AMA webinar: Keep the conversation going!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting 25 Best-Kept Landing Page Secrets hosted by AMA. We had more than 650 AMA members attend, and the dialogue that followed was tremendous. Marketers focused on how, when, and why you use landing page testing, and there were a few questions I couldn’t help but share.

What are the differences between a social landing page and a PPC page?
Erica / Insurance

A social landing page embedded in Facebook.Visitors coming from pay-per-click (PPC) traffic sources are searching for a specific thing, such as your brand, product, or maybe even your competitors. In search engine marketing (a form of PPC advertising), ads are displayed as results from a query, like “Landing Page Tips”. These ads usually contain offers—anything from a free download or trial to an online coupon or quote. In this way, the PPC landing page must service that offer specifically—and optimally, be relevant to both the offer and the search query (campaign).

Social landing pages, on the other hand, don’t always have to be so offer and conversion-focused. This is because social landing pages only sometimes service a paid advertisement. In many cases, social landing pages serve the purpose of content consumption—a key part of your brand’s content marketing strategy. Since you don’t have to be so conversion focused on these content pages, you can include social microconversions such as ‘Like’ buttons, twitter feeds, and other links away from the page.

What is a typical timeframe to leave a test running (in order to get good metrics)?

Rose / Information Technology & Software

The length of your landing page tests (in days) actually depends on a few variables, such as the amount of traffic that you’re sending to your site, the number of different variations of that page you want to test, and how ‘sure’ you want to be about your results. Because of this, there’s no “rule of thumb” that determines how long you should run a test. However, you can still predict how long a test should be by using these tips:

• The more visitors you have to your page, the quicker you’ll achieve significant results.
• Traffic aside, the more landing page variations you have, the longer the test will take.
• In multivariate testing, the same holds true: the more combinations of page elements you test, the longer it will take to reach significance.

Generally speaking, simple tests with few versions in high-volume campaigns should run quickly. If you’re testing in a low-volume campaign, keep your variations to a minimum—unless you can afford to wait for significant results.

Have you considered the resources necessary to customize landing pages for every single source of leads?

Deborah / Consulting

For the best chance at converting visitors and gleaning a response from your online marketing campaigns, we recommend optimizing your landing page for each traffic source. If you’re advertising in many venues, like e-mail, social, Google, and online industry publications, that can mean creating quite a few landing pages—especially if you’re testing different variations in each campaign!

There are a couple ways to avoid getting overwhelmed by the implications of this best practice.

• Use dynamic content substitution and insertion to customize your landing page to service multiple adgroups within the same campaign. You can insert keywords like ‘Orlando Theme Parks’ or ‘Best Italian Food in New York’ right into your headlines, providing an instant boost to content relevancy. You can also use dynamic content substitution in much the same way—swap out images and other page elements based on data that you append to your query string.
• Use landing page software to quickly create and deploy landing pages for each of your campaigns. Most landing page software comes with customizable templates that make it easy to launch social, pay-per-click, and e-mail marketing landing pages without depending on IT resources, lots of code, or a web design team.

I hope that everybody who attended enjoyed our conversation, and can benefit from the tips and strategies that we revealed. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend, check out our on-demand recording and download the slide deck from SlideShare!