Where do you begin landing page optimization if you have a beautiful, clean and profitable website? When there are no apparent issues with the basics such as call to action or page clutter then what can be done short of remaking the entire site?
Usually a good place to start is to change the perspective. It’s a common mistake for the web savvh to see the Internet through big, clear monitors and 11 point font. We look at our site and can’t understand why anyone would not be able to do the tasks the site is designed to do. Usually it has to do with what the visitor sees “above the fold” or what can be seen upon landing on a web page without any scrolling.
Unlike the newspaper, the concept of “the fold” of a web page is not a solid line that snips the bottom off every page, but rather a subjective experience. The notion of having important links, buttons and messages above the fold is taken for granted as a good policy, so what if you found out that 20% of your visitors couldn’t immediately see what you thought they could?
Using the combination of the Browser Size utility from Google and Hitslink screen resolution report, you can determine the most common resolution your visitors use and what they see immediately upon landing on your site. Plug your site into Browser Size and you’ll get that perspective. Each band of color represents approximately how many visitors will see that section immediately upon landing (the seemingly shaky lines are actually a true representation of the visible area excluding the title bar, toolbars, etc). If you have important information or buttons in the 70% range, that means 30% of your visitors are forced to scroll to see that information and convert.
Take a look at this example from the Browser Size homepage:
Click to enlarge
As you can see, 30% of the visitors can’t see the call to action button, instead they must scroll.
Think the numbers are different for your site? Check out your screen resolutions report in Hitslink to see the most common visitor screen resolutions for your own site. For most sites the list of dimensions is quite long, and the ones we in the industry tend to use – 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024 – typically only represent about 50% of the visitors at best.
So get back to the optimization grindstone, squeeze another percentage point or two into your conversion rate, or hire experts to help you with the website optimization.