Landing Page Optimization

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 a website who become sales leads and customers. A landing page is a webpage that is displayed when a potential customer clicks an advertisement or a search engine result link. This webpage typically displays content that is a relevant extension of the advertisement or link. Landing Page Optimization (LPO) aims to provide page content and appearance that makes the webpage more appealing to target audiences.1

Landing Page Optimization Infographic

Call-to-Action

Sometimes a very subtle change to a Call-to-Action (CTA) can result in a huge improvement in conversion, resulting in significantly higher sales for your website.

1. Develop a hypothesis such as, A user is more likely to do what we ask of them if we say, “Please.”
2. Each user is presented with a different variation of the CTA. In this example, one group of randomly-selected users is presented with Come Here, while another group of users is presented with Come Here, Now! And a third group of users is presented with Come Here, Please.
3. Data is collected until we are confident that one of these choices is the winner, based on a significant lift in conversion. On a website we would typically look for an increased percentage of users who add an item to the shopping cart, or who complete a purchase.
4. We make permanent changes to our design and/or advertising campaigns to reflect the winning combination.
5. Repeat steps 1-4

LPO Benefits – Increased Conversion & Sales

• The same amount of traffic generates more sales
• Decreased Customer Confusion – People find what they are looking for with less work
• Improved Customer Satisfaction – People are happy with the overall shopping experience

LPO Case Study: FineTuxedos.com

Prior to this LPO experiment, the homepage of FineTuxedos.com had two banners, one above the other with a different CTA.

CTA #1 (small banner): Complete Tuxedo Packages Starting at just $135.95
CTA #2 (large banner): Real Men Don’t Rent, Winter Sale, up to 50% Off

Hypothesis

Displaying two banners with two calls-to-action on the homepage confuses the user and he or she will be less likely to add items to the shopping cart and make a purchase. Reducing this to one CTA will eliminate confusion and improve conversion. In addition, CTA #1 is a stronger CTA than CTA #2 and would improve conversion even further. 2

Test Cases

• Combination #1 – CTA #1
• Combination #2 – CTA #2
• Combination #3 – No CTA

Results

Our hypothesis proved correct: Removing one banner, and displaying only CTA#1 resulted in 39% more users adding items to their shopping carts after visiting the homepage of FineTuxedos.com.