I spoke about landing pages in a quick 70 second video not long ago but wish I could have gone into more detail. So here you go… see below.
PPC Adverts or Paid Social, every visitor to your website costs money even the free ones.
And you want to see ROI (return on investment).
Track Users
It’s important we track visitors. By using JavaScript code snippets within your website code. Google Analytics being the obvious provider. You can create Goals within GA to track a successful sign-up or subscription by telling Google what the landing page and success/thank-you page URLs are.
Ok, so now we can monitor our traffic, users and conversion rates. But how can you improve the conversion rate? How can you influence them to click the right button on the page you’ve managed to get them to?
Remove the distraction, increase the attention
Nearly all web pages have more than one hyperlink on a page. Navigation, footer links, links within the content as well as CTA (Call to action) buttons. If you pay for someone to land on a page with all these links, the odds are they won’t click on the one you want them to. They’ll click on the ‘about’ link instead, begin nosing at your team members and then before you know it they’ve forgotten why they were there in the first place and leave. You’ve just wasted money and lost a potential lead or sale.
So what if we took all those links away and just left the one we want them to click? Doing this you are increasing the attention ratio from 20:1 to 1:1. (20 being the number of links on the original page). This is what we call a Landing Page. Some call it a Squeeze Page.
Landing Page Content
Now your landing page has real purpose you need to persuade the user to click your one and only CTA button. This is where good content and imagery comes in. A headline which is straight to the point with a supporting strap line. Keep your content short and sweet using bullet points which highlight all of the positive benefits of clicking your call to action button.
I’m not one for ‘above the fold’ but the higher the form is (if you have one on the page) the better. The size of your form will play a big part in conversion too. Less fields the better. If it’s in any way time-consuming for the user they’ll drop out due to a poor experience. I’ve read some great case studies which suggest using the image to direct the user to the form. Someone looking or even pointing at the form.
Just to be sure, you can add one or two quotes/testimonials to help convince the user it’s beneficial to them to convert.
Convert more
So your landing page is online, you’re getting traffic to your page and users are converting into leads or sign-ups. You’re analysing Google Analytics. The number of users to goal completions isn’t as high as you want it. So what can you do to improve it?
A/B Testing
Better known as split testing you can create a variant of your landing page with one difference and see which converts best. To do this is simple. Clone your current landing page and give it a different URL. Now change one element on the page to make it different.
Landing Page Variant
I highly recommend only changing one thing to test. If you change more than one then how will you know what increased conversion if it performed better?
It can be anything on the page. This could be the main header or the image or maybe try removing a form field if possible. In my video, the example I gave was a different CTA button colour.
Google Experiments
Once you variant is ready, then setup and add the code from Google Experiments in Google Analytics to your original version of the page. Google Experiments is free and really easy to configure.
Now when a user visits the original version, before it loads, the code you’ve added to the page will send the user to the original or send them to the different version. A 50/50 split. Unless you’ve configured it differently in GA.
Let this experiment run for as long as you can, a minimum of three weeks, until you have enough convincing data for Google to tell you which converts best. The green CTA or the Orange CTA. Then remove the code and update the original to match the variant (if the variant version won). Not every experiment will be a success.
Then run another experiment and another until your conversion rate is where you want it to be. This is what we call CRO - Conversion Rate Optimisation
Good luck with your tests!