The Benefits of Landing Page Optimisation

To make your search engine marketing campaigns effective, it’s essential to ensure that the landing pages to which your visitors first come onto your website are optimised to maximise their potential. This is especially important if you’re running a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign, because the relevancy of these pages to the adverts and keywords helps to increase your Quality Scores and hence reduce the average cost per click.

The primary aim of any marketing landing page, however, is to get conversions – whether these are enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, sales or any other interaction from the website. Therefore if the landing page is correctly optimised it can provide a competitive advantage for your business compared to your competitors, and achieve a better ROI (Return on Investment). Landing pages can be customised to suit the product or the traffic source and there are two main kinds of tests that can be done to improve the performance of a landing page.

These tests are known as A/B split testing or multivariate testing. The former is the simplest method and involves a comparison between the control page (A) and the test page (B), which has a change to a single element, such as a picture, or headline. Once both pages have generated a required volume of visits and conversions, the one with the better conversion rate would be retained as the control page and a new test page would be created to try and improve upon those numbers again. The maximum recommended number of pages to test at one time is three, otherwise the tests can take too long to complete.

Further tests would be performed upon different elements and page copy until the optimal page is created. The time when no more improvements are possible would become known once all variations have been tried and there’s no significant difference between the pages. The advantage of A/B split testing is that not much technical knowledge is needed and useful results can be achieved with only a small number of visitors.

Multivariate testing is a more in-depth process that involves changing multiple elements of a page simultaneously. The advantage of this approach is that the experiments can be very complex and they can produce great results for a website that attracts high volumes of visits. However, this testing methodology needs careful planning and some skilled interpretation of the accrued data to get statistically reliable results. If both these factors aren’t taken into account, the landing page can end up actually producing fewer conversions.

The main point to remember with landing page optimisation is to remain consistent in the changes being made and to just alter the same type of elements in each test (i.e. the page’s content, rather than any other factors such as traffic sources or, possibly, page design). Another crucial factor to consider is to keep records of what has already been tested, as it’s easy to replicate previous tests and end up going round in circles without making any progress.

Google can help with this process through their Website Optimizer tool, which enables website marketers to set up and track the results of landing page tests. In time, and with the correct strategy, the benefits of a well-implemented testing procedure can result in the reduction in the cost of a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign as well as excellent improvements in a landing page’s conversion rate, thereby lowering the cost per conversion.

If you’d like more information about how to use landing page optimisation to improve your website’s conversion rates, please contact us now.

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