An introduction for beginners
Landing page optimization is the process of increasing the number of conversions that take place on a website landing page or sales funnel. According to wikipedia: “Landing page optimization (LPO) is one part of a broader Internet marketing process called conversion optimization, or Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), with the goal of improving the percentage of visitors to the website that become sales leads and customers.” Yawn.
Let’s break this down to beginner basics.
You sell the all amazing Super Widget 451 on your website. You are currently getting 10,000 visitors to your site each month, and 1,400 of those visitors actually buy it. That’s a conversion rate of 14%. Niiiice!
You’re feeling like a rock star living life La Vida Loca from all the money you’re making.
But one day you think to yourself, “Man I’m a genius. Seriously, I’ve got the golden touch. But…”, then it suddenly dawns on you that 86% of all the people who go to your site actually say “NO!”. An overwhelming sense of dread sets in… you drop your margarita, get up from your poolside lounge chair and run to the vacation penthouse master suite and cry your eyes out. “Nobody loves me! Waaaaaah!”
Finally after 3 days of lying in bed, watching soaps and eating bon-bons, you get enough energy to get up and make a visit to your shrink. You unload your baggage in shrieks and sighs, sharing your maddening pain, when your therapist (who happens to do internet marketing on the side) asks you, “Have you tried doing landing page optimization for your site?” “Duhwut?!?!?” She goes on to explain the power of LPO.
You wipe your eyes, and begin to get energized enough to dig in and start your first test. You decide that even though the site is probably perfect, you might be able to find one thing that could be improved. You stare and stare at your site of awesome perfection hoping to find something.
The internal dialog goes something like this:
“Dear God please help me, I am in need. Unlike you Lord, I cannot find fault in my creation, and my Ferrari lease payment is due. Please help me find a flaw on my page.” A voice says, “Try the headline…”
So, you look at your current headline and read: “You’re an idiot if you don’t buy my product!”
Wow. That headline screams awesomeness. How do you improve on perfection?
You cry, “Dear Lord, please answer me, my headline seems perfect, what else?”
The voice in your head says, “The H-E-A-D-L-I-N-E!”
You stare at your current headline again: “You’re an idiot if you don’t buy my product!”
“Hmmm… There must be something there, I’m just not picking up on the nuances of perfect copy. But, wait… That means 86% of all people that come to my site are idiots. Hmmmm…. Maybe I could say something to people to help them not be idiots. I wonder…”
You push your margarita aside, and grab your triple-shot mocha latte and begin to do actual work.
“Maybe I should be concerned with what the prospect is interested in. Yes! That’s it! I am Da Man! A whole new approach to marketing. People will write about me one day.”
“What about sharing the features of the Super Widget 451, and blow them away with all it can do. Yes. Oh Yes!”
“Wait! What if I share with them the benefits they receive from buying my product. Hmmm… I wonder.”
After nearly 35 minutes of the hardest work you’ve done in 6 months, “Eureka!” You feel as if God himself came to you with an inspiration so powerful the world just might explode.
You run your coffee stained napkin over to the computer and type in the words you carefully dictated.
“Cut your electric bill by 57% within 6 minutes of installing the Super Widget 451. Your satisfaction is Guaranteed!”
Sublime.
You begin the landing page optimization test with 50% of the visitors going to a page with your original headline and 50% of the visitors going to a page with the new headline (all magically done for you with easy to use tools), and you wait. And wait. In fact, you wait a mere 30 days to find out the results.
You login to your LPO reports systems, and check the numbers:
Page A (Original Perfect Headline)
Traffic: 5,000 visitors
Sales: 700 Widgets sold (14% Conversion Rate)
Page B (New Even Perfecter Headline)
Traffic: 5,000 visitors
Sales: 1,200 (24% Conversion Rate)
“Oh my Schnikees!” You all of a sudden realize that if you could do that with one element on your page you could change many things on your page. You don’t know how you improved on perfection, but you did it! YOU DID IT! That, my friend, is a 170% improvement over the older version of page, and that’s what landing page optimization is all about. w00t!
When you get done celebrating your amazing-ness and want to deep dive into some of the technical aspects of LPO, go buy and read my friend Tim Ash’s book: Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.
You can also visit our free tools and tips for landing page optimization, this will help you get some different views of how your users see your site: Site Readability, Site Flasher, Horizontal Site Overlay Tool, Traffic Calculator, and more.
We offer landing page optimization services on a performance basis, if you’d like to see what it’s like to explode the potential of your current website, just contact us and we’ll show you the power of LPO!
Very great tips about Internet marketing. This would surely help newbies to get started as I know you can earn money online doing internet marketing stuffs.
Do we hear a bit of sarcasm perhaps about clients who want to magically increase their conversion rates but dont know where to start? If it were only as easy as changing an obviously dumb headline then they wouldnt need LPO experts would they? But they do because it takes knowledge and experience that most web site owners / managers dont have.
Ken, thanks for the feedback. We intended the the post to be a silly caricature of what landing page optimization is and how it works for absolute beginners (my mom doesn’t understand what we do, and this helped her to understand what it is we do here). It definitely was not intended to make fun of website owners. Again, thanks for the feedback, I’m sure there are others that may have heard it the same way.
Have a great 4th!
With all the technological advances we have been seeing as business owners, I have no idea why I didn’t hear about this earlier. Landing page optimization could change way my small online businesses forever. I am going to start working on my site’s optimization today.
As a marketing intern, this was an entertaining and informative post that I plan to use in my internship, especially for conversion rate optimization. It’s amazing what a few changes in wording can do, and how quickly they can pay off!
As a business owner I had no clue about landing page optimization and I am in marketing! Thank you so much for the information on how to increase my sales/revenue. Indeed, I love sitting at home making money and more revenue is always great.
I really appreciated the humor in this article. I’ve always had a slight idea about what exactly landing page optimization was, but I was never really clear on how to go about getting started. I feel like, thanks to this article’s simple approach to the topic, I can dive in head first now with more confidence than before. Thanks so much guys, keep it up!
Yes, what you say on your website does matter and does make a difference. I’m not into marketing, but I’m into writing, and persuasive writing is important when selling a product. The text was a bit snappy but I don’t think anyone will forget page optimization after reading your blog.
I enjoyed the humor, and I found the post branching into something I’ve found myself just on the cusp of tooling around with. I’m new to building my own website, and your idea of making a few changes with landing page optimization is very helpful in my understanding of how to get it working for me. Thank you for this, and I look forward to any more information or suggestions you have.
I’m just launching my business’s website and I had originally just been focusing on increasing the number of visitors to the site. Now, I’m realizing that if my business is actually going to be viable I am going to have actually get my visitors to actually subscribe to my service! I’m excited about implementing some of these LPO tips and seeing if they help me increase sales.
I’ve done a lot of entrepreneurial projects in my life, and I really wished I had read this article before I went about my last business venture. Getting a web page just right to funnel sales using landing page optimization has got to be the way to go. Thanks.
I’ve always been interested in building websites. Reading this was very interesting and gave me a few new thoughts about internet marketing. Really hilarious as well.
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