Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Hi AriRose,

I agree with Inbox Interactive, there is a big difference between the 2 landing pages, and "B" is much easier to read and much more compelling, so I am not surprised at the big differences.

Jay's point is right-on, let GWO do the work for you, just remember the more combinations (sections and variations) you test, the longer it will take to collect meaningful test results - and it could take a long, long time if you have a high number of combinations and low traffic.

What to test? Everything:

Products/Services (focus on higher profit ones, put in prime position), headlines, taglines (usually under logo), offers, guarantees, testimonials, "hero" shots, calls-to-action, calls-to-action buttons, urgency (call in 24 hours, offer ends February 29th), bold-face, italics, highlight - only you can determine what is most appropriate, but these are the big ones.

If you don't want to wait for the GWO results and want to speed things up, just do it the old-fashioned way by measuring how many more times the phone rings or how many email requests you get, but this will mean you need to pretty much use simple A/B and not true multivariate.

Good luck, I hope that helps.

Keyword selection can have a significant impact on conversion so that is not surprising.

Other factors are:

1. the outsourcing page has bullet points sooner than the consulting page.

2. The outsourcing page breaks up the text.

Both can have an impact on conversion. Using varying paragraph length, bullet points, blockquote, and more can also help.

The call to action is simpler and more direct on the outsourcing page and is probably helping.

What surprises me is the headline and this is justification for testing alone. I would have suspected that the consulting headline would have outperformed the outsourcing variant. What you think can be a good start but in the end, it's about what is proven to test well that counts.

Where I would go from here is to start a/b testing the outsourcing page by changing one element at a time (IE headline, call to action, etc.

Great test. Thanks for posting it.

-Greg Hill
Trinity Search Engine Marketing

Thanks for posting - good data to think about.

Sometimes it is hard to say WHY. That is why you use data and test.

One thing you did not mention was how people were getting to this page. People like everything to make sense - if you click on an ad that says "outsourcing report" the landing page should say the same thing. If the landing page says "HR Report"then people get confused and leave.

Here are some other ideas of what to test.

1) Put the form above the fold.

2) Move the "hero" image to the top left.

3) For the image, unstead of the clip art of people, try a mini version of 1-2 pages of the report. Show a cool graph or something that people want. No one really thinks they will look like the people in the photo once they get your report :)

For reference, we have gotten 8-10% conversion rates for various PPC campaigns to this page or relatively similar pages (matching headlines on the page to the ad/keywords): https://www.hubspot.com/imk

I can't see your links, but 2 top things I know
1. Google reads top left and down in the first space you have.
2. Content of another companies page with similar wording can effect your pages scores.
I found this site helpful.
https://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/10-ways-to-increase-your-adwords-quali...
and I just started reading this one
https://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/101-google-website-optimiz...
But that is the best I can do without seeing it.
Sorry

Hi MarketingCat,

Do you have a citation for the following comment:

"1. Google reads top left and down in the first space you have."

The SEs tend to read top-down when crawling code so I'm curious if you are instead referring to visitors. If so, they tend to read in an "F" pattern but that pattern changes based upon the page type.

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks.

-Greg