The process
Fundamentally, a landing page needs to be based on core design principles. But then what? You and your colleagues agree it looks great but how does it perform? We find this out through data.
You can find a range of landing page builders online that offer A/B testing. I have used Unbounce in the past and it is worth your money. Basically you can choose from templates they have pre-built and make edits to those or make your own design from scratch which I prefer. Once you have a design created (The Champion), you can then create variants of this design and assign traffic weights to each variant. You can then see which variant is converting at the highest rate. I would recommend testing against a small variable first, for example the colour of the Call to Action button.
Once a winner has been chosen, you then repeat this process by drilling down further into your design. For example changing the copy, changing the hero image, moving the CTA buttons or trailing a static form. Every industry has different key metric standards in regard to conversion rates, so there isn’t one mould that will fit for all.
The problem
Having worked for a large company, opinions about design come from all areas of the business. In this particular case study below, according to some areas of the business, the colour red was pre-determined to fail as a CTA button as it tells people to “stop” and that we should use blue. However it was my theory that (with this particular brand style) the colour red contrasts with the other brand elements. The CTA buttons will stand out and red inspires action and engagement.
The only way I could prove this theory is through A/B testing.
Testing the CTA Button
In the example below you will see three of the exact same landing page but with different coloured CTA’s (Red, Blue and Green).
The landing pages had a total of 1764 visitors with a 33.33% random traffic weighting across each variation so the visitors were shared across the 3 designs evenly. As you can see
The result
The red CTA button outperformed the other colours by almost 1%. This doesn’t sound like much but when talking about conversions it can make a huge difference.