Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

Ten Tips for Holiday Testing

I offered some thoughts on ways to boost holiday spending on your site in a recent newsletter, and was surprised at just how many people read the article. Seems as though as marketers, we're beginning to embrace testing and optimization, even during such an inconvenient time as the hectic holidays.

My point in the article was that as the holiday season draws near, we can't afford to give in to the fear that testing might somehow jeopardize the wonderfully increased numbers of the season.

In fact, giving in to fear and avoiding such a smash-hit tactic as testing can be far more risky during the holidays than continuing to test. After all, the testing of promotions and content during off-peak times results in significant increases in ROI. Imagine, then, now much more you can bring in by testing during the busiest time of year.

Testing technology, too, has changed in recent years, so that web operators no longer need to fear that making changes, testing those changes and optimizing for the best results will put any real restriction on their daily traffic or run the risk of a system-wide failure.

Rather than avoiding testing because of fear, I suggested that marketers take control of our sites and our traffic by running some simple tests.

Here's a shortened version of some of the things you might try testing. Or, go here to read the article in its entirety:

1. Landing page merchandising

 

Nothing is more important on a retail landing page than the way merchandise is displayed. What products you show, how many items are displayed, whether photographs are large or small, the quality and quantity of copy all benefit from aggressive testing and optimization.

Consider how products are grouped: Try listing best-selling items versus most popular items versus most-often-recommended.

2. Percentage off versus dollar savings, and other promotions

Customers often respond differently to promotions, depending upon how it is framed, even when the ultimate price is the same (e.g., 10% off a $100 purchase versus $10 off a $100 purchase).

You can also test free shipping and with the threshold for free shipping, to see if the resulting boost in sales makes up for the loss in shipping fees. And don't forget to testhow long you offer free shipping. The promotion matters a lot in, say, early December, but it ceases to matter later in the month.

3. Encouraging customers to “act now”

You can often improve conversions by generating a sense of urgency among visitors. Test different scarcity messaging like “Limited Time Only” vs. “While Supplies Last” vs. “Offer expires November 31st.”

4. Reflecting paid search content

Create customized landing pages for your 5 top-performing keywords. Then, make sure that the landing page content obviously relates to the search terms. You might repeat the search phrase verbatim, or reorganize your content to narrow the focus of the page.

5. Reinforcing your affiliates

Reminding customers where they came from can also increase conversion, especially if a visitor stands to gain by spending money with you (e.g. Upromise).

Try showing the logo of the affiliate to those who arrive from affiliate sites. Test size and placement of logo, as well as reinforcement copy.

6. Promotions in email marketing campaigns

You don’t have to limit yourself to testing a promotion within the email itself. You can also carry the promotion forward onto the website, customizing it so that only the people who received the offer will see the offer, and so that they will see only the specific offer that they received in the email.

7. Call-to-action

On paid search and email campaigns, test “Learn More” or “Start Now” versus “Buy.” When writing your call-to-action copy, finish the “I would like to...” sentence.

8. Gift suggestions

Test whether gift suggestions affect sales in your particular environment. If so, you might begin testing what you yourself think will be a great gift idea. Is it really something people want to give? Keep back-up ideas on hand in the event that what you think they want to give turns out to be wrong.

9. Increasing trust during checkout

Test placing confidence information (return policy, privacy policy, customer service number, recent awards, etc.) and security trustmarks (TrustE, VeriSign, HackerSafe, etc.) above the fold and in combination with each other to see if you can reduce abandonment rates.

10. Radical simplification

Yes, cross-sells and other content may increase your visitors’ average order value, but in some cases, superfluous content distracts customers from completing their purchase.

Lost revenue from abandoned shopping carts may exceed revenue gained from cross-selling. Test it and find out!

There is a "Too Much" For Everything

Next time you are looking at your site, and admiring how much content you offer and the richness of the home page, I want you to think of this picture:

Where is the limit?  When is more more (products, editorial, links) and when does it become less?

Making Relevance Work for Viewthroughs

Relevance is king. But not just for getting Google or Yahoo! rankings. It is also critical for making viewthroughs meaningful.

A "click-through" is a direct click off of a display or keyword ad onto a page.  A "Viewthrough" is a visit to a page from a customer that saw an ad but did not immediately click. 

The argument is that a visitor may have been influenced by the ad without being led to immediate action.  If you believe in this, then you should believe that the visitor should see content on the viewthrough that is relevant to the ad impression.

In yesterday's post I mentioned relevance as a reason to include more interactive applications on a website. But relevance needs to be something marketers increasingly consider, in everything they do online. That's because consumers are becoming spoiled. With a few simple clicks, they can get exactly where they want, find exactly what they want, and move on if they're not totally engaged.

