The JAR Group

Last week several of us from The JAR team attended PubCon in Las Vegas. It was a great conference with a ton of valuable information. There has already been extensive live blogging coverage and other recaps of this conference (I’ve included links below), but I wanted to provide a short recap of my favorite session, The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization. The panel was full of experts on this topic, including Kate Morris, Brad Geddes, Joanna Lord, and of course the man who literally wrote the book on this topic, Tim Ash. Below are a few key takeaways from each of these speakers.

Kate Morris

The Parts of a Landing Page

• Maintain visual interest: Landing pages should be visually interesting but not overwhelming. You should utilize white space and keep cross-selling to a minimum.
• Keep content relevant: Never send visitors to irrelevant pages. Also, keep forms short, and never ask for unnecessary or irrelevant information.
• Call to Action: All landing pages should have a call to action and the call to action should never be below the fold.
• Navigation: There are two camps when it comes to navigation, either give them a choice or make them a prisoner. Neither is incorrect so it is important to test to determine what works best for you.

Landing Page Tracking and Analytics

• Conversion Rate: When tracking conversion rate, benchmark against other campaigns. If possible, track conversion rate for the entire sales cycle.
• Cost per Conversion: Gauges whether you can afford the campaign or landing page.
• Bounce Rate: 30% is a good bounce rate, 50% is an okay bounce rate, 70% bounce rate - time to test and improve

Brad Geddes

Where do you send traffic?
Conventional wisdom says you should send traffic to the page furthest in the buying cycle. This is not necessarily true. If you jump users ahead in the buying cycle, bounce rate will likely increase. For example, informational queries might not need to land on a product page. An informational page might be more useful.

Brand Searches

Don’t send brand searches to the homepage, send them to a ‘What’s New?’ page or your blog.

Utilize the ‘Thank You’ page

Cross sell after the conversion, encourage them to enroll in your customer loyalty program, etc.

Where should you test?

Test pages that get the most page views first or pages with the highest bounce rates. Also, consider testing pages that receive a lot of internal search queries.

Remember, always test conventional wisdom and always segment

Joanna Lord: Advanced Landing Page Tactics
In-house Tactics
Assess and streamline every process possible

• Build out landing page templates
• Your site should be on a CMS
• Set landing pages to auto-expire if they are time sensitive
• Automatically remove poor performing pages

On-site tactics
Anticipate user flows

• Pre-page users and offer a dual option button
• Multiple page pathways
• Present the same information in two different ways
  • Visually vs. text
  • Standard vs. rich media
  • Onsite vs. downloadable
• Go beyond conversions
  • Focus on post-conversion branding
  • Include social media add-ons
• Push your testing
  • Implement multivariate testing
  • Maco-summary of data
  • Access multiple toolsets, not just one

Tim Ash

Tim focused mainly on tools during his presentation, providing a solid overview of some very useful tools in landing page optimization.

Crazyegg
Type: In-page web analytics
Key Features:

• Mouse heatmaps
• Click confetti
• Link click overlay
• Live data gathering
• Excellent reporting

Conversion Applications

• Identify if people are clicking on non-clickable images.

ClickTale
Type: In-page web analytics and user monitoring
Key Features: User session recording and playback with downloading
Conversion Applications:

• How far do people scroll?
• Do they reach the bottom of the page?
• What form fields are commonly left blank?
• Which form fields cause the most delay or confusion?

Usertesting.com
Type: Online usability testing
Key Features:

• Online test setup and ability to specify tasks to perform
• Pre-screened subjects taught to speak out loud when testing
• Very quick results (start getting feedback within 1 hour)
• Get A/V recording and text transcript

Conversion Applications

• Observe and report actual problems that uninterested visitors have with your landing page
• Run tests against your benchmark competitor sites
• Inexpensive, only $29/participant

CrossBrowserTesting
Key Features:

• Test different operating systems, browsers, application combinations
• Pay by the minute for screenshots or live testing

AttentionWizard.com
Type: Simulated visual attention tools
Key Features:

• Creates attention heatmaps

Conversion Applications:

• Identify visual elements that distract from goals
• Determine exact amount of emphasis on each page element

Key takeaway: If your landing page is not obvious, you’re losing money.

If you’re looking for more from last week’s PubCon, check out coverage from Outspoken Media’s Lisa Barone or SEO Roundtable.