Landing Page Testing & Tuning

Tim Ash, SiteTuners.com
Tom Leung, Google
Scott Miller, Vertster.com
Jamie Roche, Offermatica

Tim Ash

Conversion: Getting users to take the action you want them to take

Acquisition — Conversion — Retention
– conversion is the weak link in the process

(Tim just gave out $20 to someone in the audience who answered a question.)

What to tune? Mission critical parts of site
– landing pages that lead to trackable actions
– price of your product or service

On a page…you can tune everything. Don’t copy what your competitor is doing. They’re audience may not respond to same stuff as your audience.

How to Tune:
1) A-B split testing
– test one variable at a time to see which works best; keep that one
2) Multi-variate testing
– test several things at once; e.g., test two headlines and two call-to-action buttons simultaneously
3) SiteTuning Engine
– larger scale testing

Three Mistakes to Avoid
1) Ignoring your baseline — need something for comparison

(Tim just gave out another $20.)

2) Not enough data. Making decisions based on too little data.

(Another $20 given out as Tim is asking questions to the audience.)

3) Interactions are important. Mistake is to ignore/underestimate these.

(And another $20 giveaway. I’m coming to this session at every SES.)

Tom Leung, Google

Will talk about Google’s Web site Optimizer product

White Hat Testing
– don’t show bots something different from visitors
– variations should not differ to the extent that a user would be surprised on reading your site
– test tags alone won’t harm you in engine’s eyes

How to Test w/Optimizer
– choose a page to test
– choose which sections to test
– wizard will give instructions for pasting javascript into pages
– review experiment’s settings & launch
– view reports (after a couple weeks of data are available)

Testing Pitfalls
– too many combos being tested
– conversion goal too far out; easier to test how many start a funnel than finish it
– variations too subtle
– stopping test too early

Scott Miller

Good presentation, but it was two case studies and so not many opportunities for note taking….

Jamie Roche

“Campaign Relevance Optimization”

CLICK - STICK - CLOSE

Click: optimize to get people to your site; match keywords in ad to keywords on landing page

Stick: goal is to lower “bounce”
– pages must be relevant and engaging
– “you searched for KEYWORD on Google” - helps visitor know they’re in the right place; works well on some pages, not on others
– “would you like to search our site for KEYWORD?”

Close: repeat primary message throughout funnel, i.e. - “free shipping”
– optimize forms and cart

Technorati Tags: sesny2007, seo