Why Your New Web Design May Need Landing Page Testing
Many new website owners shudder at the thought of doing landing page testing – particularly when a website has just been redesigned or newly launched. A few months after a new website is live, many site owners are sitting back and enjoying a few web-hassle-free months. Unfortunately, it might be in a business owner’s best interest to jump right back on the web accessibility horse, even when a new site or redesign is only a few months old.
Landing Page Testing: We’re Sorry
Because landing page testing often seems unnecessary or too complicated, many business owners gloss over it and continue worrying about lead gen strategies. For many businesses, this can be a bad move – particularly when the website serves as a primary storefront for the brand.
It’s a smart idea to not only set a newly designed website up with Google Analytics or comparable marketing automation tools, but to begin immediately making observations about traffic data. Some questions business owners should be asking include:
- Were visitors more interactive with our old site?
- Is our bounce rate increasing?
- Are users taking the new conversion actions we’ve set up on the site?
- Do users find the navigation helpful?
- What, if anything, should we include in future plans to make the website easier to use?
The answers to these questions will often determine whether a business owner should begin planning landing page testing right away.
How Landing Page Testing Can Make the Difference
Many business owners assume that building a new website will automatically yield better navigation, a more pleasing look and therefore higher conversion rates. Many new websites don’t split-test an older look against a new look, so it’s difficult to get an idea of how user-friendly visitors find a new website compared to an older version.
In a perfect world, business owners would make former elements of a website such as buy buttons, forms and login links as easy to find on a new website, but it doesn’t always work that way. The ability to set up testing before a website would be great, but not all business owners will do this. One alternative is to create a landing page that looks like the previous design of the site. This page could serve as a gateway to the new design. Business owners could execute landing page testing to gauge the effectiveness of the new page compared with simply sending visitors to the new site.
Marketing automation can give business owners a deeper insight into how landing page testing and new designs affect lead generation. Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking capabilities go much deeper than Google Analytics or heat maps. To find out more, visit www.leadliaison.com.