That’s right; we like to turn them into guinea pigs.
We like to see if our blog readers, knowing the basic circumstance surrounding a recent test, can predict the outcome. How good is their online marketing radar? Can they spot a good webpage when they see one? How is marketing intuition performing these days?
But honestly, what really matters is the cheese they will be racing for today – one good-ole slice of free online certification course cheese with a little Twitter-love wine to wash it down.
Leave a comment below to enter and let the games begin. Read more…
We often don’t have time to answer all the questions from our international audience on the live web clinics. So we’re launching a new feature on the blog – Web Clinic Extra. We distilled the best questions and posed them to Researchers Boris Grinkot and Adam Lapp for our first episode:
The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.
We’ve all got that one friend. If you went to high school with Paul Rudd, he’s personal friends with Paul McCartney. If you just got back from St. Louis, he’s bragging about his tan from St. Barts. I call this the 1up effect. And it is prevalent on web pages as well – where each element is trying to outdo the other.
Sure, we can cite many reasons for it. Designing a functional and attractive page can be quite a task. In most cases, we have many things to consider and people to please. The sales team wants us to collect lead information with a capture form. Legal wants visible terms and conditions. Corporate wants branded images. We want our call to actions, great copy, and killer headlines. And the list goes on.
So if you’re not careful, the elements on your page may be competing against each other instead of working in sync to guide your visitors to conversion. I recently commented on this 1up effect in the latter portion of the October 28 web clinic. It boils down to is a simple question – are elements on your page competing so much for attention that you are overwhelming users and losing sight of your main goals?
A great example of this is a TV commercial from Tide. A gentleman was interviewing for a job, but the hiring manager is literally focusing on a shouting stain on the poor applicant’s shirt. Because of this stain, the interviewer misses the conversation completely:
In the same way, strong elements of the page can shout so much that users have trouble using the page for its main goal/purpose. Below is an actual web page submitted by NASCAR.com that we reviewed on the October 28 web clinic. The page seeks to draw attention to a service for watching the races live:
As you can see, color is splashed throughout the page. If you make support items very colorful, you must then use even more color to 1up the support items and make your main goal stand out. However, as you can see in the picture, the main call to action (boxed in red) is totally lost on the page with all of the color and elements shouting for attention. I know that we are all in the hunt to have great-looking, impactful sites, but marketers take heed:
“In the pursuit of cutting-edge websites and pages, do not lose sight of primary page principles.”
A clear and easy to identify goal for the user on the page is a must. Consider the path some users take to arrive at your page. Traffic coming from search and PPC has just seen a list of alternatives (other company listings). If they arrive at your page and do not find a way to engage with your message (buy a product to fix their problem, learn more about the offer, etc), then they click the back button or close the tab and to your competitors they go.
Even if a user does not leave shortly after arriving, support elements that stand out too much can cause users’ eyes to bounce around the page. This can cause them to potentially miss the juicy parts of your copy, product features, testimonials, awards, value proposition, or a whole host of other things.
Plan out your pages with your main goal always in the forefront, then keep support items just as they are supposed to be – SUPPORT items. Use size, shape, color, position, and motion with caution to ensure you are not creating aspects of the page that are in a shouting match for the user’s attention and overwhelming them as a result.
Your challenge is to create a page with elements that work together as a team, not elements that continually try to 1up each other – leave that to your friend who just got back from St. Barts.
We’ve hosted a couple of live optimization clinics in the last month or so, featuring audience-submitted search terms, PPC campaigns and landing pages for analysis and optimization.
I was reviewing the live audience Q&A recently and a comment from frequent clinic attendee Jerry E. caught my eye: “The findings are repetitive. Maybe that is because so many are still doing so many things wrong?”
Jerry is on to something here.
While there are many ways to look at a landing page and an endless combination of elements to be tested, we see a lot of similar problems in the pages we review. Mainly, lack of a strong, clear value proposition and way too much going on with pages (competing objectives, calls to action, the “kitchen sink” approach). And we tend to focus on those same areas because that’s where you can find the biggest impact from testing.
