Practicing the Art of Landing Pages

I practice yoga on a regular basis and feel as though I should be practicing everyday because so much good comes out of each practice. I feel the same way about landing pages. If everyone selling a product or service used landing pages then just think of the positive outcomes.

Like yoga, practicing the art of landing pages is not easy. For one, people scan web pages like they would a book or magazine – from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That leaves precious seconds to grab the visitor's attention, communicate the purpose and encourage them to act on your call to action. Sounds difficult but it's not impossible.

The second is putting the landing page together. Remember your first day of yoga? Remember the 50th? It doesn't get easier. Designing a landing page is no different and a refresher course is always helpful. Below are some of the best practices I apply to every landing page.

Headline
This should be clear and direct and an attention grabber. You want to make sure the headline is situated across the top of the page and that it tells visitors what they want to know. It should also contain a keyword to improve your PPC quality score and/or organic efforts.

Copy
Ideally, the copy on a landing page should be promotion based with one appealing message but at the same time consistent with the brand message. Not an easy task. It should also be uncluttered with plenty of whitespace. Use bullet points to explain the benefits and include sub-heads to break up the text. Finally, write in plain English and refrain from using jargon.

Design
This is the trickiest of all the landing page elements as most people want to over emphasize design. Remember, a visitor is going to stay on a page for no more than five seconds so keep the design simple by avoiding overbearing colors (i.e. white font on black background) and sticking with easy to read fonts. Don't be afraid to use images but use them in a way that balances out the copy, helps tell the story, sells the product and portrays the biggest benefit.

Call to action
I recommend placing the call to action at the top AND bottom of the page so that it is always visible (assuming not everything on the page is above the fold like it should be). Try to keep the call to action "soft". For example, use "Try it now" versus something stronger like "Buy Now". Remember, a visitor may not be ready to commit to your product or service yet but are still interested. I also found that buttons tend to be better than text as they stand out more.

Conversions
The purpose of a landing page is to get the visitor to understand the product/service quickly and then have them act on it. The 'acting' part can be accomplished by including the following:

- phone number (preferably a 1-800 number)
- form submission (limit the required fields)
- value proposition (white paper, coupon, contest entry)
- video (this is your best selling tool, it's interactive & will keep the visitor on the page longer)

Of course, all of the above is trackable. You can help the conversion effort by including a trust/security icon and a testimonial or two to provide credibility and give confidence to the visitor.

Yoga is as much about learning as it is anything else. Landing pages, again, are no different. Test variations with a different message, image, layout and/or color to find the right combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. With some success you will find that you'll be practicing more.

Using Your Website Content is a Two-Step Process

Let's get right to the point: Website content is the heart and soul of your website's success. The content you write can be informational, commercial or a current event.  Its purpose can be for entertainment, marketing, research, specific industries, online advertising or search engines. It can be objective or subjective. Whatever the case, effectively using your content is a two-step process. The first is to leverage the content in order to drive traffic. The second is to measure it for success.

Organic search is the best strategy available for driving traffic using your website content. It is no longer a secret that search engines like content and feed off it to determine rankings. And it's not just content that gets search engines excited about crawling a site. It's "fresh" content that keeps the robots coming back for more. With the advent of 'real-time content' in search listings, search engines, Google in particular, will seek out the best and most useful content on the Internet for any given keyword query. Updating your website content and blogging regularly will not only help fulfill the appetites of hungry search engines but also increase your chance of higher rankings and more traffic as a result.

Believe it or not, focusing on your site's navigation is a good way to keep the traffic on your site. Yet, somehow, this important element of design that serves as a gateway to the content on your site is often overlooked. Your visitors, impatient and ready to abandon a website at the first clue of getting lost, are quick reminders of how important navigation is. Following simple 'rules of thumb' like keeping the navigation simple, consistent and prominent will keep your traffic flowing from one page to the next.

The second part is to examine the fruits of your labor once you are confident that your traffic is moving seamlessly throughout your site and is reading unique, fresh and relevant content. In Google Analytics, we can measure the navigational analysis of any desired page by reviewing the navigation summary, entrance paths to the page, external sources who referred traffic to a page or the keywords that drove traffic to a page from a search engine. Let's take a look.

