Ecommerce Landing Page Optimization: The beginner’s guide to optimize your landing page and get more conversions. (March 2020 Updated)

Today I’m going to show you can optimize your landing page and get more conversion.

I remember when I first started to learn about learning page optimization I’d go from blog post to forum thread trying to understand how landing page optimization actually worked. It was super confusing and frustrating.

And in this no-nonsense guide, I’ll cut out all the noise and BS and show you exactly how to start optimizing your landing pages.

The Topic Overview

What is Landing Page Optimization, exactly?”

Landing Page Optimization is the process of making design, content and other stuff on your Landing Page as effective as possible. It is the process of continuous improvement of your Landing Page to make more profit. You’re spending a lot of time and money on it, and that’s exactly why you need to optimize it more.

For example, let’s say you have a Landing Page on Hiking Sticks. So, you have to optimize the design and content of that Hiking Stick landing page so that you can get more revenue from that page.

Split Testing is one of the ways we optimize our landing pages.

Incoming traffic to the website is distributed between the original (control) and the different variations without any of the visitors knowing that they are part of an experiment. And in the end, we conclude our winning Landing page: 

Now that you understand what Landing Page Optimization is, it’s time for me to explain more about how to get started with it: 

• Know your audience

• Hypothesis

• Execution

• Review

• Long-term growth

• Conclusion

Steps

Know your audience

Your first step with Landing Page Optimization is actually to analyze and put yourself in your target audience’s shoes to figure out exactly what is going on.

Because the fact is unless you have enough data about your target audience, it’s going to be very difficult to optimize your landing pages, which will actually convert.

Here’s exactly how to do it:

First, do a Quantitative analysis of your target audience.  This starts with Google Analytics audits to review our top goals and our top landing pages. 

Go to Behaviour -> Site Content -> All Pages, to check which pages have higher than 70% Bounce Rate (high bounce rates lead to low conversion):

Next, do qualitative analysis. This will help you understand the pains, problems, and desires of your target audience. 

It starts with tools like UserTesting – where you can watch users/visitors travel through your site to understand exactly. 

For example, through UserTesting, you will be able to know whether the popup you are using is effective or just plain ugly:

Also, use heatmap software, like Crazyegg, or Inspectlet to see specifically where people are clicking and get a detailed summary:

Finally, use tools like Survey Monkey to review specific feedback customers and potential customers give us. It can be added to many areas of your websites to automate the collection of qualitative feedback:

This takes some work, but it’s the only way to get more conversion from your landing page. 

At this point, you will get some knowledge of collecting valuable data about your target audience. Next, we’ll start by creating a hypothesis from the valuable data we collected.

Hypothesis

Your second step is to create a hypothesis from the data we collected. We prioritized a plan to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time 

Because the fact is, we’ll use data and facts to come up with educated guesses. Then we’ll outline an experiment to test the hypothesis and discuss how the results might impact the website.

Let’s get started on this:

First, according to ConversionXL.com do observe 3 things:-

• Who is your target audience? For eg- We may observe that the target customer for https://shop.byjus.com/ will mostly be students, aged 5 to 25, who are here to achieve their career and academic goals. 

• What action do you want them to take? For eg- You may want the visitors to add a course to the cart and complete checkout or at least want them to contact https://byjus.com/contact-us/ for more info:

• What action do they want to take? For eg- Visitors may want to take a course and be guaranteed that they would pass the test. Otherwise, they may want their money back

Next, do observe the process which causes the above observation. For eg- http://www.arngren.net/ is too cluttered and there is no clear way to categorize the products. So, users may find it difficult to get to a specific product and complete checkout:

http://www.arngren.net is also not mobile-friendly. So, mobile users may have a hard time browsing that website:

Also, determine how you will track success for the experiment. 

Set up goals like conversion rate you want ((Visits to the thank you Page)/(total website visitors)), revenue per visitor and engagement rate you aim for.

Finally, create a list of prioritized tests based on everything you observed. For eg:- 

• Declutter http://www.arngren.net/.

• Make a category page for http://www.arngren.net/ so that visitors can get what they want.

• Make http://www.arngren.net mobile-friendly.

Now, you made your hypothesis and listed out your tests. Next, we actually start to execute our plan based on the hypothesis we created.

Execution

Your third step is to begin executing the plan we hypothesized. This is one of the most time-consuming sections of the process.

Let’s begin:

First, create mockups for a split test using that list of prioritized tests you made in the previous step. 

Mockups are usually a wireframe, which is simply a black-and-white skeleton of a web page. And split-tests (or A/B Test) are created to know the best version from 2 webpages.  

Next, turn the wireframes into color designs using Photoshop perfectly and code it using HTML. And test those webpages using Google Ads split test or Google Optimize.

Finally, set goals for your tests including Conversion, Revenue, and Clicks goals. Always test one element per split test. 

And it’s recommended to test until each webpage/variation gets a minimum of 100 sales or 250 leads.

Now, you know how to execute the hypothesis. Next, we will review the results we got from the split test. 

Review

Your fourth step is to review the data from the finished tests and check if the winning webpage will really help in the long term growth of your business.

For eg- Consider factors like how difficult will it be to implement into the production website? Or check whether the winning webpage will produce the same results for all segments, on any device, before implementing it.

Now, after reviewing the results, next, we move on to our final step, which will lead to the long-term growth of your business.

Long-term growth

Your final step is to really grow your business and make more money. 

For eg- If a new landing page headline helps increase conversion by 20 percent, we can then take that headline and create PPC ads with it.

Or use your winning landing page image in all your PPC ads too.

Now, this ends our steps to effectively optimize your landing page.

Conclusion

Thanks to “Ecommerce Landing Page Optimization: The Beginner’s Guide to optimize your landing page and get more conversions”, you have everything you need to get started all in one place.

As you saw in the guide, without landing page optimization it’s almost impossible to convert as effectively as possible. But when you start optimizing your landing page, you can quickly get double the conversion rate.

Now, you have everything you need to get started with landing page optimization.

Before you start optimizing your first page, make sure to leave a quick comment to let me know what you think of “Ecommerce Landing Page Optimization: The Beginner’s Guide to optimize your landing page and get more conversions”.

References

For more information about Landing Page Optimization check out this great book – Small Business Big Money Online: A Proven System to Optimize eCommerce Websites and Increase Internet Profits