4 sec - Webtrends · The booking funnel demonstrates all possible touch points. Landing pages are a...

Making Initial Contact Count In the competitive and complex travel industry, landing pages are key to engaging and converting new and repeat customers. Marketers have just four seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and hold it. If what a travel shopper sees on the landing page resonates, chances are they’ll make it further into the booking funnel. If it doesn’t, they’ll drop off.

Landing pages can take all shapes and forms, from a Facebook app to mobile interstitial, campaign microsite or traditional web page. No matter its form, your landing page exists to convert (typically paid) site traffic into buyers. This is the stage in the booking funnel that is most vulnerable to abandonment.

Optimizing the landing page is an effective way to improve ROI on your marketing campaign spend— particularly when it is part of an overarching optimization strategy. Also of the utmost importance is the ability to close the loop, so to speak, by using test results to trigger an action such as a real-time email or real-time tailored content. These efforts can significantly increase your total bookings.

This white paper walks you through landing page optimization best practices, including how to get started, simple ways achieve clear results, and how to apply lessons to continue optimizing across your digital ecosystem.

The Value of a Landing Page The face of a landing page has evolved into a world of mobile apps, social campaigns and new ways of leveraging the web, but landing pages at their core remain essential to effective marketing campaigns. Why? They provide a focused, relevant experience that can turn an interested visitor into a buyer.

The job of a landing page is to keep the message relevant, consistent, customer-centric and ultimately, bring the customer through the funnel to purchase. A landing page can either make or break the success of a campaign.

Squeezing the most ROI possible out of a campaign is usually the first reason marketers test and optimize landing pages, but here are a few other compelling reasons to test landing pages.

4 secMarketers have just four seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and hold it.

How to Optimize Landing Pages for Your Travel SiteBest Practices to Lift Conversion

1 White Paper | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

White Paper

1. Easy to buildLanding pages tend to be easy to create, tear down and build again for a new campaign without waiting for development release cycles or procedures. Landing pages are therefore more nimble and relatively easy to fit into quick testing cycles for faster results.

2. Simple to testA website is full of pages that have many different calls to action, navigation bars and an infinite number of booking scenarios. When optimizing a website, it is not always easy to draw a direct correlation between an element on the page and conversion — although identifying and optimizing these metrics can have a greater lift on revenue beyond just looking at the landing page. But landing pages are a good place to start. They are by definition more stripped down and have one call to action, making it easy to isolate conversion variables and conduct tests.

3. Quick and easy proof of ROI so you can optimize for greater liftsLanding page optimization will give you a quick win, but this isn’t where you will see the biggest return. Once you prove the value of optimization, you can hone in on other key parts of the funnel, such as in the cart or across more complex interactions on the site. By continuing to test, you will continue to increase conversion and see a revenue lift. If people within your organization are skeptical about the value of testing and optimizing, a landing page optimization test will quickly prove ROI, which can pave the way for more in-depth or mission critical tests down the road.

4. Less politicalTrying to execute tests or make changes on a company’s website can often be a political exercise, but landing pages can usually be set up “off the radar.” Marketers will often use landing page optimization as the way to introduce and socialize testing into an organization by proving out the potential business value there first.

5. Place to take chances and test new ideasTo get the most out of testing you have to take chances. And, because there is often less pressure to adhere to strict brand guidelines, we find that landing pages provide marketers with a great avenue to test bold new designs, messaging and offers in a controlled environment.

ROIOptimizing the landing page is a simple and effective way to improve ROI on your marketing campaign spend.


Steps to Optimize a Landing Page

Take Inventory Even a seemingly simple landing page optimization test takes thoughtful planning. Before test planning can begin, it’s important to clarify baseline assumptions. Here are five pre-testing questions you should answer before you begin an optimization project:

1. Which landing page should you optimize?

Choose the simplest page possible, with the smallest amount of clutter and clearest call to action. The landing page should be the entry point of a highly focused sales path, without distractions to the conversion goal. There should be no excess baggage like ads, links or navigation bars so visitors have only two options: convert or leave.

