LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION

CONVERSION Best Practices to Lift Conversion

OPTIMIZATION
WHITE PAPER

JAN 2013 © 2013 WEBTRENDS, INC. WWW.WEBTRENDS.COM.

LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION
Best Practices to Lift Conversion

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
TREND
The landing page is often the first thing customers see when they
interact with your brand online. Whether it is a web page, Facebook app
or mobile interstitial, landing pages exist to deliver relevant messaging
that converts visitor traffic.

PROBLEM
A landing page can either make or break the success of a campaign.
Optimizing the landing
If messaging resonates, visitors are likely to click further into the sales
page is a simple and
funnel. If it doesn’t resonate, visitors will drop off–and your competitors
effective way to improve
will reap the benefits.
ROI on your campaign
spending.
SOLUTION
Landing pages can be simple to test, as there are usually five main It can significantly
elements to consider. But before starting a testing program, it is increase your total
important to develop a strategy in order to measure results and success. revenue.

This white paper walks you through landing page optimization best
practices, including how to get started, simple ways achieve clear
results, and how to apply lessons to continue optimizing across the
digital ecosystem.

MAKING INITIAL CONTACT COUNT

The landing page is often the first thing customers see when they
interact with your brand online. If what they see on the landing page
resonates with them, chances are they’ll make it further into the sales
funnel. If it doesn’t resonate, these customers will drop off.
Landing pages can take all shapes and forms, from a Facebook app to
mobile interstitial, campaign microsite or traditional web page. No matter
what form it takes, a landing page exists to convert (typically paid) site
traffic into sales prospects. This is the stage in the campaign funnel that
is most vulnerable to customer abandonment.

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THE VALUE OF A LANDING PAGE
The face of a landing page has evolved into a world of mobile
apps, social campaigns and new ways of leveraging the web. Yet USE A LANDING
landing pages at their core remain essential to effective marketing PAGE TO TEST
campaigns. Why? They provide a focused experience that can turn BOLD NEW
an interested prospect into a buyer. DESIGNS AND
The job of a landing page is to keep the message relevant, MESSAGING IN
consistent, and customer-centric and ultimately, bring the customer A CONTROLLED
through the funnel to purchase. A landing page can either make or ENVIRONMENT.
break the success of a campaign.

Squeezing the most ROI possible out of a campaign is usually the

first reason marketers test and optimize landing pages, but there
are other compelling reasons to test landing pages:

1. OUTSIDE IT’S DOMAIN.

Landing pages tend to be easy to build, tear down and build
again for a new campaign without waiting for development
release cycles or IT department procedures. Landing pages are
therefore more nimble and relatively easy to fit into quick testing
cycles for faster results.

2. SIMPLE TO TEST.
A website is full of pages that have many different calls to action
and navigation bars, and an infinite number of customer flows.
When optimizing a website, it is not always easy to draw a direct
a landing
correlation between an element on the page and conversion—
page can
although identifying and optimizing these metrics can have make or
a greater lift on revenue beyond just looking at the landing break a
page. But landing pages are a good place to start. They are campaign
by definition more stripped down and have one call to action,
making it easy to isolate conversion variables and conduct tests.

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 3. QUICKLY AND EASILY PROVE ROI SO YOU CAN OPTIMIZE
FOR GREATER LIFTS.
Landing page optimization will give you a quick win, but this
isn’t where you will see the biggest return. Once you prove the
value of optimization, you can hone in on other key parts of the
funnel (see below), such as in the shopping cart or across more
complex customer interactions on the site. By continuing to test,
you will continue to increase conversion and see a revenue lift.
If people within your organization are skeptical about the value
of testing and optimizing, a landing page optimization test will
quickly prove ROI, which can pave the way for more in-depth or
mission critical tests down the road.

54 VISITORS COMPLETE GOAL This Conversion Funnel Demonstrates

POST-PURCHASE OPTIMIZATION
3% Make a purchase
CART OPTIMIZATION
30% Place item in cart
SITE NAVIGATION OPTIMIZATION
60% Research/Explore Product
Category
All Possible Customer Touch Points
As an example, of the 100% of visitors
to your website, 60% will explore, 30%
will place an item in the cart and 3%
will make a purchase.
Landing pages are a great first step,
but there are more opportunities to
increase conversion and revenue along
the funnel. These opportunities depend
on your type of business and how you
use your website to sell (ecommerce,
customer engagement, etc.).

LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION

100% Total Visitors

10,000 VISITORS TO THE WEBSITE

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4. LESS POLITICAL.
Trying to execute tests or make changes on a company’s website
can often be a political exercise, but landing pages can usually
be set up “off the radar.” Marketers will often use landing page
optimization as the way to introduce and socialize testing into
an organization by proving out the potential business value
there first.

5. PLACE TO TAKE CHANCES AND TEST NEW IDEAS.

To get the most out of testing you have to take chances.
We find that landing pages provide marketers with a great
avenue to test bold new designs, messaging and offers in a
controlled environment.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE A LANDING PAGE

THE BEGINNING OF A PLAN: TAKE INVENTORY
Even a seemingly simple landing page optimization test takes
thoughtful planning. But before test planning can begin, it’s
important to clarify baseline assumptions.

Here are five pre-testing questions you should answer before you
begin an optimization project:

1. WHICH LANDING PAGE SHOULD YOU OPTIMIZE?

Choose the simplest page possible, with the smallest amount BEFORE TEST
of clutter and clearest call to action. The landing page should PLANNING CAN BEGIN,
be the entry point of a highly focused sales path, without IT’S IMPORTANT TO
distractions to the conversion goal. There should be no excess CLARIFY A BASELINE.
baggage like ads, links or navigation bars so visitors have only
two options: convert or leave.

2. WHAT METRICS SHOULD YOU MEASURE?

It’s important to boil things down to one metric. This metric
should be revenue-related, so you can directly attribute a dollar
amount to your testing. For most companies, this metric on the
landing page is conversion rate, or click-through rate (page clicks
divided by page visits). However, conversion can mean different
things to different people, and it’s important that everyone
involved in the optimization project agrees on how the metrics
are defined.

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3. WHAT ARE YOUR BASELINE METRICS?
Before you begin testing, you should understand the status quo.
What is your current daily average click-through rate? When you’re
testing, a baseline control group lets you illustrate whether test
variations are winning or losing against your existing normal state.

4. WHAT PAGE ELEMENTS SHOULD YOU TEST?

A customer’s interaction with a landing page is not always easy
to measure. And it’s a quick interaction—a landing page has
fewer than four seconds to capture the customer’s attention. You
can start to glean an understanding of customer response by
assessing where the focus on the page is vs. where the customer
is supposed to look. Honing in on this interaction can help inform
what to test. Webtrends experts can help peel through the
customer interaction layers to identify weak spots for testing.

5. WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN?

Developing a hypothesis is an important part of effective,
scientific testing. Often a hypothesis will help flesh out if a test
idea is fully sound and worth carrying through as an actual test.

Below are two examples of Webtrends landing pages.

In both cases, there is a single call to action and simple message.

Landing Pages
Single call to action and a
simple message.

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YOUR TESTING TEAM
The organization and execution of the tests themselves are the
stages at which marketing needs to tap into a broader team. This
is because optimization testing requires a diverse skill set that
often extends outside the marketing or digital groups. Optimization
analysts, designers, web developers, QA—if you are testing on your
own, all these groups must be engaged. This doesn’t even include
the person who is managing the optimization project, a job that can
quickly take up 40 hours a week.
Optimization projects are often highly visible within the company,
and many directors, VPs and above are stakeholders (particularly
if resources from different groups are pulled in to help with the
project). A lot is at stake because the online funnel is directly tied
to revenue. And without expertise to help guide you, it’s easy to
test the wrong elements, misinterpret the results, and accidentally
misguide the direction of your web site.
For an optimization project to be successful, many organizations
enlist the aid of a dedicated testing partner to advise at each stage.
Ideally, this partner will help scope out the tests and the testing
timeline, and assign team members to fill the diverse roles required
for the project, including test hypothesis and plan development,
project management, web development, QA, design and analysis.
This partner should also help roll up data in a way that is easy to
understand, and easy for you to share across your company.

TESTING BEST PRACTICES

Once preparation is complete, you can delve into the details of
fleshing out the testing plan. This is another area where your testing
partner’s experience comes in handy. A good testing partner should
help you wrangle what can be millions of variables into finite,
effective tests that will help you lift revenue.

DECIDING WHAT TO TEST

Assuming you are measuring click rate as your conversion metric,
you will want your first test to focus on the element of the page
that most influences clicks. You can glean this information from
analytics data, as well as heat maps, which show where customers
are interacting within the page. If you are working with a partner,
trusting the experience of optimization experts can also help guide
you in the right direction.

