Graham Cooke, eCommerce Project Manager, Google commenced the Landing Page Testing and Tuning session by talking about conversion frameworks and marketing effectiveness:  driving the right person to your site.   Ok, when you get them there, are expectations met (tech)?  If yes, they will stay if no, they will bounce (how many people analyse their bounce rate when optimising pages?).   

For non-bouncing users it is about website usability.  When they arrive at your page, does it offer them what they want?  Is it easy to navigate around?  Are they a short click away from finding what they need?  Product & Service Offering > Measuring Analytics > Continuous Improvement Framework.  Graham identified the web usability framework according to ‘buyers’: help me find, help me choose, help me buy.

• Find a product category
• Find product within category
• Find product with on-site search
• Find product by cross sell

Identify where there are problems on the site.  What are your KPI’s?  You need to analyse Key Trends & iInsights, Impact on the Business, Actions to take.  Multi variant testing allows you to try out different pages and identify what parts of site and your products are working.  56% conversion in Google’s own conversion for one of its own pages with a ‘try’ button instead of a ‘sign up’ button.

Graham advocated using analytics to figure out your biggest problems.  Build a simple multivariant test using website optimiser, for instance (free from Google).  Use the results to determine a scale plan, then scale successful results across the site.  Next up was Anders Hjorth, who looked at:

Landing page testing:  a DIY approach.

Why landing pages work:

• Site hierarchy
  • Use standard hierarchical structure
• Principles of design
  • Designers are taught consistency and repetition
• Level 1 personalisation
  • Why are you here? Looking for something?
  • Where did you come from? Search engine?
  • What language do you speak? Geo target
  • What are you looking for? Keywords

 According to Anders, the Number 1 secret of landing pages is ‘keep it simple’.  Use conversion cues:

• Everything the user needs is on the page
• Simple working, persuasive, efficient
• Call to action

His key takeaways from the session?  Build a framework;  Build a methodology; Appoint a strong project manager.

Jon Myers took the presenting Baton from Anders and launched his presentation with the attention-grabbing statistic that:

it takes 13.2 seconds to convince your visitor that they are in the place that they should be and not to leave

You need to physically stand out and to optimise and to do that you have to start using relevancy principles.  Quality score is more relevant for a landing page,

What are the basic principles of creating a good landing page? 

• Deep linking, offer driven - use image and text.
• Messaging
• Potent images
• Navigation
• Pricing
• Offers
• Cross selling
• Drop off
• Product reviews

Jon then gave a second stat:  that it takes 1.8 seconds and just 1 glance to get people to click through to your site. Consumers are less likely to purchase from a brand that doesn’t appear in the (google) search results, he says.  Google is trusted by the internet public.  He recommended putting an 0800 (a UK freephone) number on Google local search advertising.

Remember the Gorilla advertisement?

 185 000 people viewed video on the Cadbury’s web site.  2 500 000 watched the video on YouTube.  What does this suggest to ?  Integrate with google a lot more.