What is Landing Page Optimization?

Landing page optimization is no longer a secret. It has rapidly become the most powerful method that smart Internet marketers use to build a lasting competitive advantage. 

Well-optimized landing pages can change the economics of your business overnight and turbocharge your online marketing programs. 

Don’t guess what your visitors want. Turn your landing page into a dynamic laboratory to find out what they actually respond to. 

But you must orient yourself quickly to learn a number of new skills: 

• What is the real value of my landing page? 

• Can I see the world from my visitor’s perspective? 

• How do I uncover problems with my website? 

• What page elements should I test to get the best results? 

• Which tuning method is appropriate for me? 

• Can I build the necessary team and action plan for my project? 

• How do I avoid the biggest pitfalls when running my test? 

If any of these questions ring true, then you have found the right place If you are looking for an instant fix for your landing page, then close this article and look around for a “Top 10 ways to increase conversions” entry on someone’s blog. 

You will not find any quick or easy prescriptions here. To truly benefit from this article you will need to commit to understanding all of the important fundamentals of this challenging and rewarding field. 

If you are involved in any way with making your company’s Internet marketing programs more effective, this article is for you. If you have already gotten your feet wet in landing page optimization, this article will take you to the next level and provide you with a solid framework for repeatable future success. 

This article will benefit people in the following roles : 

• Web Designer 

• Media Buyer 

• Copywriter 

• Webmaster 

• User Experience Engineer 

• Affiliate Manager 

• Web Analytics Manager 

• Product Manager 

• Advertising Manager 

• Marketing Manager 

• Director of Online Marketing 

• Media Director 

• V.P. of Online Marketing 

• CMO 

What is a Landing Page? 

A landing page is any web page on which an internet visitor first arrives on their way to an important action that you want them to take on your site. The landing page can be part of your main website, or a stand-alone page designed specifically to receive traffic from an online marketing campaign. 

Strictly speaking, it is not just the landing page that you should be optimizing, but rather the whole path from the landing page to important conversion action (such as purchases, form-fills, or downloads e-mail) often happening somewhere deeper in your website. 

1.Microsite 

The landing page is part of a microsite specifically designed for a single audience or purpose. A microsite usually has one main call-to-action (such as a purchase or information request), and all of the information on the site funnels the visitor back to this desired conversion action. A microsite usually contains a few pages of supporting information that allows a visitor to make an educated decision about the topic in question, and request further information or buy something. Such information includes a detailed description of your product or service, buying guides or wizards, downloadable whitepapers, comparisons to similar products or services, case studies, testimonials, and other validation. Microsites can be branded as part of your main company or can have their own stand-alone brand. 

2. Advertising landing page 

This includes advertising online, such as banners, text ads, and sponsor links. Measuring advertising effectiveness usually involves tracking the number of times that an ad was seen or clicked on. Another measure is the average advertising revenue per page view for alternative ad page layouts. 

3.   Click-through landing page 

As discussed earlier, only a few parts of your website are mission-critical. A click-through can measure the effectiveness with which you funnel visitors to the desired actionable pages, and through the conversion process. Click-throughs can serve as intermediate gauges of progress. The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of visitors who click through to the desired page. 

4.  Downloads and printouts landing page 

Many websites want visitors to take away free content without having to leave behind any personal information. Visitors may be able to download and print (where applicable) any number of items from your site: whitepapers, coupons for offline redemption, samples, or computer software. The download or printout rate of the desired content is the best measure of efficiency. 

5.   Form-fill rate landing page 

Often the conversion goal involves gathering data about the visitor. This can range from a minimum of data (e.g., asking for an e-mail address to which to send future e-newsletters), to full disclosure involving a lot of personal information (e.g., a lengthy online application for a mortgage loan). Regardless of the form-fill rate’s length or complexity, the form-fill rate is used to measure the efficiency of this process.  

