jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Review – Landing Page Tutorial Part 1 and Part 2

Ok people, sorry for the lack of posts the last week or so, things have been busy busy. The private and Free PPC Mentoring section of the forum is alive and well and I will be posting some hot stuff in there this week! I’ve already answered tons of questions that would have taken a lot of trial and error to figure out, so if you haven’t joined our Free PPC Mentoring yet, better hurry. I’ve already talked about finding your targeted demographics and designing your landing pages accordingly. And in part 2 we identified key components in a landing page. In this post I want to cover some basic optimization tips and things you need to continually focus on to improve your landing pages. So let’s begin!

Landing Page Testing and Optimization

Here is a very important tip when you are first about to launch a campaign. You want to create atleast 3-4 different landing page designs. And when I say different, I mean completely different. Each one should have their different colors, header, layout, HEADLINE (the attention grabbing one), different approaches, so instead of saying “Check out these Reviews”, a secondary test would be “The Most Trusted Products are” or whatever creativity you want to put into your market. Try with a picture of your product, try without, try with a video, try without, test it all.

So the Basic Steps Are:

1. Create atleast 3-4 completely different LP designs, with different approaches, colors, looks and headline. (Most of the time you can keep the same body content but it wouldn’t hurt to test different body copy too.)

2. When you launch the campaign you should immediately be split testing 2 LPs, run them until each LP has received at least 70 clicks from the LP to the offer and a minimum of 3 conversions. Take the LP with the best CTR and CR and test the LP #3 with the winner of round one, the find the best of those two and repeat the same process with LP #4. After you have chosen the best design/layout concept of atleast 3-4 different LPs, you can now begin the next step.

3. Split testing the same LP and changing one variable at a time. So now you’ve identified the best layout/design concept for your LP, so you duplicate it. Now you have an Original LP (the winner of all your designs) and the Test LP (which is the exact same LP as the original except we are going to test one change at a time on it.). The first thing you want to test is the headline. On the Original LP you never touch a thing, on the Test LP, you want to change the headline to something completely different and test it against the original LP. Take the best performing LP of the two and repeat that a couple of times. (By the way, after each test you run, the best performing LP then becomes your Original LP and you duplicate that LP and test a new change.) Then work on testing your call to action that is above the fold. Then maybe add or test different images if you have some on your page. Try adding a video to your LP if it would be relevant. Test different color schemes, test the location of the call to action, maybe add an arrow pointing to it. Test absolutely every single thing but do it one at a time and NO more than ONE at a time.

4. Test different offers. If you are running a single offer landing page, if you are aware of similar offers in your niche, test each offer to see which one converts the best. If you are doing a review style landing page, test the positions of the offers you are running. You might have the best performing offer in position #3 when it could be the only thing keeping you from being profitable, if you had it in position #1, you could very well be banking!

5. Use tools like CrazyEgg, Clickheat and Clicktale to help you better understand what type of interaction is going on with your landing page. Exactly where are they clicking, what they are doing, what attracts them the most. That is priceless data.

6. And be creative, try split testing your normal top converting LP against the same LP but with an exit pop that auto redirects to the offer, might be able to gain a few more conversions that way. Or make the exit pop ask them leaving visitor for their email address and name, so that you can inform them of special offers or related information to what they are searching for. Then you can do email marketing on them later. And email marketing is highly effective!

7. Final Point – TEST EVERYTHING ONE AT A TIME! And don’t give up so easily!

Landing Page Optimizing for Great Quality Score

Some people make the biggest deal about getting a high Google quality score. I can honestly say I’ve rarely had a problem with my QS. The reason is, I’ve fed the hungry beast of an engine, GOOGLE, and they are always satisfied with my cooking. And believe me, you’d probably have already found your first successful campaign if you would focus on your landing pages and quality score and do it right. There are many point of views about how to get a good QS with Google, I’m merely going to list the things that I do to get a good QS. This mostly applies to Google’s terms because Yahoo and MSN QS is VERY simple to please.

1. I almost always build my websites/affiliate sites from a Wordpress foundation. I’m not an extremely great designer/web programmer so I tend to take the easy route. I put a Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) in place, which essentially means I make my wordpress blog look like an actual website even though it is powered by Wordpress. I make static pages, remove the blog posts from the front page and relocate them to another page typically names ‘Articles’. Wordpress is superb when it comes to being SEO friendly, which helps it get indexed quicker, more likable by Google, tons of nifty plugins to manipulate things however I want. Both SEO and non-SEO. Another reason why I use wordpress as my foundation is because its so easy to update. I can teach literally anyone to update new content or whatever else that needs to be done.

2. Absolute must have pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Resource Links and Articles.

3. You need to have at least 5 (preferably 10) unique article pages on the site as well. It helps if they are written were they sound factual and professional with external reference points. As you begin to optimize your campaign and realize that it has profitable potential, you need to continually add more articles to it. Two articles a week is a good number (ex:1 on Monday, 1 on Friday.)

4. On your landing page, at the very bottom, you want to link to the following pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy, Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Resource Links and Articles and 3 additional links to high authority external sources, like Wikipedia, CNN, FOX, .edu’s, etc.

5. Perhaps put A, as in 1, one, numero uno, Adsense box, that blends extremely well with your website and is nowhere near the call to actions so they wouldn’t effect it and only place the Adsense on your CMS section, not the landing pages. My theory behind it is if Google sees you are also trying to monetize by Adsense, you are continually adding new content, getting organic traffic, you are looking to be around a while and not just throw up a page and a campaign for a one night stand.

Those tips right there are some important steps that will put you way ahead of the game and competition. Feel free to ask whatever questions you have about this tutorial series in the comments below and I will answer them on my next part in the serious, which will include some rather fun stuff, so stay tuned!

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Your Landing Page A landing page or squeeze page is where visitors get…
2. Tuesday Tips – Improving Landing Page CTR In PPC you really gain a huge advantage when using…
3. The Landing Page Example! Okay, it’s taken me a bit to get this too…

Related posts:

1. Landing page optimization – the top factor for success
2. Landing Page Optimization: The 7 Deadly Sins from SES Chicago ‘09
3. Landing Pages with 74% Click-Thru-Rates. Believe it!!…
4. Ignoring Landing Pages – Are you suffering from a Low Conversion Rate?
5. Promote the Right Landing Page to Maximize Holiday Sales
6. Test Landing Pages for Big Impact on Bottom Line
7. Strategies for Landing Page Success Webinar – Today!
8. 7 Best Practices for Landing Page Optimization
9. Webinar: A/B Testing for SEO Landing Pages — How to Avoid Risks
10. More landing page examples