This is a guest post by Ruben Corbo Maxymiser.com.
Online marketers understand the importance of creating and deploying optimized landing pages that are designed to convert.
These pages are the first thing that your potential customers will see when they visit your site, so it makes sense to make them as effective as possible so you can grab their attention and get their email addresses while you’re at it.
So what makes a landing page good and effective? What elements on the page can you do without? There’s no fixed formula when it comes to creating an effective landing page, because it all depends on what will work best with your target audience.
It’s Time to Do Testing
At this point, it’s time to consider running some tests, like A/B tests or multivariate tests. Both methods are similar in the sense that site visitors are shown two variations of a single website. They only differ in the number of elements that have been tweaked: A/B tests specify that only a single site component is to be change, while no specific number of elements is given for multivariate tests.
Multivariate testing is used to determine what types of tweaks and changes to introduce to websites and improve landing pages, email copies, and other types of marketing and advertising materials.
In general, it’s recommended that complex sites go for multivariate testing, while simpler web pages with fewer elements can go with A/B testing.
A/B Tests versus Multivariate Tests
You can choose to run one test or the other at the start to get a feel for both methods and determine which type would suit your purposes more. Since only one element can be changed in A/B tests, it will take a longer time to come up with an optimized landing page. However, the reason for any change in results can be easily identified with this method.
You won’t be able to do that with multivariate tests, although you will be able to implement more tweaks after each test to come up with an optimized landing page in a shorter amount of time.
Source: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/category/multivariate-testing/
What to Test for on Landing Pages
Virtually anything on your landing page can be tested. You can bring your team together so you can brainstorm the elements to run tests on. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:
Header – This is usually where the site logo, banners, and navigational menu are located. You can play around with the positioning of these three elements, as well as focus on the specifics of each when you’re done with that. For example, test out different logos that appeal to different demographics in your audience and see which one makes the biggest impression.
Banners – These can contain ads, site announcements, or links to special content. You can try out different types of banners, like those that are either purely images or contain a mix of both images and text.
Content – Once your design elements are fully optimized, it’s time to consider this component of your website that actually contains the meat of it: your content. Play around with different font faces, font sizes, and paragraph formatting. You can also try out different tones and writing styles before settling on the one that gives you the best feedback.
Great article, I am a huge fan of testing with paid search because it is effective way to improve results without spending more and often times the on page improvements can even lower click costs with an improved quality score.
Hey Ruben,
One thing about testing is that you need to make sure you have enough traffic coming to your website to make it possible to test. If you only have 10 visitors per day and want to test 2 different variations of your site, then it’s going to take a long time to ever accrue enough data to determine which version is better and if there’s actually a statistical difference or not. Not having enough traffic is one thing that can make it hard for newbies to test things.
Hello RubenCorbo
It is good to go for these test but what is the effect of these tests on SEO?
Ruben, I have to say that this is a fantastic post. But I have to as well note that as important as testing and tweaking of websites is important, most bloggers and online marketers (including myself) don’t give it the attention it deserves. Thanks again for this post, I’ll keep referring to it time and time again.
Regards
Kevin
The rationale behind the colors are interesting and they do make sense. I’m sure big companies do keep these in mind. I wonder what plain white signifies?
The above the fold techcnique should be used properly in landing pages!
ie) The most important focus topic should be visible at once
Great Article. Landing pages is such an important player in the universe of “keeping” our customers browsing our pages. As we all know google, indexes after time spent og each page equals out quality content… There more quality articles on this matter, the better!
Thanks.
What I didn’t see in this article, and maybe I missed it, was the offer. Testing the offer is as important if not as important as any of the page elements. You can have a great headline, colors, and the other stuff, but if you are not offering the visitors something they find valuable enough to exchange their email address for, then all the rest is a waste of time.
Simple. Just think of it as having two versions of your website appear. A will have a different template from B. It will show up 50/50 percent of the time so that you can know which is best for your website’s conversion. I hope that helps!
Landing pages plays important role in marketing, if you have dull landing page than you can see sharp decline in visitors’ stay on the page ie. increase in bounce rate. There are many factors associated with landing pages design. Testing of landing page is as important as its design.