Your Baby Is Ugly - Uncovering Good Testing Ideas for Landing Page Optimization

About The Author:

Tim Ash is the president of SiteTuners.com, a performance-based landing page optimization company. The company’s non-parametric TuningEngineSM technology can be used to run much larger landing page tests than conventional multivariate testing approaches with the same data rate. Tim is a frequent speaker and writer on conversion improvement, and is the author of Amazon’s e-commerce bestseller book Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (John Wiley & Sons Press, 2008, http://LandingPageOptimizationBook.com)

Landing page testing is the last frontier of online marketing. 

Driving traffic to your site is a well-understood arena, and has already been extensively tuned and tweaked. But the pages on which your traffic lands typically range from horrible to mediocre. There is a literal goldmine waiting to be tapped by testing and optimizing the content on your mission-critical landing pages. Double-digit conversion increases are very common and can dramatically improve the profitability of your online marketing programs almost overnight.

But what should you test? How can you get ideas for what will perform better?

The best place to start is to look at what is flawed, broken, or not working. Instead of waiting only for good news, filter it out instead. Accentuate the negative. Focus on problems and things that are askew.

Stop. Now let this sink in until you actually feel it. Don’t let the fact that your online marketing program is currently making money blind you to the additional opportunities presented by taking a sober look at your landing pages.

Now that you are prepared to look for landing page problems, you will discover that there are a lot of places to find them.

Web Analytics

Web analytics software offers many powerful tools for analyzing your website and the behavior of your audience. Once historical data has been collected, you can mine it to discover problems that visitors had with your landing page. The following sections highlight how Web analytics features can be used to discover common conversion problems.

Visitors - Web analytics can track the origin and capabilities of your audience in a very detailed manner. This includes geographic targeting, preferred languages, and browser technical capabilities.

•    Map - A map can show you the physical origin of your audience. If your service is national or international in scope, maps will show you the distribution of visitors across time zones and countries. This information can be used to adjust customer service or business hours, or to create specialized content specifically for certain geographies. If your business covers a number of geographic areas, maps can help you to decide on the relative importance that you should assign to each in terms of emphasis and screen real estate

•    Languages - If a significant number of your visitors originate in other countries, you can determine whether you are ignoring their needs. Additional native language and native culture–based content may be appropriate. This does not have to be a complete copy of your site in each applicable language. But if you intend to get conversions in other languages, at least the mission-critical tasks should be available in their native tongue.

•    Technical Capabilities - Analytics software records detailed information about the setup and capabilities of the visitor’s computer and Web browser. This includes the operating system, browser type, screen resolution, Internet connection speeds, and support for various browser plug-in technologies and scripting languages such as Flash, Java, and JavaScript. Screen resolution is perhaps the most important technical capability because it literally defines the visitor’s window onto the Internet. This can range from a relative peephole to a veritable panorama. Your page should look ideal at the most common minimum resolution in use at the time. But it must also still look good at higher resolutions.

•    Visible Browser Window - Another important consideration is what appears above the fold. This term originated in the newspaper industry and referred to the main content that could be seen on the top half of the front page (without flipping the paper or opening it). On the Web it describes the content seen on the page without horizontal or vertical scrolling. What appears above the fold is influenced not only by screen resolution, but also by the size of the current browser window (which may be smaller than the whole screen), various currently visible browser toolbars (which take up vertical space), and the default size of the text chosen in the browser (larger font sizes will push content further down the page).

•    New vs. Returning Visitors Recent research indicates that a significant and growing percentage of Web surfers regularly delete their cookies, thus destroying traces of their past visits to your site. This has the effect of understating the number of return visitors.

Since returning visitors have already been exposed to your message on their first visit, it may lose effectiveness on subsequent visits. Conversely, repeated exposure can actually strengthen your message. In any case, you need to consider if returnees are a significant audience segment for you. If so, you may consider showing different information or even a different offer to this group.

•    Depth of Interaction - There are many ways to determine visitor commitment and engagement. These include return visits and acting on various conversion call-to-actions. The depth of interaction helps to complete this information. It consists primarily of the length of visit (measured by average time spent on your site) and the depth of visit (measured by page views). These metrics are especially critical to websites that rely on advertising-supported, high-quality content.

If a significant number of your visitors display a high degree of commitment to your site, you should consider breaking them out as a separate highly interactive part of your audience and showing them different content. This may be done while they are still on your site by means of dynamic content presentation. For example, you may give them preferential and free access to premium content, or sweeten your call to action even more to move them out of the deliberation stage and into action.

Traffic Sources - Traffic sources come in four main types. Depending on your particular mix, you should consider the following issues.

•    Direct - Direct traffic is the result of people typing your company’s URL directly into their Web browser. It is the combination of your event-driven publicity, offline marketing activities, and the strength of your brand. The common factor in all three traffic sources is that much of it will land on your home page. As I have discussed previously, brands are very powerful. If people typed in your domain name directly, you are top-of-mind for their particular current need. They are aware of your company and have taken the proactive step of visiting it. Because of their familiarity with and affinity for your company, this kind of traffic is often the highest converting source that you will have. Unfortunately, they have landed on your home page. If a lot of your traffic is from this source, you should make special efforts to unclutter your home page and direct them to desired conversion actions.

