The supply of test subjects is ample. Some of the traffic is free, while other sources are paid. In aggregate, all of your traffic sources result in a particular traffic mix that is unique for your website. A relatively steady and large stream of visitors allows you to use statistics to find and verify the validity of the best landing page designs. The best versions are proven winners. Unlike previous designs, they are no longer based solely on subjective opinions. Nor are they the results of popularity contests within your company.
Accurate tracking Web analytics software supports the accurate tracking and recording of every interaction with your website. Each visit is recorded along with a mind-numbing amount of detailed information. Reports can tell you the source of the visitors, their path through your site, the time that they spent lingering over certain content, and whether they were persuaded to act. Although Web analytics software is not perfect, it provides a standard of data collection accuracy that is almost unheard of in any other marketing medium.
Easy content changes Internet technology offers the ability to easily swap or modify the content that a particular website visitor sees. The content can be customized based on the source of the traffic, the specific capabilities of the visitor's computer or Web browser software, their behavior during the particular visit, or their past history of interactions with your site. In other experimental environments it is very expensive or time-consuming to come up with an alternative version or prototype. On the Internet, countless website content variations can be created and managed at minimal cost for a landing page optimization test.
The Three Keys to Online Marketing
Before we focus on the specifics of landing page optimization, let's get oriented. Online marketing can be divided into three key activities:
Acquisition Getting people to your website or landing page
Conversion Persuading them to take the desired action(s)
Retention Deepening the relationship and increasing its lifetime value
Each step feeds into the next. The efficiency of each online marketing activity can be viewed as a funnel like the one in Figure 1.1.
Inefficient acquisition activities will limit the traffic to your site. An inefficient website with low conversion rates will restrict the number of leads or customers. Inefficient retention follow-up activities will fail to extract additional value from your current prospects or clients. Ideally you would like each step to have the highest possible yield. Let's discuss them each in more detail here.
Acquisition
Acquisition activities focus on generating traffic to your website or landing pages. The goal is to create an awareness of your company or products and enough interest for your target Internet audience to actually visit your site.
Web marketing experts use a variety of methods to generate traffic. I've listed the traffic sources in this section, to convey the range of possible acquisition activities. They can be broadly grouped into online and offline methods, although there is often some overlap and mutual reinforcement between the two.
Online Acquisition Methods
Web marketers typically use the following online methods for driving traffic:
Search engine optimization (SEO) Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN provide an excellent source of traffic for many companies. Contrasted with most interruption marketing, people using search engines show focus and a specific intention to act. They may be actively gathering information about a topic, selecting the right product or service, or looking for a place to make an immediate purchase.
The process of making your website pages appear near the top in search engine search results for words and phrases (also known as keywords) that are relevant to your business is known as search engine optimization (SEO). This process is also referred to as getting organic listings in search engine results. SEO involves initial activities to enhance your website content and get other highly ranked sites to link back to yours. Once your SEO campaign has achieved your initial visibility goals, ongoing maintenance is required to keep you near the top of the search results.
One of the key ways to increase your SEO website traffic is to have important and credible sites in your industry link back to you. Links are usually requested from the webmasters of other sites. You contact them and ask them to add a relevant link back to your site from the appropriate spot on theirs.
Getting such back links from other popular websites in your industry has many benefits. As part of your SEO link-back activities it can result in higher placement in the search results and more visibility. Outside links can also enhance your credibility to people browsing the Web and drive motivated visitors to your site. Links can appear in industry directories, on the websites of your business partners, and in news-related blogs (which I will discuss in a moment).
Banner and text ads Many popular or special-purpose websites reserve space on their pages for advertisers. This is usually in the form of short text advertisements, or rectangles of various sizes containing images designed by the advertiser (banner ads). Advertisements on multiple websites (run of network campaigns) are possible through a number of online distribution companies. Such distributors can also target your ads to websites that have a specific theme. In some cases, advertisements can be further tailored to appear on only certain sections or even individual pages of a desired website. Typically banner ads are sold on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis. This means that you are charged a set fee based on a preset rate card for every time a visitor to the site sees your ad on a page. You pay even if nobody ever clicks on your ad and visits your website. This has begun to change as leading companies in the industry are moving toward an auction model (where the ad real estate is sold to the highest bidder). Some experimental programs have even sold ads on a pure performance basis. Under this business model the advertiser only pays if a specific action such as a sale or completion of a lead inquiry actually happens downstream.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Pay-per-click (PPC) is a very popular online advertising model. PPC ads are typically short text advertisements along the top, sides, or bottom of a Web page. PPC text ads appear in two major contexts. When featured on search engine results pages (SERPs), the PPC ads are targeted to the particular keyword that the searcher typed in. Other text PPC ads occur by insertion into targeted Web pages whose themes are associated with the keyword in question. In contrast to the way that search results are normally presented, the advertiser controls the exact title and text of their ad within the editorial guidelines and policies of the PPC program.
