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Your budget just took a charge for a click, and a potential conversion will hit your landing page in a second. Session panelists at SES San Jose talked about what those arrivals should find when they land.

SES: Avoid Those Rough Landing Pages

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can't be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Tim Ash of Site Tuners thinks too much landing page neglect has taken place. Site publishers need to care about tuning their sites for conversions.

For example, a landing page should lead to a trackable action. That offers a direct way to see if a landing page accomplishes part of the conversion process.

Designers have to look at the whole picture: the page's headline, its layout, the navigation. As with everything about a website, landing pages need testing again and again, especially when elements have changed.

The testing process can span across multiple landing pages, with additional paid search ads leading to them. This is where data is the publisher's best friend; don't make decisions based on too little information.

Google Website Optimizer product manager Tom Leung suggested six types of tests to run to gather that data:

Classic A/B Classic Multivariate Split path Multipage multivariate Time-based Do anything

Jamie Roche of Offermatica believes personalization is the key to successful landing pages. It's something publishers should include with their testing.

As the site gathers data, visitors can be grouped by several factors as the publisher evaluates the analytics. Those factors can be as follows:

Behavior Time-based Source Environment Registered customers

Verster CEO Scott Miller summarized the approach to tweaking landing pages by saying all of the components have to work in harmony. From page title and copy to value propositions and promos and prices offered, the only way to get to that harmonic optimization is through continued testing.