Steps For Improving Landing Page Conversions

Posted by Cameron Francis on 13 Mar , 2014 in News Uncategorized

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) of landing pages is always a concern for businesses and marketers. If you speak with any business owner with an online presence there is a good chance they will speak about methods for improving their conversions.

With the high expense of driving qualified traffic to websites, it’s not surprising that many people are concentrating on improving conversions.

The good news is that analysing and testing landing pages doesn’t require a large expenditure or complex code. Today, there are numerous low-cost tools for testing your site that can make CRO relatively inexpensive.

However, you must develop a systematic process for analysing landing pages rather than testing numerous different concepts simultaneously. You must also make use of the appropriate tools for the job.

Analyse Your Landing Pages First

Beginning your CRO on your landing pages, rather than other pages of your site has several benefits:

Landing pages have a specific focus and consequently they are likely receiving targeted traffic via your existing efforts.
Land pages provide a good environment for testing your efforts, consequently they are the best place to start. When you improve your results you can incorporate the changes you have made into the remainder of your site.

The CRO process can begin with three relatively simple steps that will provide you with the data you require to understand the changes that need to be made.

First Examine The Basics

When you begin your landing page analysis, start with these basic elements:

Forms
Messaging
Call to action(CTA) buttons

Optimising CTAs is vital to increase conversions. If you have weak CTAs it is unlikely you will get many conversions.

In particular you should test the placement of your CTAs on your page, colours, and the text associated with your CTAs to determine which combinations work best.

When you are testing the text on CTA buttons, test generic text such as “sign up” against text that is more descriptive like “get more traffic now”.

You need to test various combinations to determine what works best. A helpful tool is the button optimiser from SiteApps. This app can be downloaded for free and it functions similarly to a Google Analytics tag.

Forms

Most landing pages have a form. In fact, just about every site has some type of form in it. It is likely that on your site, there will be someplace a user must fill out a form in order to convert.

The initial action you should take is to reduce the number of form fields to a minimum and test how this effects conversion. Normally, forms with fewer fields convert better.

In some instances, longer forms are necessary to gather customer data. In these cases, it is helpful to use Google Analytics to set up some custom events to report on events that pertain to your users interactions with your form.

In general, the easier your form is to fill out, the greater will be your rate of conversion.

Copy Analysis

Of course the copy of your landing page will play a large role in how well the page converts.

The difficulty many webmasters run into when testing their landing page copy is setting up metrics to determine how certain terminology effects their conversion rate.

One technique for analysing landing page copy is to set up Google Analytics events for various user actions you want to track. An application like CrazyEgg can also be useful to analyse all the actions your users take when they arrive on your landing page.

Traffic Analysis

Now you need to focus upon analysing the type of traffic that is arriving on your landing page.

You need to perform some keyword research to determine which keywords are of high value and most relevant for a specific landing page. You may already have done this, but you can get some useful data from Google’s keyword planner.

Examine the reports on search queries in Google Webmaster and see if you are getting any traffic from the keywords you identified. If you are not getting any traffic from your identified keywords chances are the quality of your traffic is not so good. If you are not receiving relevant traffic it is unlikely that your conversions will be very good.

You will need to engage in some SEO efforts and optimise the on-site factors of your landing page so that you can rank well for your keywords of interest.

In some cases your site may rank well for various keywords but your CTR may be low and consequently visitors are not landing on your site. In this case you will need to adjust your page title and meta-description to improve your CTR.

If you are getting paid search traffic, you need to analyse your ads and optimise them to improve their CTR. However, paid search can be useful in determining which keywords convert best, so that you can focus your organic SEO efforts on the best converting keywords.

Behaviour Analysis

The last step in performing your landing page analysis is to examine the specific behaviours of visitors when they land on your page.

The initial metric you should examine is the bounce rate. Google Analytics will be helpful with this metric. Pages that have a reasonable amount of traffic and also have a fairly high bounce rate should be targeted for CRO.

Then you need to delve into the details of why visitors are not fully engaging with your landing page. You can make use of CrazyEgg to see precisely what your users are focusing on and which parts of the page are being overlooked.

Make Some Changes And Repeat

After you have gathered your data and ways to improve your landing page have been identified, you need to implement some changes and then monitor the performance of your landing page again.

If you don’t have a lot of technical skills you may have to enlist the assistance of a web designer to assist you with these changes.

Success with CRO will involve constantly attempting to improve the performance of your landing pages. Normally, it will involve numerous iterations of the above process as you constantly adapt your landing pages to improve conversions.

Continue monitoring landing pages, visitor behaviour, and your traffic and you will have the information that is required to understand which changes work and which do not.

Your conversion rate will improve incrementally as you perform iterations of this process and it will increase your profits as well.