The Long Tail of Landing Pages isn't just for paid advertisements.

Both with organic search engine optimization (SEO) and social media "viral" tactics, landing pages can be employed to target very specific niches. For instance, if I want to own the phrase "landing page ratio" in Google -- in addition to my blog post -- I can create a landing page that speaks directly to that topic.

For example: http://paths.ioninteractive.com/landingpageratio

I can then submit that URL to Google to be crawled. Or I can share it with people on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Mixx, del.icio.us, and other social media hubs where it's relevant to a particular audience.

Why not just share the original blog link?

In this case, the original blog post becomes the central reference point. However, different landing pages can be created to frame that content for more specific niches. For example, if I would like to present landing page ratio as a concept to search engine marketers -- maybe even Google AdWords advertisers, to be even more specific -- I could put together an introductory landing page with that audience in mind.

For example: http://paths.ioninteractive.com/semlandingpageratio

That particular page hasn't been customized much, as I only spent a few minutes on it as a quick sample. But even a few key choices of words and examples can make it more relevant to that particular segment. And it's easy to see that I could invest 15-20 minutes on a version that would go even deeper.

Great blog posts take a lot of investment of time, and you don't want to copy the exact same thing over and over again with only minor tweaks. Introductory landing pages in front of your best posts are a great way to extend the life of those posts and evangelize them to many different niches.

This is The Long Tail of Landing Pages for organic and viral web marketing.

Of course, as with all good web marketing, your landing pages have to be genuine and authentic. This isn't about trying to "trick" search engines or social networks. This is about authentically framing your content in the best possible light for the collective whole of niche audiences.

-- Scott Brinker

How well are you doing in adopting a Long Tail strategy in your online marketing? A new metric called your Landing Page Ratio (LPR) can give you a quick snapshot of how deeply you're engaging your niche audiences.

Start with these two questions:

1. How many different online ads do you have, search or display?

2. How many different landing pages do you have?

When counting the number of ads, be as granular as possible. In search marketing, you'd count individual ad creatives as well as groups of tightly clustered keywords. With display advertising, you'd count each different banner and each different set of placement parameters. Essentially, you want both the creative and the context in which the user sees that creative to be taken into consideration. For most companies, this quickly becomes a large number.

When counting the number of landing pages, count the number of distinct destinations -- distinct from a respondent's point of view -- that have their own layout, flow, and message. Minor variations of individual elements in the page, e.g. trying 5 different tweaked headlines, only counts as one page. This isn't about optimizing one page; this is about deploying different pages for different ads.

Now divide the number of ads by the number of landing pages. This is your Landing Page Ratio.


For example, if you have 170 ads running, but you only have 5 distinct landing pages, then your Landing Page Ratio = (170 / 5) = 34. For every 34 ads, you have one landing page. Your LPR is 34-to-1.

What should your LPR be? It depends. A 1-to-1 ratio would be a "perfect match" between a Long Tail of online advertising and a Long Tail of landing pages, giving you the maximum specificity for each niche audience and the greatest synergy with each individual ad. But you may not need to go that far to achieve your sweet spot.

Generally, I'd say a 10-to-1 ratio represents "closely matched" ads and landing pages. In contrast, a 100-to-1 ratio probably suggests that your landing pages are too generic, and you may have the opportunity to improve your conversion rate by tightening your pre-click/post-click synergy.

The answer for what's best for you is to calculate your LPR on a regular basis -- it's an easy enough metric to keep track of -- and see how it aligns with your conversion rate, ROAS, and CPA metrics. You can experiment with smaller ratios to determine your most effective zone.

-- Scott Brinker

This morning eMarketer published an article titled Microsites Still Have Marketer's Attention. "If you build a microsite, they will come, they will engage and you can get the data to prove it."

I'm not so sure that "they will come" is a given, but if you're generating clicks from online advertising or social marketing campaigns, you already have traffic. The question is do you want to send them to a plain old landing page (POLP) or something a little more impressive, such as a microsite?

The evidence is that microsites are great for engagement.