The 'Navigation Summary' view shows how visitors found your content and what page then went to next.

The 'Entrance Paths' view shows the path visitors used to get to your content, what pages they viewed next and the page they eventually ended on.

The 'Entrance Keywords' view shows the top keywords people used to find your page in the search engines.

The 'Entrance Sources' view shows how visitors reached your page.

If you have ever taken dance lessons then you know that particular dances have several steps, which, for the uncoordinated amongst us like myself, can be difficult to remember. This dance number has a mere two steps. Though, both equally important if one is succeed at understanding how well their website content is performing.

Keep It Simple Silly

Let's face it, web Analytics can be a little hot to handle even for the most experienced among us. It is full of tools, techniques, Web 2.0 and all sorts of other tidbits of information. Yet, it can be complex, intricate and at times intractable. Worst of all, it can inundate us with too much data and choices. Scared? The trick is to 'KISS' and make up with all that it has to offer. That is, Keep It Simple, Silly. Whether you are the most experienced user or know next to nothing about Analytics, we can all use a few simple tips to help us KISS better in order to maximize our efforts.

Know the Basics
This may seem obvious to some, but to others, especially those viewing analytics for the first time, the jargon may be a bit foreign. If you focus on these basic but important areas then you will be off to a good start in understanding most of what is reported.

• Arrival method: How are people finding you? Analytics breaks traffic down into three areas : Direct Traffic, Search engines (Paid and Non Paid) and Referring sites (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Understand why traffic is being driven or not being driven via one of these areas. 

• Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who went to one page only and left your site. The higher this number, the more questions you should be asking about your site's performance. 

• Content: What pages do people spend the most time on? Are your product/services pages attracting any visits? What about your blog? 

• Keywords: What keywords are people finding your site with? Are the keywords relevant and converting? 

• Location: Where is the traffic coming from? If you are local and receiving national attention then you might review your geo-targeting.

Create the Dashboard
Dashboards help you visualize and track trends on every level of your business and to align activities with key goals while keeping you on top of vital statistics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In simpler terms, it is there to communicate the performance of one or more metric (starting with the metrics mentioned above). With colored bars and nice graphs trending over time, dashboards can be easy to look at and help you gauge your website's overall performance.

Set up Reporting
We're all very busy just trying to keep our heads above water. But if we've taken the time to understand a few metrics and have gone as far as setting up a dashboard then we might as well take that final plunge and set up automated reports. It’s the old saying in business, “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”. 

Therefore, automated reports delivered to your email inbox weekly or monthly will establish a good habit of viewing your Analytics data.

Start KISSing Your Website
Once you become a KISSing expert in Analytics turn your attention to the website itself. Remember most of your site's visitors have very little patience and can be easily distracted by all the jazz in your website that leads to nowhere. Functionality, relevance and immediacy are key touch points of a site.  When it comes to web design, layout and content, your site has to KISS and tell! Use professional looking fonts and standard font sizes that are easy on the eye and make sure your site navigation easy to use and easy to find! Killer looks, per se, may kill your site so Keep It Simple!

Analytics Can Be the "Key" to Keywords

86400-1440-24-7-365. Google is on a hunt to help us find what we ask of it. All this high-powered engine needs is a few characters to produce results in what seems like nanoseconds. That's all there is to it. Or is it? Don't fall prey to the simplicity. It's the keyword relevance that draws in the qualified traffic to your website. So, in order to lure this highly qualified traffic you need to develop a better understanding of keywords.

That's where Analytics comes into play. There are a variety of free, subscription-based and pay-per-use keyword research tools available to help you find the right keywords. Google's Keyword Tool, with its huge database of keywords in over 50 languages, is one such example. You can even enter a word or a phrase that describes your business/website right in Google to get a sense of traffic. But before you do even that, utilize your Google Analytics account. That means moving from the shallow waters of the Analytics dashboard and taking a deeper dive into the Analytics data in order to conduct the appropriate research.

