If you’re looking for insight and practical advice that will help you improve conversion rates, you’ve landed on the right page. Tim Ash recently published the second edition to his opus, “Landing Page Optimization,” the seminal work on improving website performance.
We had the opportunity to interview Tim, which we have transcribed in two parts.
In part one you will learn about neuromarketing, “ugly babies,” conversion rate optimization for software merchants, and the value of the in-app conversion.
Building Keystones: Can you briefly explain what inspired you to write Landing Page Optimization and what is new in the second edition?
Tim Ash: Sure. Well, Wiley Press, which is a very established 200 year old publisher, came to me and asked me to write the book. It was one of those offers you can’t refuse. This is literally the first book on the subject of landing page optimization. At the time there were general persuasion books, psychology books, marketing books etc., but nothing that spoke to both the art and the science of making websites more efficient.
The second edition was four years in the making. Even though I tried to keep the book focused on durable content, people asked for more specific examples. The book was meant to be more of a strategic guide, but everyone wants those tactical nuggets they can put to work. So there are a lot of updated examples, a lot of very specific best practices for different situations.
BK: What is the biggest change in landing page optimization you have seen in the last four years?
Tim: I realized there was a giant gulf of ignorance out there among online marketers on what constitutes more traditional persuasion techniques, which is not really new stuff. Our brains haven’t changed at all, at least on an evolutionary time scale. But some people think that just because they’re now limited to 140 characters they need a new marketing strategy. It’s really not true. The message is still perceived through our brain and the question is how does one make effective use of new technology to speak to the old “wetware” in our heads?
So in the second book there is a lot more about neuromarketing and the reptilian brain, and the emotional part of your brain. Those are the parts that really make decisions for people. 95% of our decisions are unconscious or pre-conscious.
BK: So it’s about understanding how the brain perceives things and catering decision making toward landing pages?
Tim: That’s right. The frontier now is neuromarketing and you can get real time imaging of someone’s brain as you show them different kinds of marketing stimuli. People can say one thing with their mouths, but their brain doesn’t lie when it’s showing a different thing altogether.
BK: In your book you talk about websites as “ugly babies” and how companies have difficulty admitting that their baby is ugly. How can landing page optimizers convince a team of executives that their website is that ugly baby?
Tim: It’s hard to tell your boss something like that directly. They need to hear it from somebody else. And you basically have two types of people you can turn to. One type is the objective, unbiased, completely disinterested users of your site. If you ever make executives watch a usability test of their website they’ll be shocked at how dysfunctional it really is.
Say you’re user-testing an ecommerce site. You see people fumbling around with the checkout processes or finding a product in the first place. You just watch them stumble around and the first time you go, “Oh. The users are making an obvious mistake.” And the second time somebody makes that mistake, “Two idiots in a row. How is that possible?” And the third time somebody makes the same mistake, “Well, maybe I’m the idiot because I didn’t design it well.”
Definitely listen to the voice of the customer with feedback and surveys. Record user sessions and user tests. There’s technology from companies like ClickTale and CrazyEgg that allows you to record a lot of detail on what users are doing on your site, even on mobile platforms recently.
The other way to influence your boss is turn to outside experts who have seen a lot of these problems before and can give you a quick diagnosis. They can have an interactive discussion about it with you. We have an inexpensive and hard-hitting service at SiteTuners called an Express Review. We record via online meeting an interactive session of us conducting a structured critique of a website or a landing page. And that can be shared with the rest of the team.
The situation is now some consultant telling the bosses that they’re doing something wrong, instead of you telling your boss that they’re doing something wrong. And we’ve found that to be an effective way of saying the emperor has no clothes. It’s a structured review and we provide specifics to take back and say, “This is why it doesn’t work.”
BK: We talk primarily to an audience of software merchants. Do you think software or any kind of good delivered electronically should have a different strategy regarding landing page optimization versus physical goods.
Tim: Let me be clear on what I mean by “landing page optimization”. It’s an unfortunate term from the early days, and implies a stand-alone direct response page. The more common term you hear now is “conversion rate optimization”. I have a pretty broad definition in the book about what a landing page is. It’s not always necessarily just a stand-alone page. It could be a micro-site or a page on your corporate site, your homepage or a product page deeper on the site. Essentially, a landing page is any where significant traffic lands on the way to important conversion actions deeper in the site. And all of the pages from the entry point to the actual conversion action deeper in the site are ripe for optimization.
Regarding physical goods and downloadable stuff, I would say there are a lot of differences in the business model and the amount of risk. When someone sells physical goods, the visitors to the site are worried about all kinds of things (like clothing fit or build quality). For example I order a jacket but it’s just too light weight and flimsy when I actually put it on. Can I return it? Will I get charged for returning it? There are all kinds of things in traditional ecommerce that software vendors don’t have to deal with.
I think for the folks that are selling digital goods, especially software, dialing in the correct business model is critical. Is there a trial? How easy is it inside the software application to upsell users to the full version with expanded capabilities?
I think optimization depends on a combination of what happens on the site, the business model, as well as the in-application experience itself. A lot of conversions should be happening because they’re happy and satisfied with the use of your wonderful, intuitive software or package in the first place.
BK: So that in-app experience, do you think that’s different than going to a traditional website shopping cart?
Tim: Yes. There’s one project in particular that we did for a division of Symantec. In that case, conversion optimization depended on coordinating the experience for those who used the software because it was installed on the computer that they bought, those who were visiting the many different parts of the website etc., and all of that has to work in concert.
BJ Fogg keynoted our most recent San Francisco Conversion Conference. He says that in order to be effective, you have to put the right triggers in front of motivated people. So your users must be motivated to buy and have the ability to do so, but companies also need to place a trigger to get them to act. And you have a lot of opportunities to do that inside of a software application.
Users who bump up into certain limits in trial version are ripe for triggers: “Uh-oh! Can’t do that with the trial version! Would you like to upgrade to complete your action?”
Companies need to do that in a context of a user who is in the heat of the moment, when their reptilian brain is the one making decisions. Those nuanced experiences and those opportunities to put in the right triggers are more important than having the right headline on your landing page.
BK: And you consider understanding the user experience in different contexts as a part of optimization.
Tim: Right. So software sellers want to have a flexible environment to do landing page testing, website optimization, but I think that same flexibility needs to be built into the software. It’s so much easier to test and swap things out than with physical products. But if all the testing is tied to a software release cycle, then it’s going to takes several weeks to build something new into the application. Companies place themselves at a big competitive disadvantage because they cannot cycle through things quickly and try new things to improve in-app conversion.
Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.
Over the past 15 years, Tim has helped hundreds of US and international brands improve their web-based initiatives, including Canon, Google, Expedia, CBS, Sony Music, Facebook, Nestle, Verizon Wireless, Texas Instruments, Cisco, and Coach.
Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and the chairperson of Conversion Conference – a worldwide conference series focused on improving online conversions. He has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates, and he is the host of the Landing Page Optimization podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.
