The landing page is the first page that’s seen when an incoming visitor arrives on your site. In simple cases this is your index page, yet in many instances you can direct visitors to various, more specific, pages as a landing page, this allow you to optimize each page for a target audience. Here’s an example… A Google Adwords ad with the key words “Search Engine Optimization” can be directed at the page /search-engine-optimization.htm/ whist another on “email marketing” can be directed at /email-marketing.htm/. The optimization of the individual pages would look at converting those specific visitors into clients. This optimization often takes the demographics of the visitor into consideration as well. A banner advert on YouTube .com is likely to send you a younger visitor than an ad on news24. com
LPO can be taken further to what is known as Multivariate Landing Page Optimization (MVLPO). This is a strategy that we employ in order to tease out the best version of a page that results in the highest conversion rate, basically we use educated trial and error to determine the site design and layout that works best. When a new visitor arrives at your site one of the different landing pages is pulled randomly and displayed. The number of different landing pages that can be built, displayed and analyzed depends heavily on the amount of traffic, which will determine your statistical power. But… what happens when a visitor comes to the site more than once? Do they see a different site every time? Won’t the variation look silly to the visitor? If the visitor does visit a few times before converting, which version of the site actually drove him to convert? We get around this by using cookies; a cookie is placed onto each visitor’s computer which tells the system which version of the site to serve, so each time a specific visitor returns they see the same page. Very clever and extremely effective.
