Landing pages provide enormous value for your website. They collect traffic from paid advertising and direct visitors to the product or service they need. But what if your landing pages aren't converting?
Since they contain so many different elements, it can be difficult to know what you should change to improve the effectiveness of your landing pages. You might want to change the entire content of the page when all you really needed was a new headline or call to action. This is why it's essential to continually test your landing pages.
One of the best methods for getting started with experimentation is A/B testing. This method allows you to isolate one particular element to test on a given page. You then direct visitors to either page A or page B and see which one performs the best.
While testing can get complicated quickly, you can start by following these five steps:
1. Look for the most opportunity
Consider your goals for optimization. You want to increase conversions, either for sales or building leads. In order to do that, you'll need to lower your bounce rate and increase the number of visitors who click through to the next step in your funnel. So, start with landing pages that have high bounce rates or fail to meet your conversion goals.
2. Think like your visitors
You can randomly change fonts or colors on a page, but you want to put more thought into your testing. In particular, you want to put yourself in the seat of your visitors. What elements are most likely to drive their choices? Are they looking to buy or just find more information? Depending on the visitor's intent, you can modify page elements to guide visitors to a sale or a lead magnet.
3. Go for easy victories
Especially for your early tests, you want to get some small wins in order to validate your testing process. Instead of trying to tweak button colors, you should shoot for the large targets like headlines or hero images. Examining major elements like these should deliver clear results that you can carry over to multiple pages and future tests. The more dramatic the difference between your testing elements, the easier it is to see why the change made a difference.
4. Plan multiple tests
While you typically want to change just one element in an A/B test, you should be planning ahead for a series of tests. By setting up a plan for five to ten tests right away, you will have a true strategy. You should then modify your strategy after gathering some data from your first tests. But don’t get too far out. It doesn't do much good to plan for fifty tests in the future because you will likely change your approach as results start to come in.
5. Measure and interpret your results
For all this effort to pay off, you need to be able to interpret the results. Keep in mind that you will need enough data to validate your results, so don't try to draw any conclusions after just a few visitors. Using a tool like Google Optimize will help you set up your tests and provide insights into what the experiment reveals. It integrates with your analytics data and grows with you, from A/B testing to multivariate strategies where testing becomes more complicated.
Once you get the hang of testing, it can drastically improve the performance of your landing pages and inform your future strategy. At Interstellar, we help clients build relationships with their customers through effective design and marketing. To discuss how we can help you build your audience, contact us.