When it comes to creating a functional, user-friendly website, there are a few key things to keep in mind: a clear navigation, concise forms, clear calls to action and fast loading pages. Taking your site a step further, really eking out the maximum performance and optimizing conversions takes a little bit more finesse. The process of fine tuning your website should be ongoing and a process of test, assess, measure and improve adopted.
Central to this philosophy is landing page testing. Continual testing offers marketers the chance to improve their landing pages to achieve more conversions, based not on experience and gut instinct but data-driven decisions. There are dozens of landing page testing tools on the market and an equal abundance of tests you can try. To help you get started, we’ve rounded up three of the most useful landing page tests to try first. Use these as a starting point, before testing other page elements further down the line.
1. Call to action tests
Your call to action is arguably one of the most critical CRO elements on the page. Its success (or failure) is felt directly on your conversion rate, meaning testing, testing and more testing should be high on your agenda.
In terms of what specifically you should test about your CTA, there are three main areas to focus on: what the call to action actually is, how it is displayed and where is appears on your page. You’ll need to test all of these elements separately in order to draw meaningful, actionable results from your data.
Your call to action itself should be short, sweet and to the point. It should instruct the reader to do something:
- Contact us now for a quote
- Download our exclusive ebook
- Share with your friends on Facebook
This is a great example from TV chef, Jamie Oliver.
You’ll need to play around with your CTA text and test different variations to determine which is most effective. Likewise, you should also test the appearance of the CTA – text v button and the color of the button are all useful.
While most of us will be familiar with the mantra that the most important information should go above the fold (and this takes on particular significance with mobile browsing), it has long been argued that the position of your CTA on the page should be determined by how complex the information on that page is. This idea was tested as far back as 2012, with Kissmetrics finding that there was a direct correlation between the two.
Of course, this won’t be true for every industry and every audience but, it does show how important testing is and that what you may intuitively believe to be the right answer, isn’t always the case in the real world.
2. Headline and page copy
If you are directing traffic to a landing page from a paid search ad or other form of paid placement, getting the page copy right takes on a new urgency. You have paid for that traffic. Displaying the best possible version of your landing page, with compelling headlines and page copy that resonates is the only way to generate a viable return on investment.
When testing landing page copy, focus not just on the text itself but the headline, the sub-headline and how these relate to the advert that delivered the visitor in the first place.
There should be a strong correlation between the text of the ad and the messaging of your headline and page copy, particularly in the first paragraph. While we have shown above that the position of your call to action can be influenced by how complex your offer is, it’s also been long established that online shoppers have short attention spans and you have an average of around seven seconds to make an impression. Make sure you’re making the right impression by capitalising on what piqued the interest of the visitor in the first place – namely the ad copy.
Test different iterations of headlines and top of the page content. Focus on creating compelling headlines and sub-headlines that not only reflect the advert message but also crisply and immediately convey your value proposition. Test how precise you can be, while still mirroring the advert.
Suspect you can make the decision without testing? Behave.org tested images A and B. They then asked their visitors which design, A or B, they thought won the test. The majority opted for image A. In actual fact, image B was the winner.
Image A
Image B
3. Images
Images can be difficult to get right on a landing page. While they are important for the overall aesthetic of the page, and it’s often said that an image is worth a thousand words, image selection can be hard. Testing an assortment of images is the only way to find out which works best on your particular landing page.
Because the sole purpose of a landing page is to convert traffic you have essentially paid for, the images used should pull double duty. Not only do you want them to make the page look inviting, they should also convey an aspect of your offer that the text could not. This could be a visual representation of various elements of your message, such as step one, step two and step three conveyed in a picture. It may be an image of your product in use with text superimposed or, it could be another type of image entirely.
While intuition may get you so far, testing will give you solid data and insight and show you which visual leads more of your traffic to perform the desired action.
