Landing pages/ Improving Conversion Rates - 1100th post

In the spirit of very helpful 1,000 posts (and since I missed doing anything substitive) I thought this information would be helpful.

It all comes from a seminar I attended with the main speaker being Anne Holland, Publisher for MarketingSherpa. MarketingSherpa is a research firm used by advertising, PR, and marketing people. Primary focus is the internet.

This seminar was on improving conversion rates. All their examples and research comes from case studies with different companies and web sites. I was fortunate to sit at a table w/a marketing manager from one of the companies studied and her developer/designer. Their whole job was focused on this aspect of the industry. We have mutual friends and had used our service/product in the past and she offered some help w/our landing pages/conversion pages.

Basically MarketingSherpa tries to research and promote best examples found through their research and spread the information through their products, publications, etc. (I'm not associated with them at all but was impressed.)

Landing Pages

Landing pages are single pages with a specific single purpose - conversions. They can be unique pages built for PPC campaigns or a conversion page within a web site.

They should be Focused on a single subject - the conversion - not have other focus on the page or in the content.

Landing pages should be designed around the action of the page.

PPC Landing Pages

While you may or may not keep the web site template design a PPC landing page should be stripped of all navigation. No internal links back to the site. Capture the visitor and keep the visitor there for one and only one purpose. Strip the page of internal navigation!

Put phone numbers on the landing page. The viewer has 3 options: The landing page action; phoning your service; returning to the source.

Focus Focus Focus the design and content to the conversion action.

Landing Pages within a Web Site

Minimize navigation options back through the web site. Simplify the standard design of the site. Emphasize the focus of the conversion action. Design around the conversion action

Eye Tracking Studies

Currently eyetracking studies are relatively inexpensive for companies (about $1,000). They are also unobtrusive. Essentially visitors spend about 8 seconds visiting a page. Visitors tend to read a couple of dynamic words within a title - not the entire title. Make it simple and action packed.

Visitors go to pictures. They tend to read around text that describes pictures. Write action text that is wrapped around or immediately left or right of pictures/diagrams. Place your action phrases around and visuals.

Dumb down the Design

Don't fill a landing page with content. Dumb down the content and page. Leave space around the landing page function and content. Get the landing page action "over the fold" that is the top 1/2 or 1/3 of a page wherein a visitor doesn't have to scroll down.

Consistency in keywords

For PPC campaigns the landing page Title/ Theme/ Service Product should be consistent with the keywords that got the visitor there in the first place. If the keyword phrase is "Deliver Roses" Don't title and theme the landing page Choose Floral Arrangements. Stick to the theme.

Make the copy readable

Tiny copy is not readable. For design purposes stick to 12 point.

Marketing Sherpas best examples showed increases in conversion rates of 40-67%. While most conversion rates are way below 10%, increases of these sorts have a dramatic impact on site profitability.

Dave

Nice post Dave, We should all renew our sites with these ideas. Thanks for sharing this.

EGOL

Dave... a simple thank you for an excellent 1100th post and congratulations.

Happy 1100th!!!

Frankly our landing pages are a design disaster. We are making changes.

Even as we tripled total visits over a 2 year period through higher serps and content our gross conversions off the web have increased only marginally so our percentage is terrrible. We pretty much violate all the suggestions.

We will report later after changes to see if the rates and numbers increase. I think Onthecoast, a member of this forum has posted some valuable insights here.

Dave

This gave me food for thought. In my industry, the average cost per conversion from PPC is around $100. Every client we've ever taken on has been in that range. All of our current clients are hovering around $10 - $15 per conversion, but there's always room for improvement. I've always read about creating PPC landing pages, but have been too lazy to impliment them. We send users to our regular search page and this has done very well for us.

We're coming into the time of year when things slow down a hair for us. Going to try the landing page with no internal navigation and see how it goes.

Also, with regards to the font size, that is dead on. There's too many ecommerce sites with small fonts and in virtually all industries, this cuts down on conversions. I saw a study once where going from 10px to 12px font alone increased conversions by 12% across multiple sites.

Congrats on your 1100!

BTW -- after a very short week of testing, the four landing pages we put up are ROCKING! We've pointed all our PPC ads to them and the conversion rates are 5x what natural SERPs are bringing us.

And here's something odd... Yahoo has spidered 3/4 landing pages about 20x each LOL. (No, they're not indexed anywhere on the site, but they are heavy in Overture)

I'm almost thinking of pointing to them to get them in the natural SERPs since they're so targeted...

Son of a gun. I haven't implemented the change yet. It goes to the top of my priority list now.
Dave

I deal with conversion rates at my company all the time. This post was right on! I would add, that it is necessary to put a call to action for the user otherwise they are likely to go back to the source.

Saw this in recent posts and wanted to give an update. I cleaned up the landing pages code (meta data, etc that I didn't have before) and got them indexed. Two out of the four are now holding *very* respectable places in the SERPs for those search terms -- one of them is doing so well I pulled the PPC for that term and just let the natural roll the people in and over the last week, we've actually seen the number of people hitting those pages go *up*

Conversions have leveled off, but still are doing 3-5x better than our "normal" pages and front page landings.

This was a great article - answered questions that I had! Thanks!