I am excited to announce a new section of our split test/ conversion rate marketing resource center on Landing Page Design. In this section, you will be able to learn all about designing and optimizing effective landing pages.
A Unique Landing Page Idea
By Scott Miller on February 10, 2005Give your customers a chance to connect with you on a personal level- through your handwriting! With the Fontifier tool, you can turn your own handwriting into a usable font on your system. They say you can learn a lot about a person through their handwriting- and if you are selling an honest good product, using bits of your own handwriting on your landing page should only help your conversion rate!
Testing Idea 1003- Page Colors
By Scott Miller on February 8, 2005An often overlooked element of landing page success is the color scheme used. In brick and mortar retailing, the color blue has been theorized to increase sales. You can see this being used in many stores, from Wal-Mart to Best Buy among others. Does blue actually make a difference? Some marketing folks (especially the ones that came up with the research) seem to think so. But without testing, how can you be sure that it is the best color for YOUR product, offer or brand?
Online, color is arguably more important than in the real world. Online everything is presented in two dimensions, on a small screen. The colors you choose will likely have an even greater effect on the customers mood and actions. Here are a few of the things you can test:
- Background color
- Text color- although black on white or a similar light color is probably best for the sake of readability
- Headline color
- Accent colors
- Bullet colors
There are plenty more ideas, but this will get you started. What is the best color for your site, your product and your offer? Only you can figure that out, and only by testing different ideas.
Why testing with Google Adwords yields flawed results
By Scott Miller on February 1, 2005Almost since the Adwords program went online savvy marketers realized it had a hidden power… Direct marketing testing could easily be conducted and superior results achieved. In fact, it seems as though Google has embraced this practice, encouraging advertisers to test variations of text ad creatives. With millions of searches per hour, it doesn’t take long to reach a large enough traffic volume to attain high confidence conclusions.
To verify your own tests, feel free to use my free Google Adwords Statistical Validity Checker
Using Adwords as a “poor man’s” testing tool for landing pages has also been advocated by people who think they know more than they really do. In fact, if you peruse the marketing forums, you’ll often see this discussed, along with haphazard guesses at how much activity denotes statistically valid results.
When you use Google to split traffic between two or more landing pages, you are inadvertently adding a HUGE random noise factor. This WILL screw up your analysis and could cost you MASSIVE amounts of lost sales and advertising dollars. DON’T DO IT.
Basically it goes like this. Google counts a view every time someone clicks on your ad. Even if they come back 4 days in the next ten before buying (and coming back through the same paid link is common.) When this happens guess what it does to your apparent conversion rate. It goes down. In fact, for this guy that converted… he is only showing a 25% Conversion Rate (CR). The next guy buys on the first visit, but from one of your other landing pages. Well guess what, that one just scored a 100% CR for that customer. If this happens a few times, you’ll start thinking that this other creative is better. Bad Idea. Who KNOWS if it really is?
There is no way to be sure, and no amount of volume is going to provide enough confidence to make this test “trustworthy.” The only way to tell for sure is to only count the view once… On the first time a prospect is exposed to your offer. The vast majority of conversion tracking tools out there are flawed- counting all views against all conversions. So be careful. Testing incorrectly is worse than not testing at all- because it takes just as much work, and yields data which will never verify in the bank account.
