Nate Sandford will be speaking about “Landing Page Testing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
Since 2006 Nate has been on the agency side with (www.ionicmedia.com) in Los Angeles CA. Currently he is the Director of Search Marketing, working directly on paid search campaigns for clients in health care, travel, education, B2B technology, software, ecommerce, finance, self-help, social networking, publishing, precious metals, lead generation, debt, diet, technology & hardware, local, legal industries and many more. He is a regular presenter and contributor at both the PPC Summit (www.ppcsummit.com) and the Market Motive webinars (www.marketmotive.com).
2) For a given landing page, can you offer a list of the most important elements that should be tested?
The most important elements that should be tested are the elements that are going to shorten, clarify, or simplify the conversion process.
The Form – By shortening, simplifying, and clarifying your form you can see huge improvements in conversion rates.
The Headline – By making sure your headline is clear, matches your ad messaging, and ties into your call to action, you can keep the user focused on the task at hand: converting!
The call to action & button – If you want someone to do something, you have to tell them. Having a direct, clear, and simple call to action will always beat a general, hidden, boring call to action.
3) What set of circumstances indicate that it’s safe to stop testing and put into play the results of all the work?
Every landing page test is different, but if you can say that all of the following are true then you can pretty safely roll out your A/B test results.
The ads ran in a true A/B fashion with the control getting a minimum of 15% of the traffic
There was no anomalous data (e.g., site outages, email blast, etc)
The media was the same media (e.g., PPC vs. PPC) OR it was a solid cross section of all media with each page getting relatively the same volume of visits from each channel.
You have a 95% confidence that the winning page has a higher conversion rate (mathematically calculated, not your personal confidence).
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.