Too bloody many! All of them purport to offer the answer to the holy grail of advertising landing page design.

Most of the advice is re-regurgitated, old, unproven and bloody obvious if you have more than an ounce of common sense. What would be more useful would be a real guide to what has worked, why and how well.

The reality is that landing pages are very often the real “heavy lifters” on a web-site in terms of generating enquiries, sales, data and actions. That is a good thing as at least we know where to start when in comes to optimising performance as PART OF AN OVERALL STRATEGY.

Let’s not get bogged down in the fine detail of what to try, where and why as this does vary from site to site, person to person and market to market. Let’s start where we should do, at the beginning and from the visitor’s point of view.

1. The visitor arrives at the landing page after consciously clicking on a sponsored link. They want something, you know what they searched for. Give them what they want. If they search for a brand term then give brand options, if they search for a product then show a product, if they search for a place then give then location-based information.

Focussed landing pages have performed 150% better than generic landing pages. In real tests, with real visitors, this year.

2. Don’t make ‘em wait, impatient or frustrated people don’t convert as well. That means a fast loading page (ever wondered why Google’s home page is just 16k in size?). Speed of loading is dependent on small pages, fast servers, good connectivity and few outside “includes”.

Frequent testing with our clients show a direct correlation between logical size of page and performance. A recent test saw a 25k page perform 50% better than a 100k page and 75% better than a bloaty 150k page. The pages were identical aside from logical size.

3. Visitors want to do something, such as buy, apply, find, request or contact. Make those options clear, visible, easy and fast to do.

Above the fold can make a difference but only if the page is uncluttered. A recent test on a cluttered page showed no difference in above and below the fold for a conversion point.

4. No clutter. Less is more. Reduce choices to keep the visitors decision process simple. No need for complex navigation (or any real navigation at all?). Big text, small words, white space, compelling reasons for an action and no bloody clutter. Everything on the landing page is there to drive the conversion, everything else is dead-weight that WILL hamper conversion rates.

Testing a series of landing pages recently saw a dramatic increase in on-page, in-session and intra-journey conversion when the navigation system was removed as the page was de-cluttered.

5. Everyone makes mistakes. Most of the time. And that includes your carefully crafted (call to action) form so make sure the error handling is world class. It’s a trick called “soft-erroring” and works by never actually producing a traditional error. When an error occurs the visitor is gently guided to a “thanks but” page which gently tells the visitor we need a little more information and the reasons why and maybe makes a suggestion or two. With testing you’ll produce better forms in the first place.

This IS a killer. You can easily see a doubling in first-time conversion if the information you require is difficult to acquire (telephone number, for example) or the question is complex.

How does A/B testing work?

The idea is to change some part of your website and see if the new version does better than the old.  A good place to start is just changing words – maybe a headline. You call the existing version “A” and the new version “B“.

You already know that the page is converting at 2% so you could just try the new headline for a few days and check the new conversion rate.

Trouble with this method is that conversion rates change from day to day. You can guess at some of the reasons: weather, day-of-week, competitor activity.  So you may be trying a bad headline on a good day or a great headline on a lousy day – and make the wrong decision about the headline.

Focus on what has changed

We can remove these other factors from the test. We show A and B at the same time. Software randomly decides if a new visitor to the site is going to see A or see B, then tracks visitors through to conversion and measures if A or B is doing better.

• If it’s raining – people will see both A and B.
• If it’s sunny – people will see both A and B.
• If a rival starts a price war – people will see both A and B.

You have removed the other factors.

Is it significant?

We use a statistical test to check that results are significant – and not just random effects. Sometimes improvements are small, but still worth having. Several 2-3% increases start to add up.

Is it just Connected doing split testing?

Amazon, Zappos, Google, eBay, EasyJet – all the big names use A/B split testing. Join the big boys – with our help.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.

Connected are not a web-design company and therefore keen to avoid the the generic “web design” tag that is too frequently and loosely applied to companies in this field. Connected focus on the engine of sales and marketing and therefore engineer fits in better with our business.

What is digital engineering?

This covers 2 mains areas; functional design and continuous implementation.

Functional design

The creation of mechanical design (a blueprint, or prototype if you will) using the extensive learned skills and experience Connected have. This forms the starting point of the new site and strategy. The new design is designed to meet the current and projected business needs of the organisation with a view to being scalable and flexible across an extended life.

Most of the components come from the tried and tested bucket, the uniqueness for each organisation is how they are glued together. Using tried and tested greatly simplifies the design/build process and largely removes any associated risk of failure.

Continuous implementation

Converting the outline mechanical design into a working web-site using a third-party design company to provide the “look and feel” elements inside the functional constraints of the design plus a healthy dose of good practice. Once live the work doesn’t stop there – the site goes through a constant cycle of improve/test and test again.