Sending them to generic landing pages, or simply to your home page -- designed with every possible type of consumer in mind -- is thus beginning to reach a state of diminishing returns.

By targeting content on your home page even a little more closely to the consumer type can have a huge impact. Think of how you send users to a targeted landing page during a PPC campaign: when they click an ad with an offer, they see the offer repeated. Those who click through, then, are closely targeted.

But what about viewthroughs (those who don't click through, but who visit your site at a later date)? They come to your home page and have no reminder of the offer that may have spurred them to visit in the first place.

For a fun test, try targeting viewthrough visitors with specific content that reminds them of the original offer. How? Check out this article in Offermatica's last newsletter. It includes lots of screenshots and testing tactics.

The Basics: how to start testing

Confused about testing? Need a primer? Check out this newsletter article that offers 5 straight-forward tips to creating a testing plan.

Some of this may be basic stuff to a lot of you. But a recent post of mine got me thinking. I reminded marketers that what works for some types of visitors won't necessarily work for other types visitors, and that what works for one segment of an audience won't automatically work for another.

So why don't more companies test, and why do smart people like Al DiGuido advocate less testing rather than more? I think it's because they don't know how easy testing and optimization can really be. At minimum, all you need in order to conduct a test is two ideas. Can't decide which call to action is going to work best? Test them both.

You don't need to create two separate web pages, divide traffic, and send a percentage of your visitors to each separate page. That's the old days. Today, it's all about  usability; that's why with services such as Offermatica, all you need is a handy m-box, or content slot, which you can use to serve differing content to different groups of visitors.

Do Your Home Page Tests Flop? We Know Why...

Have you ever run an exciting test on your home page, and both versions perform equally well (or equally poorly)?

If so, you're not alone. The fact is that most companies make their first foray into live testing by showing two versions of a home page (often one for a week, then another). And sadly, many find that neither seems better than the other. It's a surefire way to take the wind out of the sales of any testing program, but it doesn't have to happen.

Giving Customers What They Want... Without Hype

I've been thinking about customer relationships this week. We love our customers, and we're in the relationship for the long haul. And we want them to love us back. Right?

But, we lie to our customers, and they lie to us. We hype features, we hide feedback, and in focus groups or surveys, they tell us what they think we want to hear. How do we get around the "infidelities" of the relationship to find out what they really think, and to give it to them without hype?

Staying Competitive in Keyword Buying

The rocketing costs of keywords -- projected by JupiterResearch to soar from an average of $0.36 in 2004 to $0.47 in 2009 -- means that marketers who don't focus now on increasing ROI from paid search will soon be unable to afford effective search engine marketing at all.

Luckily, staying ahead of your competitor in the paid search field can be relatively simple:

"The best practice for search marketers is to have each keyword lead to a unique landing page, which is tied conceptually to the keyword itself," writes Gary Stein formerly of JupiterResearch, in his December 2, 2004 report titled Landing Page Optimization: Maximizing Search ROI Through Simple Merchandising.

However, many merchants control hundreds of keywords, making customized landing pages for each term an unrealistic goal. Instead, create customized landing pages only for those keywords that bring the most activity to your site.

Then create broader category pages for terms that drive traffic but can still be bundled together sensibly.

For example, a travel destination site might create a single category landing page that encompasses lodging, car rentals, and entertainment in Florida. A separate category page might cover trips to Disney World.

Many companies stop customization at that level. But with tools like Offermatica, which works as a hosted application, merchants can highlight specific, relevant products within the broader category page, creating in essence a semi-customized page for individual users.

So, while a user who types in "Miami Beach hotels" might find himself at the broad Florida travel page, a specific Miami Beach hotel can be plugged into the page as a promotion. He might see, for example, a marketing box reading: "20% off a three night stay at the Miami Beach Marriot!"

By highlighting particularly relevant products, which tie back to the source keyword, merchants will increasingly be able to generate positive ROI, increase keyword spend, and successfully compete against bigger merchants with deeper pockets.

Staffing for Testing

These days, the question for marketers is no longer “should my company test?” but “how can my company make testing work?”

The evidence keeps piling in: Conversions leap 127 percent on a landing page test! Revenue per visitor soars 21 percent simply by reiterating an offer on a product page! Average order value jumps 8 percent after testing impulse buy suggestions on the checkout page!

So how can your marketing group organize to optimize? Here are a few tips:

º Make a schedule

º Think 40, not 4
Some customers of ours are on track for 50–100 tests/optimizations per year

º Avoid the “monster”
Big tests have their place, especially if you are changing significant back–end software. But this should be the exception, not the rule.

º Think “how can I use testing to increase performance of a campaign or program?” not “when should we test the home page again?”

Most importantly, however, think through the staffing. You do not need a Ph.D., nor does this person have to love on analytics.