6.  Multiple Actions landing page    

The situation is more complicated when multiple conversion actions are involved. For example, your site may sell a service, offer a free trial, and have a sign-up form for a free newsletter (which may eventually lead to future sales). These three conversion actions are all appropriate and roughly correspond to a visitor’s position in the buying cycle. It is important to track and measure each of them. By assigning a dollar value to each action, you can see if your overall profit per visitor increases (see the previous list item “Purchase”).  

Sometimes visitors must make a mutually exclusive choice. For example, they may choose to fill out your information request form, start an online chat session with a customer support representative, or pick up the telephone and call your toll-free number. All three advance your agenda and allow visitors to select the most appropriate response medium for them.   

7. Subscriptions landing page   

Subscriptions can apply to both services and products. Consumers agree to be billed on a regular basis during the term of the subscription agreement. Often the term only includes the initial sale and can be “canceled at any time” in the future. The value of a subscription lies in extending the term it. Typically there is a drop-off in customers each time a billing event occurs as more and more customers cancel their subscriptions. Subscription businesses that do not add a lot of real value are in a constant race to replenish the ranks of their customers before existing ones cancel. 

Understanding The Decision Process 

The key to properly applying this AIDA model is to make sure that there is continuity and flow to support a visitor’s progression through each of the steps. None of the steps can be skipped, and all of them must happen in sequence. That is not to say that equal emphasis should be placed on each within your landing page, nor that visitors will spend an equal amount of time in each step. But there should be a clear path, and the proper support to keep them moving forward toward your conversion goal.  

It is also helpful to realize that AIDA applies to different scales of tasks and different time frames. If I am a consumer researching the next computer to buy, I may take days or weeks to make my decision. My interaction with your website may be only one of the dozens. I may have long ago forgotten about your website by the time I make my ultimate decision (depending on when I visited it, the intervening research that I have conducted, and the uniqueness of your company and its selling proposition).  

At the other extreme, the Web supports small-scale and short-duration microtasks that may happen in a fraction of a second. Sometimes the task that you want the user to perform is simply to click through to another page on your site. Yet the same four steps must still happen during the visit for the conversion action to occur.  

Ultimately you must help to answer two questions for a visitor to pass through all of the AIDA stages.  

• Do you have what I want?  

• Why should I get it from you?  

This process may not happen during a single visit or interaction. The ultimate goal may be weeks or months away. But you must provide a clear path to that goal, as well as support along every step of the way. If your conversion action typically has a long delay, then try to provide mechanisms to record your visitors’ progress, and restart them in the most recent and relevant state upon their subsequent return visits to your landing page. 

1.Banner Ads  

A big awareness thief is the third-party (or in-house) ad on your own landing pages. It is an invitation to throw away your visitors’ attention and transport them to another website. Ads are specifically designed to grab awareness. Visual banner ads in particular are known for using bright, dramatic colors and provocative headlines. Many banner ads include animation and flashing colors to get noticed. Since most websites do not control the exact ads that will run on their pages, this is an invitation for disaster. A single banner ad can radically shift the attention away from your intended conversion action. Unless your primary business model is advertising-supported, ads should be eliminated from your site, or at least radically de-emphasized. 

2.  Entry Pop-ups  

The absolute best way to destroy someone’s attention is the use of entry pop-ups. These are floating windows that appear in front of your landing page as soon as it loads into the visitor’s browser. Such pop-ups typically include a call-to-action such as filling out a form or clicking on a link leading to a special offer. Regardless of how they are technically implemented, they require interaction by the visitor in order to deal with them. This means that the visitor must complete the intended action, or at least click on the pop-up in order to close and dismiss it from your computer screen. In effect, entry popups prevent you from getting to the content of the landing page and are seen as an unwelcome surprise by most Web users. 

3.  Exit Pop-ups  

The effect of exit pop-ups is not as clear. These are similar to entry pop-ups but appear only when someone is clicking away from your landing page or website. Exit pop-ups may try to entice you with a last-minute promotion, ask you to sign up for an e-mail newsletter in exchange for your contact information or gather survey information about your reason for leaving. All of these can be seen as secondary conversion actions that have value to you. Since your primary conversion action did not happen, you can at least try to extract a little extra value from your visitor stream (especially if you are paying to get them there). 

