At MECLABS, there are two things we couldn’t live without: testing and data.
Although we consider these the most vital tools in our business, we also understand the importance of the backstory. With anything you hope to accomplish in life, a good perspective on the situation and an understanding of the task makes solving any problem more manageable.
Before you can truly analyze a webpage, you must understand your prospects’ motivation and expectations. In doing so, your chances of correlating any data you’ve been collecting with the copy on the page will be greater. This also provides a basis for testing and helps you guard against inconsistent tests.
In today’s MarketingExperiments Blog post, I want to share with you a series of steps to follow, giving you a better understanding of your webpage. These are some quick and simple questions to get you thinking more like a prospect and less like a marketer.
Step #1. Understand what information you want visitors to find
To help you make this connection, you can provide more clarity in your headline, add additional value copy, or use more relevant images. Any information you feel prospects need to make an informed decision should be clearly displayed within the page.
With that said, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Is your product/service the primary message on the page?
- What is your value proposition?
- Why should prospects buy from you versus one of your competitors?
- What can you offer that your competitors can’t?
If you aren’t clearly defining the value of your offering, you will miss making that connection with your visitors.
Step #2. Find the disconnect
All too often, there are disconnects between the messaging marketers place within a page and the motivation a prospect has when arriving to that page.
Here are a few questions to consider when looking for a disconnection between prospects and your message:
- What are our visitors looking for?
- Where are our visitors coming from?
- What did they click to arrive here?
- Are we aware of what visitors have been looking at on our page?
- Does our page match the expectations visitors have when clicking through to our landing page?
Answering these questions won’t solve all of your problems, but they will certainly put you on the right track to test optimal messaging on your pages.
Step #3. Understanding the impact
Before beginning successful testing, you must first understand the impact the prospects’ motivation and expectations have on clickthrough and conversion rate.
To help you understand the impact and draw conclusions, you must ask yourself:
- What have we learned about our prospects?
- Are there any recurring trends?
- Have we found any disconnect in our messaging?
The answers to these questions will help you determine its impact and ultimately formulate a strategy for testing.
Sure, data can detect what visitors are clicking on, where they are coming from, and where they went next, but it can’t tell you why. Bounce rate is a good metric for determining if your page matches a prospect’s motivation and expectations, but it doesn’t give insight on what that motivation actually is.
In order to drive true change
Once visitors’ motivations for viewing your page are understood and the problem areas have been pinpointed, your test strategy can be crafted.
With any testing strategy, you want to find specific items to test that will not only provide the biggest lift, but also provide great learnings.
Truly analyzing a webpage and understanding how changes will affect a prospect is often problematic for many people in our field. But, the most effective way I’ve found is by learning to do one simple thing:
Think like a prospect, not a marketer.
Related Resources:
Visitor motivation: Optimizing landing pages for social networking site ads vs. paid search
Landing Page Optimization: Minimizing bounce rate with clarity
