Dwell Time and Conversion Rate Boosters

How Yahoo! Helped Me to Improve these Measures

A few months ago we wrote a post about whether or not to trap a visitor on a landing page.  This continues to be a dilemma for many of our clients.  However (I’m not afraid to admit it) I’m pretty sure I missed the boat on the most optimal approach for landing pages.  Thank you to Yahoo’s recent designs for the enlightenment!

With landing pages, we typically weigh the pros and cons of having a landing page that prohibits navigation, so we keep the visitor focused on conversion.  Or, having a landing page that is part of the regular website with all the links active, allowing the visitor to wander to gather the information they need in hopes they will get to a conversion point before exiting the site. …

Expecting to Go All the Way

… On a First Date?

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around…

Is Your Landing Page Overweight?

Because It’s Time to Get Into Shape!

Spring is here, and the pools are open. Time for some bikini boot camp for your landing pages to make sure they’re in tip-top shape as your business dives into summer.

Here are some questions to ask to find the trouble zones you’ll need to focus on in order to get lean, mean performance from your landing pages.

• Do you go below the fold? Try to keep your content concise so that your page fits above the fold and doesn’t require scrolling. If it’s just not possible, make sure that your best assets appear first including what you do, your unique value and a call to action.

• Do you have meaningless words? There have been polls and studies done about the most abused gobbledygook words and phrases. These are the filler that you use…

Stick Your Landing

…With an Interactive Website

The most recent stat I saw for how long a searcher spends on a website before deciding whether or not to click the back button was 13 seconds. I think that might be generous, but I like generosity, so we’ll work with that number.

Let’s think through what happens. A searcher clicks to go to your website:

• Second 1 – Is your site attractive enough? If yes, stay.
• Second 2-5 – Is your site relevant? Does the text or image that stands out the most resonate as what the searcher was looking for? If yes, stay.
• Seconds 6-13 – Do you have something to offer that is relevant and valuable? If yes, stay.

We frequently provide tips on landing page content and how to portray it in order to pass the above 13 second test. But even…

To Trap or Not to Trap…

…That is the Question!

Many landing page best practices dictate that you trap your visitors inside your landing page and not allow navigation to other pages within your website. The logic here is that you are after a conversion, so keep the visitor focused on converting rather than letting them wander around and forget to provide you with their info before they leave your site.

While the trapping technique can be quite effective for some advertisers, we’ve seen it result in complete failure for others. How to know what to do? Here are some simple criteria you can use to determine whether or not trapping your visitor will bring you the highest conversion results.

When trapping is not likely to work:

Your product offering or market space is not well-known. Do you have a new type of product or service that…