One Degree

The following is a sponsored post by Commune / The Content Optimization Company™.

At Commune, we've officially declared January "Landing Page Optimization Month."

Your landing page, whether it's a stand-alone sales letter or your site's home page, is central to your ability to convert prospects into customers.

Being a savvy web marketer, you probably already know that.

But if you're like most marketers we've surveyed, you likely aren't testing properly.

Or enough.

Or even at all.

So we've come up with some indispensable tips to make sure your testing is efficient, easy and effective.

Testing Is Everything

No matter how much you know about creating the perfect landing page, testing is the only way to know what truly works for yours.

Without testing, all of your optimization efforts will be worthless.

Because if you can't measure your results, you can't optimize diddly-squat.

Types of Testing

If you're new to testing or you're doing it in-house, a regular series of simple A/B tests should be all you need. It's the easiest and cheapest, and it'll give you the most immediate actionable data for honing your page.

To do it right, pit your existing page (your control) against a slightly tweaked page (or pages) where you've changed a single element like the wording of your headline, the placement of your lead-capture or the location of a testimonial.

Then keep what works and repeat with a new variable.

Sure, there are more complex tests, like multivariate testing (performing multiple A/B tests simultaneously) or even Taguchi-style multivariate testing (using a statistical model to amplify small amounts of data and project results). But these can be both time-consuming and expensive, and they're best left to the pros.

Testing Guidelines

Now that you know what you need to do, use the following strategies to make sure you're doing it right:

Run your tests long enough. Run every test for a minimum of two weeks to make sure any variance in response isn't random.
Keep it simple. Change too many elements at once, and you won't be able to tell which changes are driving your results.
Keep the traffic source constant. The only variables should be on your landing page. Traffic arriving from multiple sources (like different pay-per-click ads or different keyword searches) could skew your results.
Re-test regularly. Even top-performing landing pages have a shelf life of about four to six months.
Go beyond conversions. Knowing a page's conversion rate is great, but seeing which conversions eventually turn into qualified (and repeat) customers will be even more worthwhile.

Now that you know how to test your landing page, you'll need some tips for tweaking it.

So next week we'll serve up some recipes for clear, compelling landing page headlines.

Want to learn more about content optimization? Download our free Instant Content Optimization guide for nine proven strategies you can apply today.

Want to optimize your website or a client's? Claim your complimentary content optimization analysis and learn where you're leaking traffic, leads and sales.