The stat that I found most interesting in eMarketer's article was their reference to a MarketingSherpa survey on viral marketing tactics from April 2007. "Cool microsites" won out over online games, video clips, audio clips, offering e-cards, etc. Over 37% of 2,914 experienced viral marketers said they got "great results", while a mere 10% reported "dismal results". It was the highest spread between good and bad of any technique.

"With interactive advertising, the consumer must be presented compelling content to draw him or her into the interaction. The consumer must be engaged."

We couldn't agree more. That is what post-click marketing is all about.

-- Scott Brinker

Clicks (i.e. humans who click your ads) aren't waiting for perfection.

The respondents who click on your ads aren't going to wait around for you to get your landing pages just right. They are clicking on your ads today—right now, probably. You are paying (a lot) for them to click. They click, they land. And then what?

In a perfect world, they land on a perfect experience that gets them to do whatever it is you want them to do (engage, convert, buy). But we don't live in a perfect world, so you won't be well served by sitting around sweating the details of how to make that perfect experience. Get  something launched, see how users respond to it, and iterate based on that. Keep going, keep improving. Your post-click marketing should be evolutionary—adapting and responding to how your respondents are behaving. Each time you look at the results, the next step should, and will, reveal itself. You don't need to plan every test from here to next year. Doing so will stop you in your tracks. Just get going and keep on moving.

Anna Talerico

We're big advocates of testing. But to us, testing is only one tool in a marketer's toolbox. The bigger mission: find great customers, engage and impress them, start a good relationship, and do it efficiently with a strong return on marketing investment (ROMI).

That's why when it comes to landing pages -- particularly multi-page landing experiences -- we favor A/B split testing over multivariate testing (MVT). It helps keep the big picture in focus.

I'll explain.

I know, MVT is "in" these days. It promises a kind of magical box: drop dozens or hundreds of elements into the box, pour in your respondents, the box shakes around trying thousands and thousands of combinations, and voila!, out pops THE ANSWER. Only a few of us math geeks understand exactly how it reaches that answer, but for everyone else, that's okay, the only thing that really matters is the answer. Right?

Well, sacred cows make great hamburger.

There are a number of caveats to MVT that tend to get lost in the fine print.

For instance, fractional factorial MVT -- popularized by some vendors because they promise to give you the answer without having to test all of those thousands of combinations directly -- are usually based on the assumption that there are no "interaction effects" between the elements, say between a headline on the page and an image on the page. But do you as a marketer believe that a headline and its accompanying image have no interplay?

I've described other concerns with MVT -- optimizing to the average user instead of finding the best answer for each segment independently, difficulty in running apples-to-oranges experiments, etc. -- in a paper I wrote a couple of months ago.

But I'd like to bring attention to a very basic problem with the MVT approach that is often overlooked: the Russian roulette caveat.

Let's say you're testing a landing page with a structure of 5 testable elements: headline, subhead, image, body copy, and call-to-action button. The MVT approach encourages you to load up many variations of each, say 10 headlines, 5 subheads, 5 images, 2 body copy blocks, and 3 different call to action buttons.

That's 10 x 5 x 5 x 2 x 3 = 1,500 possible combinations.

A supposed benefit of MVT is that you as a marketer don't have to visualize each of these combinations. The good news is that somewhere in there is hopefully one combination that is better than all the others, your star, and that's what you're searching for. The bad news, however, is that there are probably a fair number of dogs in there too. Maybe even some really bad ones.

What is a bad combination? (Seth Godin's imagery of a meatball sundae comes to mind.) It's when two or more elements clash so as to confuse or mislead the respondent, give them the wrong impression, or simply come across as a disjointed presentation that reflects poorly on your brand.

For example, say you're marketing your Caribbean resort, and you have two headlines: "Enjoy our delicious food!" and "Relax in our luxurious health spa!". You also have two images: a photo of a big buffet with rich, sinful desserts and another photo of someone being wrapped with cucumber slices over their eyes. Four possible combinations, two of which are fine. However, the other two are not: one is a head scratcher, and the other is downright frightening.

Talk about headline/image interaction effects. Yow.