This Kaizen cycle of small and continuous improvements is what defines our approach. The true leaders in all fields of information, technology and manufacturing have had a policy of continuing to strive to improve. Put simply, it is not possible to create great solutions and then leave them on the shelf, they need re-working, and re-working, and re-working.

We are all different. No two groups of people have the same aims, thinking, attention span, decision process, fears or barriers to interaction. On-the-ball organisations are starting to realise a new approach and methodology is required in order to better manage visitors and to out-think their competitors.

The “one size-fits all” web that we see today has worked pretty well for the first 10 years of the web. It is, however, a rather poor fit for most business models with it’s rigid structure, resource intensive deployment and general-purpose operation.

Long gone are the days of simply creating a web assets and leaving them untouched, the drive for continual and relentless improvement now haunts most web and marketing departments. The current crop of 1990′s tools and old-world marketing thinking is proving to be a very expensive and flawed route for many organisations.

The role of web-site traffic in generating a successful site is starting to change, organisations now plan “multi-touch” campaigns across a wide range of complimentary media using a range of methodologies. Consolidating this understanding into a single, client-centric, view of traffic that is integrated into the heart of client systems and decision-making processes has become critical to success to competitive marketplaces. Say good-bye to collating reporting from page-based analytics, old-fashioned traffic and conversion reports : Say hello to integrated business intelligence. A new dawn? You betcha

A unified platform

The idea was to create a platform that allowed organisations to optimise their operational functions, brand messaging and information flow in such as way as to create a substantial competitive advantage. Whilst all of these features can be found in different platforms you quickly realise the benefit of integrating all of the key elements into a single, easy-to-use, platform.

This turned out to be a pretty big job, from a seed of an idea in 2002 the early prototypes released in 2004/5 showed promise but were hampered by relatively high deployment costs, limited performance and high R&D costs. In 2006 the the decision was made to re-write the platform from scratch using the learning from the previous years. A new roadmap was created and approximately £250k was invested in the development of V2.0 which turned out to be far easier to deploy, much higher performance and added crucial new features such as proper A/B testing and great API support.

Now on version 2.4 (released June 2009) Connected have re-defined the next generation; a flexible and powerful web platform available commercially to all. The platform provides a simple system to provide tailored, adaptive & personalised content; A/B and multivariate testing; platform independent inbound/outbound traffic management and integrated business inteliigence.

Key features & benefits

Personalised delivery : Right message, right time

Benefits: Visitors will stay longer, engage better, convert better, convert cheaper, convert faster and spend more money

Features: Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

A/B Testing : Continual experimentation and improvement

Benefits: Reverse falling conversion rates, reduce your traffic budget, be sure about successes, applied learning is cheaper next time round, beat your competitors, stay ahead of the game

Features: Simple, fast and accurate testing of the effectiveness of pages, functions, copy, Calls-to-Action, layout, design, brand messaging and profiles. Automated 2, 3 or 4-way testing with statistically correct reporting. Encourages the test, test and test again philosophy of continual improvement.

Whole of life visitor management : Business intelligence and simplified brand messaging

Benefits: Accurate information = good decisions, cut wastage, better customer communications, agility in messaging and brand communication.

Features: Supports over 50,000 landing pages with uniquely tracked codes for simple RoI reporting. Visitor value measured across single session, multiple session, multiple session/computer and whole of life. Full duplex API to back-end CRM systems allowing any piece of data or function to be synchronised online, near line or off-line in call-centres, fulfillment centres, logistics and customer services. Move data using XML, FTP, SQL and email. API to fire actions to third-party systems for data capture, processing enquiries and on-line booking systems.

Advertising RoI tracking : Simple management of traffic sources

Benefits: Race different agencies and media companies to get the best bang for your buck, simple overviews allow for quick and accurate decisions, no need to trust/question/review your media partners

Features: Fully featured APIs for Google, AOL/Advertising.com/Platform A, Yahoo!, Blue Lithium. End-to-end, click to sale reporting. Supports multi-network touch points, variable post-impression. Provides matching and synchronisation for real cost per acquisition and cost per sale. [find out more]

VITES is currently available under a license & support contract starting from £195 per month based on traffic volume and also as a complete turnkey service.

This is a classic sales process for many organisations, often referred to as the sales funnel, yet this methodology on the web is not widely available. Below I will provide a brief overview of a client that uses this technology to stunning effect.