2. What metrics should you measure?

It’s important to boil things down to one metric. This metric should be revenue-related, so you can directly attribute a dollar amount to your testing. For most companies, this metric on the landing page is conversion rate, or click-through rate (page clicks divided by page visits). However, conversion can mean different things to different people, and it’s important that everyone involved in the optimization project agrees on how the metrics are defined.

3. What are your baseline metrics?

Before you begin testing, you should understand the status quo. What is your current daily average click-through rate? When you’re testing, a baseline control group lets you illustrate whether test variations are winning or losing against your existing normal state.

4. What page elements should you test?

A customer’s interaction with a landing page is not always easy to measure. And it’s a quick interaction — a landing page has fewer than four seconds to capture the customer’s attention. You can start to glean an understanding of customer response by assessing where the focus on the page is vs. where the customer is supposed to look. Honing in on this interaction can help inform what to test. Webtrends experts can help peel through the customer interaction layers to identify weak spots for testing.

5. What do you think will happen?

Developing a hypothesis is an important part of effective, scientific testing. Often a hypothesis will help flesh out if a test idea is fully sound and worth carrying through as an actual test.

The booking funnel demonstrates all possible touch points. Landing pages are a great first step, but there are greater opportunities to increase conversion and revenue along the funnel.

Landing Page Optimization

Site Navigation Optimization

Cart Optimization

Post-purchase Optimization

100% of VisitorsTotal Visitors

60%Explore / Research Product Category

30%Place Item

in Cart

3%Make a

Purchase

10,000Total Visitors to the Site

Visitors to Website

54 Visitors Complete Goal


Your Testing Team Optimization testing requires a diverse skill set that often extends outside the marketing or digital groups of any given organization. Optimization analysts, designers, web developers, QA — if you are testing on your own, all these groups must be engaged. This doesn’t even include the person who is managing the optimization project, a job that can quickly take up 40 hours a week.

Optimization projects are often highly visible within the company, and many directors, VPs and above are stakeholders (particularly if resources from different groups are pulled in to help with the project). A lot is at stake because the booking funnel means revenue. And without expertise to help guide you, it’s easy to test the wrong elements, misinterpret the results, and accidentally misguide the direction of your website.

We help you scope out the tests and the testing timeline and provide a team of experts to fill the diverse roles required for the project, including test hypothesis and plan development, project management, web development, QA, design and analysis. We deliver data in a way that is easy to understand, and easy for you to share across your company. And, we can train your team to run simple tests independently while continuing to be involved for the complex multivariate testing that can yield significant results.

Testing Best Practices Once preparation is complete, you can delve into the details of fleshing out the testing plan.

Deciding What to Test

Here’s an example: You want to measure click rate as your conversion metric, so your first test should focus on the element of the page that influences most clicks. You can glean this information from analytics data, as well as heat maps, which show where customers are interacting within the page.

One thing to keep in mind is that “industry best practices” or even “internal best practices” don’t always apply to all pages. Although it might seem like you can apply lessons across many different sites, every page is unique and often tests differently. It’s not unusual for marketing organizations to hold true to common understandings such as “green buttons always perform the best,” but these pieces of folk wisdom can change depending on the campaign, the audience, the competing page elements and the call to action (as well as other variables).

All elements test differently and all elements are testable. Common testing elements include: copy, graphics, buttons (copy, color, placement), call to action, white space and form threshold (how many fields to include in a form). Any page element is a potential candidate for testing.


While there may be five elements in this example (and most landing pages), it is the combinations of elements that actually influence results. No single element is meaningful in a vacuum. For example, the orange call-to-action button may test better when the headline is shorter, but test worse when the headline is longer. When you combine additional elements (e.g., combine them with different sections of copy, or additional graphics, etc.) the amount of possible combinations can exponentially explode into the thousands or even millions — which is one of the reasons that marketers look to technology and expertise to enable a successful optimization testing optimization program that ranges from simple A/B testing to highly complex multivariate testing.