Google Analytics allows us to see the data in a nice context. It's almost like giving us the answers to a test. An entire "keywords" section is devoted to providing the keywords people used to find our website, how many visits from the keyword, how much revenue that keyword generated, the bounce rate and much more! This is very informative data to have before you start investing time and effort into organic and paid search.

This table allows us to see which keywords are performing well and which ones are not when it comes to the critical metrics such as the number of visits, time on site and bounce rate.

Analytics allows us to focus closer on a particular metric, in this case bounce rate compared to the website's average.

Remember, we want to lure qualified traffic to the site. SEO experts follow a basic thumb rule for choosing keywords that bring the most relevant, revenue-adding traffic to a website. Here are a few considerations:

• Say no to single words. Phrases or long tail keywords are better than singular words.
• Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. However, do not use keywords that have less competition just for this reason alone.
• Choose keywords that are specific with a narrow focus but avoid getting too specific so as to not lose traffic.
• Localize your keywords by making use of your geographical location.
• Use at least 2-3 different, but related, keywords on each of the pages of your web site (too many keywords on a web page will saturate your efforts).

Remember, you will want to get the most of out of your keywords when you begin to optimize. That means including them in obvious places on your web page (title tag, meta tags, copy) and not so obvious places (alt tags, anchor text) in order to achieve high keyword density, frequency and prominence.

Without having a good place to start for choosing keywords, the task can quickly become mind boggling given there can be literally millions of keywords to choose from. Besides, choosing the wrong keywords can be disastrous and set you back months if you are optimizing your site for organic search. For that reason alone is worth the time and research using Analytics.

Avoid the Dangers of Averaging

Metrics, a wise man once said, are not proxies for performance.  The lesson here is about moving beyond easy to game metrics, and avoid getting trapped in the dangers of averaging. Averages are like a low-hanging fruit, irresistible for those who prefer working off the armchair, but when was laziness a virtue? You can’t become an Analysis Ninja by worshipping at the altar of averages.

Averages are guilty of under-leveraging Analytics on the web and do not offer fresh insights. And therein lies the problem. Yet, most of us are prone to using averages as a default metric in our analysis. But why do we love averages while number crunching? Perhaps because it is a commonly accepted feed for any metric cycle and it is an easy way to aggregate the numbers or analysis or data.

Another issue with averages is that they lie smartly and persuasively. Here's an example. Let’s assume your Analytics throws up these numbers:

Scenario 1: Average time spent by visitors on your site is 60 seconds. This, let us say, is on par with the score for the previous year. What does it tell you? That your site is not slipping up on its performance, popularity and buzz value. Are you sure?

Scenario 2: You have segmented the data from your Analytics. And this is what it shows (additionally):

- Average time on site (all visitors): 60 seconds
- Visitors from social media: 35 seconds
- From Search Engines: 38 seconds
- Not from search engines: 75 seconds.

Now, you have real insight. You know the social media and search engine traffic are not staying very long and likely to be unqualified traffic. You also know where to focus your efforts so that you are able, empowered and competent to act on this insight. Proof enough that you should not bet all your cards on averages.

When you take the averages route in Analytics, you will get “true lies".  In some cases, it may not have a strong bearing on your decision making arising out of such analysis. But in quite a few instances, it will give you perilously the wrong outcome.

Another example. Analytics tells you that 60% of your website's visitors remain for 0-10 seconds. But wait. Nearly 40% of your visitors stay for 3-10 minutes!

Your averages tell you that your site is in ICU. Dig deeper and you will see that your site is actually far from sick with a small directed, focused dose of insight from Analytics. Find out why 40% of your visitors are interested, why a significant percentage of them are loyal, and how you can invest and leverage it to convert the remaining disinterested 60% of your visitors, so that you can add significant, tangible value to your site.

To leverage Analytics to the maximum one must avoid the dangers of averaging.

There's Nothing Wrong with Profiling

Setting up a profile or, better yet, profiles in Google Analytics can turn off minds that are not comfortable with figures, screenshots, and technical options. Yet, Google has made profiling one of the best features available in Analytics. It's like an unknown secret yet very informative if used to your advantage.

