Original Page
4.19%
-1.18%
-
Treatment 1 4.87% 16.22% 1.52% 28.91%
What you need to understand:
The test resulted in a 59% Increase in overall Conversion, with Treatment 2 also significantly outperforming Treatment 1. The impact of the difference between Treatments 1 and 2 is also immediately evident in the numbers: the “webinar” feature is getting more clicks than the “send campaign” feature. It appears that the webinar feature is considered to be an easier form of initial/introductory engagement with the company, while the idea of sending a trial campaign just sounds like too much effort, too early in the relationship.Homepages Optimized
So, what was the difference between this homepage optimization project and landing page optimization? The key distinction is that, unlike landing pages, homepages have the job of getting the visitor to the right content, rather than into the conversion funnel. For companies that speak to multiple audiences about multiple offers, there is simply no way to make a landing-page-like homepage. An important caveat is understanding how you manage your incoming traffic. If you are using PPC or display ads, affiliate marketing, and so on—you should be landing that traffic on dedicated landing pages, based on the offer, on which the visitor had clicked. There is rarely a good reason to send those visitors to your home page: you would be missing out on the extremely valuable information you are able to glean about those visitors, simply based on what ad they are coming from. Therefore, ideally, your homepage traffic should be difficult to differentiate—you shouldn’t know what these visitors really want or who they are—because if you did know, you would’ve put them on a separate landing page.
This is both the primary challenge with optimizing homepages, and their defining property: given undifferentiated traffic, the job of the homepage is to effect such differentiation. By properly positioning the available choices in front of the visitor, the homepage should be able to tell you exactly what the visitor came there for, based on
where they click. In a sense, it is based on that information that you put subsequent content in front of that visitor. The objective of the homepage is to make this choice on the part of the visitor as effortless, yet as informed as possible, so that you can put them on just the right next page.
Common B2B Homepages
When we review common B2B homepages, we see a recurring pattern: marketers are trying to do too many things at the same time, completely disregarding the fact that their visitors might not give them the three- to-five minutes required to figure out exactly what they are expected to do, what the best choice for them is to click. When you are competing against numerous other pages that the visitor might be pulling up in other browser tabs, you need to provide clarity and value to keep them—as opposed to losing them when they click on the little red “x” to close the tab, with the hope of finding an easier page to comprehend.
We are confusing these visitors with product offers, free trials, company information, fun facts about the CEO, employment opportunities, sponsor logos, and so on, instead of focusing them on a short list of things they can choose from, so that we can put them on the right next step. It’s like arriving at the offices of a large firm, without a front desk person or a directory. What we are doing is asking the visitor to go through the building, knocking on each door, to find the office they need.
Common B2C Homepages
In addition to the issues discussed above, we see a tremendous emphasis on brand imaging in B2C homepages. While the branding aspect is certainly understandable, it probably should not also be all-consuming. Your customers did not come to your site to marvel at your amazing graphics (unless, of course, you are selling marvelous graphics or things with said graphics printed on them). Your visitors are there to engage—for a wide range of possible reasons, from purchase to career information. As mentioned above, your homepage traffic should be undifferentiated if you are managing your traffic channels properly with targeted landing pages.
As a result of over-emphasis on brand, there is tremendous confusion about what the site is there to do. It’s like going to Home Depot on a busy day—you can just walk around and look at all the things that you need, but if you came seeking help with a specific project, there is nobody there to help you. You know that everything you need is in there somewhere, but getting it into your shopping cart seems like a far-fetched dream.
A Process for Optimizing Homepages
Based on our experience optimizing homepages, we have developed a step-by-step process that makes these projects manageable and effective. This process is not a collection of design best practices—it’s a roadmap for your homepage optimization efforts.
Step 1: Identify all homepage objectives
To understand how we think about homepage objectives, consider the following characteristics that make homepages unique:
• Homepages vary significantly, but the most common challenge (and point of weakness) is managing competing objectives. We have a lot to say, and we try to use that one page to say it.
• Homepages are prime real estate for organizations and so frequently they are a marketing battleground. Unfortunately, it’s the visitor that often loses.
• For most online optimization strategies, eliminating competing objectives is essential. For homepages, however, we must clearly manage and sequence multiple objectives. We can reduce them on a homepage, but rarely to just one.
We identified the following (long!) list of objectives based on the original page: • Establish branding
• Provide current customer login/support • Provide live chat and phone #
• Provide general site navigation • Feature free product trial • Feature product tour
• List small/larger business offer details • Feature email campaign preview/lead
gen capture
• Provide a secondary link to the free trial • Link to webinar on email practices • Feature clientele
• Feature deeper product information • Provide social media info
• Provide an option to buy now • Provide legal information
Step 2: Prioritize the objectives into three categories
When we cannot simply eliminate an objective, we need to understand its importance to the business. That way, we can start planning, for which objectives we want to optimize—in other words, what visitor actions on the homepage are going to be most beneficial to the business. For simplicity, we divide all objectives into three major categories:
Primary Objective: When possible, a homepage should have a single objective identified
as the key performance indicator (KPI). These objectives will be more long-term, usually directly connected to the business model, and should have the highest revenue potential. (e.g., lead generation form, membership product offering)
Major Objectives: These objectives are very important to the homepage’s overall success, but
are not the primary goal. They are usually short-term objectives that may or may not be directly connected to revenue. These will most likely come from differing internal departments and/or differing marketing campaigns. (e.g., upcoming sales presentation, special featured product offer)
Minor Objectives: These objectives are functionally necessary for a homepage, but are not
tied to directly revenue or any marketing efforts. (e.g., site navigation, legal information) Starting with the list of objectives obtained in Step 1, we prioritized them in order of business value. Below, different colors illustrate the three categories of objectives on the original page:
Primary Objectives Major Objectives Minor Objectives
Step 3: Connect success metrics
Determining the success metrics for homepages is more difficult than for single-objective landing pages, since multiple actions can lead to different, and often difficult-to-compare, business outcomes. The most obvious metric by which marketers tend to judge homepages is the bounce rate, or its converse (the click-through rate or CTR).
However, these simple go/no-go metrics should not be considered in isolation. We have seen many times that pages that are good at getting higher CTR can also lead to decrease in revenue, because they end up driving away qualified visitors, while making up for it by letting more of the less qualified—yet curious—visitors through.
Homepages should be viewed as part of a holistic conversion funnel. This means that you may need to track metrics like
• Conversion rate • Revenue
• CTR on each homepage link
• Time on page and site, and page depth • Bounce rate
Given that the homepage typically received traffic from more than one source, you would ideally need to understand each metric with respect to each source separately. As you can imagine, this data gathering can require a lot of effort, potentially making the optimization project impractical. This topic is outside the scope of this article, but you must carefully select a reasonable number of metrics that you will track—sufficient both to validate the results and to alert your attention to any anomalies.
Holistic view of the homepage Objective
Free Product Trial Upcoming Webinar Main Navigation
Key Success Metrics Examples
CTR + product trials + product purchases CTR + registrations + product trials + product purchases
CTR + pages per visit + bounce rates + product trials + product purchases