How Soon Will the Testing Yield Results? The length of each test depends on several variables:

• Traffic volume to the landing page

• What percentage of this traffic you want to put in the test pool

• The number of variables being tested

• The entire customer flow through the funnel

• The number of success conversions being measured (a landing page optimization test typically measures one conversion, but tracking more conversion points yields greater insight, which in the long run can increase conversion rates)

• How effective the tested content is at eliciting increased or decreased visitor behavior (the more similar the content, the longer it takes to statistically determine differences in behavior)

• Your organization’s resources and response time

Testing elements of sample landing page:1. Headline

2. Copy

3. Form

4. Imagery

5. Call-to-action button

Webtrends takes all factors into consideration and helps you develop a project timeline that will give you the quickest, most accurate results.

In this example Webtrends landing page, there are five distinct elements, all of which can be tested.


Choose the Right Test Methodology The three most common types of optimization tests are:

1. Split Testing

These tests split traffic to two or more different pages that represent different executions of the same test idea, then measure the comparative results.

2. A/B

A/B or A/B/n tests focus on testing one element on a single page or the same element across multiple pages (e.g., button color or navigation). This test is relatively simple to set up because it isolates a single testing variable, but it can take a long time to generate results — and results themselves are limited. When more than one element needs to be tested, these tests are typically run sequentially, which takes even longer.

3. Multivariate

These tests focus on testing multiple variables simultaneously rather than sequentially. These tests tend to be more complex to set up, but represent a major time savings to run, and provide the most valuable insight into how all elements work together.

Since one of the benefits of optimizing a landing page is its simplicity, your first test will probably be an A/B/n test, focusing on a single element of the page. This will give you quick insight and uplift, and also help inform further testing.

�

A/B/nTesting

SplitTesting

MultivariateTesting


Conducting the Tests Even with the best test plan and timeline in the world, the testing phase is where things become most challenging. This is when all the key players and their respective “moving parts” must work in concert to meet the testing dates. It is up to the marketing manager to corral this diverse group and keep project from unraveling.

Even if the assembled team has signed on to take part in the testing plan, it is common that these resources are “borrowed” from other parts of the organization. For example, your design resource may agree to help create different iterations of the hero shot, but other priorities may take precedence and the work doesn’t get completed by its due date. Meanwhile, the time that web development sets aside to implement the test has come and gone, and they are on to other projects.

Even though testing is a project with direct revenue impact and high visibility within the company, it can easily lose its way. Who gets the blame for that? Frequently, it is the marketing manager, who is often a single point of accountability for campaign conversion and success. However, there is a better way, one where the test plan is completed on time.

Sharing Results Across Your Company People tend to have strong opinions about which elements of a landing page are effective, and which are not. Without testing, opinions are just that: opinions. Only with testing can you know what drives results.

Webtrends delivers easy-to-read reports on testing results, which can be shared across the organization and understood by everyone. Webtrends lifts the data out of the statistical weeds and clearly and accurately demonstrates percent lift, revenue increase and ROI. Our combination of experts and technology gives you results quickly, so you can be an expert in digital marketing without having to also be an expert in statistics.

Communicating Value While it’s important to share results, how you deliver those results across the company is part of the impact you can make. It’s common for many players in many groups to have a stake in the testing, and when you show them the results, you want the message to be as clear and have as great an impact as possible.

At Webtrends, working on our own optimization projects as well as working closely with our travel clients, and others, we’ve discovered what works best in terms of rolling up the lessons from an optimization test across the company.

When you partner with Webtrends, our experience and team of experts are all part of the solution.Rather than having to beg, borrow

and steal your own internal resources,

we provide a team of experienced

optimization experts who specialize in

each discipline required for a successful

optimization project.

You will have a developer, QA engineer,

designer and optimization project

manager dedicated to your tests.


