From search to review – The cycle of conversion optimization
Landing pages help improve a company’s ability to segment its marketing approach. From bringing in varying key demographics to visitors coming in through an array of social media marketing campaigns, a landing page offers an effective way to inform specific groups of potential shoppers what they’ll find on the site.
It also helps direct these possible customers to products they are more likely to find interesting based on their navigation route to the website. However, landing pages do not simply accept traffic from inbound links.
Landing pages are also sourced, crawled and listed on search engines, so improving search engine optimization and making pages more attractive to incoming visitors will help boost a company’s conversion rate and return on investment. Here are some of the most beneficial tools and tips for optimizing any landing page, regardless of the company, products or services.
1:1 attention ratio
Landing pages are designed for specific target audiences. Due to this, it needs to have a singular call to action. Likewise, it should have a single idea. The attention ratio is the number of attention-grabbing attributes to a landing page, Ideally, an individual landing page should have one, or in other words, an attention ratio of 1:1. Subsequent attention-grabbing attributes should have separate landing pages for these purposes.
In a recent study, VMO, an A/B testing, and conversion optimization service provider looked at what would happen if it reduced the number of attention-grabbing attributes on one landing page. It removed the header of the particular page, which cut the attention ratio from 13:1 to 3:1. This simple change resulted in a 100 percent conversion rate increase (Venture Harbour, 2018).
The entire purpose of a landing page is to provide specific information to a smaller demographic of visitors. If a landing page is going to provide a dozen or more attention points, it might as well not have a landing page at all. The more focused the landing page, the higher the performance rate.
Split the attention ratio to different landing pages
Landing pages are simple and straightforward. By reducing the attention ratio of an individual landing page, it isn’t necessary to abandon the point of interest on other pages. In fact, creating another landing page for the other points of interest help increase optimization by allowing a business to segment its incoming traffic even further.
Crafting additional landing pages may only require slight adjustments within the wording, yet these additional landing pages lead to a drastic increase in a company’s conversion rate.
According to HubSpot (2017), a website with between 31 and 40 landing pages experiences seven times as many leads generated than companies with only one to five landing pages. For companies with over 40 landing pages, the lead generating jumps to 12 times more than companies with between one and five landing pages (in the study, websites with between one and five landing pages had around 100 newly generated leads while companies sporting over 40 landing pages saw over 1,200 new leads).
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Answer questions before asked
Customers often attempt to talk themselves out of making a purchase. It’s why such a large percentage of shopping carts go abandoned (depending on the metrics used, shopping cart abandonment ay vary between 40 and 80 percent, while the Baymard Institute found the average shopping cart abandonment across all e-commerce sites sit at 73 percent, and over 80 percent for tablet shopping 85 percent for shopping with mobile phones).
Unanswered questions with regards to a specific product or service for sale play a role in shopping cart abandonment. That’s why it is helpful to address these questions on a landing page. By answering questions before asked, there are fewer reasons why someone on a landing page might back out.
Some recommended FAQs to provide on a landing page can include how much it costs, when will the product go out, is it trustworthy, is there a return policy/refund policy and what kind of payment options are accepted?
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Avoid the avoidable errors
Nothing crushes a landing page’s optimization potential than an easily avoidable error. If the page contains spelling or grammatical errors, a visitor to the page may see it as less than professional. Landing pages contain very little in way of written text, so errors become that much more noticeable and flagrant. By taking the extra time to avoid these minor, avoidable mistakes, fewer visitors to the page will back out of it due to an unprofessional nature.
Mobile optimization
More Internet searches are performed on mobile devices now than on desktops. Desktops will likely never again have a higher usage rate than mobile electronics. Despite this, many websites fail to format landing pages for a smartphone or tablet.
According to Adobe, only around 50 percent of companies currently using landing pages utilize mobile-optimized pages, yet more than 75 percent of Internet usage is done on a mobile device. This means a large portion of landing pages will not properly display on the mobile device, which in turn will lead to landing page abandonment and a drop in the conversion rate.
According to the same Adobe statistics, implementing a mobile-optimized landing page will triple the chance of boosting a conversion rate and result in a landing page optimized conversion rate of over five percent (the average is around two percent of landing pages converting visitors into leads).
Consider videos
Videos on landing pages come in two forms: in the background and embedded into the page. Videos offer a desirable increase in conversion rates when utilized properly.
First, the business should not use a video as the background. The constantly moving image, without the ability to turn off or pause playback, may prevent the visitor from seeing the important information needed. Second, a video background increases the amount of data an Internet connection needs to download in order to load the landing page. One of the main benefits of a landing page is a faster load time. This video background removes the advantage altogether.
Instead, when using a video, it needs to be embedded into the page from an external source, such as YouTube. This way, the video can load and playback after the page has already loaded. According to Eye View Digital, landing pages with an embedded video see an increased optimized conversion rate of 86 percent.
Ditch the bloat
Landing pages need to load quickly. These individual pages shouldn’t have the kind of anchored bloat of a website. It needs to be streamlined with images properly formatted to load quickly. Added bloat, such as graphics or video backgrounds (as mentioned earlier) will drag down the loading time. The longer it takes for a landing page to load, the lower its conversion rate goes.
According to Kissmetrics, for every second it takes a landing page to load, the conversion rate drops by seven percent. This means a four second load time drops conversion rates by 28 percent.
Removing the video backgrounds and unnecessary coding will help cut out the unnecessary data downloads. Additionally, making sure an image is formatted for the Internet helps as well. Images taken directly from a camera are likely a few megabytes in size (if not larger). By down-converting the file, it’s possible to shrink the file to under 100 kb, which won’t slow down the loading time for the landing page.
Remove clickable content
In website design, providing backlinks and connections to other pages is part of the page building process. However, outside of the very specific all to action, it’s important to remove all clickable content.
According to Whole Brain Group, 58 percent of landing pages provide offer-related visuals that are clickable. Initially, it may seem like a good idea to provide a clickable image within the landing page. However, these clickable visuals drag down the conversion rate and hinder total optimization.
It’s crucial for a landing page to keep a visitor until the potential customer has turned into a conversion. If the drive for the landing page is to collect an email address, providing clickable images takes the visitor away and prevents them from providing the desired information.
In some instances, it’s possible to have a form load and request the same information as what is desired on the landing page. In general, though, the best practice for any landing page is to ditch all unnecessary links and to only give a visitor one available course of action. This limited course of action forces the person on the page to either fulfill the call to action or to back out of the page completely.
In conclusion
A landing page has the ability to boost quality traffic into a website while directing visitors to products and services in line with their particular interests. With that said, it’s still important to optimize landing pages to boost the potential conversion rate of such a landing page. By following these different tips and suggestions, any business has the ability to experience an improvement in its return on investment while generating more emails for its email list, grow its social media presence or reach any other goal it has established for itself.
Mike Giannulis
I am an entrepreneur & coach specializing in business growth and digital and direct response marketing. I run a small coaching & consulting firm (OnlyOneMike.com) helping businesses achieve maximum profits. In 2012, I was on a weight loss TV show called Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition.
