How-To
Testing Your Landing Page
How to make the most of your landing pages by Dave Pasternack
Jan 19, 2004
Even though I’m sure all of you already know what a landing page is, I will take this short time just to make sure. The landing page is the page within your website that specific traffic is driven to. In other words, it is the page that one of your banner ads points to, or your email campaign, or even your paid search campaign. This landing page can be the same for all your advertising, like your homepage, or it can be targeted to each specific ad. For example, a banner ad selling Porsche parts could drive traffic to the specific page in your site that pertains to Porsche rather than to a page containing car parts of all types. This type of targeting usually results in better conversion, but we’ll get to that later.
Obviously, your paid search marketing can and should benefit from this landing page targeting. Each of your search terms should be pointing to a specific page that pertains to the topic the search term represents. When someone searches for Porsche parts, the URL that appears should drive them (no pun intended) to the Porsche page. This is all very basic and I’m sure most of you have already implemented this logic.
The remainder of this article will cover, specifically, the issues of landing page conversion with respect to paid search engine marketing.
You hear the expressions “landing page conversion” and site conversion, but what do they mean exactly? The terms refer to the percentage of visitors driven to a landing page, or to your site, who convert to customers. For instance, let’s say our search campaign drove 1,000 people interested in Porsche parts to our Porsche page, and 10 of them ended up placing an order. That would be a conversion rate of 1% due in part to the landing page and in part to the site, including shopping carts, design and navigation. It’s not exactly rocket science. Common sense would tell us that the higher the conversion rate, the better. And that’s true.
But how important is the conversion rate? It’s obviously important because it increases the pull of your advertising and lowers the cost of customer acquisition. But it is especially important when it comes to your search advertising. In paid search, you are competing for qualified traffic in a real-time auction. The amount you or your competitors can afford to pay for a click is determined by the gross profit which that click will produce. The better your conversion rate, the more revenue you produce per click. The more revenue you produce, the higher you are able to bid for that keyword and the more traffic you’ll receive. You can now see that search advertising is a zero-sum game. Someone will win and someone will lose, and the winning marketer will be the one with the highest landing page conversion rate.
Given that the appropriateness of the landing page has a huge impact on overall conversion, how can you make sure you’re using the best landing page for the job, in order to maximize that conversion rate? It’s through a process called A/B testing (or more sophisticated Darwinian testing for high traffic pages).
Here’s how it works (At least this is how my company, Did-it.com does it): Our client, sometimes with our help, will design a number of different landing pages. They may have different looks or even different offers. We put them in a round-robin rotation, driving an equal percentage of the inbound traffic to each one of the pages. We then track the actual conversion rate each page is producing. A report is generated at the end of the test period, which summarizes the results. If one of the landing page designs performs better for a particular keyword, the traffic can be permanently directed to that page. In fact, our system can even be programmed to pick the best landing page design for each keyword listing automatically, and redirect to it. That’s true landing page optimization. It all sounds pretty simple. And if you use a capable system or professional services firm to set up and do the work, you should be fine. Without the right tools, however, it could be a nightmare. For instance, just randomly distributing the traffic requires some know-how. In addition, landing page conversion rates often change throughout a 24-hour day. One page may work better at night and another during the day. Any system you choose has got to be able to track these differences and take advantage of them. You can see that to get the most out of your campaign can be a difficult chore without professional help.
So what will be the ultimate benefit of a good landing page testing program? It may be fantastic success in the search marketplace, or merely the ability to survive in the jungle of high paid placement bids. Either way, an inefficient campaign that loses money and misses opportunity is never an option. Take a fresh look at your site and your landing pages.