5 Landing Page Optimization Tips to Ensure Success
You’ve just created your business’ website. It has all the makings of a great site: meticulously-organized navigation, strong calls to action, and plenty of engaging content. And you also just finished creating some inbound marketing campaigns on Facebook and Google to attract some new customers. But then it occurs to you: How will you know if your efforts are working? More specifically, how will you be able to tell if your landing page is doing its job?
You've created a dedicated landing page, right?
First, you’ll want to make sure that your campaign’s landing page is purpose-built. In other words, to ensure the best possible success, you’ll want to make sure that your landing page is tailored specifically to your audience that will be visiting this page – likely for the very first time. This is your business’ chance to make a great first impression. Make sure that your landing page has all of the components to grab your audience and entice them with your service or product. We’ve found that you’ll want to keep your content brief and to the point. Tell the visitor what you’re offering, what the benefits are to them, and then give them plenty of (easily accessible) opportunities to take the next step.
Conversion Tracking
Speaking of taking the next step, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got conversion tracking set up so that you can reliably track the actions that your website visitors are taking.
You’ll want to make sure you’re tracking the obvious actions like eCommerce order completions, appointment sign-ups, and contact form completions. But don’t forget to track actions like phone calls, emails, and sharing content. If you can avoid it, don’t set conversion goals for actions that are less meaningful. For example, we’ve seem some websites that track a conversion if someone stays on the site longer than three minutes or if they view more than two pages. We strongly disagree with these tactics as it doesn’t necessarily mean that your website visitor wants to become a customer. It might just mean that they are lost on your site and can’t seem to find what they’re looking for!
Bounce Rate
Another great way to tell if your landing page is working is to examine your landing page’s Bounce Rate. Many times we see poorly-designed landing pages that have a super high bounce rate. If a website visitor arrives and can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re going to leave without taking any action.
Also keep in mind that your landing page might not be solely at fault for your high bounce rate. If your campaign is targeting the wrong audience and someone stumbles into your site with a misunderstanding of what you’re offering, they’re most likely going to leave immediately. After all, if you went into a store because their sign on the outside said, “Pineapples for sale,” and you found they were actually selling shoes inside, wouldn’t you leave immediately?
Heat Map Tracking
The next method you can use to determine if your landing page is effective is to install a heat map testing tool, like HotJar or Lucky Orange. Both services offer amazingly detailed tracking tools that allow you to see exactly what your website visitors are clicking on and where they spend the most amount of time viewing your page. We’ve found heat map tracking provides some really interesting insights into how people are using our clients’ landing pages – and websites as a whole.
A/B Split Testing
Lastly, if you find that your landing page isn’t getting the results that you had hoped for, it’s time to iterate and test. As with many facets of marketing, sometimes you have to try multiple approaches to determine which is the most effective. This could be changing the text used on the site, the placement of your calls to action, and something as simple as the colors and images that you’re using. The best way to test variations on your landing page is to use a split testing tool. Our favorite solution for this is Google Optimize. With Optimize, we can easily alter elements on a landing page and display those new variations to a segment of our website visitors. Or, we can create an entirely new landing page and send a portion of our website visitors to the new landing page. And, Google Optimize integrates with Google Analytics so that we can compare bounce rates, page views, and conversions between our different landing page versions. Best of all Google Optimize is free, so it is easily the most cost-effective tool for this purpose.
In conclusion, it’s crucially important to make sure that your landing page is doing the best job possible of converting your audience into customers. After all, if you’re making a significant investment by running a digital marketing campaign, make sure that those marketing dollars aren’t going to waste with an ineffective landing page.
If your business needs help with landing page optimization and analysis, contact us using the form below and our digital marketing experts can help make your campaign a success.
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About the author:
Jeff Pollard
Partner, Director of Technology
Jeff is one of Torx's founding partners and serves as the agency's Director of Technology. He built his first website back in 1996 and has never looked back. Jeff wears many hats at Torx: front-end designer and developer, server administrator, and resident Apple enthusiast.