4. Keys to Creating Awareness  

We’ll revisit some of the suggestions in this section later in the article as we discuss timeless testing themes. Stop screaming at your visitors. Get out of the interruption marketing mindset. Imagine your Web visitors as guests who have just arrived at your home. Would you scream at them? Turn down the volume by eliminating gaudy and flashy visual elements on your landing pages. Everything on your landing page does not deserve special emphasis. This does not mean that you should not have a larger headline or clear call-to-action. Your desired conversion action should be prominent and clear. 

But in the absence of competing elements for the visitor’s attention, this will happen naturally. Eliminate unnecessary choices. Now that you have clearly defined your conversion action(s), you must take a hard look at your landing pages. Anything that does not directly support the conversion goal must be eliminated. If you have more than one conversion goal, you must emphasize the ones that have the highest value per visitor. These should receive a disproportionately large amount of screen real estate and prominence. Minor or supporting conversion goals should be minimized. “Unclutter” what remains. Now it is time to become a word miser. Ruthlessly edit your remaining text copy. Simplify concepts. Shorten prose paragraphs to easy-to-scan bullet lists. Organize information with short headlines so visitors do not have to read unwanted topics. Create room to breathe with lots of whitespace on the page. 

5. Interest 

On the Web, interest is very fleeting. A world of other websites is just a mouse click away. People at this stage are in an “If it’s interesting I’ll check it out” mindset. The level of commitment is very low. Interest is often tied very closely to awareness. The attention of the person flits like a butterfly across all of the available points of interest on your landing page. So awareness can also be described as an ongoing scanning process. 

Interest is akin to the butterfly alighting for a moment on a particular flower. Interest can be viewed as a transient pull and concentration of attention on a particular object. Often, interest in the Web is expressed in a split-second decision to click on something. If the attention surge is strong enough, you will take the action of clicking. If not, your attention will subside back into a more diffuse scanning mode. If your needs are not being met and you grow frustrated enough, interest can peak instead as a desire to leave the current Web page. The key to creating the interest is to focus on the visitor. Elements of your landing page must be relevant to them, and they must self-select because they recognize this relevance. 

6.  Self-Selection  

In order to self-select, I must be given a discrete choice of specific classes of visitors to your site, and the appropriate path to follow. In effect, I have to raise my hand and say, “Yes, I identify with this label.” Figure 4.3 shows the home page for The University of California, San Diego (ucsd.edu), my alma mater for undergraduate and graduate studies. Several navigation methods are available. One of the most prominent ones is the list of typical visitor classes near the upper-left portion of the page. It allows a visitor to self-select and proceed down the correct track. 

7.  Desire 

The mindset and attention span of the visitor in the desired stage are different from those in the preceding stages. Whereas the attention and interest stages may have lasted only a few seconds, visitors in the desired stage may give you their full attention for minutes or even hours. They are in research mode and are willing to take more time. With visitors in the desired stage, you get the precious gift of having them spend time on your landing page or website. You have piqued their interest and they are now going to check you out. You are engaged in a subtle seduction to continue to increase your visitor’s desire. Just as in an interpersonal setting, seduction is a tricky and tenuous activity. You can’t move too fast without seeming off-putting. Yet we see this all the time on the Web. Have you ever visited an e-tailer website, and after being shown some random featured product on the home page, been instructed to “Buy It Now”? This can be seen as premature and inappropriate. So what should you do instead? Follow these basic rules for building desire:  

The Rules of Web Desire  

• Make the visitor feel appreciated. 

• Make the visitor feel safe. 

• Understand that the visitor is in control. 

Do You Have What the Visitor Wants? 