Most PPC search engines charge advertisers using some variation of a live auction model. In other words, your position in the paid search results depends on how much you and other advertisers are willing to pay per click. The more you pay, the more prominently your ad will appear.
Many PPC campaigns involve a large number of keywords (ranging from dozens to tens of thousands). Each keyword has a different value based on its focus and relevance to the advertiser's business. Because of the live auction environment, the position of each ad in the paid search results can change based on the actions of other advertisers. If the position gets too low, the amount of traffic from that keyword can drop very quickly. Typically, many advertisers will compete for the top few positions and bid the prices up over time. Specific software tools have been created to maintain the proper pricing and position for each keyword in the face of changing circumstances. Even with these automated tools, maintaining PPC campaigns can be extremely time-consuming. Because of this, some companies hire dedicated staff to run the campaign or outsource to a search engine marketing (SEM) agency.
Banner ads may also be bought on a PPC basis. Regardless of the format of the ad (text or banner ad), the advertiser is only charged when a Web surfer clicks on the ad and follows the link to their website or landing page. With pay-per-click ads, the advertiser controls how much they are willing to pay for a click on their ad.
Affiliates Many midsize and larger companies have well-established affiliate programs. An affiliate program is essentially a form of pure-commission selling. The affiliate directs a visitor to a website or landing page. The affiliate that the visitor originated from is recorded. If that visitor converts by taking the desired action (e.g., purchases, fills out a form, downloads something, or clicks through to another Web page), the affiliate gets credit and payment for the action. For sales, the payment is typically a fixed amount or percentage of the sale. For other actions such as sales leads or special offers, the payment is typically a fixed amount. There are often volume tiers, with higher payouts for top-performing affiliates. Affiliates vary widely in their sophistication and traffic-driving tactics. The bottom line is that they send traffic to your landing page and get paid only if that traffic subsequently converts.
Third-party e-mail lists Many companies purchase third-party e-mail lists from a number of sources and send a single e-mail or multiple e-mails to the list. The quality and targeting of the lists varies widely. Some are clearly low quality and will be perceived as spam by the recipients. Others can be well targeted and provide a good overlap with your intended audience. Very targeted e-mails can be sent (e.g., to the readership of a particular focused blog). Since repeated mailing to the same list can lead to list fatigue and lower response rates over time, responders to e-mail are not typically used as traffic sources during conversion tuning tests (which require a steady flow of new and unbiased visitors).
Blogs Blogs are public online diaries. The number of blogs is continuing to explode. They exist on an incredibly wide range of topics, and are often focused on deep coverage of their subject matter. Some blogs are informal and conversational in tone. Others are more akin to a regular magazine or newspaper column, with in-depth coverage of a specific event or topic. Once a blog author has a reputation as a "thought leader" and an expert in a certain field, their readership can grow quickly. They may mention, or "cover," your company in one of their online entries, or "posts." The resulting exposure may mean high-quality ongoing traffic from their reader base as people read and reread the post over time.
Social networking Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow people to connect in communities of shared interest. If members of the community recommend your products or services or describe them in a positive light, they can influence other people with similar tastes and interests to visit your website. Key members of these online communities can have significant audiences and followings similar to popular bloggers.
Collaborative authoring Collaborative authoring sites include news and discussion forums, client-authored product reviews on e-commerce sites, user reviews on various city-guide websites, and extensive encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.org. Anyone can add content to such websites (and in the case of Wikipedia even remove the content of others). Links embedded in informational posts on such sites can direct visitors to your website or landing page.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash Copyright © 2008 by Tim Ash. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.