Last time, I shared with you the 10 landing page elements, such as the call to action, that make up the anatomy of a landing page.
Once you have identified your elements, there are five dimensions to evaluate if the elements will work at converting your visitors. The five dimensions are:
- Relevance
- Quality
- Location
- Proximity
- Prominence
Relevance
Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.
First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.
Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.
Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.
Quality
The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.
Location
Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.
Proximity
Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.
Prominence
Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizard from fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.
These five dimensions of the 10 landing page elements, in conjunction with some testing, can help you have the most effective landing page for converting your visitors to take action. In my next column, I’ll share with you the seven factors of form design that are critical to your conversion rate.
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Thanks for the great landing page article.
“Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out?”
Honestly, I never thought about this before. The part where you talk about prominence is excellent.
AJP´s last blog ..World’s Best Internet Marketing Training Program- Does It Really Exist?
This post will be bookmarked and forwarded onto my staff. I have a few graphic design friends and I try to tell them they're getting to caught up in there skills and not focused enough on simplicity.
They obviously never read "Ogilvy on Advertising"
Great stuff – thanks guys!
That was a great article and said a lot more than a lot of the expensive courses on the subject.
I think the graphic up the top says it the best – always be testing. The only way you know if you are producing the best landing page possible is to always try and beat it. Follow the ideas you mentioned and keep split testing variations until you find out exactly what works for the audience.
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Just discovered this post of yours, Bryan. Excellent info! Thank you for sharing the wisdom.
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Geno Prussakov´s last blog ..Why Automatic Approval of Affiliates is Always Dangerous
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