Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree — CXL Institute Review #7
Introduction to landing page optimization
As I mentioned in my first few blog posts, in this series, I am going to talk about conversion rate optimization (CRO). This blog is part 7 of the 12 reviews that I would be publishing based on my learnings from the CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree program. This post is all about Landing Page Optimization.
CXL Institute offers some of the best online courses, mini degrees, and certifications in the field of digital marketing, product analytics, conversion rate optimization, growth marketing, etc. I am a part of the Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree program. Throughout the series, I would be discussing the content of the course as well as my learning and thoughts about the same.
If you are unemployed, underemployed, or interested in learning more about marketing from some of the best in the industry, look into the 12-week Minidegree scholarship program from the CXL institute while the offer is still available.
Who should apply for the CXL Institute Scholarship?
If any of these describe you, you should apply:
- You are looking for a serious transformation in your career, and are willing to put in the hours to accomplish that transformation.
- You are not afraid of hard work.
- You embrace any challenge you face and are determined to do whatever it takes to succeed.
- You are a self-driven individual that takes the initiative to learn.
Introduction to the landing page optimization
Landing page optimization (LPO) refers to the process of enhancing or improving each element on your landing page to increase conversions. In CXL’s course on LPO, Michael Aagaard (Senior CRO consultant) walks us through how to design our landing pages to convert. It covers landing page best practices, conversion optimization strategies, copywriting, and teach us how to gather inspiration for our landing pages from user research.
Landing page optimization (LPO) is the process of improving elements on a website to increase conversions. Landing page optimization is a subset of conversion rate optimization (CRO), and involves using methods such as A/B testing to improve the conversion goals of a given landing page. — optimizely
Micahel mentions that creating an effective landing page experience is not just about what goes on the page itself. The landing page is a page user lands on/ entrance page. It is the first page a user sees after clicking an ad source. This page focuses on a clear conversion goal.
Characteristics of a Landing Page
- Shortens journey from click to conversion
- Follows up on “promises” made in ad source
- Speaks to user motivation & addresses barriers
- Answers important questions & creates clarity
- Creates a clear path to the conversion goal
Look at the landing page experience as a part of the bigger picture.
The instructor explains why it’s important to always treat landing page experience as a piece in a much bigger puzzle which includes the factors such as what visitor groups land on the page (their demographics, traffic source, device, locations), what ads or emails they’ve seen, and what their next steps in the journey are. These things largely influence your landing page messaging and structure, but it’s easy to lose track of them when focusing on optimizing a single page (even if you’ve looked at these initially).
Information Hierarchy
Rita H in one of her blogs talked about Information Hierarchy in great details — Having a lot of information on your landing page is fine, as long as it is relevant and served in a logical and concise way. Too much information at once = Confusion and higher bounce rate. Not enough information = Irritation and higher bounce rate. Information hierarchy helps you find the right balance. To build your information hierarchy you need to answer the following questions first:
1 — Target audience: Who are you communicating with?
- Problem aware: Aware they have a problem but don’t know that there is a solution
- Solution aware: Aware that there is a solution, but they aren’t familiar with yours
- Product aware: Aware of your product/offer, but don’t know if it is right for them
- Most aware: Aware of your product/offer/brand and they know they want it
2 — Goal: What do you want them to do?
E.g. Download a free app vs Buy a $5,000 technical product
3 — Source: Where is the traffic coming from?
Newsletter (target audience has background knowledge), Banner Ad (no background knowledge), Social Media, etc.
To sum it up, start by defining: who, what, where. Move on with questions, motivation, and barriers. Then start wireframing and build a logical information hierarchy.
According to the instructor, “a logical and well-structured information hierarchy is the backbone of any high-converting landing page”. He shares his ‘working backward approach’ which is based on these three pillars:
- Answer Questions
- Reinforce Motivation
- Address Barriers
In a nutshell, Michael recommends starting with your conversion goal (fill in a form, click to the pricing page, download the pdf, etc.) and listing the key questions, motivation, and barriers that the visitor might have at this stage and how these could be addressed on the page. The next step is to repeat the same exercise for other key sections on the page: offer, brand, and intro. This is a simple yet effective exercise, which I’ve found really helpful to get a rough structure of the content that should be on the page early on.
