Landing page testing – can you afford not to do it?

You might not be the world’s best analyst but you may still be a good marketer, copy writer or web designer and these are also key skills that you need to create good landing pages.

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!