Click Here to view the landing page for Heart Health Guide
Landing pages are important. They are the first “contact point” for a visitor to your website when you are buying traffic. Some folks (me, for instance) will even argue that EVERY page of your money site should be designed with a landing page like layout.
It’s that important. Why?
Simple – conversion. The game here is all about getting traffic and directing those visitors to take action. At some point it really is as simple as Traffic + Conversion = $$$.
Let’s take a quick look at a landing page True Health is using to promote Dr. Cutler’s Heart Health Guide. Click here to see a copy of the landing page.
When we look at a landing page – or any web page really – it ‘s best to view things in chunks first. This is my way of saying that we don’t nit pick the content. Here are the chunks I see:
- banner graphic
- headline (in red)
- 2 sub heads at top + 3 additional sub heads to break the content up
- “money shot” graphic of the product
- bullet list of benefits
- call to action box
- testamonials
- credential boosters (in the footer)
This is a pretty damn good list of the elements you’d expect to see in a landing page. If this were your web page you’d want to set up simple A/B split testing to test various versions of the chunks to see which converted better. If you were really fancy you could use something like Google Website Optimizer and do multivariate testing and test different versions of the chunks simultaneously.
That’d be super ninja. It’s the kind of thing you do when the landing page is a lead magnet for a significant part of your internet business.
But we can get super simple here. You see, True Health may have all the pieces here – all the chunks – but my guess is that they missed something.
SCREEN RESOLUTION
Most internet marketers and graphics designers have fancy wide screen high resolution monitors. On my laptop for example here’s a thumbnail of how the landing page looks.
The thing to notice here is that the landing page is displaying the Call To Action – the opt-in. This is great because it means that the call to action is “above the fold” and visible without scrolling or skimming through the page.
Putting your call to action above the fold will almost always INCREASE CONVERSION.
Except… there’s one problem here. My laptop screen resolution is 1900×1200. That’s 1200 pixels from top to bottom.
Most internet surfers have screens with 800 pixels of vertical (top to bottom screen resolution)
This is especially true with older populations where in addition to smaller screen resolutions they may also zoom in the screen to make the fonts larger. The bottom line of all this is that on many screens the landing page really looks like:
The opt-in box is completely hidden. Now, it may be that the glamor shot of Dr. Cutler (for credibility), the product shot, headline, sub heads, and the beginning of the call to action box are strong enough to get the visitor to scroll. The “Free Report!” and “FREE Heart Health Guide” may be enough to get the vistor to scroll or page down – or even skim.
Notice by the way that the landing page deals with skimmers pretty well. If people scroll and quickly skim through the page they see another opt-in box right at the bottom.
Again, all the chunks are here. But modifying the layout will likely increase conversion. What you’d want to do here is get the call to action box up above the fold. Doing this on a page like this isn’t necessarily easy if you don’t have web layout skills but it’s amazing what $5 – $10 can do these days using sites like Fiverr.com and others like it.