Optimize Your Landing Page with the Right Testing Strategy

At Commune, we've officially
declared January "Landing Page Optimization Month."

Your landing page, whether it's a stand-alone sales letter or your site's
home page, is central to your ability to convert prospects into
customers.

Being a savvy web marketer, you probably already know that.

But if you're like most marketers we've surveyed, you likely aren't
testing properly.

Or enough.

Or even at all.

So we've come up with some indispensable tips to make sure your testing
is efficient, easy and effective.

Testing Is Everything

No matter how much you know about creating the perfect landing page,
testing is the only way to know what truly works for yours.

Without testing, all of your optimization efforts will be worthless.

Because if you can't measure your results, you can't optimize
diddly-squat.

Types of Testing

If you're new to testing or you're doing it in-house, a regular series of
simple A/B tests should be all you need. It's the easiest and cheapest,
and it'll give you the most immediate actionable data for honing your page.

To do it right, pit your existing page (your control) against a slightly
tweaked page (or pages) where you've changed a single element like the
wording of your headline, the placement of your lead-capture or the location
of a testimonial.

Then keep what works and repeat with a new variable.

Sure, there are more complex tests, like multivariate testing (performing
multiple A/B tests simultaneously) or even Taguchi-style multivariate
testing (using a statistical model to amplify small amounts of data and
project results). But these can be both time-consuming and expensive, and
they're best left to the pros.

Testing Guidelines

Now that you know what you need to do, use the following strategies
to make sure you're doing it right:

1. Run your tests long enough. Run every test for a minimum of two
   weeks to make sure any variance in response isn't random.

2. Keep it simple. Change too many elements at once, and you won't
   be able to tell which changes are driving your results.

3. Keep the traffic source constant. The only variables should be on
   your landing page. Traffic arriving from multiple sources (like
   different pay-per-click ads or different keyword searches) could skew
   your results.

4. Re-test regularly. Even top-performing landing pages have a shelf
   life of about four to six months.

5. Go beyond conversions. Knowing a page's conversion rate is great,
   but seeing which conversions eventually turn into qualified (and
   repeat) customers will be even more worthwhile.

Now that you know how to test your landing page, you'll need some
tips for tweaking it.

So next week we'll serve up some recipes for clear, compelling landing page
headlines.