To determine whether you have what they want, a typical visitor will pass formally or informally through several steps:  

• Research 

• Compare 

• Get details 

• Customize 

1. Research 

Understand what features of the product or service are important to visitors. Rank their importance as must-have, nice-to-have, and nonessential. During the research step, people may have only vague notions of what they want. They are looking for a guide or a knowledgeable expert to help them get oriented. Once they understand the lay of the land better, they can compare the available options against their perceived needs. These needs themselves may undergo change during the research process. As new information becomes available, additional needs may arise.  

Alternatively, former needs may become irrelevant in light of some new discovery or understanding. As long as your information is useful and objective, you get to define the rules of the game and can present key features that are a source of competitive advantage and a differentiator for you. 

2. Compare 

Check out alternative solutions or products to see how they stack up against the previously determined feature set. Once visitors have been educated about the desirable features of the product or service, they usually find more than one acceptable alternative. The key must-have features have all been satisfied. So the decision to narrow their choice does not depend on these previously considered features. They need additional “tie-breakers,” although these may be secondary or even tertiary in their ultimate importance. But, in the absence of the primary selection criteria, they serve as differentiators. Giving as much side-by-side detailed information during this step is critical. This is usually done in the form of a comparison matrix.  

Because comparison sites are specialized and focused on this step, they obviously play an important role and have a definite advantage in influencing the ultimate decision. They fulfill one of the ultimate promises of the Internet: aggregating the full range of choices for a particular industry or product type and helping to guide consumers. Most comparison sites also cover the research and desire steps and seamlessly hand off to the ultimate recommended e-retailer or service provider. 

3. Get Details  

Make sure that you understand everything about the total experience with the chosen product or service. Once visitors select a product or service from a list of finalists, they want to make sure that they are making the right decision. At this step, even more, detailed information should be provided including:  

• Detailed description 

• Features 

• Specifications 

• Compatibilities, standards compliance, minimum requirements 

• Configuration options, available service levels 

• Photos, diagrams 

• Accessories and suggested add-ons 

• Third-party media reviews and endorsements 

• User reviews and client testimonials 

• Case studies or survey results 

• Suggested alternative products 

• Delivery and setup options (shipping, installation) 

• Service plans and customer care levels 

• Accurate costs and payment terms 

• Availability and in-stock status 

detail pages are chock-full of information that will help visitors make a good decision: detailed staff-written reviews, pricing, shipping costs, specs, features, pictures of all available color choices suggested upgrades, accessories, alternative competitive models, and extensive reviews from actual customers (with ratings of how helpful other visitors found each one).  

It is important to provide complete and objective information, even if this means reporting something negative. Chances are if someone is going to do their homework about your product or service on the Web, they will run across the negative information anyway. By presenting it yourself, you are seen as more trustworthy. You also have the opportunity to frame the concern on your own terms, and partially mitigate its impact. 

4.Customize 

By configuring or personalizing a product or service to your particular needs or circumstances, you are mentally envisioning yourself enjoying its benefits, and maybe near the action stage. Once visitors have decided on a particular product or service, they should be given the opportunity to customize it. By personalizing the solution to their specific needs, they are vicariously “trying it on for size.” This gets visitors involved in imagining exactly how they might use it in the future. Personalization and configuration put visitors in control and create momentum toward the action stage. 

5. Action 

Desire and action are not really distinct stages, but rather a continuing give-and-take. Increasing desire pulls us to take successively larger steps toward the ultimate conversion goal. Each of these steps is in itself an action. After each action, we build on its momentum to create enough desire to jump to the next level of action and commitment. Even if your website can answer the “Do you have what I want?” question in the affirmative, you still have to get past the “Should I get it from you?” hurdle. Some additional desire is usually needed to propel us through the ultimate conversion transaction. 

Why Your Site Is Not Perfect? 

Imagine that you have been involved in designing landing pages for a long time. This typically involves holding fun brainstorming sessions, creating exciting graphical presentations of possible page designs, and writing persuasive offers and text copy.  

