Why always optimize landing pages?

Sometimes people ask me why landing pages are such popular targets for optimization and testing. Why not optimize a home page? A product page?

Actually, we can optimize those kinds of pages, but almost all businesses come to us with a landing page that needs help. Beyond the demand for landing page testing though, is the fact that landing pages inherently are fit for testing. Let me explain.

One of Widemile’s landing pages

The strength of multivariate and split testing is in pulling out the best page possible for what you want to do. With a homepage you have multiple things you want to do (e.g. show your products, company history, customer service, get people to spend X minutes browsing) and with a product page you are typically working with a CMS template for your whole site. Those factors complicate things a bit since you have to figure out what counts as improvement for the homepage and for the product page, you have to work with a CMS system and make changes that improve the majority of products pages using that template.

These things are not impossible to do or even difficult in many situations, but a landing page is usually totally independent of everything and has only one goal.

In a technical sense, a landing page is more simple to deal with. In a measurement sense you only need to improve one metric, the conversion. With a landing page, we don’t have to make copy and creative that works okay for all situations, we simply make copy and creative that is optimal for one situation.

This makes testing really fun and easy, since you can test and find out who your audience really is and what causes them to convert.

Now that I’ve answered this question, in the future I’ll move onto a more interesting post: Why you should optimize everything else too.