There are many aspects that come into play between the time an anonymous website viewer arrives at your site, and the time when they become a lead. Taken together, these aspects make up the different parts you need to pay attention to for effective conversion rate optimization.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization for Landing Pages?
One of the most important aspects of conversion rate optimization, is continuously testing your landing pages to make sure they are operating at full effectiveness. For most sites, landing pages are still the biggest conversion points. They are where your paid ad traffic is driven, and where hot leads end up when they click your kick-ass CTAs. But all of those efforts could be for naught, if the landing page itself isn’t optimized.
Imagine — you click Google ad that seems to answer all of your needs. The exact service or product you’re looking for. But when you click the ad, you land on a generic contact page, that doesn’t even tell you what the company does — let alone what will happen if you fill out the form. (Is someone going to call me? Am I signing up for a demo? What’s happening?) There’s a good chance you’ll back right out of that page and seek out more information elsewhere, right?
That’s what we want to avoid! But there are a lot of different aspects that might cause someone to bounce away to another page.
A/B Testing Landing Pages to Improve Conversions
There are a million and one “strategies” and “frameworks” for how to do CRO on landing pages. I’m not here to be the end-all-be-all on the subject. I just want to show you how I test my own, and my clients’ landing pages to improve conversion rates over time.
Step 1: Figure out which page you want to mess with.
Pick a landing page with a lot of traffic, but not the best conversion rate. That’s a good place to start.
Of course, you may have certain priority pages you want to focus on, too. That’s a good place to start as well.
Start by choosing one page to work on. It’s best to start the process small — but you can apply the same principles to multiple pages at once. (Just make sure you deal with each page separately.)
Step 2. Figure out what part of the page you want to mess with.
Use your noggin. Best practices, experience, and goals can guide this, but it’s also your opportunity to get creative.
Do you have a heatmapping software that can give you insight into where people are getting stuck? Can you run a focus group? Have you gotten any direct feedback from prospects?
You can test pretty much anything, but here are some ideas that might produce results…
- Page design and placement of page elements.
- Form fields and their labels
- Page copy — headers, body, white space, etc.
- Including a new element — video, testimonial, etc.
Step 3. Pick one specific change to make on that part of the page and document what it is.
Example: “Update to page copy. Changed headings to be pain point-oriented, rather than feature-oriented.”
Document the exact change, and the reasoning behind it.
Step 4. Implement A/B test on that one element.
This is a built-in option in some page-builders, like HubSpot, which is sweet.
For these cases, simply “start a test,” when editing the landing page, to create your new page version. Edit the new variation of the page as you wish, and publish the new version.
(Traffic is automatically divided between the two different versions, for comparison.)
Step 5. Check results.
Let the test run, and after enough time has passed (depends on average traffic, and the margin of difference between the two versions…) take a look at the test results. You’ll want to make sure that enough submissions have taken place that your results are statistically significant.
If your new variation page is showing a significantly higher conversion rate…
Select it as the winner, and end the test, victorious. Make this version your only version.
If not…
Rinse and repeat.
Revert back to the original version and begin the next test.
Looking for help increasing your conversion rate? Drop me a line!
DeMaio Digital Marketing 