SES Recap: Landing Pages Testing & Tuning

Getting someone to click on your search ad is only half the battle. Once visitors arrive, the landing pages you display to the prospect are a crucial component in the conversion process.

Moderator: Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath

Speakers: Scott Miller, CEO, Vertster; Tim Ash, President, Site Tuners; Jamie Roche, President and CEO, Offermatica; Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

Tim Ash:
Don’t neglect your landing pages.
Your customer should “design” your web pages.

What can you tune?
- Landing pages that lead to trackable actions.
- Price of product or service
- Elements
- Headlines
- Layouts
- Navigation
- Color Scheme
- Form Layout
- Button text
- Sales copy
- Graphics
- Calls to action
- There are no “Universal Truths”
- Do not copy your competition - test your customers instead.

Types of testing
- A-B Split
– Test one at a time, send equal traffic to each.
– Easy to track and implement
– Typical Test Size: 1-10
- Multivariate
– Tests several variables at once
– Compress your data into one test across all the variables.
– Typical Test Size: 100
- Proprietary Tuning
– Infinite

- Remove the clutter - leave the persuasion and trustmarks.
- Shorten the forms - remove unnecessary elements.

Tom Leung:

Economics are tough - you spend a lot of money to Google, SEO’s and your visitors still leave!
The goal is to get you more green. More non-bouncers.

Technology is only a tool - plan and manage the process! Know which pages to test and why, what variations you want to test.

Scott Miller:
Test 1: The Offer
Offer components:
- Headline - should describe value
- Supporting Copy - bullet, text, image captions
- Value proposition
- Risk Reversal - reduce the risk of an online transaction.
– Test your privacy policy, live chat, free shipping offer.
- Scarcity - limiting the availability of something - use messaging or promotional message.
– Dell does a good job of this.
– Time crunch pushes you to make the purchase.
- Price/Promotions

Tested Hacker Safe logo
- Simple A/B test site wide
- Objective
– Conversion
– Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
- 14.8% conversion lift
- 15% lift in RPV
Takeaways
- Balance risk reversal, value and scarcity.
- The only way to get there is testing

Test 2: Getting Attention
Elements which can influence bounce rate
- Logo
- Headline
- Tagline
- Imaging
- Audio/Video
Ran an L16 Algorithm Taguchi test
Ran against all PPC traffic
Setup
- Hero Shot
- Call to action
- Button color
- Low Banner
- Guarantee

Of the 16 variations, the Hero Shot, Call to action Header and Low Banner were the most important.

Takeaways
- Focus above the fold
- Conversions ,mirrors eye tracking study
- Blink of an eye mentality
- Before you can convert, you must get attention

Jamie Roche:

Is the best page the best answer? No, different people require different experience to bounce less.

Reduce bounce by increasing relevance. Increase relevance by user type and bounce will drop.

Relevance is the key to targeting customer categories or customer stage. Make it relevant through personalization.

Myth - Personalization is very difficult.

Dynamic insertion of search keyword on landing pages has shown increased conversion.

The key to performance is relevance. The key to relevance is showing the right people the right things.