Posts tagged as:

landing page optimization

Web marketing is more integrated than you think (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – October 7, 2011)

by Tim on October 7, 2011

in E-commerce, Marketing, SEO, Search, del.icio.us links

Marketing on the Internet seems to get harder all the time, doesn’t it? Content marketing, paid search, natural search/SEO, display advertising, remarketing, and on and on and on. How can anyone expect to keep up?

Well, happily, here’s a secret: They’re all much more related than you might think. You build content to meet your customer’s needs. That’s a landing page. Make sure it’s got some appropriate keywords in it, get some folks to link to it, and you’re doing SEO (admittedly, a simplified version, but it’s better than nothing). The better its relevance, the less you pay for clicks if you point paid search or display ads to it. And so on.

Happily, loads of resources exist to help you tie your activities together. Here are just a handful of excellent posts to help you start:

Google’s Agency Blog has a great look at using Audience insights to improve your ad campaigns. While Google’s presentation focuses on paid search and display media advertising, the tools offered can help you develop better content and understand your customers’ behaviors more readily, too. (I’ve added the full video below if you’ve got the time to watch it.)
Rimm Kaufman Group’s RKGBlog (one of the Thinks 2011 All-Stars), explores paid search conversion by position. Very cool.
What, you don’t do and paid search or display advertising? You might want to consider it. The Certified Knowledge blog shows how to use PPC to test SEO. Sweet. (And sorry about their “enroll” popup when you land there. The content’s still worth reading.)
Social Media Explorer follows up this theme of “content meets search meets SEO” with this post that, well, explores the future of content in SEO. Very much worth the read.
Now, in case you wonder why all of this is a good idea, check out Drew McLellan’s report on mixing media types. It seems customers exposed to the same message in multiple media channels (surprise, surprise) showed better recall than those seeing the message in only one. Offering the same message, in multiple channels, targeted to the right customer, goes a long way to achieving your best results.

Have a great weekend, folks. And remember, we’re here at Thinks every day helping you untangle the Web to improve your marketing and e-commerce activities. Why not subscribe via email and get these updates delivered to you?

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Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Technorati Tags: brand building, branding, content marketing, content strategy, conversion rate optimization, E-commerce, e-commerce, E-commerce strategy, e-marketing, ecommerce, google, google adwords, internet business, internet marketing, landing page design, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing best practices, online brand building, online marketing, ppc, ppc marketing, Rimm-Kaufmann, search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, strategy, integrated marketing

Tagged as: content creation, content marketing, digital marketing, integrated marketing, interactive marketing, landing page, landing page optimization, online marketing, online marketing strategy, ppc, ppc marketing, search engine, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, search strategy, sem, SEO

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Which landing pages contribute to your business goals?

by Tim on December 21, 2010

in E-commerce

Not all landing pages are created equal. But, if you haven’t defined e-commerce funnels within Google Analytics, how can you know which ones work best? Want a quick way to figure out the value of your best landing pages? It’s easy.

First, take a look at your Top Landing Pages in the Content section of GA, like this:

Top Landing Pages

You’ll want to select a broad enough period that you get an accurate representation of your traffic. I recommend at least a few months worth of data unless you’ve noticed a big change lately (you do take a look at your top landing pages regularly, don’t you?)

Next, create an Advanced Segment, using the Landing Page as the Dimension with the condition as “Matches exactly” (or “Starts with” if you have query strings attached) and set the value to the name of your highest entry landing page. For instance, I’ve created a segment called “Landing Page = Taking a Look at Weebly”:

Create Top Landing Pages Segment

Then, go ahead and look at your Goals Overview report. You should see something like this:

View Goals by Top Landing Pages Segment

Do the same thing for each of your top landing pages until you’ve covered 80% of your site entries, and you’re well on your way to identifying the pages you want to focus on as you enter next year.

Of course, this whole exercise assumes you’ve set up goals in GA, but, fortunately Google has provided a great tutorial that makes it relatively simple.

Cool, huh?

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Technorati Tags:
analytics, continuous improvement, conversion, conversion rate, conversion rate optimization, E-commerce, e-commerce, Google, Google Analytics, landing page design, landing page optimization, measurement, metrics, page design

Tagged as: analytics, google analytics, landing page, landing page optimization, measurement, metrics

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4 Steps to Improve Your Landing Page’s Performance

by Tim on September 15, 2010

in E-commerce

Landing pages are the place where it all begins for your customer. Or ends, depending on how well the page performs. Want your pages to do their duty? Then let’s begin, shall we…

We started off earlier this week looking at how to find landing pages worth fixing (as well as demonstrating our most important landing pages by way of example the day before that).

But once you have figured out what pages you’re going to fix, what do you do? Easy. Just follow these 4 steps:

First, find out where your traffic is coming from. I showed you how to find your Top Landing Pages yesterday. Now, in Google Analytics, click on the link for the first page you’re going to work on. Check out the Entrance Sources for the page (other analytics programs offer similar functions). In the example below, most of the traffic (88%!) comes from search:
If, like the example above, most of your traffic comes from search, check out the Entrance Keywords report. It will show you which terms your customers are using most often to get to this page. If the traffic isn’t coming from search, you’ll need to visit the linking sites driving the highest traffic to see what their link text is. In either case, make a list of the top words customers use to find you. I cannot emphasize that enough. These terms are half the battle.
Work from your list and incorporate those terms into your title, copy and call-to-action. This does not mean “keyword stuff.” The point isn’t to load the page up with the word (remember, you already rank for it or draw traffic because of it); you’re trying to guide the visitor through using their own words.
For example, if your top term is “affordable office furniture,” be sure your headline is (something like) “Affordable Office Furniture from $99″ and that your call-to-action includes “affordable office furniture” too. “Shop Now” is good. “Shop for Affordable Office Furniture” is better. (Though testing which one works better is always best).
Finally, it’s not enough to get visitors to want to buy. They also have to want to buy from you. So, as you’re improving the page’s relevance using the technique above, you also want to improve your customer’s trust in you. How can you do that? unbouce has a great list of simple techniques that will improve your customer’s trust.

Getting customers to engage with your brand requires getting them to stay on your site. These four tips are the beginning of building that engagement. They’re not fool-proof; bad design, copy or call-to-action can still kill you. But they’re the first step into getting your landing page to work for you.

Did I miss something that’s working for you? Tell us all about it in the comments.

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Tagged as: a/b test, a/b testing, continuous improvement, conversion, improve conversion, improvement, landing page optimization, optimization, testing

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