Marketing Research Chart: Testing is vital to create an optimization culture

by Meghan Lockwood, Research Analyst

Chart: LPO performed in organizations based on testing and best practices in 2010

Q. What LPO efforts have been launched by your organization in 2010?



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Testing is, in fact, the paradigm through which every optimization strategy should be formed. To evaluate the success of a landing page optimization (LPO) strategy, you need concrete, accurate data. Without numbers, building different landing pages -- or deciding on next year’s online marketing program -- amounts to educated guesswork.

Not surprisingly, more than two-thirds of survey respondents indicated their organizations were engaged in landing page optimization in 2010. As previously discussed, there is some bias in the survey data, as LPO practitioners were relatively more likely to respond in the first place.

However, the 31% of marketers not engaged in LPO in 2010 demonstrate a high interest in the subject matter and a desire to get involved. The challenges discussed in Chapter 2, and especially marketer insights at the end of that chapter, speak to the difficulties that marketers had to address.

What is especially interesting is that among marketers that were engaged in LPO last year, almost half were also testing. This connects well with the relatively lower incidence of challenges related to testing among survey respondents. It appears that once marketers start optimizing, getting into testing is not impossible. Still, more than one-half of LPO practitioners did not test.

Rather than resort to magic 8-balls, savvy marketers rely on a wealth of testing tools available to ground their LPO strategy in real numbers. Testing is the only way to get true evidence of what customers think about your landing pages based on how they react to different treatments. Through optimization and testing, marketers learn to better communicate with customers by measuring what products, paid search campaigns and calls-to-action their prospects value most.

A meeting with C-suite is much more productive when you can explain, "We developed two new landing page treatments for our top selling lipstick. When we tested these pages, we found that Treatment 1 experienced an overall revenue increase of 86% over our original page."

For additional research data and insights about landing page optimization, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this chart

2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report

Landing Page Optimization: How to start optimization testing and get executive support

Landing Page Optimization: 5 questions every marketer should ask before choosing a testing tool

Marketing Research Chart: Top challenges to implementing testing as part of LPO

Landing Page Optimization: Test ideas for a B2B lead capture page