Landing Page Optimization

Imagine that you are in charge of online marketing for your organization. You have slaved for months to tune and optimize your campaigns. Countless hours and days have passed in a blur.You have constructed keyword lists, written pay-per-click ad copy, properly set your bid amounts, bought additional banners and exposure on related Web sites, optimized your site for organic search engines, created a powerful affiliate program with effective incentives and set up the Web site analytics needed to track the return on your investment in real time.

The first visitor arrives — and leaves in half a second. The next one lands on your site, clicks another link, and is gone as well. More and more visitors flash by — a virtual flood. Yet only a tiny percentage will take the action that you would like them to take.
What's wrong?It's hard to figure it out:
• You have their fleeting attention for a split second.
• You don't know who they are.
• You don't know what they are thinking or feeling.
• You don't know why the vast majority of them leave so soon, empty-handed.

It seems like a hopeless situation. You are forever doomed to suffer from the poor marketing program economics that result from a low Web site conversion rate.All of your hard work comes down to the few precious moments that the Internet visitors spend on your Web site.Your landing page is not written on stone tablets. In fact, it is the most ethereal of objects — a set of bits that resides on a computer hard disk that is accessible to the whole world. No one is forcing you to use the particular colors, page layout, pictures, sales copy, call-to-action, or headlines that comprise your landing page now.You are as free as an artist in front of a blank canvas. Maybe you will create a masterpiece that will move most people who see it. Maybe you will create bland and uninspired mush that will bore and turn away everyone.The promise of better performing landing pages is often tempered by a fear of making things worse than they already are. How are you to know in advance what will or won't work better? Yet you are supposed to be the “expert.” Shouldn't your landing page already be perfect based on your extensive online marketing experience? What if your landing page design knowledge was exposed as nothing more than pompous subjective posturing and guesswork?Don't be afraid. You actually have access to a real expert — in fact, thousands of them.
You are interacting with them daily already, but you have mostly ignored their advice to date.You may never be able to answer why a specific person did or did not respond to your landing page. But there are ways to determine what catches the fancy of your Web site visitors.In fact, landing page optimization can be viewed as a giant online marketing laboratory where your experimental subjects voluntarily participate in your tests without being asked.Their very actions (or inactions) expose them, and allow you to improve your appeal to a similar population of people.