At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas my colleagues John Rampton (Editor-at-large) and Loren Baker (SEJ Founder) had the opportunity to interview two experts about how to optimize pages for usability and conversions.
Paul Ryazanov of Promodo is doing some cutting edge things with heat mapping and eye tracking, which he discusses in detail. Stoney deGeyter literally wrote the book on “The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!”
Between the two of them we gathered some new ideas for tools and tactics you can put to use when optimizing your next landing pages. Hear what they have to say in the videos below.
Tracking Your Users’ Behavior: An Interview with Paul Ryazanov
Measure Success with Great Marketing Checklists: An Interview with Stoney DeGeyter
Here are some key takeaways from the videos:
- Eye tracking and heat mapping can be used to analyze a page and have it modified for conversions even before ever launches. Multiple tools can be used to analyze that, one of which is the Yandex Metrica tool (free!).
- The Yandex Metrica tool shows you information about click-throughs and user behavior after they land on your page. It also records a video of every single visit so you can see what pages visitors are going to and how long they’re staying on each page etc. From there you can make more accurate assumptions about what is a distraction on the page, and what is preventing a user from ultimately responding to your call to action.
- Common trends being noticed include consumers’ preference toward clean, minimalist designs with very targeted messages and limited forms to fill out.
- When testing long forms for users to fill out versus short forms, the shorter forms always convert better. The reason for this could be the rise of mobile searching, so marketers have to make sure their landing pages are fully optimized for mobile.
- CrazyEgg is a good, popular tool for landing page optimization but limited compared to Yandex Metrica. For example, you’re very limited with CrazyEgg if your site doesn’t receive a ton of traffic or if you want to track a very specific page. With Yandex Metrica you can even group your audiences by gender to see how the conversion path differs between males and females.
- Usability issues are becoming more and more important when it comes to optimizing landing pages and pleasing search engine algorithms. focusing on usability and making sure people can get the information they want is critical.
- Something else to focus on is analytics and reporting your successes. It’s important to know what is or isn’t a success so you know what you need to adjust for your next campaign. If you don’t know what your goals are, there’s no way to know if you’re winning.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Category
SEO
