Landing Page optimization with One Up Web and display media
While browsing Tech Crunch today, I came across a banner ad from One Up Web. One Up web is a marketing firm that specializes in search engine marketing. I find this humorous because they claim to be a search marketing firm but are using display media as an acquisition tool for new clients.
I'm a sucker for agency's campaigns, and like to see what they are doing. I clicked on the banner ad and landed on this page. (I striped out any campaign tracking data so it won't interfere with their analysis) As any seasoned digital marketing expert might know, landing pages are extremely important. These landing pages can make or break a campaign by just a few percentage points.
Depending on your industry you might use this page for different things. Examples might be to obtain a lead like One Up Web or others might want you to complete a purchase in a eCommerce environment. While an eCommerce environment opens up a can of worms with your checkout flow, this landing page is designed fairly simple. Fill in your information and submit the form.
One Up Web is advertising their "Merge" magazine. Which reads like a digital marketing magazine but in reality all of the content is sourced from within the firm to promote their own services. Cheesy. I liken these types of strategies to infomercials on TV, wherein companies buy large blocks of time to promote their products and everyone from the audience just raves about it.
Welcome Messages are great for door mats
One Up Web uses a welcome message. Welcome messages are great in certain circumstances, like when you purchase a product (Apple uses an automated email campaign when you purchase a new mac for example: "Welcome to the family"). However, on a landing page, since we are limited to the amount of "stuff" we can fit on the page, do we really need to have a welcome message on this page? And if you must have a welcome message, shouldn't it be in a readable font? I can barely read this:
Videos are a great way of telling a story
One up web uses a video to let the audience connect to their brand. This is a really good example of good landing page design. Videos are excellent! However, when you view the video you're greeted with quick snippets of clients and a lot of boring text to read. Please don't tease me with a video only to switch me back to reading text again. Sit one of your directors down and interview them, ask them questions. Get answers. People like seeing people in videos. For one it tells me that you don't have robots running your campaigns or worse, aliens.
Web forms are critical to the success of a landing page
Everything you've done before the form is meaningless if you can't get the user to fill out your form. This is extremely important. The form fields are the "Superbowl" of good landing page. On this example, One Up Web uses a border around the form field. I'll go out on a limb here and state they found (via usability or A/B testing) that users can fill out a form faster with a border around than those without. It's true. Usually around 20% faster too.
Since One Up Web is subscribing you to their "Merge" magazine mentioned earlier, they want your address, city, state and zip. In my opinion this is a lot of information to ask for and they might test asking for less, (first name, last name, email, company, phone) for an example.
The last point of contact with the form is the "submit" button. Although this usually isn't labeled a submit button. In this example, One Up Web is using the phrase "submit" and the font is actually the same as the welcome door mat message above. I normally don't suggest using the same welcome font and submit button font together, in this case it is hard to read. Really, the submit button should describe the action the user is taking, such as "request information" or "subscribe".
Plug those leaks
It is important to remember that your goal of the landing page is for the user to take action, usually the action of completing a purchase or fill out a form. What happens though is the user doesn't do what you wanted them to do. This usually happens when your page isn't' getting qualified traffic or your page has leaks. Leaks are areas where the user can click out of the page and out of your conversion funnel.
On the One Up Web example, the footer is filled with social links. What is your goal? Did you want to increase your subscription count on YouTube, grow your followers on Twitter, or increase your likes on Facebook? Or did you want to the user to fill out the form? There are better ways to fulfill those actions.
Note: One Up Web uses Click Equations to track their PPC and Google Analytics