Then comes the public unveiling. As the euphoria of the project starts to wear off, you inevitably start to see chinks in the armor of your beautiful and perfect creations: the text is too long, the intended audience is not identified clearly enough, there are no useful navigational cross-links if someone lands on a page deep within the site… It gets worse.  

Your dread may grow as objective evidence of poor design starts to mount: high shopping cart abandonment rates, extensive call-ins to the toll-free support number, high bounce rates on important pages, lower-than-expected conversion numbers.  

Yet, in all of this gloom lies the way out of the mess too. After that, you’ll see exactly why your landing pages are at cross-purposes with the way that people take in and process information. Based on your honest analysis you can prepare yourself for deciding exactly which elements to test.  

Somewhere in the world is the world’s worst doctor… and someone has an appointment with her/him tomorrow. —Comedian George Carlin 

The chilling thought above is brought to you by the deliciously twisted mind of master comedian George Carlin. What makes it so funny is that it is factually correct—there is somewhere by definition “the world’s worst doctor.” Of course, the consequences of being the world’s worst landing page designer are not as severe. No one will die on the operating table. Your online marketing campaign will simply fail. If you are not the worst one, your campaign may simply bump along at a much smaller scale than it otherwise could. Besides, you can always go to your bosses and after throwing up your hands in frustration tell them all about how it is impossible to get cost-effective traffic to your site in the face of ever-increasing advertiser competition and rising prices. 

1.Uncovering Problems 

Instead of waiting only for good news, filter it out instead. Accentuate the negative. Focus on problems and things that are askew. The mind-set that I am describing is not some prescription to become a cynical person. It is actually a well-respected business approach called managing by exception. Assuming that you have set up your systems and procedures properly, you should have key indicators that tell you when things are going smoothly. During those times you should work on further strategic improvements to your business. Only if something goes wrong (as quickly flagged by your monitoring of key performance indicators) should your attention and resources be focused on the problem. 

1-1 Audience Role Modeling 

Obvious problems with your site can be discovered by overlaying “The Matrix”.Once you have identified all of your important user groups or roles, you can assign them to the important tasks that they may be trying to solve. For each task, you need to make sure that the person is properly guided through the AIDA steps of the decision process. If any of the roles, important tasks, or AIDA steps are missing, it is an indication of a potentially important problem. 

1-2 Web Analytics  

Web analytics software offers many powerful tools for analyzing your website and the behavior of your audience. Once historical data has been collected, you can mine it to discover problems that visitors had with your landing page. The following sections highlight how Web analytics features can be used to discover common problems. 

1-3 Visitors 

Web analytics can track the origin and capabilities of your audience in a very detailed manner. This includes geographic targeting, preferred languages, and browser technical capabilities. 

1-4 Map 

A map can show you the physical origin of your audience and allows you to drill down to get the exact level of granularity that you need. If your service is national or international in scope, maps will show you the distribution of visitors across time zones and countries. 

1-5 Languages  

If a significant number of your visitors originate from other countries, you can determine whether you are ignoring their needs. Additional native language and native culture-based content may be appropriate. This does not have to be a complete copy of your site in each applicable language. But if you intend to get conversions in other languages, at least the mission-critical tasks should be available in their native tongue. 

1-6 Technical,

Capabilities Analytics software records detailed information about the setup and capabilities of the visitor’s computer and Web browser. This includes the operating system, browser type, screen resolution, Internet connection speeds, and support for various browser plug-in technologies such as Flash, Java, and JavaScript. 

1-7 Visible Browser Window  

Another important consideration is what appears above the fold. This term originated in the newspaper industry and referred to the main content that could be seen on the top half of the front page (without flipping the paper or opening it). On the Web, it describes the content seen on the page without horizontal or vertical scrolling. What appears above the fold is influenced not only by screen resolution, but also by the size of the current browser window (which may be smaller than the whole screen), various currently visible browser toolbars (which take up vertical space), and the default size of the text chosen in the browser (larger font sizes will push content further down the page). Although long landing pages are no longer the absolute no-no that they were several years ago, key information should still generally be above the fold. This guarantees that visitors can see all-important choices as they make their decision to click away or to stay longer on your site. 

