I attended Bryan Eisenberg’s keynote about landing page optimization at HeroConf, an all PPC conference in Austin last month. He had some really actionable advice for landing page design so I thought I’d share the highlights here. You can check out Bryan’s presentation titled “Developing a High Converting Landing Page” on his site.
Why landing pages are often broken?
- Most companies bring $92 to bring traffic to their site but only $1 to convert them.
- Most sites don’t have a traffic problem, they have a conversion problem.
- Many marketing teams suffer from the curse of knowledge: they bring their own knowledge about the product and try to sell it to people who know nothing about it.
What a great landing page experience needs to be
A landing page needs to be all of the following. Start from the top of the list and only if you meet the criteria, move on to the next one.
- Functional – i.e. not a 404 error or otherwise broken (use our landing page watchdog script if this is a concern for you)
- Accessible
- Usable
- Intuitive
- Persuasive
$44B is lost in e-commerce due to issues with just the first item on this list…
What landing pages need to address depending on various stages of the buying cycle?
- Early awareness – solution may be to define a problem for the consumer.
- Mid/consideration – solution may be a buying guide
- Purchase – solution is to provide a sign-up or shopping cart
- Post purchase – solution may be ways to engage with the product
How many tests should you do?
Amazon did 1900 tests in 2013. So no, you’re probably not doing enough.
The Conversion Trinity: What you need to convert
- Relevance
- Value
- CTA
The 10 elements every landing page must have?
- Logo
- Headline
- Text
- Graphical
- Offer
- Descriptive Copy
- Bullet block
- Key features
- Key benefits
- Product / service presentation
- Product image
- Tours
- Screenshots
- Lifestyle images
- Call to action
- Confidence building
- Testimonials
- Examples of users
- 3rd party validators
- Contact info
- Link to more info
- Template elements
How to prioritize these key elements?
You need to be careful about the page layout and make sure the page flows well and the users’ attention is drawn primarily to the right things.
Employ the visible anatomy which has 5 dimensions:
- Relevance – reinforce the keywords in the title so you preserve the scent of the query
- Quality – the page needs to look like it’s high quality – if you add too many trust badges, your site may look desperate to try and prove legitimacy and actually have worse conversion rate because it will be perceived as low quality
- Placement
- Proximity
- Prominence
You should prioritize 3 key sections to have great placement, proximity to other key sections, and prominence on the page:
- Call to action
- Choose any of the remaining
- Choose any of the remaining 8
Then run a heatmap study and compare the heatmap to the anatomy you created. Your 3 priority elements should match where the users are looking. If not, iterate to fix this.
If you ever have a chance to see Bryan in person, I highly recommend it.
