The importance of testing your landing pages

You might have already spent a fortune on CPA/CPC campaigns both in terms of ad fees and search engine optimisation. But have you spent enough time and money developing and testing your landing pages?

Imagine your website as a bricks and mortar business. Your ad campaigns are the guy in the sandwich board on the street corners. This guy, wearing out his shoe leather, has done a great job in getting potential customers to walk up to your store. And then these people look into your shop window to find your products badly merchandised without clear pricing. They walk on. Wouldn’t do would it?

Now think about your landing pages. Are they doing the same thing as above?

As Toni Marino says on his blog – ‘Landing pages are the first thing that your customers see after they click an ad. Because of this, landing pages need to do a lot’. 

Indeed, just like a shop window, their job is to:

  • Be really obvious to customers what value they will receive
  • Communicate clearly language that they understand
  • Address any concerns or objections
  • Persuade them that your business is trustworthy
  • Present any information in a useful way that helps them buy
  • Gives them a clear call to action

Is your landing page is doing all these things? It’s a big job for single page which makes it’s a tricky task. It’s no wonder that so many do so badly! Copyrighting is a very difficult skill to master. But here’s the thing – you shouldn’t expect to get it right first time, or the second time, or even the third. In fact you may never get it perfect, but continuous improvement is more than good enough.

The psychology of a conversion, and the motivations of consumers, are somewhat elusive until you have the data to guide you. This is why the very clever people split test their landing pages. What this means is that you have two or more versions of the same landing page and split the traffic across them for a short time. Monitor the results and see which one works the best. Keep the best one and split test again. You get the picture! This is what we call a test-and-learn strategy.

The things you might do differently across different versions of the page, for example, are changing the colour of the call to action button or changing the font. Start with the obvious and simple things. You might also experiment with automatically playing an explainer video, or not, and seeing which strategy wins out. Another trick is to try different price points, this is especially easy for digital products. It will probably take you many iterations to find something that works.

Truth is nobody really knows what’s going to convert browsers to customers for your product at the start. It takes time and effort (plus a small ad budget) to find out. Testing and learning is really the only way to do it. And think of it this way; most people don’t bother doing this rigorously so this small investment, relatively speaking, could result in high conversions and lots of sales!

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