How To Get Your Landing Pages Ready For Testing

Are your landing pages ready for testing?

In the first part of the Creating Effecting Landing Pages series we talked about the difference between tracking click-thru rates and conversion rates, and why tracking conversion rates is more important. In part 2 we’re going to talk about how to get your landing pages ready for testing and optimization.

While “best practices” are often shunned, and rightly so, there are some “best practices” that should be adhered to, particularly when it comes to the user experience (UX) of your landing pages.

I’m not suggesting you usability test your landing pages because seeing what a test group does won’t tell you how your landing pages are going to perform with a variety of different visitors once the page is live. However, I am saying there are fundamental UX principles that should be considered before you even begin testing.

Here are four things to consider before you begin testing your landing pages:

• Load time of your page
• Messy, multi-layered navigation
• Browser optimized
• User-forgiveness

Once you have these basic elements nailed down, now it’s time to start testing.

Here are 5 quick ways to start testing your landing pages:

1. Behavioral targeting – keep this simple: give second time visitors different information than you gave them the first time (obviously they’re interested if the returned, now give them something new to convert them).
2. Copy – change your messaging, headline and body copy, and experiment with bullets and paragraph lengths.
3. Images – experiment with people (male vs. female, group vs. individual, looking left vs. looking right), product shots, animals, charts, etc.
4. Geolocation – test providing local content such as mentioning specific city names and showing images that reflect the location the visitor is in.
5. Content – experiment with different content elements (tabs vs. no tabs, still image vs. video, bullets or no bullets, etc.