Here are the roles we have found to be necessary to run an ongoing testing program:

--Champion--
The champion, or operator, is generally a manager–level employee who plans and sets up the tests, watches results, makes changes, and keeps the program moving forward. Generally, the champion is the program advocate –– the one who knows on a fact–based level the success the program is bringing to the company.

--Content creator--
If you’re going to run a test of four different versions of a promotion, someone will need to create those four versions.

--Technical--
While the technical needs for Offermatica’s testing solution are minor, somebody does need the ability to make sure the interface with Offermatica works.

These three roles, along with that of the business owner –– the head honcho who signs the checks and who cares the most about results –– are all it takes to run a successful testing program.

Better yet, these do not need to be four separate people. Depending on the size of the company, a single person can wear all the hats, handling the role of champion, content creator, and techie. A testing program doesn’t take a Ph.D. to run. In fact, a Ph.D. would likely become mired in the numbers and spend too much time analyzing, rather than testing, tweaking, improving, and moving on (not to mention the six–figure salary you’d pay).

We work with companies who have seen remarkable success in testing using someone who devotes 25 percent of her time working on it. And we work with companies who have two or more full–time employees engaged in the testing process. One company we know compensates their champion based solely on the improvements she is able to bring to the bottom line through testing and optimization.

Look at your staff. Find, or hire, a campaign–focused manager who chomps at the bit to take ideas and make them happen. Then, set him free and let him run with it.

Is Multivariate Testing Right For You?

You can increase sales or conversions by 400%, according to a MarketingSherpa finding, by testing and optimizing your landing pages. Use multivariate testing rather than A/B testing, and you can reap those increased conversions much more quickly.

Multivariate testing is a mouthful, but worthwhile to be aware of. Think of multivariate testing as running thousands of A/B tests all at once. It uses a mathematical algorithm to rank multiple elements within a single test.

For example, imagine you want to test these types of elements:

• order and wording of registration fields
• hang-tag with a special offer
• "free trial" starburst
• dense copy vs. bullet points
• photos with people vs. product photos
• incentives (free shipping or dollars off?)
• navigation bar: green vs. blue
• stylized links vs. simple buttons

Multivariate testing allows you to test all of these elements (and more) at the same time. It works with test cells as small as a few hundred, so you don't need hundreds of thousands of users for accurate results. And it ranks each element alone and in relation to each other, something A/B testing cannot do.

A/B tests still have validity. If you've never dipped your toe into the testing stream, A/B testing allows you to start slowly, tweaking a single element at a time. At a global level -- say you're trying to decide whether to sell apples or oranges -- A/B testing is a simple, straightforward approach to determine the better of the two options.

But if you want to get more revenue from fewer visitors and you're not sure what elements have the most impact on conversions, multivariate testing works best. Here are three things to think about if you're considering running a multivariate test:

1. What pages should you test?
The Web pages that have the highest value are prime for testing. Look at the two or three hardest-selling pages. Are they pushing as hard as they can?

Other opportunities to apply multivariate testing include landing pages for email, ad, or search campaigns.

2. What elements on those pages make customers take action?
Every retailer has an idea of who the customer is, what they care about, and what the site needs to do to meet their needs.

Look at your assumptions of customers: Do they care more about price? Quality products? Being part of a community? Getting information before anyone else?

3. Test your assumptions

Anything that you think drives conversions should be thrown into the blender.

Should a big brand put a really average product in the hot real estate to push it harder? Or should you put a hotter product in the key real estate? Both have merit, but which works better?

Multivariate testing is the difference between fishing with a net and fishing with a line. The upshot? You get better results more quickly, an important factor when you consider that most things you test won't have a significant affect on conversions. And you have the added excitement of finding hidden elements that improve conversions (hidden, because they likely won't be the elements that you expected).

Add those elements together for an optimized page that increases conversions and lowers acquisition costs.

Landing Page Testing Best Practices

#1: Never eat anything bigger than your head:

Marketers should resist the urge to test their biggest idea first.

There is a pent up demand for testing among sophisticated Internet marketers. Tests that seem like they should be easy to run are held up because they require new software or development and stagnate in the IT priority queue. When forces align and testing becomes available, marketers are often drawn to large, complex tests. One company asked us if they could "create custom landing pages for all of their 35 identified segments and test each against the default landing page." Although a perfectly fine test, the amount of set-up, content creation and planning required for a test like this makes it less likely to yield useful data and a clear ROI.

An alternative test would be to identify a small number (2-3) of higher value and higher volume segments and design tests for them. A smaller number of tests allows for more careful thought about WHY the results are the way they are. It is very common that ideas that are "sure things" are duds and strange things matter. Which brings us to our second rule:

#2: Prepare for the "Castanza effect":

Often the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you predict will occur.

