Now the title is not suggesting that you kick back and let the tide of your website visitors wash over you but it is saying that the calm before the storm should be to sit and observe. For me this is one of the most exciting parts of the testing cycle, you get to view your visitors in their natural habitat whilst they go about their tasks and achieving (or trying to) their objectives.

I have been involved in tests where the designs were created out of a combination of what the in-house team thought were best practise and anecdotal feedback from users and work colleagues. Now don’t get me wrong this is often the catalyst for most in-house testing but with the wealth of data we have available at our fingertips we should be looking to develop a more robust testing hypothesis (but what better way to introduce landing page testing to your company by introducing an hypothesis and having someone disagree with it thus having to run a test to see who was right!).

Below is an example of some ways how you could go about doing this using analytics;

Website Analytics – often overlooked and rarely understood but a well configured analytics package is your lifeline to understanding how your website functions. BUT, it often only shows 2 dimensional data which is hard to draw conclusion from for landing page testing, where it can help though is;

• Understanding which pages to test – pull reports on high impact pages and ones that are at the beginning of your user’s journey (top landing pages). The higher the volume of traffic the quicker the test, the higher the revenue generated from that entry point the higher the return will be if the conversion rate is positively affected.
• Segmentation – you should already be segmenting all the traffic sources that come to your site, sure an aggregate view is good for the CEO but what if a significant percentage of the traffic source is from a one off campaign your running  or an email campaign drives traffic in a seasonal peak? Without this understanding you could find further testing a headache as you will need to start again, you can also gain marketing channel specific feedback if say one of your traffic sources has a disproportionately higher bounce rate than the others. Also be wary of new versus returning visitors as their motives are often different.
• Geo targeting – if your website is global (or targets more than one country) then make sure you understand where and how they are accessing your pages as any changes could be more detrimental than you think.
• Site overlay – can be very useful to understand how your segments are interacting with your page, the dynamics of this is important as it’s the landing to goal interaction ratio that you are looking to improve. Each page should have a goal, part of any micro conversion process is to break the main goal down into smaller goals thus making it easier to analyse and interpret the data.
• Entrance paths – these are very important, if many of your segments are visiting a second page before returning to the entrance page and interacting with your goal objective then you have already observed an area that could be improved
• Browsers – what is this 1998 I hear you say! No but in all seriousness what works in one browser won’t necessarily work in others, a simple changing of a button placement or movement of an image might seem ok in IE7 but if you haven’t tested it thoroughly you are leaving yourself open. Pull a report by browser, by page and check for bounce rates and average time on site, If anything is above the website average investigate it.

Ok so there are a few areas you should be reviewing whilst developing your observational hypothesis, also these are metrics that you should have readily available to you. If you want to dive deeper then there are other qualitative tools our there which will help further and which we’ll discuss in another post.

{insert Dear who here}

I want to talk to you about Keyword tagging, something that is not new to the web and something I remember using fondly back in 2004 when I used my first bit of bid management kit named Atlas DTM (it was a big deal back then), I think they’re still kicking about but are now owned by Microsoft.

So what is it? Well it’s the ability to be able to tag an individual or group of keywords with a different name which can then be searched for and sorted by that tag reference. Similar to what you may do with your favourite social bookmarking site like Delicious.

The benefits of this are endless, for me some primary functions are;

• Monitor keywords that are under/over performing – a quick search by tag will pull up all those terms that through your analysis need babysitting
• Promotions or date sensitive keywords can be monitored closely and a can be a catch all fail safe to make sure you are turning the promotions on and off when necessary – yes we have regulations in the UK, especially in the financial services area where strict advertising laws have to be observed. Tagging would make this a lot easier to manage.
• Tagging can work in any environment; I would like to see tags being used for behavioural profiling, user intent, conversion timings, media attribution, integrated search to name a few.

Tagging would also make the account structures more 3 dimensional which would get in-house teams and agencies all over the country world thinking more conceptually about their search marketing campaigns. Also Google you would have another layer to see how people are targeting and structuring their campaigns, I could think of several good uses for that.

Much obliged,

Neil

So if this wish were to come true in the not too distant future then maybe someone at Mountain View did read this post, maybe we should suggest some more features. Be great to hear if anyone has any other suggestions.

AdWords Tip – if you already use naming conventions for you campaign structures (if not you should at least have them for head, mid and tail terms and separate conventions for brand terms) then use tags like HT (head term), MT (mid tail term), LT (long tail term), PB (pure brand), BP (brand plus product term) at the beginning of the campaign and then use the filter within the AdWords UI to search for ‘campaign name > starts with’ as this should help you analyse your campaigns more efficiently.

There is no doubt that creating winning landing pages is not that easy, and there is always a temptation to give up after the first attempt. Finding the right combination of advertising message (copy), images, layout and design is usually something that requires a number of iterations, and there is no guarantee that what has worked with one product or offer will work again with another.

Don’t let that deter you though! The best advice we can give if for you to try to steer your business away from the temptation to only change your landing page once or twice a year. If possible opt for making a series of smaller changes to the design, layout, and marketing copy – referring back to your data at every step of the process.

Many organisations have some of the skills they need [marketing know-how, analysis, copy writing and design skills], they just need to find a way to unlock them and get someone to take charge of designing a program of measurement and testing that leads to actionable insights from your data and measure improvements.

But where do I start? Start simply by defining clear metrics for measuring the success of your business and make sure that everyone knows what these are – this is your macro objective, it’s the one that tells you and the business how well it’s performing. Then start thinking about what mirco-objectives you have to achieve in order to meet the macro objective.

A micro conversion point on your landing page could be measuring the rate at which traffic you point to your landing pages bounces (the bounce rate); this shows how many of your visitors go on to make a click or simply just view the page and leave. Bounce rates are a very powerful metric and tell you about not only about the quality of your traffic but also how those visitors start to engage with your site.

If you have a marketing agency then you might want to ask them to review the bounce rates for keywords within your PPC campaign and define a clear strategy for inefficiency that stems from high bounce rates.

Finally, for this post, always start by testing the highest traffic pages of your site first as this is where you can get the most benefit from the work you are going to do – it’s always about the low hanging fruit!