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?

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?

According to a new Forrester survey:

“In a recession, marketers typically cut interactive spending. But our survey of 333 interactive marketers revealed strong support for maintaining or increasing budgets in categories including social networking, email, blogging, and search optimization. Among 12 major categories only online displays ads looked soft. Professional services, financial services, and media marketers are most likely to plan increases in interactive marketing. In a recession like this, marketers should focus on the measurability of their online and social applications and think in terms of building long-term assets, not one-off campaigns to boost quarterly sales.”

Forrester’s Groundswell Blog shows a nice graphic of the results too.

I certainly have seen an increase in activity and interest around social media/online conversations, such as clients asking about blogging, site comments/reviews and either participating in online communities or even starting their own. I think the sometimes immediate results and very measurable nature of online campaigns give these a permanent place in marketer’s toolboxes.

I was a little surprised about online video and mobile marketing showing only 20-30% growth optimism. But I suppose the survey was at large to medium sized companies/agencies, and not all of their client’s business may have mobile or video content needs. I do think that many companies could give much more personal impressions if they used video more… for example, why not have the CEO introduce the company via video on the main “About” page of your site? Why not have the VP of HR tell you why you should come work for that company in a quick video? These are quick, contextual and very rich interactions that would benefit greatly from online video.

Email, the old standby is still working quite well and marketers are optimistic about in in the future. Although most of the emails and landing pages I’ve seen lately could certainly use some work, email is still producing results.

I was not super surprised about the only online marketing area not producing much growth (10ish%) is display ads. I know many websites depend on those types of ads, but between crap creative, poor targeting and obnoxious execution, as well as general “banner blindness” fewer customers are finding them interesting and relevant.

Are these results reflective of your plans for the next year?

My favorite business networking tool LinkedIn.com, anounced recently that they’ll have pages/profiles for companies launching this week. Here’s a blog post that demos the pages and components, with video.

Here are some sample companies that have already launched: Google, Oracle, LinkedIn, Yahoo, eBay, even the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

I think it’s a great evolution of the featureset that LinkedIn has, including some basic corporate info (like Hoover’s) as well as links to research, “previous” and “after” careers of employees, your connections at the company, recent promotions and hires.

It’s yet to be determined if the company has direct access to edit the page, or how frequently they could update it. I could see daily updates pushing the “status update” of the company high on individual’s “dashboard” pages and getting out of hand quickly. Overall, it can make a very positive impact on:

• PR for the company
• Recruiting efforts
• Moral/Recognition of the employees
• Natural Search/SEO

I’m sure there is a downside in making it even easier to poach employees from targeted companies, but that’s really a fair price don’t you think?
Will your company post/make available and keep your Company LinkedIn Profile up to date?

A little levity on Monday… a pal sent me this (thanks Jay) the SEO Rapper. He riffs on CSS, SEO and other “best practices”… he’s pretty good, if not exactly expressive.

Some news about MS that doesn’t just focus on it’s proposed Yahoo acquisition…
An overview of some of the new advertising technologies coming out of adCenter labs, many are focused on search, but here are a few others.

Another used speech recognition to make a transcript of a video, then served up ads — in the demonstration, they were text links — alongside the video. As the topics discussed on screen changed, so did the ads.

and

The third program scanned a video for surfaces where ads or product images could be inserted later. The demo showed how the same frames could display a Coke ad one moment and a Pepsi ad the next, without having to reshoot the video.

In searching for the main adCenter Labs page, I also found this interesting labs tool to “predict” the demographics of either a search term or a website url. According to this tool, Seven87.com is male oriented with a .57 confidence. It also has age orientation too. Interesting stuff. MS adCenter Labs: Demographics Prediction Page.

Some other neat stuff too, including the “Video Hyperlink,” and “Detecting Sensitive Webpages.” They don’t quantify what they mean by “sensitive” but Microsoft.com is only rated “not sensitive” by a confidence factor or 60.4%… so who knows what they are measuring. This is also hilarious… I put in “YouP*rn.com” and it’ is “not sensitive” by a 79.3% confidence! I guess they have a long way to go with that project…

If you are using Google Maps to check out cities in California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada or New York, you’ll notice a new option in addition to “Traffic, Satellite, Map or Hybrid”… “Street View”.

It’s a nice way to “virtually tour” places you’ve never been, or to see the neighborhood of an office you are heading to. Very cool!

Below is a screen grab of a street level video view of New York’s Times Square. You can move forward, back, turn around and down connected streets in the interface.

Some cities, New York at least, have 3D building views as well.

Of course there is also speculation on “virtual billboards” and other advertising in this video… I’m sure it’s coming…

When I’m about to meet someone for a client meeting, interview or other business meeting, I usually do a little homework by checking their LinkedIn profile or Googling them. I just look for commonality in people we know, companies or industries we may have worked for, etc. It often makes for a richer conversation…

But Scott Karp goes into some interesting stories of people obsessed with controlling the results of Google searches on their name.

–

I’ve got a good amount of competition on “Charlie Nichols” at Google, but I take three of the top 10 results on the first page of results. This blog’s main page, my LinkedIn Profile and some Boxes and Arrows comments I’ve made.

I also am on a smattering of other results pages, but there are links to other Charlie’s… including an article announcing my death, (won’t my wife be surprised?!), a movie/TV director’s profiles, a musician and a Star Trek character.

I just hope that people who Google me realize I’m still alive, blogging and can probably help with their online customer experience… but not their warp core. I’ve given that up.

I just came across Jonathan Mendez’s “7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization” blog post. I understand Jonathan is somehow related to Offermatica, an online testing company which I’ve always been interested in working with.

The main points he covers are:

1. Have a Clear and Direct Headline
2. Place High Value on Whitespace
3. Deliver Your Value Proposition with Short Direct Messaging
4. Have a Persuasive Message Directly Above the Call to Action
5. Large Red Buttons Rule
6. Call to Action Copy Matters
7. Trust and Security is Still Incredibly Persuasive

Most of these are things I advise almost daily to my clients, especially the “trust” item. I’ve blogged on that before, as I still see it as a problem on many sites.

The “large red buttons” point though is new… and an interesting thing to explore.

Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate. Green can be good as well but most times in our testing if color matters it is red that wins. Also, don’t skimp on button size. Make users notice where the button is upon landing.

The National Federation for the Blind recently filed a lawsuit against Target Corp., because it’s website Target.com is not accessible to blind users using screen reading technology.

Accessibility has long been in the back of many website owner’s minds, and in the forefront of a few, but I think this will bring out a whole new focus. I know several usability-focused consultants (Gordon Montgomery at GMETA is one I’ve worked with) and even small web shops that put a high priority on making sites usable to screen readers, but for most it’s an afterthought… not even in the top 20 list of priorities for development time. This lawsuit and the awareness that comes with it may change that, especially for retailers with brick and mortar locations, as the U.S. law is more strict for them. I don’t expect it to ever be in the top 5 priorities, but maybe it will now crack the top 20.

I’ve been a advocate of text on websites for a long time, if mainly for a different reason: search engines. Text is effectively hidden to screen readers for the blind as well as search engines when embedded into Flash or images. Alternative text that gives the same or similar message as the Flash/image has two huge advantages; search visible and screen reader visible.

I expect you’ll see some consultants in this space doing quite well for themselves and web agencies starting to add it to their advertised capabilities. Good for them, good for all.

Here are some resources if you are interested in finding out more: Section 508 Law website for the U.S., and the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

Try this: go to your web browser’s settings and either turn off image loading or show all “ALT” text… Can someone still get your message? Can they navigate? Can they purchase your products? Can they contact you?