Landing Page Optimization Article

Published on January 2017 | Categories: Documents | Downloads: 34 | Comments: 0 | Views: 271
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What exactly is landing page optimization? For most search marketers, optimizing landing pages means A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT). It means using tools such as Google Website Optimizer to experiment with different arrangements of a page or different variations in the content of a page to maximize its conv ersion rate. We may ask questions about many different elements of a page. Which headline wor ks best? Is the offer button better with complimentary shipping or free shipping ? Do es a picture of the product compel more people than an image of a friendly custo mer service representative, or the other way around? What about a blue color sch eme versus a green one? This is landing page optimization as most people know it. And for what it does, it is a good approach. Let s call it content optimization finding the best present ation of content on a particular landing page. But content optimization is not the only way to optimize landing pages. In fact, when it comes to boosting your conversion rate, it may not even be the most eff ective method. Segment optimization offers a new approach Segment optimization is about determining how many different landing pages are o ptimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from t he other. Instead of stretching one page to try to please everyone, which is quite hard to do segment optimization breaks out several specialized landing pages that each focus on pleasing a particular segment of your audience. For example, say you re marketing language learning software. Although everyone wh o clicks on your ads wants to learn a language, there are different motivations among them. Students hope for better grades in their classes. Vacationers crave more authentic trips. Business travelers are most concerned about efficiency. It would be difficult to have one page that speaks passionately to all of those distinct audience segments simultaneously. Just consider the headline. If you were deploying one page to fit everyone, you might try lots of variations (content optimization) to discover that Learning Fre nch is easy! is the best headline (on average) for all respondents. Let s say it a chieves a 5% conversion rate, not bad, but not earth-shattering either. But if you had three different landing pages, one for each of these segments you might find that Ace your French exams! works best for students, Experience France as only a French speaker can! works best for vacationers, and Business French in 1 0 minutes per day! works best for business people. These might achieve conversion rates of 12%, 11%, and 14% respectively for each segment, a tremendous success that more than doubles your overall conversion rate. You could never achieve this using one page for everyone. Ace your French exams! w ould perform disastrously for vacationers and business people. If you tried that headline for all respondents, content optimization would throw it out as subopt imal because 2/3 of the audience would think it was awful. But when it s presented to students (and only students) it is the indisputable champion. In that example, segment optimization was achieved by deploying three different pages instead of just one. Content optimization was then used to determine which headline was most effective for each separate segment.

How can you begin using segment optimization in your campaigns? Start by making a list of possible segments within your audience. Who are the di fferent types of people who look for you online and why? Don t restrict yourself t o the way you may have segmented people in your database or your business plan. Brainstorm what s important and relevant from the respondent s point-of-view, by con sidering any or all of the following issues: the specific problem the respondent wants to solve the demographic/psychographic persona of the respondent the respondent s stage in the buying process the role of the respondent in their organization the respondent s geographic location the respondent s industry or the size of their organization These are your initial buckets into which respondents could be segmented. Don t wo rry if there s overlap between buckets, as these won t necessarily be either/or choi ces. Next, review the keywords and ad creatives you re running in your search marketing campaigns. For each keyword/creative pair, ask yourself is there a particular s egment that its respondents would clearly belong to? If the answer is yes, add i t to that bucket along with the number of clicks per month it generates. If ther e answer is no, leave a question mark next to it perhaps with a handful of segme nts it might appeal to. For instance, in our example above, the keyword phrases french exam and college fre nch are obvious candidates for the student segment. Phrases like business french an d executive french fall into the business traveler bucket. But learn french can t be s egmented just from the keyword. Now, look over your segment buckets and see which ones have the most number of c licks per month. These are your best targets for segment optimization. For each one, create a dedicated landing page that is focused on the needs, want s, and characteristics of that particular segment. Here you can use content opti mization such as A/B testing or MVT to find the best headline, imagery, layout, etc. for each page. You can almost be guaranteed that these segment-specific landing pages will outp erform your more generic ones. With your first few big segment wins in place you can move further down The Long Tail, to less popular, but still easily identifi able keywords to meet each segment. What about keywords that you can t automatically associate with a particular segme nt? In those scenarios, you can use techniques such as multi-step landing pages and directed behavioral segmentation . But that s an article for another day.

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