I’ve been discussing landing pages with several clients in the last few weeks, sharing some of the complexities and best practices in getting to high conversion rates. I thought I’d share some links to some overviews of tips for your landing pages for your banners, email marketing, paid search and more.

As you probably know, the first step to managing anything, especially online, is to measure it. Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer are two free, robust and valuable tools that are the foundation of any improvement program.

If you don’t know how many people are moving through your ads/site now, how will you know if these recommendations have any impact, better or worse?

One of my favorite resources is WhichTestWon.com a site that features different A/B tests each week. Both options are shown and you choose which one you think would be more successful in conversion, then after your vote, you get the answer and why… of course you get to see how other site visitors voted too. The past award winners is a treasure trove of examples.

This is a Hubspot presentation from a webinar, so there is a sales pitch there, but it’s also a really good high level overview of the concepts and basics. “Optimizing Landing Pages for Lead Generation and Conversion Webinar“.

A nice basic, short Slideshare presentation on “Landing Page Best Practices“.

“Landing Page Design & Optimization” with some good examples. An interview with the author that gives some additional perspective.

A good research-based presentation “Landing Page Optimization Study: Improve conversions on Lead Generation campaigns“.

A ton of info and detail on this Slideshare presentation, “101 Landing Page Optimization Tips“.

“Five Tips for Healthy Landing Pages” from the CEO of Offermatica, a testing company.

Finally, here is a really good blog post with some examples, and summaries of 5 more articles on landing pages “5 Must Read Articles on Landing Page Best Practices“.

What is your best tip for landing pages?

A few good links I’ve seen over the past few days:

10 Tips to Build Trust with Social Media
An excellent and super-simple list of tips to build trust and be authentic in corporate social media. We all know how to not be “that guy” that crosses the line at the company party (well most of us do), but we could all use the reminder of how to keep in touch online, especially when we are representatives of our companies in social media.

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Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines
A great list of links from large companies and a few interesting info graphics from the US Air Force on setting internal guidelines on social media participation. This is a great resource to bookmark or use as a research guide for setting up your own corporate guidelines.

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The Rise of the C-Tweet: Points to Consider for Twitter-Friendly CEOs and CMOs
The article helps us consider some good questions like

“And herein lies the greatest challenge of the C-Tweet: Where does the voice of the brand end and the voice of the individual begin?”

and gives a few good guidelines for leaders to consider before jumping off into a twitter account. But it doesn’t really go much into one of the best reasons for company leaders to engage with Twitter and social media: “To get better in touch with their customers and their needs.” It’s a mantra of so many business books and successful companies, maybe it’s just obvious. If you don’t have an AdAge account you can see the article here.

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Yahoo Search Marketing Blog has a good post (refresher) on choosing keywords. Good overview of choosing general/broad AND specific/narrow keywords. Example: “toyota” is general, “toyota camry” and “camry hatchback” are more specific. Make sure to have both.

There are lots of good posts on Yahoo’s Search Blog, make sure to read more.

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Social Media in Pharma and Medical fields
Here’s a great list of leaders in the pharma and medical device fields that blog and/or twitter. Some of my medical clients have been very cautious with social media because of the regulatory issues that could come up. Clearly you can engage with peers and customers as this great list shows. Good to see my pal Greg Rust on the list!

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Email and Analytics
Bronto Blog has a good post, although pretty technical, on setting up Google Analytics to measure your email campaigns. Google Analytics has a great tool called URL builder that you can compose to measure the source of the click, label different mediums and campaigns to give you full insight into where clicks are coming from. If you set up all your email links with these, you can A/B test different email or promotion versions, see trends in clicks/purchases over time or start to get insights into your customer segments and improve targeting.

Have a GREAT week!

Via a quick post on the SuperWebAnalyist Blog from Ed Wu of the Web Analytics Association and Dell’s Consumer Online team come a great post on “numbers that lie” or at least don’t really offer any insights about online behavior.

