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Robert Bergquist is the president and CEO of Widemile Inc., a content optimization company based in Seattle, Washington that provides multivariate testing technology and related creative and professional services.

Previously, Bergquist ran an online collaboration applications provider which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He has held positions with Bankers Trust Company (now Deutsche Bank) and worked as a corporate attorney and partner advising companies on finance issues and corporate transactions. He has also provided consulting services to businesses, including Microsoft and venture funds.

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Outsmart Your Competition With Optimized Landing Pages

Written on
April 8th 2008
Author
by Robert Bergquist  |
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ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE –- Whenever an economic downturn crops up, costs and competition tend to climb at the same time. More than 60% of interactive advertising companies recently surveyed by Jupiter Research said that they plan to increase their spending on search advertising. This growth in search spending means increased keyword competition and higher costs for search advertisers.

You don’t have to watch costs and competition skyrocket:

If you optimize your whole sales funnel, from keyword buy to your ultimate conversion goal, you’ll instantly see improved returns on your existing search budget. When confronted by increased keyword costs and declining returns, most search advertisers limit their focus to the front-end of the “funnel” -– merely adjusting their keyword buys and trying new text ads. That’s an important first step, but only part of the answer.

Go beyond traditional SEM tactics and turn your attention to the next critical step in optimizing your user experience — the landing page, which is the page where search ads direct users for more information and, ideally, a conversion transaction. You don’t have a fully optimized search campaign until you’ve optimized your landing pages and all other page elements your users encounter on their way to a conversion.

You’re in control with multivariate testing:

Optimizing landing pages for peak performance is now much easier and efficient with the advances being made in online content-testing technologies and procedures. Multivariate testing enables you to test hundreds or thousands of possible Web page variations and determine the optimal combination of factors (e.g. offers, images, copy text) quickly and easily. With the newer testing approaches, there’s little need to involve your engineering or IT teams. You can drive the process.

Leading-edge marketers typically test multiple versions of the header text, product and offer description, images, customer testimonials and the call-to-action button. Imagine the impact on your ROI of knowing the specific combination of page variables that is most likely to cause your targeted prospects to become paying customers. Banish the days of merely guessing which product shot may work best. The results can be surprising, with previously untried ideas often performing best.

This is not guesswork -– it’s the process of analytically determining exactly what users find most appealing and what will elicit the response you’re seeking. That sought-after response, a “conversion,” could be signing up for a free trial, downloading a whitepaper, requesting more information, completing a registration form, paying for a product or simply clicking through to another targeted page. However you define conversion, it’s the key objective of the entire campaign.

Multivariate testing offers many benefits over traditional content testing methods, including increased speed and efficiency. In addition to allowing you to test a significantly larger number of variables more quickly, it also reveals what makes a page perform best, so lessons can be applied to other pages and projects within your advertising network. Marketers who have leveraged multivariate testing for even modest periods of time start to recognize common themes within customer segments and can use this knowledge to improve other landing pages and campaigns.

Bottom line: get more customers:

By using multivariate testing and optimization, you can double the return on search ad spending.

Multivariate testing and landing page optimization is still a relatively new discipline, but rapidly becoming an essential part of top performing search campaigns and part of the agency discipline. Leading Interactive agencies including Ascentium, Avenue A | Razorfish, Brand Digital, Closed POP, Portent Interactive are now making optimization services part of their suite of services, in addition to online strategy, creative development, search expertise, media planning, and other marketing guidance and support. They are finding campaign optimization is highly complementary to these core agency services.

Don’t waste your search budget and traffic on low-converting landing pages. Look into leveraging advanced multivariate testing and optimization techniques to improve conversion rates and higher search campaign efficiency.



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Reader Comments.

How much does the software to do testing cost? I imagine it’s pretty expensive?

Posted by Jack | 1:13 am on April 10, 2008.

Hi Bob,

Great article! You are absolutely right - landing page optimization and testing is one of the few remaining areas that can result in significant online marketing profit improvements. Driving traffic is getting more and more competitive. Without improving your “post click” conversion rates, you will be left in the dust.

At SiteTuners.com we routinely see double digit conversion improvements from our tests (check out some public case studies here: http://SiteTuners.com/landing-page-case-study.html).

Jack’s earlier comment about the cost of testing software being pretty expensive is not true. We are authorized consultants for Google Website Optimizer. This is an excellent tool for A/B Split and Multivariate testing and is available for free.

For online marketing agencies that handle landing page tests for multiple clients (or companies that want to run many tests in-house simultaneously) we license our non-parametric TuningEngine technology. If you have a higher data rate (over 100 conversion per day) it allows you to run much larger, quicker, and more powerful tests than traditional Multivariate fractional factorial approaches (also known as “Design of Experiements” or the “Taguchi Method”). The pricing is very reasonable and depends on usage. http://sitetuners.com/licensing.html

Another way to deal with the expense is to only pay for results. Our pure-performance payment option does not require any upfront fees. You only pay based on the documented profit improvement from our better landing page design (when compared head-to-head against your original one).

For additional background information on landing page optimization, please download our free whitepapers: http://sitetuners.com/downloads.html

If you want to get a jump-start on your testing program I would also recommend my new book from John Wiley & Sons Press called Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (http://LandingPageOptimizationBook.com).

Warmest Regards,

Tim Ash - President - SiteTuners.com

Posted by Tim Ash | 5:50 pm on April 15, 2008.

Hi Bob,

Great article! You are absolutely right - landing page optimization and testing is one of the few remaining areas that can result in significant online marketing profit improvements. Driving traffic is getting more and more competitive. Without improving your “post click” conversion rates, you will be left in the dust.

At SiteTuners.com we routinely see double digit conversion improvements from our tests (check out some public case studies here: http://SiteTuners.com/landing-page-case-study.html).

Jack’s earlier comment about the cost of testing software being pretty expensive is not true. We are authorized consultants for Google Website Optimizer. This is an excellent tool for A/B Split and Multivariate testing and is available for free.

For online marketing agencies that handle landing page tests for multiple clients (or companies that want to run many tests in-house simultaneously) we license our non-parametric TuningEngine technology. If you have a higher data rate (over 100 conversion per day) it allows you to run much larger, quicker, and more powerful tests than traditional Multivariate fractional factorial approaches (also known as “Design of Experiements” or the “Taguchi Method”). The pricing is very reasonable and depends on usage. http://sitetuners.com/licensing.html

Another way to deal with the expense is to only pay for results. Our pure-performance payment option does not require any upfront fees. You only pay based on the documented profit improvement from our better landing page design (when compared head-to-head against your original one).

For additional background information on landing page optimization, please download our free whitepapers: http://sitetuners.com/downloads.html

If you want to get a jump-start on your testing program I would also recommend my new book from John Wiley & Sons Press called Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions ( http://LandingPageOptimizationBook.com ).

Warmest Regards,

Tim Ash - President - SiteTuners.com

Posted by Tim Ash | 5:53 pm on April 15, 2008.

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