While this example is obviously contrived, it's not hard to imagine how even well-intentioned MVT trials can lead to unexpected -- and undesired -- combinations. If you were presented with one of these combinations outright, you would immediately veto it. Unfortunately, since it's 1 of 1,500 combinations, you don't get the chance to picture it on its own. It's lost in the math of possibilities.

Now, of course, these bad combinations aren't going to win out in your trials. After you run your MVT experiment long enough to achieve statistical significance, these bad combinations will go away.

But the Russian roulette caveat is that by then a number of legitimate respondents have already been exposed to them.

Any one respondent doesn't know that they're participating in a test of 1,500 different combinations. They don't say, "Heh, heh, sorry guys, this one's wacky, give me an alternative instead." All they know is what they see. To quote The Truman Show, "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." If their landing page is disjointed, weird, wacky, misleading, confusing, etc., they simply have a negative experience of your brand.

What percentage of MVT-generated combinations deliver these bad experiences? It's hard to predict. After the fact, you can look at the list of worst performers and see that 10% were awful. But for the sake of argument, let's say it's low, maybe 5%. In which case, 75 of those 1,500 combinations are unfit to represent your brand.

Is your landing page optimization mission worth the risk that 5% of your would-be customers have a bad experience? Particularly as their first impression of you?

The risk here is increased by the fact that many companies are subject to the Pareto principle: 80% of their business comes from 20% of their customers. So on average, if 5% of your landing pages give bad brand and 20% of your customers become superstar customers, then 20% x 5% = 1% of your combinations to would-be customers are resulting in a superstar prospect being mishandled on their first touch.

Statistics are easy to accept impersonally. But when they translate into real people, with high stakes, it's hard to be as cavalier. Every 100th deep-pocketed customer who walks through your door you throw a water balloon at them.

The thing is: you don't have to do it that way.

With A/B testing, you as the marketer get to explicitly visualize each combination before it's in production. Yes, that means a smaller number of combinations are tested, but in exchange you can be guaranteed 100% that no respondent will ever receive a BAD experience.

Every respondent will receive a good experience, and you're simply testing to find the BEST experience.

Narrowing the number of combinations you're trying isn't necessarily a trade off in your results either. The history of direct marketing is rich with examples -- online and offline -- of A/B tests that have produced as significant results as what is advertised by MVT vendors. More combinations does not mean better combinations.

With a smaller number of tests, where you're actually able to visualize each test, you don't waste time with junk combinations or redundant variations. You focus on real hypotheses and clear ideas. This is the sort of thinking that leads to breakthrough experiences that change the game and double or triple your conversion rate.

A/B tests are easy to set up. They're easy to understand. You can visualize exactly what is being tested. And there is no Russian roulette.

-- Scott Brinker

During the Landing Page Clinic at SES NY last week, one of the volunteers from the audience offered up what I thought was a good, solid landing experience. It's for The Entertainment Book, which publishes local discount and promotion books around the country.

The landing page was similar to their home page, with a beautiful look-and-feel and an inviting way for respondents to preview discounts in their zip code. Path based, meaningful segmentation, great branding -- many of the key principles of the post-click manifesto. I'm not the only one who thought it was good either: apparently they had tested many different concepts and variations, and this one was the hands-down winner, as judged by real users.

Yet when it was discussed at the clinic, concern was quickly raised about the image-heavy nature of the page and the form required to get to step two of the path. Would this not negatively impact the Google Quality Score? Wouldn't it be better to have more text, fewer images? Move it towards Google's Platonic ideal of what a landing page should be?

I had to interject.

Google is not your customer. Google is your vendor. You pay them; your customers pay you.

I appreciate that the Google Quality Score impacts your price and position in the SERP. You shouldn't ignore it. You should certainly try to keep it as high as you can. But when the Google Quality Score has become an end unto itself, I think priorities are out of whack.

Creating compelling experiences for your respondents, maximizing your conversion rate, winning over more and more qualified prospects: these should be your primary objectives. Achieving the highest possible return on advertising spend (ROAS) should be your goal.

The Google Quality Score is a factor, but it shouldn't be the dominant factor. What matters more is your Human Quality Score -- how real people react to your landing experience. Do they find it appealing? Are they engaged? Does it motivate them to move forward with you? Ultimately, do they convert?

