You've published your landing page. Now what?

Landing Page Academy » Chapter 4: Landing Page Optimization » Lesson 1/7

If you’re reading these words, you probably know that there’s more to come after landing page publication. It all can be gathered under the name of optimization. In the previous lesson (the last one in Chapter 3), I said a few words about it to give you a hunch of what to expect.

Chapter 4 of the Landing Page Academy focuses on optimization entirely, so you can expect tips and instructions about improving every aspect of your landing pages.

But before we dive into optimization per se, you should know what to do with your landing page right after the publication, a.k.a. how to prepare your landing page for optimization.

Give it some time

That might be an odd piece of advice, but it’s often being overlooked by marketers, who strive to achieve the best results since day one. The truth is, if you want to see a positive outcome of your landing page, you need to give it a few days, maybe a week or two. After time passes, you may look into the guts of your page and diagnose the problem (or problems).

Analyze the landing page

A/B testing is a great optimization tool that lets you change one thing on your landing page and see what happens. It’s an extraordinary way to improve landing pages, but you really shouldn’t do it following a hunch. To successfully optimize your landing page, you need to find what exactly is wrong with it. A brief analysis should already tell you something, but an in-depth one won’t hurt.

I know of two tools that can be extremely helpful in finding the pain points: heatmaps and PageInsider™.

Heatmaps show the spots, which the visitors place their cursors over – that can give you the impression of which parts of your landing page are the most interesting for them and which they’d rather skip.

PageInsider™ is a tool that basically does the same, but it works based on the user’s behavior prediction, which means you can optimize the landing page before you even publish it! The PageInsider’s core is an engine that has analyzed over 4 000 landing pages to precisely predict which elements of your landing page will probably be viewed the most.

Each landing page builder has a built-in dashboard that lets you track conversions. After some time, check how your landing page is doing and compare its results with your assumptions before the launch. That will give you a hint on whether you should try to tweak it a little or rebuild it completely.

Track conversions

Check page speed

The first impression matters more than we imagine, so seeing a loading screen or a blank page is the last thing we want visitors to see. Of course, each page has to load, but it shouldn’t take more than 2-3 seconds.

If you’re not sure about it (or you don’t see yourself sitting in front of the computer with a stopwatch), check Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It won’t only tell you how good (or bad) the page speed is, but it will also leave you with some valuable tips on how to improve the result.

Find pain points

There are a lot of things on your landing page that might need improvement. Your job right now is to determine which of these should be taken care of first – content, visuals, maybe just a headline… or the entire layout?

Here are a few possible pain points with potential solutions:

• If people don’t click on the CTA, it may indicate that it’s placed too low – in such a case, consider repeating the CTA in the opening section or even one more time if the landing page is long enough.
  It also may be a sign of a poorly matched copy on the CTA. Try to make it relevant to the content of the landing page.
  
  
• If the bounce rate is disturbingly high, you should consider increasing the page speed – it is possible that the landing page loads so slow, the visitors don’t wait for the whole thing and leave it.
  Sometimes the bounce rate may be caused by a lousy message match. If the advertisement that led people to the landing page said something about a discount, but the headline doesn’t follow the message, people may think they’ve landed on a wrong landing page or even feel deceived. Try rewriting the headline if that’s the case.
  
  
• If visitors see the form, even click on it, but won’t submit it, the problem probably lies in the form itself. Check it for unnecessary fields, try to shorten it, and ask only for the information you really need for the next steps.

After discovering all the pain points of your landing page, you should create a prioritized list of things that need to be optimized. In the following lessons, we’ll walk through each aspect of a landing page with real-life examples of how to improve them.

• If people don’t click on the CTA, it may indicate that it’s placed too low – in such a case, consider repeating the CTA in the opening section or even one more time if the landing page is long enough.
  It also may be a sign of a poorly matched copy on the CTA. Try to make it relevant to the content of the landing page.
  

• If visitors see the form, even click on it, but won’t submit it, the problem probably lies in the form itself. Check it for unnecessary fields, try to shorten it, and ask only for the information you really need for the next steps.

• If the bounce rate is disturbingly high, you should consider increasing the page speed – it is possible that the landing page loads so slow, the visitors don’t wait for the whole thing and leave it.

Takeaways

1. Don’t expect great results immediately after release – a landing page needs time.

2. Analyze every data you have access to – you can’t go wrong with more information.

3. Try to determine the least polished aspects of your landing page.

4. Form a list and focus on improving one thing at a time.

What's next?

In the next lesson, we’ll focus on how to track the results of your landing page and how to read them to make the right assumptions that will be the basis of your next moves.

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