When spending money in advertising online or offline it is important to have properly optimized landing pages that will convert.  No matter what your business goals are, testing is imperative to better understand the following:  what kinds of media provide the best ROI, what is the most appropriate call to action, how does your brand message impact your audience, do your web page visitors understand your product and are they compelled to convert, etc.

There are various ways to test landing page performance by using variations of the page layout and design, call to action, content variations, and so on.  There are many ways to accomplish this using both manual and dynamic methods.  Manual testing would simply require you to have multiple versions of your landing page and swap out the pages over time, track the result, and see what works best.  This can work well but can take longer and limit your insight.

The more technical and popular forms of testing landing page performance are:

• A/B Split Testing
• Multivariate Testing

A/B Split Testing:  A/B testing is about testing different verions of web pages to see which ones convert better.  A/B split testing can be accomlished in a few simple steps using free tools such as Google Website Optimizer.  Before you get started you need to have a few things accomplished.  (1) Define your conversion goals, (2) Develop your content and call to action to support those goals, (3) Create two versions of your landing page with some variations in design, layout, verbiage, and call to action, (4) Have each landing page on a unique URL and make sure to use some kind of “Thank You” page for tracking conversions.

Once you have your pages ready you will place code on the page that will dynamically serve them to different visitors.  Essentially, if you are testing to different pages, half of your audience over a period of time will land on one page, and half on the other.  Then you can set up various conversion goals for each page (i.e. registration form, PDF download, video view, etc.) and run the test for a couple weeks (depending on your traffic levels and what kind of data you are trying to collect).

Google Website Optimizer is a great tool for this because it can be accessed through Google Adwords or directly and it is simple to use.  It only cares about two things in regards to your visitors:  (1) what page did they land on, (2) and did they convert.  This tool is simply for collecting data, but you can use excel or other platforms for deeper analysis.  Keep in mind that if your pages are not receiving much traffic you will need to run your tests for a longer period of time in order to collect enough data to make any kinds of decisions.

Multivariate Testing (MVT):  MVT is about testing different versions of content within the same page.  So for example you might want to swap out tag lines, call to action, images, videos, etc.  Website Optimizer is also a great tool for this but there are more sophisticated platforms (but they are not FREE). 

When setting up MVT you are atually placing code snipets around each piece of content you want to swap out.  The interesting thing about MVT is the vast amount of combinations you can run.  Google Website Optimizer for example can provide you with 10,000 content variations but I would not recommend doing that.  Keep it simple at first and choose your most important pieces of content like your call to action, maybe a video, etc. 

Both methods are great to use and can easily be tracked by Google Analytics.  Proper testing can drastically improve ROI for paid search and prevent wasted ad dollars.

First, let’s define what a bounce rate is exactly.  A bounce is essentially when a user come to your site and leaves within 8 seconds.  Therefore, if 100 people come to your site and 50 people leave in under 8 seconds, your site has an 80% bounce rate. 

When designing a conversion optimization strategy for any website, it is important to first define the goals of the website.  And to define the goals of the website, you must determine the true business goals.  The business goals (i.e. revenue and profit for example) will define the website goals, and the website goals will determine the conversion goals that must be set. 

Any business would naturally want to reduce their bounce rate as much as possible right?  The longer a user is on the website the more likely they are to convert right?  This is somewhat true in many case but again it goes back to website goals.  So is a high bounce rate really a problem?  In some cases, not so much.  Here is why:

Scenario 1:  A home page for example might receive a high volume of search traffic due to great organic rankings from broad search terms.  Often broad search traffic from short tail keywords drives “unqualified” traffic or people simply browsing the web.  If they do not see what they are looking for they might leave quickly, but this does not necessarily mean the page is not well optimized for your target audience.  Your conversion rate for the actual users you care about might be higher then you can tell from the overall bounce rate. 

Scenario 2:  In another case, a page might do a fantastic job of communicating your brand messsage or product offering, but might simply be receiving less targeted traffic.  In that case people will quickly understand what you do without having to stay on the page longer or dive deeper into the website.

A high bounce rate can of course be a huge problem.  If your website is essentially getting the right kind of traffic and the page is not meeting your defined conversion goals, this will negatively affect your business goals.  But don’t just use “reducing the bounce rate” as your conversion goals for A/B testing or multivariate testing.  You should still use your revenue goals as the benchmark.

Here are some examples of how using bounce rate reduction as your only goal can hurt revenue:

• Removing pricing from the page can reduce bounce rate but negatively affect conversions (having unqualified users digging deeper until they find out they can’t afford your product)
• Having too many special offers, discounts, or FREE services can improve bounce rate but potentially hurt revenue because the people that are converting are buying at a discount or getting free services
• Adding too much content or too many additonal tabs to the page that will keep the user longer but distract them from the end goal – in this case it can often be a good idea to put the bulk of the additonal content and resource below the fold and focus on the calls to action above the fold

When considering conversion optimization as it relates to PPC landing pages you must consider Google Quality Score guidelines.  To achieve a high Quality Score, many things are factored but landing page quality is high on the priority list.  The days of simple pages from brand new URLs with limited content and only a large call to action are over.  Google wants to see that the page is relevant, that there is good supporting content, keyword association, good domain history, etc. 

Here are some very basic tips to acheive a higher quality score as it relates to your PPC landing pages:

• Use a URL with good domain history – for example instead of creating a new landing page for a product launch by using the product name, create a new sub page under the main company URL.  If your company website is AwesomeMedicalSupplies.com and you want to launch a PPC campaign for a new product launch (your product is “Spiderman Band Aids”), you should host the page on AwesomeMedicalSupplies.com/Spiderman-band-aids/ instead of a brand new URL unrelated to the main website.
• Have compelling content – these days PPC landing pages should have a decent amount of content especially if the URL or website is newer.  If your business is a large recognized brand, you probably won’t have to worry about quality score if your pages are set up correctly.  But for newer sites and pages, content is important.  Video content in fact is a great way to engage the users and becoming a very popular form of landing page content.

Here are some general conversion goals that are tied to revenue that can be used in a conversion optimization strategy:

• Revenue per user
• Reducing CPA (cost per acquisition)
• Return on Ad spend
• Registration conversion rate
• Click to call conversion rate
• Software download
• Whitepaper download
• and the list goes on and on…