Let's say you have two landing experiences, X and Y:

X is Google's darling, and gives you a "Great" Google Quality Score for the keyword. As a result, your minimum bid is $4.00 per click. But when real people land on it, only 3% of them convert, the industry average. You could call this an "OK" Human Quality Score.

Y has a format that the Google algorithm doesn't like as much. It has more images, maybe even Flash or video as one of its main elements. It gives you an "OK" Google Quality Score, which causes your minimum bid to be 20% higher, $4.80 per click. But wow, the people who click really love it, and they convert at rate of 10%. You get a "Great" Human Quality Score.

Which would you rather have? Let's do the math.

Assume that the keyword and ad are the same for both, giving you the same click-through rate (CTR), and you get 1,000 clicks. For the sake of keeping the math simple, say each conversion is worth $1,000.

Landing experience X costs you $4,000 and gives you 30 conversions. You win $30,000 of business from that spend, so your ROAS is $7.50 for every $1.00 spent.

Landing experience Y costs you $4,800 and gives you 100 conversions. But now you win $100,000 of business from that spend, so your ROAS is $20.83 for every $1.00 spent.

Your ROAS is 170% higher for landing experience Y and you net 70 additional customers. I don't know about you, but I'll take Y over X every time (and it's not just because I subscribe to Theory Y management). My feelings aren't hurt that Google only thinks I'm OK, if my customers think I'm great, and the economics are in my favor.

Besides, if you take Google at face value, they want people who click on search ads to have a great experience and find "rich and original content". If you focus on building great landing experiences for your customers, you're doing the right thing. Just because Google's ad algorithm may or may not agree with what you and your customers think is great today, doesn't mean that won't change. In fact, it can change quite suddenly.

People who prize a Google Quality Score over everything else live a precarious existence. When Google decides to change their algorithm, then all the learning about optimizing one's score can be made worthless overnight.

Learning about what your customers value, however, has much more staying power. It also has value far beyond Google.

One more point that needs to be made on this subject is the debate over rich media. A number of folks will tell you to avoid having it on your landing pages for fear that it will negatively impact your Google Quality Score. It's almost heretical in some quarters (certain sessions in SES, for instance). But keep two things in mind:

1. Real people tend to actually like rich media. Done well, it can win you an extremely high Human Quality Score. A whole cottage industry of avatars and integrated page video producers has sprung up because these techniques are delivering phenomenal conversion rates. (This is one of the reasons we were so excited to announce the seamless integration of Flash objects into LiveBall earlier this month.)

2. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube. Clearly they recognize the enormous value of rich media as well. It's not hard to imagine how that will evolve to be increasingly reflected in Google Quality Score calculations. We are not a society of text. We are a society of images and interactivity. And Google is as eager to tap into that as anyone.

Again, I'm not advising that you should be reckless with your Google Quality Score -- any more than you should be reckless with any of the other secondary factors that contribute to your marketing choices and overall campaign success. And if you can have a "Great" Google Quality Score and a "Great" Human Quality Score, all the better. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Just don't let the tail wag the dog.

Put your Human Quality Score first. Put your end-to-end results first. Put the Google Quality Score in its place, high on your list perhaps, but not quite that high.

-- Scott Brinker

I caught Matthew Bailey's presentation for "Analytics: Data into Action" at SES NY this week, and it's true: he is a fantastic, animated speaker. I can see why he's a favorite at so many of these shows.

Matt's session started with basic but good points (a) that analysis is more than reporting, (b) that web analytics works best when you start with clearly defined expectations about what you're going to measure, and (c) that no analytics solution is 100% accurate, but that trends are far more important than accuracy. All good stuff.

But then he delivered a hallelujah moment: great web analytics is about understanding the segmentation of your audience.

He exclaimed with great vigor: "Find the different goals and motivations of your visitors -- they're not one big herd of cattle moving from point A to point B!"

He also emphasized that "there is not a single conversion rate, but different conversion rates for different segments. Segment your analysis as well as your visitors."

I wanted to jump up and shout, "Yeah!"

