The first question that should be asked is how necessary are
landing pages? The answer – very necessary.
Landing pages are pages built within a site and are meant to drive conversions
tied to a specific objective. These landing pages are generally built to
capture the clicks from paid ads and have a clear, direct message that pays off
whatever the ads are referring to. According to Patel & Jacob (2016),
“A landing page is generally
your first and only opportunity to make a first impression with your customer.
It’s your chance to start a conversation, ask a question, invite discussion and
welcome clicks on into your site. For many sites, particularly those in
high-competition areas, it may be your only chance to reel in a visitor and
convince them that your offer is worth their time and attention.”
This means that landing pages must provide
quick access to consumers and house the exact information they are looking for,
making it vital for companies to adequately assess how the information is
provided.
Does this mean that optimizing a landing page based on analytical
data can truly convert to sales? The short answer, yes.
Case in point – due to the global recession of
the late 2000s, Nature Air, a Costa Rican airline, was experiencing harsh web
sales and had to adjust their strategy quickly to make up for these declines.
In order to truly understand what could be adjusted from a web perspective to
help increase sales, Nature Air did extensive usability studies and qualitative
analysis through online surveys of the Nature Air sites.
The destination landing pages within Nature
Air were crucial to the success of business (and continue to be) since they are
the top pages landed on from the search engines. Nature Air knew these pages
needed to be exactly what the consumer was looking for as research showed consumers
entering the site from the search engines were typically in the later stages of
the buying cycle and more likely to provide a true conversion to sales.
So what did Nature Air do to adjust their strategy and address
this challenge?
Nature Air tested 17 landing pages to find
out what it was that would make consumers act quicker. As shown below from one
of their pages, consumers were more likely to click the conversion link when
the content was embedded in the body of the page.
ORIGINAL:
AFTER TESTING:
(Kelly,
2009)
According to Kelly (2009),
“The thinking behind this change was that by placing the call to
action within the content area, with messaging specific to the location, and
including the starting fare price, the call to action would become more relevant
and people would connect with it and be persuaded to book a flight.”
Within
this example from Nature Air, there are a few specific analytics elements that
were analyzed and adjusted to better answer the consumer needs:
·
How many visitors entered the landing page
– (landing page – visitor characterization)
·
How many visitors clicked through the
contextual link – (click through – visitor characterization)
·
How many times a flight was booked – (conversion
– conversion)
The
testing of the landing pages, followed by a simple contextual change within the
site (allowing for another click-thru within the body of the page) increased Nature
Air’s conversion rate from 3% to 19%, a pretty sizable increase. This is just a small example that shows the
importance of understanding what the consumers are looking for, how to adequately
answer paid ads, how to adjust payoffs based on testing, and ultimately the
importance of web analytics in comparison to sales.
Patel,
N., & Jacob, S. (n.d.). Landing page optimization. Retrieved May 30, 2016,
from https://www.quicksprout.com/landing-page-optimization-chapter-1/
Kelly,
K. (2009, June 17). How website usability testing increased sales in the face
of the global travel recession. Retrieved from
http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/google-website-optimizer-increases-conversion-591
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