• Tweet

Well, this sure has been an interesting week for this campaign.

I wanted to find out if my landing page mocking my target page would convert better than a general landing page design. What I found out wasn’t quite what i expected.

In some cases, it helped, in some cases, it didn’t. 1 target went from negative ROI to 100% positive. Another 2 stayed positive, but ROI dropped about 20%, and 1 just bombed compared to the general landing page. Quite odd if you ask me.

I have some theories behind this:

1. To mimic the targets LP, more graphics had to be added to the landing page. This could cause a significant slow down in page loading time which is important for PPV.
2. It could have something to do with demographics, although it is something I’d have to study more in depth. It seemed the male demographics converted better on the mocked LP, while females converted higher on the general LP.
3. Might have just overdone the LPs. I made the LPs look exactly like their target counterparts – logo, buttons, link color, etc. My best converting LP was designed around the target page, but left out a lot of things like the logo and didn’t quite have an identical layout. It was an inspired design, but not copied. Perhaps the viewers didn’t think it was a legit offer from the target site.

So was this case study a total waste of time? Absolutely not. I gathered a ton of data. I experimented a lot and gout outside my comfort zone. Using the collected data, I can apply it to future campaigns, and constantly keep analyzing it to see why things went right and why some things turned sour. I know that testing landing page designs is a lot more important than I previously realized. While I always split test for the best results, I now know that perhaps I wasn’t thinking it through far enough.

So now I’m going back on these campaigns to rebuild landing pages and effectively split test them with 2-3 different landing pages, some general, some slighly based off the target, and all very light in size. This is what I have concluded will convert the best for me, although I can’t keep assuming this. It will be effectively split test on all my campaigns from here on out. PPV is a weird beast to tame, and is hardly ever consistent like this.