To clarify, a profile allows you to:
1. Track a single web property (or specific pages from an existing web property)
2. Track multiple independent web properties (www.domain1.com and domain2.com) owned by an individual or organization
3. Determine which data from your site appears in the reports.

But why would I want to set up another profile, you ask? Here are just some of the benefits of profiling:

• Improve and control the flow of information about your website
• Manage multiple web properties
• Segment your visitors
• Set up reporting access for a variety of users
• Create custom reporting
• Reveal trends
• Track various, specific outcomes with goals
• Obtain information on internal search habits 
• Establish a back up for your main profile

Below is great overview provided by Google of how profiles can work with a personal Analytics account and a company account (ex. googleanalytics.com) shared with co-workers.

Adding a profile is the easy part. The more challenging task is configuring your profile so that it is pulling in the appropriate data. There are a variety of options to make your account run more efficiently so make sure you do the following:

• Specify the Default Page option
• Apply AdWords cost data 
• Consider adding the Site Search option
• Set up at least one goal  
• Filter your results to set up different properties that will affect your reports
• Add other users whom you want to have access to this profile only

Here's a few other important notes to keep in mind...

- When setting up an Analytics account, it is a best practice to make the first profile for a property the "master" profile. A master profile should have no filters so that it contains ALL historical data since tracking began. Once this is set up then leave this profile alone!

- Make a back up of the master profile. This should be common sense with no further explanation needed. Especially since it is very easy to accidentally hit the "delete" link by mistake. And once a profile is deleted, the profile data cannot be recovered.

- When you set up a new profile, tracking begins as soon as the tracking code is installed on the website and a visitor's browser loads a page.

- When you add an additional profile from an existing website with its own profile, then the additional profile will not contain the historical data that you see in the first profile.

Setting up profiles rewards your effort with great customer insight. You can then leverage that insight to your advantage by developing better content or redesigning your page flow. The end result will help you market your product/service to your prospect-turned customer.

So, in the end, for all the negativity that profiling in the "real world" receives, this is one area of your life where profiling actually does some good.

Assign Values and Know Where Your Bottom Line Stands

Assigning values in the context of analytics is essentially about measuring the number of conversions. It is very important from the point of view of the publisher because the revenue received is based on the number of conversions. Just as important for the advertiser because assigning values helps to keep tabs on revenue stream. One way of objectively measuring this is by assigning values to conversions.

This involves three simple steps:

1. Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports. Example:  "email sign-up", “newsletter sign-up”, or "article ABC download."

2. Identify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Funnels are optional, but defining one shows you where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal.

3. Assign a value for the goal. Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, per visit goal value and other important metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. For example, if you are able to close 10% of your prospects/leads that are generated via your contact us page and your average transaction is $500, then you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your "Contact Me" goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your "email sign-up" goal.

Web analytics allow you to define a dollar value to any goal you define. When you do not assign goal values then you are omitting key data. Goal values give a holistic view of which traffic sources perform the best. Some common examples of defining goals are lead generation forms or purchased products. Secondary goals could be posting a comment or entering a contest.

You can then measure the real performance of traffic coming to your site by using the goal conversion rate, which essentially treats all goals equally by adjusting the weight for each goal against the per visit goal value. You may discover that your email campaigns have a higher conversion rate compared to your PPC campaigns but a lower per visit goal value.

In the case of pay per click (PPC) campaigns, goal values can help you determine the true value of each active campaign. Comparing revenue per click against cost per click is essential information for determining how to best optimize your PPC spending. You could be under spending on a PPC campaign that has a low average conversion rate but high revenue per click and, vice versa, over spending on a PPC campaign that has a high average conversion rate but low revenue per click, and you wouldn’t know unless you actually assign goal values.

Above all, assigning values helps you to showcase the dollar value of your site to the website's stakeholders. There’s no value in saying, ‘Our site has 355 newsletter signups, 260 comments, 20 leads generated from submissions, 900 social shares, 76 RSS subscriptions, and 286 account registrations.’ The true value is in saying all this, and adding the all-important rider: ‘....This represents $50,000 in value to our business, up 20% from last month.’