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One thing to keep in mind is that “industry best practices” or even
“internal best practices” don’t always apply to all pages. Although it
might seem like you can apply lessons across many different sites,
every page is unique and often tests differently. It’s not unusual for
marketing organizations to hold true to common understandings
such as “green buttons always perform the best,” but these
pieces of folk wisdom can change depending on the campaign, the
audience, the competing page elements, and the call to action (as
well as other variables).

Testing Elements of Sample

Landing Page:
1. Headline
2. Copy
3. Form
4. Call to Action Button
5. Brand Graphic

All elements test differently; all elements are testable. Common

testing elements include: copy, graphics, buttons (copy, color,
placement), call to action, white space, form threshold (how
many fields to include in a form). Any page element is a potential
candidate for testing. In this example Webtrends landing page, there
are five distinct elements, all of which can be tested.
While there may be five elements in this example (and most landing
pages), it is the combinations of elements that actually influence
results. No single element is meaningful in a vacuum. For example,
the green call-to-action button may test better when the headline
is shorter, but test worse when the headline is longer. When you
combine additional elements (e.g., combine them with different
sections of copy, or additional graphics, etc.) the amount of possible
combinations can exponentially explode into the thousands or
even millions—which is one of the reasons that marketers look
to technology and expertise to enable a successful optimization
testing program.

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HOW SOON WILL THE TESTING YIELD
RESULTS?
THE LENGTH OF EACH TEST DEPENDS ON SEVERAL
VARIABLES:
• Traffic volume to the landing page
• What percentage of this traffic you want to put in the test pool
• The number of variables being tested
• The entire customer flow through the funnel
• The number of success conversions being measured (a landing
page optimization test typically measures only one, but you
can typically increase conversion even more by testing multiple
conversion metrics)
• How effective the tested content is at eliciting increased or
decreased visitor behavior (the more similar the content, the
longer it takes longer to statistically determine differences in
behavior)
• Which resources within your organization you intend to use, and
their availability

CHOOSE THE TEST METHODOLOGY THAT MAKES THE

MOST SENSE
The three most common types of optimization tests are:

1. SPLIT TESTING
Split testing drives traffic to two or more different pages that
represent different executions of the same test idea, then measure
the comparative results.

Optimization Tests:
Since one of the benefits of
optimizing a landing page is
its simplicity, your first test
will probably be an A/B/n test,
focusing on a single element of
the page.
This will give you quick insight
and uplift, and also help inform
further testing.

A/B/n Testing Split Testing Multivariate Testing

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2. A/B
A/B or A/B/n tests focus on testing one element on a single page
or the same element across multiple pages (e.g., button color
or navigation). This test is relatively simple to set up because it
isolates a single testing variable, but it can take a long time to
generate results—and results themselves are limited. When more
than one element needs to be tested, these tests are typically
run sequentially, which takes even longer.

3. MULTIVARIATE
Multivariate tests (MVT) focus on testing multiple variables
simultaneously rather than sequentially. These tests tend to be
more complex to set up, but represent a major time savings to
run. MVT also provides the most valuable insight into how all
elements work together.

CONDUCTING THE TESTS

Even with the best test plan and timeline in the world, the testing
phase is where things become most challenging. This is when all the WITHOUT TESTING,
key players and their respective “moving parts” must work in concert OPINIONS ARE JUST
to meet the testing dates. It is up to the marketing manager to corral THAT—OPINIONS. ONLY
this diverse group and keep a testing project from unraveling. WITH TESTING CAN YOU
Even if the assembled team has signed on to take part in the testing REALLY KNOW WHAT
plan, it is common that these resources are often “borrowed” from DRIVES RESULTS.
other parts of the organization. For example, your design resource
may agree to help create different iterations of the hero shot, but
other priorities may take precedence and the work doesn’t get
completed by its due date. Meanwhile, the time that development
and QA had set aside to implement the test has come and gone, and
they are on to other projects.
Even though testing is a project with direct revenue impact and high
visibility within the company, it can easily lose its way. Who gets
the blame for that? Frequently, it is the marketing manager, who is
often a single point of accountability for campaign conversion and
success. However, there is a better way, one where the test plan is
completed on time.

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Many organizations solve this challenge by hiring an outside resource.
Rather than having to beg, borrow and steal from internal resources,
a testing partner provides a team of experienced optimization
experts who specialize in the diverse fields required for a successful
project. This typically includes a developer, QA engineer, designer and
optimization project manager dedicated to your tests—which ensures
you get reliable results in the quickest way possible.

