Since starting to use dedicated landing pages with conversion-centered design, Campaign Monitor increased conversion rates by more than 1180%. In this post we’ll show you how we helped them do it.
1. Know that A really is better than B
Testing takes the guesswork out of optimization and enables us to make decisions based on data, but you need to make sure your tests work before confirming changes.
To know for certain that an A/B test is finished, and to know –for a fact– that one-page variant is better than the other, we need statistical significance. Statistical significance is mainly determined by two factors– the volume of traffic through the test and the amount of difference in performance between A and B.
There are some excellent tools out there to help you calculate statistical significance, and we use one from Kissmetrics.
2. Make sure your message is consistent across ads and landing pages
When you want to increase conversions from paid ads, you need to make sure your landing pages match the ads. Landing pages that match the messaging in the original ads convert better.
Just like gorillas search for bananas, your visitors are out hunting for something useful. «The banana» is what triggers the gorilla to click on the ad – and a banana is just what the gorilla expects to find after he clicks.
If you offer the gorilla an entire fruit basket, rather than the banana, he has to search through the basket to find what he’s looking for. This increases the likelihood that he will give up and leave. Offering an entire fruit basket rather than the banana means you’ve wasted your chance to get the conversion.
To make sure our messages are consistent across ads and landing pages, we use dynamic text replacement on the landing pages. In other words, the message or call to action on the landing page automatically changes to reflect the copy from the ad in Google AdWords.
Below you’ll see a test where we tested dynamic text vs. a previously high-performing headline. The result?
The dynamic headline gave a whopping 57% uplift in conversion rate on the landing page. In other words, that change alone gave us 57% more signups to free trial accounts.
This case study is originally posted on Campaign Monitor’s blog.
Head on over to the Campaign Monitor blog to read the rest of the story »