|
Perfecting
Your Landing Pages
By: Cindy
McMahen 01.17.03
This
month we continue in our quest for better returns from pay
per click buys. In my last article, Increasing
Your Pay Per Click Profits Through Testing we explored
the benefits of testing the titles and descriptions used in
your pay per click (PPC) buys. I hinted at the end of the
piece to take your testing one step further, and test out
variations of Landing pages as part of your overall goal of
improving conversion and profits.
Perfecting
paid listings has become a popular topic at recent SearchEngine
Strategies Summits. Today's smaller marketing budgets has
changed the game from the move to get lots of traffic -- to
making the most from the traffic you already have.
The
truth is, as marketers we seldom have control over all the
business' budget priorities, but we DO have control over our
ads and Landing pages. Testing different creatives, looking
at landing page performance, and how to better measure return-on-investment
(ROI), have all become larger concerns of savvy marketers.
They know if they can double the conversion rate of landing
pages (say even from a miniscule .5% to 1%) they can afford
twice the bid prices, which may give them more placements
and the ability to deliver more traffic. Alternatively, in
doubling the conversion rate they could instead decide to
stick with the same spending, and double profits.
Before
we go any further, let's start with "Just what is a Landing
page?" For our purposes, it's the entry page that visitor's
first sees when they click through to a Web site. A Landing
page could also be compared to a "bridge" between an ad (the
listing you have), and the point of sale on the other side.
How the Landing page performs and how visitors react to it,
is one of the critical factors to getting them to the "other
side of the bridge" and generating a sale.
Time
for true confessions. Do you currently send searchers to your
site's home page from your pay per click bids? If so, you
may be missing the boat. Here's an analogy:
What
if you saw a car salesman out on his lot, and you excitedly
asked if they had that new Ford Mustang model? He replies
yes - and leads you to the entrance to a huge lot where he
makes a grandiose wave of his arm and says "Just Enter Here!"
Not what you expected. You expected to be led up to the model,
shown the colors it comes in, and have some explanation of
the various options shown to you, right? Why should the online
world be any different? Don't leave potential clients standing
at the entrance on a generic home page, or worse yet a splash
screen. Direct them to a Landing page or Product page built
to match their search term and the specific product or information
they're seeking.
Here's
another example. Jim Novo, author of Drilling
Down is considered by many to be an expert at using customer
data to improve profitability and create higher ROI. In his
Drilling Down Newsletter (#12 Published 9/02), Novo put forward
a simple analysis on the effect that Landing pages content
can have on searchers.
Novo
ran a Three-Part Test where he:
-
Sent visitors to his home page which covered all 3 of his
offers in a generic sense, and displayed prominent links
to other site pages for more information.
-
Developed custom Landing pages written to match each search
term used.
-
He also used traffic derived specifically from Google, and
then simultaneously ran tests from other Search Engines
combined to complete the test.
As in any good analysis Novo also selected the means for evaluating
results. The measurements he used in measuring success were:
- Average
visit length
-
One page visits
-
Percentage who downloaded his book's sample chapter
-
Percentage who bookmarked the site or page
-
Percentage who subscribed to his newsletter
The test results may or may not surprise you. When visitors
were dumped on the generic home page they stayed longer and
viewed more pages. However, a larger percentage of them left
without completing one of the desired goals.
Visitors
sent to custom Landing pages stayed for a shorter length of
time, viewed fewer pages but downloaded, bookmarked and subscribed
at a higher rate. Engines also performed differently. As for
the test's outcome: the results were fairly significant, with
3 times the download rate and 2 times the bookmark rate for
the Landing pages over the generic Home page.
Novo
goes on to explain that the results demonstrate the more targeted
you get on the "front end" the lower the initial response,
but the higher the "final conversion" or the desired outcomes
you were hoping for. He says that while it might seem intuitive
which Landing page does the best job, you can't know for sure
which page best matches what visitors are looking for until
you measure the results of each.
"Keywords, landing pages, paid search links, and the search
engine itself all have a huge impact on the quality of your
visitor traffic", reports Novo. "All traffic is NOT created
equal.If you're not doing some analysis then there's no doubt
that your wasting resources on what you THINK is working,
as opposed to what you KNOW is working."
Another
proponent of Landing pages is Kent Lewis of Anvil Media, Inc.
and publisher of the online ezine by the same name, www.anvil-media.com.
He attests to having some experience at maximizing client's
conversions using landing pages. Lewis also recommends creating
customized landing pages for banners and pay per click placements,
and then tracking results to see which performs best. "Ideally
you develop different landing pages to test the various elements
for a page such as the headline, text, offer, imagery, etc."
Other
variables you might consider in your testing are site navigation,
use of testimonials, different layouts and color schemes,
using search boxes, and copy length. One of the biggest debates
going on right now is the long page formats (sometimes 3 or
4 screens in length) being used by many marketers on Landing
pages. There's no definitive answer yet on whether these long
formats are better, but it seems clear that the copy needs
to be long enough to answer all the important questions in
the visitors mind. A quick rule-of-thumb is, the more expensive
the item and the less familiar the person may be with it,
the longer the copy may need to be.
One
last point. Even if it seems all the proposed changes seem
good, it's important to make them one of them at a time so
you can effectively track the result of each change. Take
a methodical approach and you'll find your efforts won't be
wasted, and you'll be rewarded with higher ROI and profits.
I
hope this look at Landing pages has been useful. If we had
more time I would have like to have shared how you can also
strengthen copy to deliver better conversion. I'll save that
for another time. Until then (to borrow a pun coined by marketing
extraordinaire, Kevin Lee) "Happy Landings!".
More
info about the author: Cindy
McMahen
|