1-8 New vs. Returning  

Visitors With Web analytics, it is possible to identify not only the overall percentage of returning visitors but also important details of their past interactions with your site. Most of the time the mechanism for tracking repeat visits involves the use of cookies (small files left on the visitor’s hard disk by the browser software that can be used to identify visitors and personalize their experience on subsequent visits to the same or related website). There are different types of cookies, including first-party (those left by your website) and third-party (those left by other sites such as ad servers or some Web analytics programs). Recent research indicates that a significant and growing percentage of Web surfers regularly delete their cookies, thus destroying traces of their past visits to your site. This has the effect of understating the number of return visitors. 

1-9 Depth of Interaction  

There are many ways to determine commitment and engagement. These include return visits and acting on various conversion call-to-actions. The depth of interaction helps to complete this information. It consists primarily of the length of visit (measured by average time spent on your site) and the depth of visit (measured by page views). These metrics are especially critical to websites that rely on advertising-supported, high-quality content. 

2. Traffic Sources  

2-1 Direct  

Direct traffic is the result of people typing your company’s URL directly into their Web browser. It is the combination of your event-driven publicity, offline marketing activities, and the strength of your brand. The common factor in all three traffic sources is that much of it will land on your home page. 

2-2 Referred  

Referred traffic comes from other websites that link to you. By examining your Web analytics reports, you can determine the top traffic sources. Since referred traffic comes from direct links, much of it can land on specific pages deep within your site. Review the specific landing pages to make sure that they function well as a starting point for a visitor and are not a dead-end with no relationship to your desired conversion goals. 

2-3 Search  

Many companies work very hard at SEO to get ranked near the top of organic search results for keywords that are important in their industries. Such rankings can guarantee a stream of “free” visitors to specific pages on your website. Depending on the keyword, the visitors may have a specific and actionable need or a vague interest in your offerings. 

2-4 Paid  

Paid traffic (whether from PPC, banner ads, trusted feeds, or other sources) has several desirable characteristics. It can be controlled (turned on and off, or increased or decreased) depending on the circumstances. It can be targeted (the traffic from every PPC keyword can be sent to its own specialized landing page). Its value and profitability can be tracked (by campaign, keyword, and even the version of the ad copy used). 

3. Content  

Web analytics related to the content of your website can provide many important clues to uncover and prioritize potential problems: 

3-1 Most visited content  

The popularity of a Web page helps you to understand whether it is getting the proper exposure. If a key page is not getting enough traffic, it may be necessary to move it to a more prominent location on your website or to create more links to it from other popular pages. 

3-2 Path analysis  

Path analysis allows you to see the sequences of pages that visitors use to traverse your site. They show you the most common flows of traffic. It may be possible to change the position of key conversion pages or links within the site to benefit from such drive-by visibility.  

3-3 Top entry pages  

A list of the top entry pages shows you the point of the first contact with your site. Generally, the more traffic that is hitting a landing page, the more attention that page deserves in terms of conversion tuning. Traffic levels can help you to prioritize which landing pages need to be fixed first.  

3-4 Top exit pages  

Exit pages are the places where visitors leave your site. Each exit page can be viewed as a leaky bucket. If visitors exit your site, they probably did not find what they were looking for. In some cases, there is nothing that you can do about this. But for many of the visitors who left, you could have probably improved the page to provide more relevant information or better navigation. 

The total number of exits and the exit percentage of a page can be used to prioritize among problem pages. 

3-5 Funnel analysis  

Regardless of your visitors’ initial wandering path on your website, they must often pass through a well-defined series of pages in order to convert. It is possible to see the efficiency of each step in this linear process. The funnel narrows as people drop off during each step. High drop-off percentages may signal that a particular step is especially problematic. If problems are uncovered, they may suggest breaking the process up into smaller and more manageable steps or simplifying it. E-commerce shopping cart abandonment is a common example of this kind of funnel analysis. 

