Landing page usefulness
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 09:11PMOn Monday, I had the great pleasure of joining the panel for Increasing Conversions Through Better Usability at SMX East in New York. Usually I try to squeeze several post-click marketing topics into my 15-minute time slot at these conferences, but for this session, I decided to focus on just one: landing page usefulness.
My thesis: Usefulness is more important than usability.
In most discussions of landing page optimization, the focus tends to be on ways to test lots of presentation variations on one particular page. Try different headlines. Try different images. Try different button colors. MVT advocates sometimes go overboard with this (“test hundreds of variations!”). It’s true, these things can have an impact on a page’s conversion rate.
But, frankly, that kind of optimization is a side show.
Such tweaks represent maybe 20% of the potential value to be achieved in post-click marketing — even though they tend to dominate 80% of the talk around landing pages.
If you want to make a major leap forward in the effectiveness of your landing pages — and your entire search marketing program — you need to focus on the more fundamental issue of usefulness. A really useful landing page gives the respondent exactly what they were looking for when they typed their search query into Google (or Bing?).
As I show in the above slide deck, Overland Storage has done a wonderful job with this. If you do a search for “data deduplication,” they offer you a useful fulfillment specifically on data deduplication. Click, click, you’ve got it. They also do the same with data recovery, SOX compliance, data retention, backup window, business continuity, etc. They are masters of giving searchers specifically what they’re looking for — and in the process generate quality leads with double-digit conversion rates.
To be sure, there’s a lot of “usability” that has gone into these pages too. Beautiful designs, clear calls to action, helpful segmentation choices, strong headlines, etc. But that’s icing on the cake. The reason people convert isn’t because they’ve been dazzled by a secret incantation headline; it’s because they’re getting what they want.
In my presentation, I show a slide of a respondent saying, “Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.” That’s the goal we need to go after.
Once you set your sights on that target, you start to realize how powerful landing pages can really be. Your primary website has a lot of inertia — it’s hard to squeeze dozens or hundreds of niche concepts or offers into a cohesive navigation system. But with short, focused landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites, you can whip together clear and compelling content that tightly integrates with the promises you’re making (explicitly or implicitly) in your keyword buys and search ad creatives.
“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”
Landing pages are to paid advertising what blog posts are to organic search (or what tweets are to social media). They’re a way to rapidly deploy a targeted (and meaningful!) message to a targeted audience that’s looking for just that specific content.
Once you frame your post-click marketing mission in those terms, then you evolve from trying to optimize a handful of pages ad infinitum — forever held back by the law of averages — and embrace the real objective of landing page management agility: being able to quickly and efficiently generate lots of individual landing pages, each one matched to a particular niche of your audience that will find it to be immensely useful in their search.
“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”
That’s the goal.
Reader Comments (5)
I think that the second to last slide sums it up beautifully. "Find what they're looking for and give it to them" Seems pretty simple to me.
Exactly. We probably could have edited it down to just that one slide, but I had 14 1/2 more minutes of presentation time to fill. :-)
Love the point you're making here Scott and I totally agree.
What I'd like to hear is how you know what customers want? Are you using testing still? Your methodology of creating many different landing pages and funnels is very compelling but how do you know what you should slice and dice and when you should stop?
It sounds like you still do use testing to help find where you should slice and dice, in addition to other things, but I'm not sure.
Keep it up, wish I could've saw your presentation first hand.
-Billy
Hi, Billy -- thanks for the kind comment! You raise several excellent questions.
You're right, most of what we're advocating could be categorized as "testing" and "slicing and dicing." Ironically, even though landing pages are great for targeting specific slices of an audience, many marketers haven't pushed the envelope there very far -- not because of philosophical objections, but rather the operational overhead has been daunting. We've tried to build software to dramatically reduce that overhead, so it opens up the bandwidth to explore finer slicing techniques.
When do you know to draw the line? It depends. The de facto answer would be to say "when it stops giving you return on more time invested." Once you have your core marketing running at max speed though, I'd continue to reserve room for experimental work -- to constantly explore new niches.
Since this presentation was given in the context of search marketing, I could turn the question around and ask: how do you know how many keywords to buy? When you should you stop buying more? Really, that's the same issue, since it's just the next higher step in the funnel -- the point of the landing page is to just match the expectations of the keyword/ad as closely as possible.
As for knowing what customers want, that is the ultimate question. Landing pages are great to test hypotheses about that, but for generating the ideas in the first place... well, I'd say that may be one of the great contributions of the social media sphere, to listen to what people are interested in, using their own words and ideas. (Reports on your organic traffic keywords are great too, albeit not as sexy as social media.) ;-)
It all boils down to a phrase you had in one of your slides: "freshly squeezed landing pages." Of course, in smaller clients there is a lot of resistance to saying you need to spend to build (many) more landing pages. But that is the reality. And this presentation helps make that point.