I get a lot of questions from customers about what to test, and especally what to test first. There is a very simple rule of thumb here. Almost always, your headline will have the greatest impact on overall conversion rates. A great headline can literally make or break your campaign, so start here.

The esteemed John Caples, author of “Tested Advertising Methods,” estimates the headline makes 50%-75% of an ad. Must be why he spent and entire 5 chapters on headline writing and testing alone. If you don’t have this book on your shelf now, and you are serious about improving your online sales copy, I suggest you get it immediately. It’s probably the smartest fifteen bucks you could spend.

Brian Carrol of the B2B Lead Generation Blog posted a new entry yesterday. His podcast features a great interview with MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland.

During the interview, Anne provides some highlights of the information in their new Landing Page Handbook, including the top mistakes people make on their landing pages.

View his blog entry now, with a link to the podcast!

Conventional wisdom suggests that a landing page should focus on providing one path and one path only. Either the user converts, or not. This works best for most offers. But what if your particular product or offer has a longer sales cycle, and your marketing campaign is likely driving prospects at various stages of the sales cycle to your landing page.

In this case, the single offer paradigm may be bettered by using more than one conversion option. Create conversion options for each possible stage of the buying cycle.

Consider this example. Prospects the farthest out in the sales funnel may be averse to filling out a full registration form to get a whitepaper. For them, a simple opt-in newsletter may work better. But the mid-stage prospects are beyond the newsletter and will gladly give their information for the information rich document.

How to handle these very different prospects with one page? Put both options on the same landing page. How you count conversions here is important. You can measure each element separately, lump them together, or do both at the same time.

The other option is to set up a “two stage” conversion process. This basically presents the conversion options one after another. First get the user to sign up for one thing, then on the confirmation page, present them with the next. This can work very well because the person has already crossed a mental barrier against providing information after the first step.

Of course the question is, which offer to put first. And that is one that needs to be tested too!

Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an article titled “Call to Action Ads Give Clients Results They Can Measure.” It’s the first time I have seen the Journal embrace something we have known would happen… that the trackability of online marketing has begun to filter into the world of Madison Ave. advertising.

By incorporating website addresses in a television spot, marketers can quickly guage an ad spot’s effectiveness. Companies like Cadillac are running ads and immediately correlating the numbers over to visits on the landing pages created for the TV campaign (see www.cadillacunder5.com for an example.) According to the Journal, Papa John’s is able to track online orders by the hour and can immediately judge a spots effectivess.

The part of the article I found the most compelling was this quote from John Freeland, managing partner at Accenture: “Do they focus on marketing as a management science, or do they treat it as an art form?” And of course the fact that all this stuff is measureable also means that it can be tested and optimized. I wonder if they are doing that too. They certainly should be.

Optimizing a single step process like a landing page gets great results. But if you want to get really incredible improvements, look at optimizing your “multiple step” transactions. Each step you optimize creates an accumulating effect on your end results. Check it out…

For this example, lets look at a newsletter. It’s possible to greatly increase your newsletter subscriber list, with a few simple tweaks and optimizations. Imagine if you could generate 1000 new subscribers a month instead of the current 500. Is this realistic? Absolutely. Almost everyone can achieve these kind of results with a carefully administered test and optimization strategy.

What you do with these ezine subscribers is up to you, but most people use ezines to build their brand as well as promote products and services. Take a typical offer in the newsletter, which pushes people to a landing page on your site. Have you tested and optimized this offer? Imagine you have, and you increased your clickthrough rate from 2% to 4%. Again, totally realistic.

Once they get to your site, they hit a landing page. This is where things get fun- the money is actually made here. Optimization of the landing page has yielded a conversion increase from 2% to 3%.

Lets see what happens to the big picture:

WOW! We went from 4 to 13 sales, by optimizing three steps in the process.

If you read many of the marketing SEO blogs or went to SES NYC, you probably have heard of Eyetools. Their recent research of how people actually see Google search results has been a major hit among search engine marketing practitioners. The Eyetools technology measures how people actually “see” a web page. The result is a multicolored heatmap with varying shades overlaid on a web page, depicting where eyes spend the most time.

Rather than jump on the bandwagon and report how great their Google research is, we’ve found some other nuggets on their site and blog. The best is probably this case study of an actual home page improvement project. Conversion was not their specific goal, but I would like to think that most of their findings could improve conversion rates, especially for internal marketing messages. People can’t click things they don’t even see, which after reviewing their research is quite a bit.

Keep an eye on these guys, their doing some really interesting stuff!

Dr. Ralph Wilson, of Wilsonweb.com fame, has just released the results from his test of the SitePal Avatar system. You can read the full case study in todays “Web Marketing Today” email, or by clicking here.

Sitepal avatars provide an animated flash character intended to “engage” the user. This being the case, Dr. Wilson used Vertster combined with Clicktracks to compare changes in site stickiness caused by the Sitepal avatar. View his full assessment and results.

Two of the most prevalent sources of website traffic are “organic” search engine traffic and paid traffic. Many sites struggle to gain acceptable search engine traffic, and resort to buying hundreds of dollars worth of ads to compensate for this. While buying traffic does work, the conversion strategy is usually all together different from search engine traffic.

With paid traffic, the best way to convert is often by sending the visitors directly to a targeted landing page, with few options other than the buy button.

Maximizing conversion results from organic search traffic is altogether different. It is difficult to write strong direct response copy, and optimize it for top search engine rankings. You just don’t have control of which of your pages will show up for a given search term.

The bottom line is, you can’t control where people will enter your site, and you have little control over what they will see. When working with organically search traffic, we move to using “internal site marketing tactics.”

Internal site marketing refers to elements of the site which drive people to act- such as promoting a whitepaper, prompting people to request more information, visit the forum, sign up for a trial, register for the newsletter, etc. How these are presented and promoted will have a huge impact on the actual benefit of organic traffic.

The best part about them, is that they can be tested and optimized! Although testing with “global” site traffic introduces noise, if you run your test out longer, you’ll still be able to get a pretty good indication on what works and what doesn’t.

I just stumbled on this gem this morning over at Search Engine Roundtable about dynamically creating your landing page with actual search keywords. See Passing Query Phrase into Document Landing Page, which provides a brief commentary and link to a related thread over at the Search Engine Watch forums.

This is definitely something that would be worth testing for 90% of people out there. In most cases, my guess is it would increase conversion rates for many.

Every time you run a test, think about things you can do to reduce noise- or uncontrollable effects on your data. One thing that is often overlooked is fluctuations caused by the day of the week. Think about it. Many sites enjoy significantly more traffic and more sales on weekdays, while others perform best on the weekends.

Web site visitors tend to be very different on the weekends and evening, than mid day during the work week. I have seen a lot of activity and responses come from senior management of very large companies. Rarely during the day. Weekends are when these time-stressed executives get to surf.

Say you run a test starting on Monday. By Thursday, you could have a substantial amount of data, pointing to a clear “winner.” The inexperienced tester would begin celebrating prematurely. Along comes the weekend, and what you thought was the winner could end up falling behind.

How to avoid this? Always run your tests by the calendar week. This essentially removes the weekday/weekend fluctuations from affecting your end results.