3-6 Conversion goals  

Web analytics software allows you to track conversion rates (CRs) for all of the important goals on your site. By comparing your CRs with analyst research for your industry, you can get a rough idea of whether your site efficiency is competitive or substandard. 

4. Eye-Tracking Studies  

Eye-tracking studies have been used for many years to improve software, as well as the design of other visual systems such as aircraft cockpit instrumentation. This technology can literally show you what people are looking at, in what order, and for how long. The latest techniques can even monitor involuntary changes in your pupil dilation in order to determine how much attention your brain is devoting to the current object that you are focusing on. 

4-1 Usability Basics 

Common sense is not so common. —Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)  

Much of this section should make perfect sense in the context of what I have discussed earlier. The question is: have you used common sense on your landing page? Review your site to make sure that you have followed these guidelines. If you have not, flag any deviations as the basis for constructing possible alternatives to be tested.  

Some of the overall goals of usability are: 

• Decrease the time required to finish tasks 

• Reduce the number of mistakes 

• Shorten learning time 

• Improve satisfaction with your site  

When we are considering usability for landing pages, we should always take into account the following picture of our visitor’s typical mindset and behavior: 

• The visitor has extreme impatience. 

• The visitor’s commitment level to your website is low. 

• Text is scanned, not read. 

• The visitor has a short fixation on more prominent items of interest. 

• The visitor will pay attention to certain kinds of pictures. 

• The visitor’s typical desired next action is to click on something 

4-2 Accessibility  

Accessibility is closely related to the awareness stage of the decision process. If I cannot find something on your landing page, it might as well not exist at all. Accessibility has to do with how information is organized, how much emphasis is assigned to items, and how easy the information is to access. 

a )  Availability 

Do visitors know what their options are by visually inspecting the page? Is your navigation prominent enough, consistent, and placed in a conventional location? 

b ) Feedback 

When users take an action, do they get immediate feedback? Does the page change when they click on or mouse over important content? 

c  ) Organization 

Is your information architecture clear, consistent, and based on appropriate visitor roles and tasks? Is it organized into a small number of digestible “chunks”? Is it easy to skim and scan?  

d  ) Fault tolerance  

Do you anticipate common user errors or refuse to deal with them because only “illogical” people would make them? Do you suggest meaningful or helpful alternatives when the visitor has reached an apparent dead-end? Does your site support the easy reversal of unintended actions by the user? Are your error messages supportive or alienating?  

e  ) Affinity 

Does your intended audience like your site? Do they feel comfortable or anxious during their visit? Do they consider you professional and credible? Are your visual look-and-feel and editorial tone appropriate for your audience? Remember, these questions are answered automatically by the visitor’s limbic system and cannot be fooled or reasoned with. Their initial gut impression of your site will influence their motivation to continue, trust, confidence in the information that you provide, perception of the ease of use, and overall satisfaction.  

f  ) Legibility 

Is your font easy to read? Is it the right size for your intended audience? Do text and background colors clash, or assault the senses? Are too many fonts, sizes, and colors used throughout the page? Since most of our Web experiences are currently based on reading, legibility requires special attention. 

g  ) Font styles  

Use sans serif fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, or Geneva. Do not use serifs (with small lines at the end of characters) fonts such as Times Roman, Courier, or Palatino. At typical monitor resolutions (which are a lot lower than printed materials), serif fonts are harder to read.  

h  ) Font sizes  

Use 10–12 point fonts for most body text. Larger and smaller fonts reduce reading speed. Consider increasing your font size by a couple of points if you are targeting an older audience, and make sure that you allow sufficient spacing between lines as well. 

i ) Line length  

Blocks of text over 50 characters wide are harder to read. Consider putting in forced carriage returns (also called “hard breaks”) in your paragraphs to make sure that your lines do not become too long when displayed on wider computer screens.  