Stake your claim
Many marketers are afraid of defining the one thing that separates their company or offer from competitors — and putting that stake in the ground. We worry that we’ll alienate some of our visitors and send them to the back button. Keep in mind that your potential customer clicked through to your page because something in your search results or PPC ad caught their attention.
Figure out each page’s value proposition and stick with it on the page, as well as in the corresponding PPC ad and search results. If we try to be everything to everyone, we end up being nothing to anyone. Specificity converts.
Choose one ball
Another issue we see often is way too much content on a page, and it’s not unique to landing pages. It’s a big problem in traditional advertising too, and it reminds me of Rethink Communication’s Ping Pong Ball Theory: If I throw one ping pong ball at you, you will probably catch it. If I throw five ping pong balls at once, you probably wouldn’t catch any of them.
It’s the same thing when several marketing and advertising messages are thrown at you all at once. Most landing pages we see have more ping pong balls than any visitor can catch. You are far more likely to absorb the most important message if it’s the only thing coming at you.
This may seem simplistic, but it’s something we all encounter so regularly it’s worth reminding ourselves when we’re at work on our own sites and campaigns. For each page, pick your ping pong ball carefully, and throw just that one.
We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.
Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page? Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?
In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:
When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.
Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?
The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.
As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.
What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.
Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?
If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.
Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.
Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.
Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.
Journalist Alfred Edward Perlman wrote about the necessity of change: “After you’ve done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.”
Our team works on shorter deadlines, but our approach to change is similar: for growth to happen, change must come, whether in life or in landing page optimization. In landing page optimization, improvements can come in two ways, either by baby steps — fine-tuning landing pages by changing single page elements slightly — or by radically redesigning the appearance of a page, or even the presentation of an offer.
At the end of our Surprise Winners clinic, the team put theory into practice by quickly reviewing a handful of audience-submitted landing pages. The focus was on trying to improve the pages in their current categories by providing suggestions for improvements through incremental changes and radical redesigns.
Participant page: Goldline International
The purpose of this page is to get people to call the 1-800 number or complete a sign-up form requesting a contact from a salesperson.
Jimmy Ellis: For incremental changes, I’d revise the headline so that it included a clearer value proposition. The intro copy has enough information but could be transformed into three to five bullets that are easier to scan. In addition, I’d revise the layout so that the content on the page flowed more easily for users. I don’t think you need both the image of the coin and the animated graphic — the two images together are too much distraction for viewers. It is simply not clear why, if I am going to invest in gold coins, I should choose Goldline to do so.
Dr. Flint McGlaughlin: The major mistake this page is making is that it has two evenly weighted columns. Landing pages are conversations that flow in sequence. People don’t want to have to skip all over the page to find the information that they need. Evenly weighting your columns is providing people with only random conversations, like making them work an entire party just to find a single piece of information. What you want to do is experience the conversation in your mind in a vertical fashion. One of your two columns should be the main column and the other column should be there only to support the main one.
Aaron Rosenthal: To follow up, I’d like to ask: what’s the motivation for someone trying to call this number? Is it about purchasing gold coins or is the main call to action the free investor kit? If the purpose of the call is not to get someone to buy, but only to build relationship through the free kit, then the free kit needs to have a value proposition of its own. The start of a radical redesign is to make that free kit the primary focus of your page.
A second radical redesign is going to be taking down the lead on this page. Don’t ask them to call just yet. Get them to tell you where to send their free kit and then you can make the outbound call to them to begin to establish the relationship. For your first radical test, present the free kit as your primary offer. For the second redesign, I’d collect the lead for the page and allow your salespeople to make the follow up calls.
Summing up
All three presenters focused on the idea that the most productive changes to this page would be ones that brought it closer to its true goal of relationship-building.
In your optimization efforts, one way to judge the effectiveness of any change is whether or not it brings you closer to your goal of communicating clearly and effectively with your customers.
Audience: What do you think? Use the comments field to post your suggestions for this landing page, agree/disagree with our assessment, and let the Goldline folks know what you would do.
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