What is an LPO?
Landing Page Optimization is the process of optimizing a particular page where a visitor tends to land on a website. The optimization is done on the content and appearance in order to make the page more interesting and useful to the target audience. The better the landing page, the lesser the bounce rate of the particular page.
LPO has to be done not just in the home page but on all the pages where the visits are high. Normally the top 10 or 20 performing pages out of 100 have to be optimized and considered as the landing page.
There are different types of landing page optimization based on the target audience of a website.
1. Passive Targeting – Rules based optimization or passive targeting is optimizing a page based on analytics. The traffic source, geographic location of the visitor, the search keywords used on a website is analyzed using analytical tools. Based on this information, the content is optimized.
2. Active Targeting – Active targeting or predictive content targeting is optimizing a content based on information obtained about a visitor. Information such as navigation pattern, personal information like age, gender, hobbies, interests, favorites and visitor purchases are retrieved and analyzed. Based on these crucial data, the content is optimized.
3. Consumer Directed Targeting – Social or Consumer directed targeting is the optimization of the landing page content by using consumer feedbacks like product ratings, discussions and reviews.
Multi Variate Landing Page Optimization (MVLPO)
Before optimizing an important landing page, it’s good to try optimizing a different page on an experimental basis. This is termed as Multivariate Landing Page Optimization (MVLPO). Multivariate landing page optimization is an experimental implementation of design and contents on a website to measure its performance.
Multivariate testing produces reliable information about a customer approach and understand what he/she is looking for. However, MVLPO can not prove fruitful as you are optimizing just one page in a given time, and complex sites like an e-commerce site can have multiple pages leading to a purchase page.
A LPO based on experimentation can be classified into two types:
Total Experience Testing:
These types of testing are done by examining technical performances of the website platform like Blue Martini or an ATG. Experience testing can provide site statistics and performance of the entire site.
This testing uses a methodology where the site platform is used to create multiple persistent statistics and chooses the one most preferred by the visitor. However, total experience testing can be time consuming and tedious.
Close-End Experiments:
A number of landing pages are optimized for a similar topic considering various aspects and the behavior of the consumer is observed. Based on these experiments, one of the optimized page is chosen and other experimental pages are removed from the site permanently. The page chosen is normally the one with a higher conversion rate and a low bounce rate.
Open-End Experiments:
Open-End experiments do work similar to close-end experiments. In a close-end experiment, the page content is not changed until the experiment is completed. However, in an open-end experimentation, the pages are frequently changed and altered based on the analytics received until a specific period. The optimizer does not wait till the experiment is completed.
Based on the experiments mentioned above, landing page optimization can be approached in different methodologies:
A/B Split Testing
Multiple pages about a particular category like a product page or a customer support page is created. Each page is checked for performance. The links to these pages are split inside the website so that visitors land on all these test web pages. The performance is measured with the bounce rate, entry/exit rate, click-thru and ease of navigation. These tests can either be done one page at a time or all the multiple pages simultaneously.