j ) Contrast 

High contrast between text and background increases legibility. For reflected light sources like books, black text on a white background is best. Projected light sources like computer monitors are actually best with light text against a dark background. The light emitted by the light-colored pixels on the screen interferes with your ability to pick out the passive dark pixels of the text itself. However, there is such a long-term bias from the printing world regarding dark text on light backgrounds that you should use it whenever possible. 

k  )  Link text  

Blue underlined links are a de-facto standard (as is the purple color for previously visited links). Do not change these defaults unless you have a very compelling reason. 

l  ) Text background  

colors and images White backgrounds for body text are a strong convention. Navigation and header background colors should also be relatively light to enhance legibility. Do not use high-contrast graphical images as background for text. 

4-3 Visual Design 

Visual design is critical to the success of your landing pages. It makes a powerful first impression and is responsible for many visitors leaving your site within the first few seconds of arriving. Upon arrival, your visitors have not had a chance to scan or digest most of your text messages. They are mainly reacting emotionally to your page design. As I previously mentioned, you can’t fool or argue with the limbic system. If it does not like something, there is no appeal. Most of us can tell instantly whether a landing page appeals to us or repels us. We can tell if the page is “cheesy” and unprofessional. This determination is made based on the page structure, color scheme, font variety, graphics and images, and the degree of visual clutter on the page. Use the following guidelines to improve your visual design. 

A ) Page Layout  

The main quality that your page design has to have is coherence. It must be well organized and hang together as a single unit. It is helpful to use a grid design to create your preliminary layout. Design the page around the visitor’s task and the conversion action. Give the proper visual prominence to important elements. However, be careful not to give too much prominence. Some people take this to an extreme and subscribe to the “I’ll make it so big they can’t possibly miss it” school of thought. Unfortunately, large and obvious graphical elements can be largely ignored by most visitors (especially if they are surrounded by too much whitespace). This well-documented phenomenon is called banner blindness. Too much visual distinction can cause the item to be perceived as an ad and ignored. If you intend to make prominent items very salient, always provide identical text links below them, and in the main navigation areas of the page. 

B ) Graphics 

Images on your landing page are a powerful two-edged sword. They can support your key messages and desired actions. Or they can serve as major distractions or interruptions for your visitor. Their effect depends mainly on their purpose and how they are perceived. The best images support your visitor’s task:  

• Relate to the content on the page 

• Illustrate key concepts (not simply used as window dressing) 

• Show product views or details 

• Contain pictures of friendly real people (not models) 

• Have clear composition and tight cropping 

However, images can also be ignored or have a negative effect: 

• Generic images or stock art (unrelated to the topic of the page) 

• Clearly fake staged, contrived, or slick images 

• Bright flashy images that look like advertisements  

Visitors will look at images of other people—they can’t help it. This can be useful in two tactical situations. Important text or calls to action can be displayed as a caption immediately below the graphic. This guarantees that the caption text will get more exposure. Similarly, if only the top of your picture is visible above the fold, your visitors will be encouraged to scroll. 

C ) Color 

Color has a strong emotional impact on people and can dramatically alter moods and attitudes. This is also true on the Web. So you should use color sparingly and conservatively. This applies not only to individual colors but also to palettes of complementary colors chosen for the landing page’s visual theme. Make sure that your colors look unified, professional, and appropriate for your target audiences. 

Do not use inverse color schemes with dark backgrounds and light text colors. Most Web browsers cannot print such pages very well. Stick to common color conventions. Use white (or very light) colors for text background areas (wild background patterns make it harder to read). Use colored text sparingly, and always use blue underlined text for links (and do not use blue for any other text). 

Don’t be complacent. Remember that there’s always another percentage point of conversion waiting around the corner to be squeezed out of your customers. If you’re lacking inspiration, try rating your landing page with the Conversion Scorecard to give you a to-do list of things to optimize.