In one of my new favorite blogs to read, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shows how Averages, Percentages, Ratios and Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics) don’t show much real insight, and can often be misleading.

As an example to combat the “fluff” of averages, you should identify your most important / interesting segments for your business and report those along with the overall averages. Distributions of tiers of activity also help wade through the numbers and get to real actionable insights.

See the rest of his very good recommendations here, including how to make use of the “Better Google Analytics” Firefox plugin that offers several advantages and updates Google Analytics.

Another great post is on his recommendations on establishing strong KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators for your website. (Not sure why there are 6 recommendations but 8 rules, but hey, who’s counting? What’s a KPI?

Measures that help you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

Although to some it’s obvious, unlike several of my past clients (sorry), you do need to set objectives for your web marketing efforts (some thing a little more specific and measurable than “have a cool website” and “make more money”) and then set measures to track your efforts in attaining them. How else do you prioritize your efforts?

Some of his recommendations are pretty standard, but his explanation of WHY they are good is worth a read. I’ve overviewed them here:

1. Conversion Rate, (pretty obvious) measures towards objectives
2. Average Order Value cross and up-sell measures (Yes, with segmentation and distributions!)
3. Days & Visits To “Purchase”, especially with relationship customers and products that are considered purchases
4. Visitor Loyalty & Visitor Recency, aiding in segmenting & targeting most valuable customers
5. Task Completion Rate, goes hand in making sites usable and fine tuning good content
6. Share of Search to better measure against competitors. Compete.com seems like an interesting tool to help

Follow Avinash on Twitter.

Are you actively managing your site’s analytics? What are you missing in your optimization of your sites efficacy and customer experience? Are you really capturing your share of market?

Just finished reading an interesting post from Douglas Bowman of StopDesign, he’s just left his role as Visual Design Lead of Google. He talks about his experiences of pure quantitative research overtaking visual design principles and creativity at Google. He confirms that:

“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. “

He goes on to say that he understands why Google needs to approach decisions this way, but he also feels like they don’t balance the quantitative with other research or best practices in design. (There is an interesting related article on Marissa Mayer’s role in this on the New York Times site.)

I have three quick thoughts on this:
1. Although as a designer, Douglas has trouble with this extreme strategy, knowing who Google is and who their products target, i.e. everyone, I think it’s a pretty good idea to approach their user experience this way for them. BUT, testing 41 shades of a color doesn’t seem like the best use of anyone’s time.
2. Any idealistic, enthusiastic professional in their field has specialty backgrounds and expertise that make them good at their job… but it also can bring them further away from the perspective of their users. This is part of the ongoing conflict between “usability” professionals and “visual design” professionals. One wants “pure” usability with nothing extraneous to get in the way, the other wants style, panache, and a “wow” factor for the work. Who’s right? Both of them… that’s the fun part, the negotiation, part of the constraints and collaboration on teams that drive successful products.

3. More companies could learn from Google’s approach. Quantitative analysis doesn’t have to be 100% of the decision, but it should approach half of the input for many decisions. In my experience, most companies suffer from the opposite problem. Too few companies do any testing of designs for their website, their messaging or even their products. The only testing many have done is some vaporous “focus groups” recruited and paid for poorly thought out opinions. Too often the designs are based on what executives or the production team “think,” or “like” as the priority input over real users and actual data.

Any company with a significant part of their business on the web should have these efforts as core to their website or application marketing strategy and internal or external staffing: (No, this is not a complete list.

• Web analytics that are set up correctly and constantly monitored
• A/B testing or even multivariate testing, especially for ecommerce and applications
• Social media monitoring, WOM, user comments, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs
• Use of paid search or media buys to test messaging, (yes, marketing/branding messages can be tested effectively via PPC!), ads and landing pages
• Frequent direct contact with customers and users (yes, this is qualitative too!)

What areas of input and research is your company missing in gathering for your marketing, website or application? What can you jump into *today* to move more in that direction?