Marketing Campaign: Landing page optimization can help improve the return on your media spend
Let’s take a quick look at the typical marketing funnel in 2011 to see how you can improve your results. If you’re like the average marketer, you spend a lot of money on media, such as:
- Broadcast TV ads
- Newspaper ads
- Magazine ads
- Outdoor advertising, such as billboards and transit advertising
- Radio ads
- Internet advertising, such as banner ads and pay-per-click ads
In fact, marketers spent $238 billion in just the first six months of 2010, according to Nielsen.
Why do companies spend so much on advertising?
That’s a lot of loot. And, of course, marketers are spending that money to sell a product. However, they aren’t truly selling a product or service at all … they’re actually spending that money to drive customers to a landing page. In fact, according to Econsultancy, 65% of all UK print and television advertising now includes a Web address.
Even when the ad don’t specifically include a URL, ad-inspired branded searches drive many customers to a website as the next logical point of contact.
In other words, you’re spending a lot of dough to funnel traffic to your landing pages.
If you’re a long-time reader of the MarketingExperiments blog, you already know about the power of LPO and you might as well stop reading now because I’m not going to share anything new today (although, feel free to forward this post to your boss, colleagues, and mother to show the value of what you do every day).
However, if you are looking to improve the performance of your marketing campaign and are not yet familiar with landing page optimization, I hope you’re starting to see why this practice can have such an impressive ROI.
Essentially, if you’re spending all of this money to drive potential customers to a website, investing just a little in increasing conversion on that site (more sales, more leads, etc.) can have an outsize impact, as you can see in this research from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report:
After all, the deeper into the funnel you improve performance, the bigger an impact it has.




What I see out there is that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. Good intentions behind powerful and relatively easy-to-use platforms like Omniture® Test&Target™ and Google® Website Optimizer™ have generated a misleading sense that as long as a multivariate test is large enough (several hundred or more combinations being tested), at least one of the combinations will outperform the control.
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