Research
Quantitative Research
Gathering quantitative data is a very important step in LPO. This insight gives you an overview of what users are doing and where things are going wrong. Moreover, it provides you with important insight into who your target audience is and how they interact with your landing page.
1. Set up custom reports to gain insights such as overall landing page, device and browser performance, traffic, conversion rate, transactions, bounce rate, source, second page, exit page, gender, age, potential bugs.
2. Landing pages report — Set up secondary dimensions such as Device category, User type, Source/medium, Browser, Operating system, Age/gender.
3. Google ad campaign overview — look at campaigns where the cost is higher than the revenue.
4. Set-drop analysis — To get an overview of each step in the landing page funnel so can see where users are exiting and identify the weakest parts.
5. Calculate your test capacity.
Qualitative Research
1. Heuristic walkthrough — Empathy & understanding. What do our users experience while going through the landing page and the funnel? This is going to be the starting point for further research: It’s about identifying the weakest points in the landing page experience and works best when you aren’t familiar with it at all. Also a great source for forming initial hypotheses.
Task 1 — At a glance: look at the page/step for only 5 seconds and answer the first series of questions.
What is your first impression of this step? How does it make you feel? Is there anything that stands out? Is it clear who the source is? Does the source seem credible?
Task 2 — Detailed analysis: go through all the content on the page/step and answer the following questions.
Is the information delivered in a logical order? Is the content structured in a logical order? Does anything seem confusing? Do you have any unanswered questions? Do you have a clear idea of what to do next? Is there anything you would add? Is there anything you would remove? Is there anything you would rearrange? Are there any UX issues? Are there any bugs / technical issues?
2. Customer review sites
· Read a lot of reviews
· Get an overall idea of what’s good and bad
· Look at suggestions for improvement from users
· Analyze overall language and specific words
3. Interviews with customers, customer success, and sales
· Don’t try to guess what the audience is thinking or feeling. Talk to your audience or the people who spend all day talking to them.
· Prepare a list of questions you can ask during interviews with CS, Sales, and customers.
· “Lead the witness” as little as possible
· Keep it short and sweet — shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes
4. Session recordings
· Capturing real user behavior.
· A feature to record your user sessions on your website, your app, or your landing pages.
· It’s really good for getting critical insight on your funnel and figuring out kind of what’s going on and building hypotheses on how to make it better.
5. Heatmaps
· Find out where users are clicking and how far they are scrolling.
6. Feedback polls
· Get clear, actionable insight
· Bother users as little as possible
· Try to use a hybrid format where you have multiple-choice, and then it opens up for open-ended
· Make them short and sweet — 1 question at a time
· Ask clear and specific questions
· Don’t give too many options (2 to 5)
· Find weak spots in the funnel and implement polls to better
understand why users are having trouble/exiting
· Sample: Get at least 100 replies — more if you want to segment
Aagaard stresses that it’s important to remember that some users might not read the full content on the page and scroll directly to the form. That’s why form headline, supplementary text, labels, and buttons should be very clear and make sense for someone who hasn’t necessarily read the whole page content.
Review —
I find the CXL CRO Minidegree very insightful. The instructors are champions in their fields and they know exactly what they are talking about. Being an experimentation analyst, I understand the importance of experiments (A/B testing) and I have seen numerous examples where the outcome of the test was contradictory to public opinion. The emphasis on testing and learning from it is something that I admire the most about the course.
The material that I went through for the seventh week helped me understand the basics of landing page optimizationplays a vital role in optimizing the conversion of a website.
The concept of interactive design is explained in so many details and so is emotional strategy. Everything about the course is so descriptive. Something, that can be easily implied in real-world scenarios/ and business problems.
The detailed walkthrough of performing user experience research and quantifying the results into actionable insights. I am eager to learn more about Google Ads and experimentation during my week #8.
That’s all folks. See you next week!
