What’s in Your User’s Mind?

This is a follow-up article from Yuval’s first post, The Science of Performance, Explained, posted on October 3rd, 2009.

In my last article, “The Science of Performance, Explained ”, we discussed the most important parameters for publishers in order to make your offers as an online advertiser attractive and to generate high volumes of traffic. One of the parameters was the offer conversion rate. High conversion rates are not only in the interest of the publisher, they need to be in the interest of the advertiser as well. Relevant users need to be converted into action quickly and easily in order to optimize traffic and decrease marketing expenses.

Many books, articles, posts, and eBooks have been written about how to build a good landing page. This is not my intention for this article (but later on I do give you some tips…). I want to discuss with you my way of reviewing, analyzing and building an offer.

The first master rule in building an offer I learned from a very big Israeli affiliate: “Think like a first time visitor in all of your offers”.
You are probably saying now: “This is obvious, tell us something we don’t know”, but unfortunately, most of the advertisers don’t follow this online marketing rule.  I review hundreds of landing pages every month and I can tell you that 90% of them can convert much better with a few small changes.

So, let’s talk about the users:
The user is exposed to a lot of data while he surfs the web. There are many so many options! The number of web pages is almost infinite, he sees dozens of banners with every visit, gets more than a few marketing mails every day and every search he does in Google shows hundreds of millions of results.
This causes a very severe users symptom – they are impatient! The average user visit on a web page is less than 5 seconds!
Users have their trigger fingers on the mouse over the “back” button before they see the content of the page, and are moving forward to the next page (BTW, many statistics systems don’t even count fast-bouncing users, so don’t count on them to see the stats of your landing pages).
The user asks himself 2 questions when he visits your site (in this order):

1. What’s in it for me? – Why should I stay in this website? What can I find here? What’s my incentive?
2. What do I need to do? – in order to get the incentive from the first question.

As you probably understand by now, you have less than 5 seconds of attention span to explain to the user why should he stay in your website. That’s mean that you need to explain your offer, your product, your service and what makes you different in 3-5 words or a clear image. “Free iPhone”, “Best Pizza in Manhattan”, “Low-cost Flights in Europe”, “Win a Wii”, “1 Day Loan”, “IQ test”, “Online Games”, image of a PSP, screen shots from MMORPG etc. Reading is working too hard, so if you are not doing SEO, content is your enemy. Keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One of the first sales tips I got from my father was “If you want to sale jewelry to a woman show her 3 options to choose from. If you’ll show her 20 options she won’t be able to decide and she will leave without buying”. Too many options is too much work, so:

1. Keep the opportunities for thinking limited
2. Remove navigations bars
3. Minimize the number of fields the user needs to fill
4. Lead the user’s eye to the important places in the page
5. Keep the important buttons (“Submit”, “Check out”, “Order Now”…) above the fold and use a clear call to action.
6. Make sure your banners and landing pages match. If a user liked the banner and the offer in it and decided to click on it, he should get the same offering and the same look and feel in the landing page.
7. And again, keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One last point, why build one landing page when you can build 3? One of the advantages of advertising online is the simplicity of testing and optimizing different creatives to see which performs better and to improve their conversion; it is cheap, easy, and should be a mandatory step in every new offer launching. My dear friend Dov Yarkoni at Xtend wrote a good post about landing page optimization on the Xtend Blog.

If you have any questions, if you want to consult me about defining a flow, designing a landing page or banners, testing and optimizing, don’t hesitate to contact me at Adsmarket! We have the experience needed, we promoted thousands of creatives and landing pages, we know what performs well and what doesn’t, we know the publishers abilities, we have a team of very talented designers and most important we are here for you, to help and consult.

Comments

1. October 29, 2009 at 1:51 pm

   Daneka at Adsmarket says

   Yuval, you've written a very good follow-up post! Clear and to the point. Thanks for your insights!

2. October 29, 2009 at 2:29 pm

   M says

   Very good article!

3. November 3, 2009 at 5:47 am

   ConnieFoggles says

   Not only are users impatient, they are busy. This post explains the idea of KISS and makes it relevant for online advertisers in all forms, even bloggers.

4. November 3, 2009 at 5:12 pm

   Ram Gunjal says

   Nice post, I am going to try some landing page optimization methods.
   Thanks,

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