Having been banging on the segmentation drum for many years ourselves -- occasionally feeling like the lone little drummer boy -- it was wonderful to have such a respected voice in the web marketing space advocate this ideal so clearly and passionately.

However, while Matt primarily focused on using different search marketing keywords as the way to segment respondents -- which is certainly a good idea on its own, matching different landing experiences for your different traffic sources -- we believe that pre-click segmentation is only trickle from the faucet compared to the waterfall of insight that can be harnessed from post-click segmentation. Transparent, participatory segmentation choices that respondents make along path-based landing experiences enable a much broader range of segmentation tracking and analysis.

I hope this segmentation meme comes up more and more in the shows and seminars ahead for 2008. As we've seen with our customers again and again, it is key to moving the bar in conversion rates.

-- Scott Brinker

Building on yesterday, I'd like to speak directly to the most critical points in your post-click marketing: your 'trust moments'. These are the moments when your respondents ask themselves if they should deepen their commitment to you—or not. There are many smaller trust moments in any conversion path, but today I'll address the top three: landing, asking and delivering.

You want these moments to be no-brainers. You really want them to be non-events—meaning your respondents are so engaged, with so much desire, and so much confidence in you, that trust is inherent. You want your trust moments to become trivial.

For most online marketers, trust moments are anything but trivial. We inadvertently make our trust moments these huge, momentum taming roadblocks. Points at which respondents stop dead in their tracks and question why they're doing what they're doing. Bang! That's the sound of the door to conversion being slammed in our face. Ouch.

Take heart. If we identify these all-important, make-or-break points, we can lessen their likelihood of causing our conversion rate to quiver in fear.

Yesterday, I spoke to engagement and time spent as metrics for assessing what's right or wrong in your conversion paths. Trust moments can exist at any point in your conversion funnel. They are interactive not independent of your engagement and time-spent evaluations.

Trust Moment #1: Landing
Your first trust moment happens immediately when your respondent lands. In a split second he draws a conclusion as to your credibility. He decides if you're worth a second look or not.

• Trust increases with the perceived quality of your landing page
• Trust increases when your landing page message matches whatever was clicked on

Part of trust on the landing page is respecting the respondent's time and attention. If they feel a lack of respect, their trust in you (as a good match for them) declines precipitously. Therefore...

• Trust decreases as what's asked of the respondent is outside of their comfort zone
  

Good News
Each time you are successful in moving your respondent deeper in your conversion path is a huge coup for the trust the respondent places in you. I call it completing the trust cycle. And the more times you can do it, the better your chances of conversion.

Trust Moment #2: Asking
For many conversion paths post-click #2 is the tough one to get. That's usually the one with the commitment on it. You can identify your commitment as the point at which the respondent is no longer anonymous.

You need to wait to ask until your case is so strong that they want you to ask. That means they need to want it—a lot. If they want whatever it is you're offering, they're happy to exchange something for it. Remember the trade has to be perceived as fair and equitable. If you're offering something of so-so value, don't expect much in return.

• Trust increases when what you're asking matches in scale to what you're offering

Then there are mechanics. People trust other people more than they trust machines. They also look for comfort when they're giving up personal data. You can evaluate the trustworthiness of your forms in these terms:

• Trust increases when the form is warmer and more humanized—in language and/or visually
• Trust increases when you make a short, profound statement to bring comfort to the exchange of personal information. All of our forms say something like: "Your personal information, including your email address, will be held in the strictest of confidence and will never be shared with anyone."
• Trust increases when you ask the right questions--or more specifically when you don't ask the wrong questions. Requiring questions to be answered on forms is one thing. But requiring questions to be answered that the respondent may be uncomfortable or unable to answer is a sure way to lose them.

Trust Moment #3: Delivering
This is post-conversion, but don't tune out. Just because you got what you wanted, doesn't mean your opportunity to build trust is over. Deliver whatever you promised quickly, directly and without interruption. Why? Because we all know that each completed conversion path is merely a step towards retaining a great customer. Your brand is on the line. And what you do post-conversion has a profound impact on your perceived trustworthiness going forward—with this respondent—and with others as word of your behavior spreads socially.

