Landing page usefulness
source from “Business Week, 6th October 2009″
Usefulness is more important than usability.
In most discussions of landing page optimization, the focus tends to be on ways to test lots of presentation variations on one particular page. Try different headlines. Try different images. Try different button colors. MVT advocates sometimes go overboard with this (“test hundreds of variations!”). It’s true, these things can have an impact on a page’s conversion rate.
But, frankly, that kind of optimization is a side show.
Such tweaks represent maybe 20% of the potential value to be achieved in post-click marketing — even though they tend to dominate 80% of the talk around landing pages.
If you want to make a major leap forward in the effectiveness of your landing pages — and your entire search marketing program — you need to focus on the more fundamental issue of usefulness. A really useful landing page gives the respondent exactly what they were looking for when they typed their search query into Google (or Bing?).
As I show in the above slide deck, Overland Storage has done a wonderful job with this. If you do a search for “data deduplication,” they offer you a useful fulfillment specifically on data deduplication. Click, click, you’ve got it. They also do the same with data recovery, SOX compliance, data retention, backup window, business continuity, etc. They are masters of giving searchers specifically what they’re looking for — and in the process generate quality leads with double-digit conversion rates.
To be sure, there’s a lot of “usability” that has gone into these pages too. Beautiful designs, clear calls to action, helpful segmentation choices, strong headlines, etc. But that’s icing on the cake. The reason people convert isn’t because they’ve been dazzled by a secret incantation headline; it’s because they’re getting what they want.
In my presentation, I show a slide of a respondent saying, “Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.” That’s the goal we need to go after.
Once you set your sights on that target, you start to realize how powerful landing pages can really be. Your primary website has a lot of inertia — it’s hard to squeeze dozens or hundreds of niche concepts or offers into a cohesive navigation system. But with short, focused landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites, you can whip together clear and compelling content that tightly integrates with the promises you’re making (explicitly or implicitly) in your keyword buys and search ad creatives.
“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”
Landing pages are to paid advertising what blog posts are to organic search (or what tweets are to social media). They’re a way to rapidly deploy a targeted (and meaningful!) message to a targeted audience that’s looking for just that specific content.
Once you frame your post-click marketing mission in those terms, then you evolve from trying to optimize a handful of pages ad infinitum — forever held back by the law of averages — and embrace the real objective of landing page management agility: being able to quickly and efficiently generate lots of individual landing pages, each one matched to a particular niche of your audience that will find it to be immensely useful in their search.
“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”
That’s the goal.
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