tagged 
Landing Pages, optimization
Landing Pages, optimization Thursday
09Oct
The limitations of landing page optimization
At the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation summit earlier this week, the event was capped off by a live, landing page “optimization” session. During this session brave attendees offered up their landing page to be displayed on the projector for all to see. Marketing Experiments (the company that owns Marketing Sherpa) then went on to provide landing page optimization feedback to the attendee (change the color of your headline, make your call to action bolder, bring your value proposition into the headline, get rid of the three column format, split up the form into two pages, make the copy longer, make it shorter, more bullets, shorter bullets, etc). I give a lot of credit to those who offered up their landing pages and the team on stage providing this real-time feedback.
After watching this for 30 minutes, I was reminded of two things.
- Optimizing within the confines of one page will only take you so far. We can list 50 or so best practices (like the ones listed above taken from the session), but then what? Then you are tapped out of ideas & best practices, and stuck with whatever your conversion rate is. This is the problem with thinking about a landing page. We need to think about landing experiences and we need to be open to experimenting. This goes straight back to the innovation/iteration cycle.
- Best practices are just that, nothing more nothing less. There are no hard and fast rules and we shouldn’t pretend like there are. That’s why testing is so important. It doesn’t matter what I, or any other optimization whiz, know (or think we know). There are no hard and fast rules. All that matters is what gets results. And the only way to know what gets results to is to test & try.
Reader Comments (4)
Hey Anna, Thanks for the recap on the live optimization session. I'm surprised that the whole "Landing Page Experience" concept isn't more mainstream. We are in an age were the user is in control, and you would think that Marketers would want to do everything possible to make the experience as relevant as possible. Also in my opinion it makes optimization, and testing a whole lot easier.
Anna - Kudos to you for blogging about a topic that sorely needs more posts - landing page optimization. Optimization and testing can truly lead to both evolutionary and revolutionary change in sales and ROI.
However, on my end, your ideas on landing page "experience" are not developed enough to fully comprehend and differentiate from other concepts on the topic. For example, how would you define "landing page experience" and how would you create it?
I look forward to hearing more from you on the topic. - Ryan
Hi Ryan, Thanks for your comments. One way we define landing experience is conversion path. Here are a few links to places where we've dug into the conversion path concept.
http://www.ioninteractive.com/articles/2007/6/4/the-anatomy-of-a-conversion-path.html
http://www.ioninteractive.com/liveball-support-blog/2007/1/10/what-is-a-conversion-path.html
http://www.ioninteractive.com/glossary-of-post-click-terms/post-click-marketing/conversion-path.html
A landing experience might be a page. Or a microsite. Or a conversion path. I think it's important to step outside of the box of a single page and just think about the mindset of someone clicking the ad and what type of 'experiences' you can try to get more people to do more of what you want them to do.
Looking forward to continuing the conversation Ryan, and thanks again for the comment!
Hi Anna,
Excellent topic. I think you bring up something that it is at the heart of conversion optimization. Increasing conversion rates to the double digits goes far beyond best practices, good headlines or few calls to action. Double digit conversion rates are very possible but require a holistic approach to conversion that puts customer at the heart of every decision during the landing page creation process.