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Jivan Manhas is a Founder and Head of Sales of MediaTrust. Both a seasoned executive and experienced entrepreneur, Mr. Manhas possesses diverse business experience, a fundamental understanding of how to leverage cutting-edge technologies within online media, and valuable strategic and operational experience in creating new ventures. Prior to co-founding MediaTrust's Advaliant, Mr. Manhas was a co-founder of three Internet consulting companies, ViaCentrix, Digital Bytes and Consultica.

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The Perks of a Smooth Landing Page

Written on
Jan 20, 2010 
Author
Jivan Manhas  |
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The Perks of a Smooth Landing Page

landing_smallADOTAS – Every performance marketing campaign should be run through a simple yet effective (and rapid) landing page optimization routine. The reason for this is simple: conversion performance and revenue.

In our world of performance marketing, you only get paid for the results, so advertisers, publishers, and networks alike benefit when the landing page does its job.

While it may take a little extra time to get the page launched, a simple A/B split test may be the difference between 3% and 10% conversion, which if you have a lot of traffic, could mean a lot of revenue.

Here’s an example from our platform: Client A was getting ~5,000 clicks/day to their landing page and the traffic was only converting at 2.5%. Their average sales price is $35, which meant that they were seeing $4375 per day in revenue or an ePC (earnings/click) of $0.88.

Once we had designed a new landing page and A/B tested it (the one we designed was a better page), we brought the conversion up to 7.56%, or $13,230 per day — an increase of $8,855 per day, a new overall ePC of $2.65 for the campaign. The result, an additional $265,650 per month in revenue just based off the existing traffic!

The benefits are obvious if you are a smart advertiser looking to maximize the return from all your marketing activity.

Many publishers use the ePC measurement to determine how well one campaign is doing compared to a similar campaign. The higher the ePC, the more traffic the campaign will receive from the publisher. A great win-win scenario where both parties benefit.

Here are a few other supporting reasons why you should run every landing page through an optimization process:

Start competing on conversion rates, not payouts.

Most networks and advertisers try to compete on the highest payout thinking this is the best way to get publisher traffic. With highly optimized landing pages, you can perform better drive higher ePCs at a lower payout than competitors paying much more. This leads to greater ROI for both the advertiser and publisher.

You gain rapid marketshare. With simple optimization tools you learn a lot quicker. Gone are the days of lengthy A/B tests or multiple month multi-variate tests. With today’s tools like Google web optimizer, you can run an experiment in days (minimum traffic for a good split test is roughly 1,000 clicks on the landing page to declare a winner).

We have several clients that have seen conversion move into the double digits from the low single digits after just three days of traffic. I cannot overemphasize the speed by which you can see results if you are paying attention to the details of your landing page. All it takes is seeing this conversion lift once for a marketer to start swearing by optimization as a critical tool to ramping up revenue quickly.

You don’t waste time in development. Like today’s software development processes, agile development with landing pages is a more effective way to get to market. With optimization, you get a couple pages designed and test them right away so you can keep iterating on them to improve the results.

Gone are the days when you wait for the perfect design. If your network is doing their job, you’ll get the traffic and you can split test new designs each week to bring conversion up quickly. The ideal scenario is that your network partner can setup and run these tests for you and execute design changes on the fly so you worry about your business and the experts worry about your conversion. Remember, your network partner has a vested interest in your success!

You maximize your revenue and minimize your cost. By optimizing your site you get more from the traffic that comes to your site and you learn very quickly what your audience responds to. Not to mention that you minimize cost overhead by only building and designing what works and eliminating time spent on elements that don’t work.

Again, if you choose the right network, likely they will do a lot of this work for you for free if they feel the campaign will make everyone money — further minimizing your costs.

You learn how to target your audience more effectively. The intelligence you gather during the process of split testing a page is something every marketer should be paying attention to. With each design change you can visually see how your target prospect responds to marketing influencers such as copy, color, design, ease-of-use, etc.

You’ll also learn what types of traffic convert best for you. Does social media work better than email? If so, that will help you spend budget smarter in other parts of your media buy.





Reader Comments.

Great article Jivan!

Posted by Lev | 12:28 pm on January 21, 2010.

Even though I made some good money last year for my first year in affiliate marketing. I know I have a long way to go. If feels like drive and motivation are not always what is needed to succeed!!!

Posted by Collin - Media Buying | 5:30 pm on January 21, 2010.

Well put and I can’t wait to put an end to the “one landing page fits all the internet traffic” that still seems to be happening on campaigns in 2010! We’re excited about the upcoming roll out of more sophisticated automated optimization tools and features for both affiliates and advertisers to lift conversions and ROI!

Posted by Geofferson Marcy | 7:55 pm on January 23, 2010.

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