Outsource Landing Page Optimization

Operating an online business that seeks to generate leads or sell products can generally be very competitive. As more and more advertisers enter the paid search market, the most competitive businesses will practice landing page optimization.

The case for landing page optimization is clear. If you can marginally increase your conversion rate from just 1% to 2%, you can double your ROI, without spending any additional money. Suppose, last month you spent $1,000 on AdWords, and received 10 orders on your store from 1,000 visits, with a bit of landing page optimization magic, you could hope to receive 20 orders from the same budget and number of visits.

In many cases, having a high converting landing page will allow you to bid higher, and dominate the paid search listings, since you can generate more value from each click than your competitors.

How Agents of Value does Landing Page Optimization

Agents of Value follows industry standard best practices for landing page optimization.

Typically, for a new project, we using the following process:

1. Scope out the industry landscape. Our first step will be to study the top 5 to 10 competitors in the client market niche. These can be identified by either studying top paid search bidders in the niche, or through research provided by the client.

2. Clearly understand your goals and business circumstances. By clearly understanding your goals and your prior experiences with website testing, we can design a landing page optimization program around the desired conversion actions.

There are two main testing strategies in landing page optimization. The first is A/B testing, and the other is called multivariate testing.

3. Create landing page mockups. With the client goals in mind, as well as a clear idea of the industry landscape, one of our web designers can begin to create landing page mockups. These will typically be created in a graphics tool like Photoshop, to give a very clear representation of what the final version of the landing page will look like.

Depending on the scope of the project, the client may be presented with 2 to 5 different landing page variations to review. Revisions can be added at the request of the client. Once the client has approved the landing page designs, they will be coded into HTML templates.

4. Start website testing. To start testing, we’ll upload the completed website templates, and configure them to work with a website testing program.

Choosing a website testing platform

There are several very good website testing platforms that support both A/B testing and multivariate testing. We generally choose to work with either Google Website Optimizer or Visual Website Optimizer.

The biggest advantage of Website Optimizer is that it’s completely free. It provides ongoing statistical analysis of the tests, and will guide you on how many impressions and conversions would be needed to run a statistically significant test.

Visual Website Optimizer starts at $49/month, but does include quite a few features that are not available on Google Website Optimizer. Among other things, it allows you to create page variations in a drag and drop environment. This is great for rapid prototyping of different page variation options. Additionally, the reporting provided by Visual Website Optimizer is in real time (Google Website Optimizer is delayed by a few hours).

Common FAQs about outsourcing landing page optimization

1. How long does it take to setup and run a test?

Once there’s a clear testing plan in place, it may take just a few hours to create the page variations and associated graphics. Then, once the test started, it depends on the amount of traffic and number of conversions tracked. Generally, speaking, the fewer variations you are testing, the faster the results can come back. Overall, we find it’s good to design test that run over the course of one or two weeks. If it’s shorter than that, you might be swayed by results that were based on the time of day, or day of week, that don’t maintain themselves over the course of a full week. If it’s longer than a month, then, we feel like we’re missing the opportunity to apply improvements that we were learning from our tests.

2. I want to test my site, but I’m afraid I might lose a lot of orders, if I end up testing a page version that doesn’t convert at all. What can I do?

Both Visual Website Optimizer and Google Website Optimizer allow you to select what % of traffic will view the test versions of your pages. If you don’t want to risk a sudden drop in orders, you might decide to only send 10% or less of the traffic to your test pages.

Later, when you’re viewing reports, you’ll be able to see at what percentage each of your page variations are converting. Also, if you see that the test variations are leading to a significant drop in conversions, you can stop them early.

3. I’ve been testing a variation on my site for a month, and so far there’s no conclusive difference between them. Should I continue running my test?

This depends on a lot of factors, such as the amount of page views and conversions you’ve received over the course of the month. However, if it seems like there’s no noticeable difference between the variations you are testing, you might want to end the test early, and design a test that may have a more significant impact on the conversion rate.

One of the hardest things about landing page optimization is designing good tests. We find it’s better to test more substantial things (stock photos or page structure), rather than testing very minor things (such as the page font or the color of a button).

4. Do I need to hire a web designer and a virtual assistant to do landing page optimization?

Generally, it’s best to hire a web designer first. They can create any required graphics and the page variations, and integrate them with the website optimizer software. If you find that you need help to write test plans, and manage reporting, then you may want to additionally hire a virtual assistant.