•    Referred - Referred traffic comes from other websites that link to you. By examining your Web analytics reports, you can determine the top traffic sources. Since referred traffic comes from direct links, much of it can land on specific pages deep within your site. Review the specific landing pages to make sure that they function well as a starting point for a visitor and are not a dead-end with no relationship to your desired conversion goals.

You also need to take the time to visit each major referrer link and understand the context in which your site was last seen by the visitor. In some cases it will be favorable (“this company is the greatest thing since sliced bread”). In other cases, your link will be buried in a long list of competitor sites. It is also possible that the link will be there for the purpose of belittling your company. If you understand the mind-set of the visitors from important referral traffic sources, you can modify the landing page content (amplifying goodwill or neutralizing negative perceptions as appropriate).

•    Search - Many companies work very hard at SEO to get ranked near the top of organic search results for keywords that are important in their industries. Such rankings can guarantee a stream of “free” visitors to specific pages on your website. Depending on the keyword, the visitors may have a specific and actionable need, or a vague interest in your offerings.

But search keyword relevance does not mean that the page is effective in supporting your conversion goals. By examining the most popular organic searches and corresponding landing pages, you can modify their content to make them more actionable. They may have not been part of the mission-critical page set. However, they may be important feeders for these pages. You should consider whether they effectively transport incoming visitors from important keywords to the intended conversion path. In other words, you may not be giving the visitor a clear trail to follow to get to your conversion task’s front door.

•    Paid - Paid traffic (whether from PPC, banner ads, trusted feeds, or other sources) has several desirable characteristics. It can be controlled (turned on and off, or increased or decreased) depending on the circumstances. It can be targeted (the traffic from every PPC keyword can be sent to its own specialized landing page). Its value and profitability can be tracked (by campaign, keyword, and even the version of the ad copy used).

Yet many companies do not take full advantage of these capabilities. The main obstacles are improper traffic mapping and inappropriate landing page content. In many cases, traffic is sent to the website home page instead of the more appropriate pages deeper in the site. Or the traffic is sent to the most relevant page on the corporate site but should instead be sent to a stand-alone landing page that does not have all of the navigation options and other distractions of the main website. The traffic mapping for all high-value keywords should be reviewed to make sure it is being sent to the best possible pages. You may have to create new and more specific landing pages to receive the traffic from these keywords.

Content - Web analytics related to the content of your website can provide many important clues to uncover and prioritize potential problems:

•    Most visited content - The popularity of a Web page helps you to understand whether it is getting the proper exposure. If a key page is not getting enough traffic, it may be necessary to move it to a more prominent location on your website, or to create more links to it from other popular pages.

•    Path analysis - Path analysis allows you to see the sequences of pages that visitors use to traverse your site. They show you the most common flows of traffic. It may be possible to change the position of key conversion pages or links within the site to benefit from such “drive-by visibility”.

•    Top entry pages - A list of the top entry pages shows you the point of first contact with your site. Generally, the more traffic that is hitting a landing page, the more attention that page deserves in terms of conversion tuning. Traffic levels can help you to prioritize which landing pages need to be fixed first.

•    Top exit pages - Exit pages are the places where visitors leave your site. Each exit page can be viewed as a leaky bucket. If visitors exit your site, they probably did not find what they were looking for. In some cases, there is nothing that you can do about this. But for many of the visitors who left, you could have probably improved the page to provide more relevant information or better navigation. The total number of exits and the exit percentage of a page can be used to prioritize among problem pages. The worst-case scenario is a popular entry page that is also a frequent exit page. The bounce rate is the percentage of entry page visitors who leave immediately without visiting any other site content. High bounce rates on high-traffic pages are a red flag indicating that those pages need attention.

•    Funnel analysis - Regardless of your visitors’ initial wandering path on your website, they must often pass through a well-defined series of pages in order to convert. E-commerce shopping cart abandonment is a common example of this kind of funnel analysis. It is possible to see the efficiency of each step in this linear process. The funnel narrows as people drop off during each step. High drop-off percentages may signal that a particular step is especially problematic. If problems are uncovered, they may suggest breaking the process up into smaller and more manageable steps, or simplifying it.

•    Conversion goals - Web analytics software allows you to track conversion rates (CRs) for all of the important goals on your site. By comparing your CRs with analyst research for your industry, you can get a rough idea of whether your site efficiency is competitive or substandard. Some Web analytics tools offer the ability to view reverse goal paths. These are the most common sequences of pages that visitors traversed on their way to completing a conversion goal. Unlike forward-looking funnel analysis, reverse goal paths look backward at the most popular points of origin for a conversion. By using these reports, you can discover unexpected ways that visitors are converting and evaluate the effectiveness of your desired conversion path.

