Sherpa's Updated Landing Page Handbook Has Landed

The Landing Page Bible has been updated with inputs from 3800 marketers whose opinions plus research plus self-reported data have been expressed in 54 charts, 114 examples and 273 wire-bound pages. Its a veritable cornucopia of best practices. Huzzah!

I spoke to Tim McAtee, a senior research analyst at Sherpa. This puppy was his first project since joining Sherpa from NeoOgilvy in August. A typical stat guy with a background in online media at StarCom, Tim spared me the trouble of padding through all those pages by cutting to the chase and calling out the key take-aways from this $497 report. Here's his POV:

1. Keep it Simple. A landing page should offer only 2 choices: convert now or later. Strip out the navigation and force the visitor to act. Make the forms simple.Don't get too nosy. The more you ask for; the greater the abandon rate. Create individual landing pages for each e-mail and each keyword. A templated page that expresses your brand and orients the visitor but is specific to the keyword or keyword phrase searched or the e-mail contents or offer yields the best conversion results.

Usability trumps design. Citing Craig's List as an example. Tim argues, based on the accumulated data, that less is always more. The ideal landing page marries a simple interface to complex but unseen technology. Imagine the continuing internal battles they've had at Google to keep the home page as simple and effective as it is.

2. Keep Testing. Evidently testing new stuff always yields better results than sitting on your laurels or your duff. In fact the simple, cheap tests get the biggest percentage increases and uplifts while the costly multi-variate tests often yield a much smaller or incremental improvement in performance. 

Incremental A/B testing, done on the DM model, where individual components are tweaked and measured in isolation over time works and works well. But Tim is impressed with marketers who carve off a discrete hunk of traffic and test something totally different because he sees evidence that the bigger the test risk, the bigger either the likely payoff or flop.   

Comments

[Paul]

Hi Danny

As a staunch advocate of A/B testing, I appreciated your summary of the Landing Page Handbook. The other advantage of A/B testing on a landing page is that it doesn't require the large amounts of traffic of a multivariate test.

Some of my greatest conversion increases have also come from more "radical" tests, so it's great to hear this is suggested in the Handbook.

Thanks again for the nice summary.

Paul Hancox
PowerSplitTester.com

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