You wanna know what really pisses me off? When the Broncos lose. (I was angry quite often this season...)
You wanna know what really boggles my mind? Landing pages. Sometimes knows as squeeze pages.
The objective of a squeeze page is to get somebody to give you their name and email address. That's it. Usually, you send somebody to a squeeze page from a PPC click. That person is probably looking for exactly what you have to offer. That person will probably be very happy, in the end, that they gave you their private email information.
Your job is to communicate as efficiently as possible all the great things that are in store for them if they sign up.
And, of course, there are a million ways to do this. And of course, the lifeblood of your online business is getting these people to do that. If you can get a high percentage of people to sign up (generically speaking) you pay less per conversion. If you get a low percentage of people to sign up, you end up paying Google a lot more than you should for each converson (and probably lose money on each sale, and probably go out of business, and probably become a bitter old man). So, it becomes a point of much testing and changing and tweaking to get as many people to enter their info on the squeeze page.
But here is what boggles my mind:
These two landing pages are identical, with one obvious difference. In the original squeeze page, the signup form is in the middle of the page, after some interesting content explaining all the fantastic benefits of signing up. In the new version, the signup form is placed smack dab at the top of the page underneath the headline.
A simple change like moving the signup form from the middle of the page to the top of the page produced
much better conversions. You can see from this Google Website Optimizer screenshot that the new squeeze page (with form at top) performed a heck of a lot better.
One disclaimer here. As you can see, not a whole lot of conversions have been run through this test. BUT, I'd say at this point it doesn't matter how many more are run, the new squeeze is going to win out.
Moral of the story? Test everything.
To be fair, as is often the case these days, I got this idea from Glenn Livingston. A looooong time ago he said to me something like:
Travis, I'm very happy that you've got a nicely performing squeeze page. Now you need to test the heck out of it. Test everything. Headlines, colors, move the form around, testimonials, .....
etc, etc, etc... And, as usual, my thick skull takes longer than it should to process what a smart man says.
So - thanks again Glenn!
Labels: livingston, online marketing