Few weeks back, I configured Google Website Optimizer for WordPress to test landing page conversion rate with new wordpress  page.  After setting up Variant 1 page and installing scripts, I waited for the results.

Original Page

Landing page should have following features

1. Bold Call to Action
2. Less distraction ( menu, articles, ..)
3. Provide what you promised to deliver
4. Bribe content (free ebooks, tutorials, ..) to make readers sign-up

Original page under test had just the option 4 form above.  1 to 3 were missing big time. It had lots of distractions ( menu, articles, sidebar, ads, ..).

Variant Page 1

Optimized landing page had following arrtibutes that oroginal landing page didnt have

1. Full width page in wordpress without widgets ( sidebar)
2. Link to home page ONLY in the header
3. Sign-up form ( Name and Email)
4. Two bullet points that explained why they want to sign up
5. No images ( just plan text within sign up form)
6. Call to Action words used – Sign & Receive

Experiment Result

After running the experiment for few days, following results was obverved (click on the image to view larger version)

Wordpress Landing Page Optimization with Google Optimizer

It was very evident with just 26 conversions, Variant 1 was doing much better than original version. It resulted in improvement of 17% in conversion rate. For a landing page, 17% improvement in the conversion rate is awesome.

So, if you are using Ad Words campaign or have sign up page for simple Email News Letter, you should definitely test different versions of landing page.With wordpress, it just took less than 10 minutes to install the plugin, scripts and have experiment running. It might take additional time to create a new landing page, but overall for 1 hour time spent, resulted in over 17% improvement in conversion rate.

Experiment 2

To further optimize the landing page, I created another variant of new landing page ( with image) and ran the test for few more days. Results were bit disappointing. I will post the results in next article.

Related posts:

1. How to Configure Google Website Optimizer for WordPress Hosted Blogs
2. Google Website Optimizer for WordPress – Test Results 2
3. Create Landing Page in WordPress Blog in 2 Minutes