Always Be Testing: Landing Page Selection and Testing is as Important as Ever

Posted by Sachin Gadhvi, Account Director

Search marketers, by and large, accept that landing page selection and testing are important.  The question is: how often do they make it a part of ongoing best practice?  Ask your SEM vendor what their views are on home page vs. category page vs. custom landing page.  Are they constantly testing which page is right for specific ad groups?

Marketers should leverage conversion optimization to dramatically increase the effectiveness of your landing pages and conversion paths.  This includes building a test plan, making recommendations on what pages to test and, upon conclusive results, implementing the winning landing pages rapidly into your program.

Performics recently collaborated with a client that has an in-house team and solution to test landing pages for some high volume generic keywords.  The control pages were the custom entry page featuring the client’s key products.  The test pages were category, sub-category and shop online pages.

In one test, the category page performed 14% better than the custom entry page
(Results have been masked – for illustrative purpose only)

 
In another test, the custom entry page (control) performed 27% better than the category page

 
These results highlight that when it comes to landing pages, you should never take anything for granted and always be testing.  You should:   

• Have a testing calendar
• Have a consistent metric (conversion rate) that will determine success of the test
• Have a statistical confidence level that you are satisfied with
• Have a consistent format to report test results
• Have a process to implement changes in a timely manner