Onsite Search

Many sites offer an onsite search. It is viewed as a tactic for improving conversion rates and helping visitors directly find relevant information. But this is a two-edged sword. Research shows that many visitors will abandon a site if they do not find what they are looking for on the first page of onsite search results.

Onsite search can also be a source of information about what is not working. Many searches produce no matching results, indicating a mismatch between visitors’ desires and expectations, and the ability of a site to provide relevant content. By taking a careful look at such empty search results, you can identify the type of information that is not effectively being found on your site.

You can also auto-populate common empty search results with hand-picked search results pages. Alternatively, you can broaden the scope of the search to at least bring back close matches if exact results are not found.

If a search is very common it may be a candidate for inclusion in the site’s permanent navigation. In other words, you may want to enshrine the search result with permanent visibility to help even more people find it (since a small minority of them will bother to use the search function).

Usability Testing

Usability testing allows you to test your design ideas on actual representative user of your website. It can be an effective means of uncovering disconnects between user’s expectations and your designs. Usability testing companies can help you recruit appropriate subjects, conduct the tests, and deliver detailed findings.

But usability testing can often be done inexpensively and rather informally. After running as few as three subjects through your mission-critical conversion task, you can often uncover significant issues with your current landing page. All you need for this kind of informal approach is a quiet room, a mock-up of your proposed design (possibly just hand-drawn on paper), and a clear task statement (of what you want your subjects to accomplish).

Usability Reviews

You do not always have to conduct full-scale usability testing. Hiring usability experts for a high-level review of your landing pages is often a terrific investment. Usability experts have seen dozens or even hundreds of poor designs, and have learned to extract subtle commonalities. They can quickly focus on potential problems without even conducting a usability test. Besides their testing expertise, usability experts also bring an outside perspective and a mandate to uncover problems. Often organizations that would be reluctant to take input from their own staff will listen to the advice of a hired expert.

Focus Groups

Focus groups, like usability tests, draw on people from the target audience. Via a moderated group discussion, insights can be gleaned about user needs, expectations, and attitudes. These findings can be compared to the proposed solution to determine if key elements are missing or are incorrect. Of course, focus groups can be easily biased by their more outgoing and assertive participants, and the moderator’s influence is important. But this is okay since the purpose of focus groups is to provide qualitative information that can serve as input into deciding what to test.

Eye-Tracking Studies

New software visualization techniques and analysis have made the presentation of eye-tracking results more accessible for the mainstream online marketing audience. EyeTools Inc. (www.eyetools.com) and Marketing Sherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) have recently collaborated to conduct some pioneering work specifically on eye-tracking for landing page optimization. The EyeTools heat map is an aggregate of the eye movements of all test subjects looking at a particular landing page. “Hotter” areas show where subjects spent more of their time. Attempted and successful clicking can also be recorded. Before and after the tests, the subjects can also be asked specific open-ended questions or ones based on the commonly used Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree).

Eye-tracking is particularly useful in detecting problems in the earlier stages of the visitor’s decision process (awareness and interest). If most test subjects do not look at the desired part of the page, they are not even aware that the conversion action is possible. In effect, for similar visitors to your site the conversion action does not exist. Such studies are an excellent source of problems regarding page layout, visual presentation of information and images, and emphasis.

Customer Service Reps

Customer service representatives deal with your website visitors’ problems all day long. Their  interactions can lead to valuable information about how to actually fix the underlying problems. Feedback can be collected in two ways: direct interviews or surveys of your reps, or a review of actual visitor interactions. Chat and phone call logs can be used to classify problems into categories. The prevalence of particular types of problems can be used as an indication of their severity. Such analysis can also point to where on your site the majority of problems originate.

A weakness of customer service–based feedback lies in the self-selecting audience. Only the most dissatisfied and assertive visitors will voice their complaints or escalate their resolution to a rep. This creates a bias toward late-stage issues in the decision making cycle (desire and action), while underestimating the problems with the earlier stages (awareness and interest).

Surveys

A number of easy Web-based and telephone surveying methods and companies are available. Surveys among your target population can be a useful source for discovering additional problems with your site. People who have already completed your conversion action already would seem to be the best group to sample. However, you should generally avoid surveys and interviews of existing users. They are already biased because they have already made the decision to act on your offer. It is better to sample randomly among a pool of people from your intended target audience.

Forums and Blogs

Many industries have specific communities of interest and popular discussion forums. Even if your company is not a market leader that is mentioned directly in forum posts, you can still gain valuable insight into the concerns and problems of your target audience. Blogs and public comments about blog postings serve very much the same kind of communal discussion function. Such venues allow you to gauge the loyalty or frustration of people, their immediate needs, and attitudes toward your industry, company, or product.

As you can see, there are a number of ways to determine what is wrong with your landing page. This discovery process should serve as a fertile ground for identifying alternative ideas and page elements to include in your testing. Don’t fret - the uglier your baby is the more room there is for improved conversion rates and higher profits.

This article is the first in a continuing series on landing page optimization. Stay tuned for the next article on “The Usual Suspects: Assembling Your Landing Page Optimization Dream Team”.