There was an episode of Seinfeld where George Castanza decided to do the exact opposite of what he would normally do. As a result he gets a promotion, wins the girl... In testing, the "Castanza effect" dictates that tests will often produce results that are the exact opposite of what you were absolutely sure they would be.

A highly respected consultant tested to quantify the positive effect of including thumbnail images of his books on a page soliciting email newsletter signup. He assumed, reasonably, that the images would add credibility to the offer and would increase the likelihood of signup.

The results were the opposite. Of the 5 elements tested on the page, the existence of the book images provided the greatest negative impact on sign-up. We were so surprised by the results we ran the test again with the a and b version flipped and as predicted by the system, the version with no book image (now the b version) was significantly more likely to produce a sign-up.

This is not to say that a marketer's intuition about what will work is not valuable, it is the most valuable part of the equation. When the intuition is dramatically wrong, careful analysis usually uncovers a variation that produces the desired effect. Which leads us to rule number three:

#3: 99 bottles of beer on the wall 99 bottles of beer…

Prepare for more than one iteration if you are looking for significant lift.

The best results rarely come from the first test. Even when we bring all of our best experience to a focused experiment design, the real wins come from the second experiment that is suggested by the results of the first. In other words, designing an experiment that answers the question "why did that happen?" or builds from a "that's interesting, I wonder what will happen when I…" typically turns out more profitably than one that starts with "we can grow sales if we…"

Every smart marketer thinks that they know how to improve conversion rate, increase response, grow sign-ups or improve average order. "If only I could remove that step from the process," "If only I had better targeting capability," if only I could change the navigation from this to that." Marketers are often held back by scarce IT resources, by conflicting demands from the BRAND or corporate marketing or just by internal disagreement. But when they finally get a chance to run their test, ALMOST ALWAYS, they yield less change or different results than expected.

The best approach comes from starting with a hypothesis like "I believe that our navigation is too complicated and if we could simplify it we would have fewer dropouts." Next we create a series of relatively simple tests to isolate the cause of the complication and test several versions that we believe will simplify elements of the navigation. By decomposing the assumed answer into parts and trying variations of the parts we nearly always find a collection of changes that improve the overall result.

The worst-case scenario occurs when a marketer uses IT time and political capital to make a change or run a test that results in a negative or inconclusive result.

#4: Not enough monkeys:

Know how large your test population will have to be in advance.

There is a theory that if enough monkeys sat at enough typewriters, they would eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, fewer than enough and you get mostly garbage. Take a look at the "Monkey Shakespeare Simulator" for more details. We have had several experiences where tests were run on an area of the site that received so little traffic, or had so few conversions that it would take years to reach an answer with reasonable level of confidence.

Fortunately it is easy to avoid this problem. At the beginning of an experiment, estimate the number of visitors and conversions on EACH BRANCH of your test. In most cases it requires between 40 and 100 conversions per branch to begin to achieve confidence. This means that if you running an a..n test with 9 versions and your conversion rate is .2% you will need between 18,000 and 45,000 visitors in the test to produce an accurate result.

For most businesses, tests should take no longer than 2 weeks and when planned properly, they can be concluded after a week.

#5: "A million here, a million there…":

If you combine enough small improvements you can create a large improvement.

There are many things that can be varied on a typical Web page to effect conversion. Unfortunately only a small number of them will yield any significant difference and only a few of those will IMPROVE your conversion, average order… As a result marketers who have been able to construct and execute simple A/B split test often conclude that the results do not justify the cost and time required to run the test.

There is an alternative. Using relatively straightforward techniques, it is possible to test an almost unlimited number of potential page variations by only testing a few combinations or "recipes." Imagine that you would like to test a new page treatment versus an existing "base" page. The base page has three elements, say a product image, a product description and a promotion, and the new page has the same three elements but with changes to each.

It is possible (and fairly typical) that the conversion rate will be no higher for the new page. It is also possible that one or more of the changes on the page increases conversion, but that its effect is canceled by negative effects from the other elements. For example, the new product image increases the likelihood of conversion by 10% but the new description and the new promotion each lower conversion by 5%.

We can construct a test that identifies the impact of each of the elements in their default and new versions so that you can create a new theoretical "best" page. In this example, the new product image with the old description and promotion.

This approach is useful with three elements, but it becomes even better when you are testing 5, 7 or 10 elements or a smaller number of elements in 3 or 4 variations. By running a cycle of tests that starts with testing a large number of elements in two versions to find which make a difference and then testing the important elements in 3-4 variations, we regularly see conversion improvements of 15% - 45% and higher.

Like the world of stocks and bonds and Billy Beane's Oakland A's, science and quantitative analysis will inevitably hit the world of online selling. I hope these tips help you to enter this next phase with great success.