Landing Page Design

The goal of a landing page on a website is simple – to persuade someone to take a predetermined action. Two common actions that a site owner looks for on a landing page are:

1) Persuading a visitor to leave their name and email address for use in subsequent marketing efforts.
2) Persuading a visitor to buy something on which the site owner earns a commission.

Note that many of your visitors have no interest in buying a product, and never will however hard you try. I was watching my teenage daughter use the internet yesterday, and as always she was chatting on Facebook – this time about high-heeled shoes (who knows why!). She and her friends were finding pictures of shoes they liked, and sending each other to the shoe sites to look at the pictures, but they will never buy them:

(1) because they don’t have enough money (2) because they aren’t able to pay for things online without their parent’s consent and (3) we live in France and the shoes were in the US.

The point? You will always have a lot of visitors who just aren’t going to take the ‘required’ action whatever you do. However, the number of people that do take the desired action can be dramatically improved by continuous testing of different page layouts and contents, and revenue can, of course, be increased as a result.

Some of the aspects of a page that can be changed and tested are obvious, some less so. A few common things to test are:

1) Removing as many other links and distractions from the page as possible, so that the visitor does not drift off elsewhere on your site.
2) Adding ‘trust builders’ – these might include references from existing customers, logos of reputable companies that you deal with, or money-back guarantees and promises.
3) Changing the position of the call to action ex. from top-left to top-right to further down the page (or having the call to action appear more than once on the page).
4) Changing the layout of the page e.g. using different colors and larger fonts, different headers. Bigger and bolder isn’t always better.
5) Add or remove relevant images.

Distractions such as flashing banner ads can be a big problem. Not only do they usually not get clicked on nor do they make a sale, but they often make a site look less trustworthy and professional. Some well known sites get away with having pop-up windows, flashing banner advertisements and newsletter sign-up forms that impose on every step of the process, so I suppose it must work for them. It never seemed to work for me and although I occasionally do use banner ads to fill a space (or because the offer really is eye-catching), I generally find that they are best avoided and can be very counter-productive on a landing page.

The main challenge with testing new page layouts is that most of us don’t actually get enough visitors to a page, and don’t make enough sales, to realistically assess the impact of changes we make. For example, if I change the color of a form or the size of an action button and next week I make six sales instead of four, can I be sure the increase is due to my changes? Almost certainly not! The volumes involved are too small. The easiest way to increase traffic so that your changes can be tested more easily is by using PPC advertising, but that can become very expensive if your page does not have a good conversion rate!

As a result, most of us go with instinct – if sales are up slightly after a change, we’ll keep the change and see what happens next week. If you do this remember to check that the improvements are still valid later. Keep a record of the changes you made and the dates they were implemented so that you can look back after a few weeks or months and see how effective they really were. Very often a change that looks effective after a day or a week proves to have had no effect when looked at over the longer term.

Example:
At this page about short breaks in Paris the goal is clear – to persuade people to book hotels and make other Paris travel arrangements. Some of the more obvious changes suggested above have been implemented: the page has less menu items and links than most other pages on the site and there are confidence building brands listed in the sidebar. Mention is made of best-price guarantees and consumer protection.

Further testing might include: changing the colors behind the hotel search box; improving the whole site design to be more modern; removing the paragraph at the top of the page (Why is it there? Everyone knows what a weekend in Paris is without a sentence to tell them!); changing the words on the hotel search box to say ‘Find me a hotel now! instead of just ‘search’; removing the site-search from the top of the page. Pictures are included to help remind the visitor they would like to be in Paris – but would a photo of people sitting in a cafe do the job better?

All of these are possible changes that are definitely worth testing.
Any one of them could have a positive impact on conversion rates!

Summary:
Every site is different but the principles are similar for all landing pages – first be clear about your goals, and then keep testing different aspects of the page to see if you can get closer to that goal. Some changes can make a big impact, others are more subtle, but without a continuous program of testing you will never know.