SHARING RESULTS ACROSS YOUR COMPANY

People tend to have strong opinions about which elements of a landing
page are effective, and which are not. Without testing, opinions are just
that: opinions. Only with testing can you know what drives results.
In today’s metrics-based marketing era, marketers are looked to as
data leaders. And even as many marketers are still developing this
expertise, conducting accurate optimization tests that deliver revenue-
impacting lift can make marketers an instant, proven hero. Just be sure
to deliver easy-to-read reports on testing results, which can be shared
across the organization and understood by everyone.

COMMUNICATING VALUE
While it’s important to share results, how you deliver those results
across the company is part of the impact you can make. It’s common
for many players in many groups to have a stake in the testing, and
when you show them the results, you want the message to be as clear
and have as great an impact as possible.
At Webtrends, working closely with our customers, we’ve discovered
what works best in terms of rolling up the lessons from an optimization
test across the company.

Essentially, you are telling a four-part story:

1. The problem you were trying to solve (e.g., increase click rate on the
landing page)
2. The control vs. the test variations (including visual examples)
3. Which version won, and why (including lift)
4. The impact of the lift on the business

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We’ve found that a slide deck most
effectively communicates this story
because it allows you to incorporate
pictures and graphics that illustrate
exactly what was tested.
Here is an illustration of a sample deck
that represents what our customers
may send to their colleagues once a
test is complete:

SLIDE 1: OBJECTIVE AND

CHALLENGES
Slide 1 states your test objective, the
challenges you faced, and a screenshot
of the page you tested.

SLIDE 2: CONTROL VS.

CHALLENGERS
Slide 2 includes a screenshot of
the original page and all variations
you tested.

SLIDE 3: SUCCESS
Slide 3 is identical to the previous slide,
but highlights the winner and states the
lift increase and revenue impact.

SLIDE 4: LESSONS
Slide 4 communicates what this
increase revealed. State why that test
was the winner and any additional
lessons from the tests.
When you communicate your testing
story, it often circulates beyond
those you share it with. By using this
template, you keep the story clear and
consistent, making sure the purpose,
lessons and value of your test won’t get
lost in translation.

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 ANYTHING CAN BE OPTIMIZED. IF CORRECTLY EXECUTED, YOU
WILL SEE REVENUE LIFT AND LEARN IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT
WHY YOUR CUSTOMERS PURCHASE.

NEXT STEPS: INCREASING REVENUE LIFT

Once you’ve improved ROI and established a preliminary revenue lift
as a result of landing page optimization testing, what comes next?
Applying those lessons to additional areas and audience segments.
Optimization is a journey, not a destination, because greater lift is
always in sight. Lessons from one test will inform the opportunities
of a new one. In addition to testing other important landing pages,
testing in other areas will produce significant lift and continue to
improve ROI.

Here are three ways to continue optimizing:

1. OPTIMIZE THE SHOPPING CART.

When customers come to the shopping cart, they have made it
through the funnel far enough to be considered “serious customer
prospects.” However, cart abandonment is a real challenge for
even the most sophisticated ecommerce-savvy vendors. By
optimizing within the cart, you can pinpoint the factors causing
drop-off and make improvements that directly improve conversion
and increase revenue.

2. OPTIMIZE ACROSS THE ENTIRE CAMPAIGN.

More and more, customers are interacting with brands across
channels—through social campaigns, on mobile devices, online
and more. It’s ideal to optimize your campaign across all these
channels, and target your messaging to relevant audiences
depending on how they are interacting with the content. This
optimization strategy focuses on an earlier stage of the conversion
process, allowing you to bring more people into the funnel.

3. OPTIMIZE WITHIN CUSTOMER SEGMENTS.

If you can get substantial incremental lift by optimizing for the
general population, imagine the increases you would see if you
optimized within customer segments. For example, by targeting
returning customers, you could improve their conversion as
separate from new customers. By targeting and testing within
customer segments, your revenue lifts become even greater.

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 CONCLUSION
Anything can be tested and optimized, and if correctly executed, you’ll
almost always see revenue lift. If you are new to testing, landing page
optimization is a great place to start. If you’re looking for a testing
partner, Webtrends has the experience, expertise and technology to
unlock the potential of optimization, prove ROI and increase revenue,
starting with your landing page, executing across your entire site, and
extending to mobile and social channels.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WEBTRENDS OPTIMIZATION

SOLUTIONS, VISIT:
webtrends.com/solutions/optimization/

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© 2013 Webtrends, Inc.

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