Share a four-part story

1. The problem you were trying to solve (e.g., increase click rate on the landing page)

2. The control vs. the test variations (including visual examples)

3. Which version won, and why (including lift metrics)

4. The impact of the lift on the business

We’ve found that a presentation slide deck most effectively communicates this story because it allows you to incorporate pictures and graphics that illustrate exactly what was tested. Here is an illustration of a sample deck our clients may send out once a test is complete (using a sample test from a fictitious company).

Slide 1Objective and Challenges

Slide 1 states your test objective, the challenges you

faced, and a screenshot of the page you tested.

Slide 2Control vs. Challengers

Slide 2 includes a screenshot of the original page and all

variations you tested.

Challengers

Objectives and Challenges

Control vs. Challengers

Key Objective:

Increase membership registrations

Challenges:

Don’t want to distract from purchase

Don’t want to confuse customers


Success

Slide 3 is identical to the previous slide, but highlights the winner and states the lift

increase and revenue impact.

Slide 4Lessons

Slide 4 communicates what this increase revealed. State why

that test was the winner and any additional lessons from the tests.

When you communicate your testing story, it often circulates beyond those you send it to. By using this template, you keep the story clear and consistent, making sure the purpose, lessons and value of your test won’t get lost in translation.

Lessons

+13.5% increase in signups

Challengers

Success

Translates to additonal $650,000 in annual revenue

Key Learning:

Adding text to the hero shot increases signups

None of the variations impacted travel bookings

“Free flight upgrade” plus “Start saving now” caused the most signups


Next Steps: Increasing Revenue Lift After you’ve improved campaign ROI and established a preliminary revenue lift as a result of landing page optimization testing, what comes next? Applying those lessons to additional areas and audience segments.

Optimization is a journey, not a destination, because greater lift is always in sight. Lessons from one test will inform the opportunities of a new one. In addition to testing other important landing pages, testing in other areas will produce significant lift and continue to improve ROI.

Here are three ways to continue optimizing:

1. Optimize the cart

You may have travelers that make it through the booking funnel far enough to be considered “serious prospects.” However, abandonment is a real challenge for even the most sophisticated travel marketers. By optimizing within the cart, you can pinpoint the factors causing drop-off and make improvements that directly improve conversion and increase revenue.

2. Optimize across the entire campaign

More and more, travelers are interacting with brands across channels — through social campaigns, on mobile devices, online and more. According to PhoCusWright, on average, travelers who shop online access 6.5 touch points when planning their leisure trips. Webtrends lets you optimize your campaign across all these channels, and target your messaging to important traveler personas and depending on how they are interacting with the content. This optimization strategy focuses on an earlier stage of the conversion process, allowing you to bring more people into the funnel.

3. Optimize within customer segments

If you can get substantial incremental lift by optimizing for the general population, imagine the increases you would see if you optimized within traveler segments. For example, by targeting returning bookers, you could improve their conversion as separate from new ones. By targeting and testing within segments by demographics or travel history or other characteristics, your revenue lifts become even greater.

Conclusion In travel, it is important to understand the full customer journey, from research to post-trip activities, especially across all channels and devices in order to learn from those interactions. By understanding both the actions and intent of these interactions, the best strategies for improving the visitor experience and maximizing conversion often reveal strong testing and optimization opportunities that will inevitably lead to both improvements in profitability and improved brand consideration. If you are new to testing, landing page optimization is a great place to start. Webtrends has the travel industry experience, data expertise and technology to unlock the potential of optimization, prove ROI and increase revenue, starting with your landing page, executing across your entire site, and extending to mobile and social channels.


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About Webtrends Inc.

For more than 20 years, Webtrends has helped companies make sense of their customer data to drive digital marketing success. By combining innovative technology with our team of trusted and creative advisors, our solutions are designed to provide actionable insights, increase customer engagement and boost revenue.

We partner with companies at all levels of digital maturity and offer solutions in measurement and optimization. We work closely with approximately 2,000 global brands including Microsoft, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, HSBC, Marks & Spencer, npower, BMW, Toyota, The Telegraph, Lastminute.com and many more.

To learn more about Webtrends, visit:webtrends.com/testing


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