Bad Landing Pages and Badder Conversion Paths

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this quote from a client or prospect:

We’ve tested landing pages against conversion paths and the landing pages always win.

As many of you know, we’re advocates of testing. And, we’re also advocates of advanced, more strategic landing experiences — often known as conversion paths. And while there are contexts in which a landing page may well be a more appropriate format than a multi-page experience, we generally find that conversion paths beat the pants off of landing pages (sorry, no visual).

If you’re wondering which types of landing experiences to use when, have a gander at my 2007 post Which Type of Landing Experience is Right?

So how is it that conversion paths are losers?

Quite simply, there’s a lot more that can go wrong in a conversion path than a landing page. It’s like comparing a bicycle to a car. The bike has a few moving parts, the car has thousands. It’s easy to tell why a bike won’t go — check the chain, check the tires — done. Not so fast when your car won’t go. There are a lot more variables and much more that can go wrong.

Most of the time when we see a landing page outperforming a conversion path, it’s bad versus badder.

• A bad landing page isn’t that much worse than a good landing page.
• A bad conversion path is absolutely abysmal.

In the following comparison, I’m making some assumptions to keep things simple:

1. Conversion is completing a form to become a lead
2. The conversion path is a very basic one consisting of: a landing page with a few segments; an offer page for each segment; and a thank you/confirmation page post-conversion.

Ways Landing Pages Go Bad

1. Too long — too much content
2. Mismatched message — landing doesn’t tie into the message that earned the click
3. Bad form — too many questions, too personal questions
4. Low credibility — weak branding, low quality
5. Weak content — poor headline, complex copy, emotion-less visuals

Ways Conversion Paths Go Badder

Conversion Paths: Landing Page Gotchas

We’ll begin with the landing page — the first page a respondent sees when she lands. This is the most critical page in a conversion path. Abandonment must be minimized. Segmentation choices and design are vitally important to preserving 60-80% of all respondents through to subsequent, segment-specific offer pages. When things go wrong on the first page, all is lost. Here are a few of the most common snafus:

1. Mismatched message — doesn’t tie into the message that earned the click
2. Weak segmentation choices — internal- instead of respondent-focused
3. Too many segmentation choices — too many options result in fewer clicks
4. Missing segmentation bail out — need to get a click out of those not in your strategic segments
5. Weak segmentation design — unclear or too-subtle calls to action; overly complex visuals
6. Low credibility — weak branding, low quality
7. Weak content — poor headline, complex copy, emotion-less visuals

Conversion Paths: Offer Page Gotchas

Once you move 60-80% of your respondents through your segmentation page, you need to reinforce and deepen your original promise. You need to get more specific on the segment-specific offer page in order to migrate casual interest into committed desire. Here are some of the most common offer-page snafus:

1. Mismatched message — segment-specific promise isn’t fulfilled with segment-specific content
2. Weak content — poor headline, complex copy, emotion-less visuals
3. Too long, too complex — more is less (conversion rate)
4. Bad form — too many questions, too personal questions
5. Low credibility — weak branding, low quality — trust killer as you ask for personal data

Testing Bad Versus Badder Isn’t Testing at All

If you make a bad landing page and test it against an equally bad conversion path, it’s likely the landing page will win. We’ve seen this again and again. Weak conversion paths actually alienate respondents. Weak landing pages just aren’t as strong as they could be.

Testing a landing page against a conversion path is what I call form-factor testing. In order for it to be valid, the integrity of each form factor must be preserved. If the basics of a form factor are not intact, the test is invalid. It’s that simple.

Bad versus badder teaches us nothing.

Read Anna’s article Anatomy of a Conversion Path for more on what makes a conversion path a conversion path.