Landing page optimization method!

Looking at today's marketing situation, brand owners like to make large-scale campaigns, conduct tests at any cost, and devote manpower to conversions... These methods are indeed very effective, but if we ignore the hidden crises behind them because of the significant effects, it will ultimately be short-sighted. This leads to a discussion about the common short-sighted traps in “landing page optimization”.

The concept of "short-sighted loss aversion" is introduced here. In the fields of economics and applied psychology, it is often used to explain why people behave in a "short-sighted" way because they "hate losses", that is, they would rather give up options that are better in the long run.

"Short-sightedness" means that people only guide their behavior based on short-term impact results.

For example, someone invites you to play a game with an expected return greater than zero - a 50% chance of winning 2,000 yuan and a 50% chance of losing 1,000 yuan. Would you be willing to participate?

This is a famous applied psychology experiment. Most people actually refuse to participate in this game because the possible loss amount is too large, even though everyone knows that there is an equal chance of gaining 2,000 yuan. This example reveals that we are all "short-sighted" loss averse people . Faced with the same amount of gains and losses, losses are more unbearable for us. There is a quantitative statement that the negative utility of the same amount of loss is 2.5 times the positive utility of the same amount of gain.

Focusing on the scenario where we usually do "landing page optimization", the "short-sightedness law" is reflected in the fact that we know that there are some options or possibilities to obtain better benefits, but we do not seek any breakthroughs beyond inertia. Because any breakthrough or change will result in short-term loss of profits - additional tool costs, additional energy consumption, learning costs, and difficult-to-predict short-term conversion effects.

2. Have you ever used the method of guessing?

Recently I heard that a user who was launching financial products encountered the problem of optimizing the conversion rate of the landing page. Starting from July, due to fluctuations in external uncertainties such as the market and media, the cost of one of his information flow pages with the best conversion effect soared by nearly 3 times.

In a hurry, he tried to make major changes to the page twice in two weeks: the first time, he replaced the most important header image and slogan, but the effect was even worse; the second time, he restored the original structure, and then imitated competitors and changed the main color from orange to dark blue, but the effect was even worse. . .

Throughout the entire decision-making process, he perfectly demonstrated the "snap decision method" - making judgments based on his existing experience system. Even though this method has thousands of loopholes, it is the most commonly used in marketing decisions. There is only one fundamental reason for this - it is fast enough!

Marketing requires racing against time and cost, and most of the time you cannot afford to hesitate. "Shooting with one's imagination" is an effective way for many marketers to increase their chances of winning. The reason is that practice tells us that the cost of "inaction" is often greater than the cost of "doing something wrong."

So, where does the "short-sighted trap" of making decisions based on one's own ideas come from? When making marketing decisions, we choose the easiest way to make decisions, which is the solution of brain system 1 . In the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", the author puts forward a concept that is of epoch-making significance: human thinking has two systems, System 1 is fast thinking and System 2 is slow thinking.

If you only use your System 1 to make “subconscious decisions” when optimizing landing pages, you will fall into a dilemma: you will not be able to accumulate real knowledge that can be reused in practice, and your success and failure will become more random; at the same time, you will often question yourself because the page creativity is getting worse and worse, “ What is the value of daily optimization?”

Countermeasures:

1. Ability to achieve flexible modification and rapid testing

Whether using some SaaS tools or developing it on their own, the marketing team needs to empower the team responsible for the landing page with the ability to modify page details at any time and make flexible adjustments and revisions.

At the same time, it is also necessary to be able to verify hypotheses quickly. In addition to doing regular AB testing, there are many ways to iterate in small steps, such as using tools or independently developing a page management background that can flexibly allocate traffic, allowing manual audience grouping and random version testing to run at the same time, thereby increasing optimization efficiency.

2. If you think "optimization" is mysterious, then the cost of trial and error must be low

The so-called metaphysics means that you may not be able to explain the reasons clearly in the effective stage, or you may need to change your way of thinking to solve the problem: analysis cannot solve all optimization problems in marketing.

If this is the case, simply give up some of the methods you originally relied on and eliminate wrong answers at a lower cost. We may be able to use a broad range of creative approaches to quickly eliminate versions that do not convert well, and find high-quality versions that are within an acceptable range.

3. Can scientific rigorists avoid short-sightedness?

uncertain.

Another extreme example I came across recently came from a very wealthy brand owner - any changes must be tested, and any ideas must be verified for authenticity. At first glance, it sounds fine, very advanced and scientific.

They are in the home improvement industry and have a large investment volume. Any changes to the page will be confirmed through AB testing. Although the explicit costs are very high (long testing cycle and large lead loss), they feel that this is a necessary link, so the price is worth paying. This is actually a very advanced concept. But when we interviewed the landing page planners who actually implemented it, they said that doing so actually limited their optimization capabilities.

I analyzed it and found that this might be because there is a hidden cost that has been overlooked - the version they chose for testing was selected based on prior experience. This screening process limits people's optimization space to a great extent. That is, many possibilities are lost in the process of execution without being noticed. People will use "short-sighted thinking" to minimize risks or recklessness in order to obtain the most reliable test results.

Of course, brands will also weigh the technical difficulty and implementation costs of practicing too many creative versions at once, which causes many "scientific and rigorous" people to restrict a large number of dynamic creative ideas in the initial stage. This is actually a very unscientific and rigorous approach - only ideas that are within the scope of testing capabilities have a chance to survive.

Does it feel a bit ironic? But this is the reality that marketers face. We can’t be really scientific and can only try our best to draw conclusions that are more reliable than guessing.

Countermeasures: