Hitting the Landing Page Jackpot

Yesterday, after two months and a dozen iterations, I tasted what I can definitely describe as success through content. A landing page for an analytical product suddenly began to perform.

Here’s how it went:

Recognizing the Initial Problem
We had something I could term as a Master Landing Page. It simply had everything anyone needed to know about two of our products, and was used extensively across a majority of our campaigns. This means whether a person was searching for “analytical reporting tool” or “database report” or “report writing” they would come to the same Master page. And over time, as the page showed some success, it had generally been extended to other campaigns as well, until about 60% of our campaigns were pointing at this one page regardless of the keyword.

By studying the results of these various campaigns over a period of time, it became clear that only a couple of campaigns were actually converting from the Master Landing page, while a few like Analytics were performing rather poorly.

Creating a Focused Landing page
We first created a landing page, with new content and supporting material (case studies, brochures) that focused completely on analysis and what our product could do. What we also did was tailor the page content towards corporate analytical requirements, as our product was mainly an enterprise product.

It didn’t work.

Redesigning the Page
We then enhancing the visuals that supported our content, sample analytical reports, screenshots of the product, graphs charts etc. I had the download buttons placed regularly across the page so that our call to action was always visible regardless of how much a visitor scrolled.

It didn’t work.

Making the Content Personal
While reviewing the content, it seemed to me that the language was not direct enough. Talking on an enterprise level tends to be a little impersonal, and so we rewrote the content to be more on a first-person basis.

It did slightly better, but not really the success I was looking for.

What are my Competitors Saying?
I then went into research mode (something I should’ve done first) and looked at what our competitors were doing and adopted some of their good points into my page. Some of these activities included, making the page headline more visible, increasing the size of the download buttons, putting some important keywords/phrases in bold, linking to flash demonstrations.

Performance still average.

At this point it must be noted, that point of comparison was against the Master Landing Page. When I say performance was average, visitors were downloading, but no more that they were on the Master Landing Page.

What do visitors want?
Having also redone a lot of the ads (with much greater success) I was familiar with both the keywords and headlines that were bringing visitors to my page. So I went back to the basics: What can I say that answers/reemphasizes the headline that they clicked on? How do I bring the top keywords into the content? How do I make the content (which by now was a VERY long page) short and succinct?

After answering these questions, I finally began to see the results I was looking for.

So what worked? No doubt about it. ALL of the above.

The Winning Combination…
Getting the right content on your landing page is a process. You have to try multiple ideas, and even harder, combinations of these ideas to see what’s going to work for you.

This is what I think worked for me: focusing and personalizing the content, making the visuals and buttons larger and accessible, adding supporting material like flash demos and screenshots, ensuring top keywords were clearly visible on the page, and bringing the page content down to a single scroll.

…Trial & Error
It always seems obvious when we list it out like that, but when I applied these tactics to another poorly performing page… it just didn’t work, so here I go again.

It’s tedious and frustrating to say the least, but when you hit the jackpot I can assure you, it will be worth it.