CRO Minidegree Review — Week 5

This is the fifth post in the series of twelve posts where I am reviewing CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Mini-degree, once every week. In this post, we will be covering some aspects of Landing Page Optimization.

So, what exactly is a landing page? Well, it can be defined as any of the following:

• Page users “land on” / entrance page
• First page users see after clicking an ad source
• Page that works independently of the site/app
• Focused on a clear conversion goal

What exactly does a landing page do? How do you identify if a page is good or not just by looking at it? Here are some characteristics of a good landing page:

1. Shortens the journey from click to conversion
2. Follows up on the promises made in the ad
3. Speaks to user’s motivation and address barriers
4. Answers important questions and creates clarity
5. Creates a clear path to the conversion goal

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) aims to fix all these factors. Please remember, LPO is not just about making landing pages look pretty. A host of multiple factors need to be worked upon. Here are some:

Factors for fixing LPO

Let us understand 2 important factors which are related with all sorts of marketing and product improvement disciplines, including LPO.

1. Cognitive Biases & Load

Daniel Kahneman, in his beautiful book — Thinking fast & Slow, mentions 2 systems of thinking:

1. System 1 — driven by intuitive thinking — fast. This is something that happens to us. This is automatic, emotional, subconscious & in the moment.
2. System 2 — driven by analytical thinking — slow. This is something we do. This is effortful, logical, done consciously and needs planning in advance.

Human beings often choose system 1 for their day to day work. Our brain does a cost-benefit analysis if it should go through the pain of deploying system 2. It take these meantal shortcuts (also called cognitive biases) to save heavy lifting.

So, as marketers, we need to step in their shoes and make things simpler on our landing pages etc. “Laptop cover”, for example, could mean insurance to the insurance company but the customer pictures this in his mind:

There are a lot of cognitive biases or mental shortcuts. In connection with landing page optimization, 3 are very important:

1. Priming: Exposure to one stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus. Let’s say that all the marketing you do leads the user to a form filling which the user is expecting to get a 30-day free trial. But, right before the form submission, we ask for his credit card information. So that’s just an extra thing you weren’t expecting. The problem here is we were priming them on getting the free trial on every single step but then we suddenly flipped it by asking credit card information. Here, priming can backfire.
   Another example is showing an ad in a certain visual format — use of colors, fonts, imgery etc. but when a user clicks it, the landing page is completely different.
2. Framing: The way you deliver your message has a direct impact on what the user perceives. “Order X now!” vs. “Get X now!” — Order asks for bigger commitment. CTR on ‘Get’ is usually higher than on ‘Order’. People choose “80% lean meat” over “20% fat meat” when fundamentally, both are same.
3. WYSIATI: It stands for “What You See Is All There Is”. People make assumptions on the basis of what they see. If there are any gaps in putting the pieces together to make a story, they craft stuff on the basis of their previous experience and see the picture in their own way. Hence, we need to be crystal clear.

2. The tale of 2 chemicals

Dopamine & Cortisol drive human behavior.

Dopamine is released when we are exposed to a reward stimulus. It plays a central role in motivation and habit formation. Once someone is exposed to an unexpected reward, it gives a surge in the dopamine levels. Next time, whenever there is a cue of the reward, the surge happens. However, if there is a cue but reward doesn’t come, it triggers Cortisol.

Cortisol produces the “Oh no — I have to do something now!!” feeling. It is a built-in alarm system which conveys that pain would come if you don’t act now. Our body remembers the instances when cortisol got triggered — this mechanism was essential for the survival of our ancestors.

Cortisol is triggered on:

• Violating expectations (perceived bait and switch)
• Ambiguity (lack of clarity)
• Disempowerment (I’m not in control)
• Multi-tasking (trying to solve several tasks at once)
• Too much pressure (forced to make a decision)
• Stop words (e.g. SPAM)

So, the baseline is that we shouldn’t disappoint our users by failing to deliver on a promised reward. Be clear, transparent & honest. Do whatever it takes to avoid triggering Cortisol.

Information Hierarchy:

Information Hierarchy helps us answer 2 important questions:

1. What information is most important?
2. And how much of information is neccessary?

To build Information Hierarchy, look at these 3 things:

1. Target audience: Who are you communicating with?
2. Goal: What do you want them to do?
3. Source: Where is the traffic coming from?

Target audience can be classified on the basis of their awareness levels:

Most aware audience (knows about your product and what it does etc.) need the least amount of content and are easiest to convert and vice-versa.

What do you want them to do? Depending upon the task, the amount of copy needed changes. Let’s say you want them to download a free app vs. you want them to purchase an expensive product — the amount of copy needed would be very different for these purposes.

More complicated the product, more copy would be needed.

Where is the traffic coming from? Obviously, the users who are coming from your newsletter know more about you vs. the users coming from a paid ad for the first time.

Basically, we need to Answer Questions, Reinforce Motivation & Address Barriers (let’s call it QMB) and this needs to happen while working backwards.

Let’s say we start with Conversion Goal. There will be some question which needs an answer, some motivation which needs to be reinforced & some barrier which we need to address. Then we go to the offer and address QMB for this section. Then, we move on to our brand and do the same here. Finally, we define the summary section which actually goes on the top of the page — this contains value proposition & also address QMB.

Preliminary Quantitative Research on Google Analytics

Creating a custom report on your Google analytics account is a great way to identify oppurtunities for improvement. To start with, look at Sessions, Bounce Rate, Transactions & Conversions for the following areas:

1. Landing Pages at Device Category, Source/Medium, Gender, age, OS, Browser & Browser Version level.
2. Second/ Exit Page at Device Category & and Landing Page level.

This exercise will help in understanding:

• Overall landing page performance
• Overall device performance
• Overall browser performance
• Traffic, conversion rate, transactions, bounce rate
• Source, second page, exit page, gender, age
• Potential bugs

Worry not if you aren’t too comfortable with it. We will cover Google analytics in details in a separate post later.

I will be covering the remaining part of LPO course in the next post.

Happy Learning!

Yatin