No respondent is an island. Build trust and it will come back to you.

Enjoy SES today and visit us in booth #1016.

—Justin Talerico

Let's say you're a good post-click marketer and you're using multipage conversion paths. Now what? How do you know how well they're working? How do you know where and how to iterate?

Sure you look at your conversion rate. But if that's not all it can be, how can you tell what the problem is? The path's page-by-page performance can tell you everything you need to know.

1: Engagement
The first metric you need to look at is initial engagement. In conversion paths we typically measure initial engagement by looking at the percentage of respondents who segment on the first page of the path. This key percentage tells us how matched the first impression of our conversion path is to its click source. You should be seeing segmentation percentages of 40-80%. If you can get it above 60%, you're doing well.

• If your initial engagement is low, then your first impression doesn't match with respondent expectations.
• If your initial engagement is high, then your first impression matches well and you're on the right path.

2: Time Spent
In many conversion paths the next step after the initial segmentation is an offer page. These pages usually speak very specifically to the segmented respondent and have the potential to retain a significant percentage of the people who come into them. If this page also features a form for conversion, then it also has many potential ways that it can alienate the respondent. We have to be careful not to jump to conclusions when evaluating the performance of a multifaceted page.

Your assessment of this page should start with an objective look at its performance. If you segmented 60% of your respondents and got them to engage in your path, then you know that you're speaking to the right people about something that interests them. So your offer page has a huge opportunity. But if it's only converting at 2%, then something's very wrong with the page. But what?

Your first clue as to where your offer page is going wrong could be time-spent. If respondents are spending just a few seconds on the page you can look for these obvious problems:

• Content disconnect—doesn't match previous page or promise
• Overwhelming—too much text or content
• Distractions (non-conversion links, navigation, off-task video, etc.)
• Offensive form (too long, poorly designed, etc.)

The problems above are easier to spot if you can divorce yourself of your internal view of the page to 'see it like a respondent does'. Landing and bailing (quickly) means you alienated them (quickly). Take a subjective, impartial look at your page through the lens of your respondent and you'll likely see the problem.

But what if time-spent is longer, say 30+ seconds? That's good in that you have them more deeply engaged, but it's bad in that you have them interested, but then blow it. If you're seeing deep engagement in time invested by respondents, you need to look more closely at your page:

• Is there something technically standing in the way of conversion?
• Is there one question on the form that's difficult or uncomfortable for people to answer?
• Are you adequately addressing privacy concerns with a clear, simple statement?

I'll get into evaluating your 'trust moments' tomorrow. Suffice to say that you have to look long and hard at certain make-or-break moments in your landing experiences.

Stop in and see ion interactive's 'Now what?' booth at SES New York (#1016). Scott, Anna, Jeff, Megan, Susan and Richard are all there for you.

—Justin Talerico

If you happen to be at SES New York this week, please join us for the Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic at 4:45PM on Tuesday, March 18.

This session should be great fun, as it's entirely interactive with the audience. No boring PowerPoint presentations. Instead, anyone in attendance can offer up their SEM ads and landing pages to be evaluated in real-time. It's kind of like American Idol for landing experiences. I'll be sharing the stage with Kris Jones, the CEO of Pepperjam, and Matt Naeger, a vice president from Impaqt.

In case you're not able to make the event, I'll give you my 5-point criteria for evaluating landing experiences that I'll be using in the session:

1. Message match: continuity, expectations, credibility; recognize that the ad is the first step of the experience and make sure you have pre-click/post-click alignment.
2. Simplicity: clarity of purpose, minimal distractions, "relate" to your respondents but don't overwhelm them.
3. Branding: make a great first impression, signal that you're a top-notch organization and that you care about what your customers think of you.
4. Segmentation: search engine ads are brief and context can vary, so be sure to disambiguate your audience while finding ways to engage them.
5. Reciprocity: give authentic content to receive authentic responses, make a compelling offer, and don't ask for (or give) too much.

We'll see where Kris, Matt, and the audience agree or disagree. Hope to see you there -- please do stop by and introduce yourself.

-- Scott Brinker