Laser eye surgery company

Founded over 10 years ago on a traditional clinical sales model (information -> consultation -> sale -> treatment) the emergence of the Internet offered this client a unique opportunity to map their current sales process onto an online model. At the start of this project in 2002 less than 20% of treated individuals ever touched their web presence. In 2009, nearly 90% of treated patients went through some element of the various web assets – they have, in effect, transformed into a dot com business in just a few years with spectacular results.

The challenges

Mapping a sales transition curve onto an online system is relatively simple to do with the right platform and this was achieved quite quickly and easily. Using the VITES™ platform a number of sales steps were created; first-timers, information gatherers, thinkers, consultation bookers, consultation attenders and treated patients. At all stages in the journey help and assistance is made available. Testimonials re-enforcing and evangelising the positives in the process are posted.

To grow the business and generate sustainable sales, every person in the process has to go through (almost) every stage and this process is not always linear, some steps are missed out and some are clumped together depending on the needs, fears, issues and financial standing of the customer.

At each stage there are various challenges faced by the company and the customer. Here is a summary of the stages and the challenges:

First timers – Stage A

Customer : Who is this company? Are they right for me? What’s involved in surgery? How much? Will it hurt?

Company : Quick engagement, make sure they stay or leave a method for re-engaging (email, address)

Information gatherers – Stage B

Customer : Where is the information I need? How much will it hurt? How can I afford it?

Company : Getting the “this is simple & painless” message across. We can make this affordable. We are the best.

Thinking about it – Stage C

Customer : Really not sure about surgery? Will I go blind if it goes wrong? It’s expensive.

Company : Gotta keep ‘em warm, if they disengage we stand a good chance of losing them. It really *is* safe.

Consultation bookers – Stage D

Customer : Can I see someone near me? Does it cost? Will it hurt? Credit or cash purchase?

Company : Consultations are free, no obligation, no sales pressure. We are the best!

Consultation attenders – Stage E

Customer : Hmm, I’m suitable now – should I go ahead? What happens if I go blind? What about post-op complications?

Company : Gotta get them to buy, this is the most expensive stage to lose ‘em, momentum is the game

Treated patients – Stage F

Customer : Wow, it’s fab – who else can I tell this about, can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner, it didn’t hurt

Company : Lets get these guys talking to the wide world and also to the people in the early stages

There are clear themes that run throughout most of the process, fear and cost for example, but at each stage there are subtly different issues, challenges and therefore different messages, different calls to action and different ways of dealing with the visitor.

The solution

Using the VITES™ Journey Platform, rules define that each visitor is tagged at each stage and “dropped” into a profile that fits the stage that they are at. In each profile there are different ways of dealing with the various challenges and these are served up as custom content based on what is known about the visitor. Additionally, there is external learning that can be transferred into the system; for example an incoming first-time visitor who has typed “laser eye treatment” into Google has a higher preponderance to move faster through the sales cycle than, say, an individual who has responded to a “win FREE laser eye surgery” banner on Hotmail.

A bespoke forum comprising FAQ’s and posts is available to the visitor. It is important that platform technology and the quick and easy availability of “help” work together to enable the journey to continue.

Below are some rule examples:

• If you are a stage A and have typed “laser eye treatment” into Google then show a “Consultation request” form
• If you are a stage A from a (filler) banner campaign based around “Win FREE” then show a “Win FREE form”
• If you are a stage A person and leave the site then flood the visitors banner network with “Win FREE” banners to get you back.
• If you have been on stage B for more than 30 days show an “Interest Free Offer”
• If you have just become a stage B then show a “Consult Booking” option
• If you are at stage C then show testimonials from people like you, treated near you and show forum posts from stage F people (how wonderful it is)
• If you are stage D then show special offers during week 6 to 9

The rules are not complex but there are a great deal of them and with around 3,500 entrance points to the site used by approximately 1,000,000 visitors per month the automated system simply chugs away delivering the right content at the right time. To further expand the model, to say “show a consult booking” option is wider than just online; it includes the use of personalised email and also communicates this information to (and from) the call-centre to ensure that the sales message is consistent across all communication platforms.

See it working?

The average time from first-arrival to sale is around 90 days and with the VITES™ platform being self learning and with many of the rules making quite subtle changes it’s actually very difficult to see the process in action – which is good. You don’t want the visitor to have a “jolting” experience every time he or she returns to the site. The very nature of VITES™ is that it is subtle.

Trial and error economics

The very nature of the platform encourages testing, seeking improvements in all the stages. A few percentage point improvements in the stages generates huge compounded gains. For example, the overall conversion rate from visitor to client has doubled over the last 3 years and the cost per sale has dropped 80% over that time period whilst the time-to-close has fallen by over a third. These are all substantial gains and one of the reasons that the work done on this client is often quoted as real “best practice” across the world and used by some of the top Internet gurus as the basis for workshops, seminars and events.