A funny thing happened the other day

We were split testing a landing page and almost didn’t run the test because we are so sure.
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This was a business to business site and just expected to get more leads if we added logos of the clients that the business had worked with.
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This business has worked with some big names, Rolls Royce, BBC and Siemens to name a few and we thought these would show the business had authority in the space
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But this variation tanked
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Not only this but the variation with trade association logos and partner badges also did worse.
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Again, these badges should have increased conversion
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But they didn’t
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It was as if the lowest authority landing page was getting the most leads
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Why was this?
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Of course, everything after the fact ‘becomes obvious’
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What was happening is that at that current moment, when people were hitting the landing page, they were in research mode looking for information.
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They didn’t want to be sold to – yet.
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Anything that looked salesy was a red flag to them.
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So, changing the landing page to look more like an information resource, or part of a publication worked much better.
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What’s the lesson here?
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I think we all read ‘best practise’ blog posts on conversion rate optimisation but there is no one size fits all for CRO work.
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Whenever we do the test in our head we are doomed, we just don’t know what ‘mode’ the customer is in.
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Once we knew where the prospect was we were able to triple to lead generation rate on that page by moving the design in the direction of ‘news publication’ and away from ‘sales page’
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I learn something new everyday about conversion optimisation and it’s especially important for Google Shopping as those product pages take a battering.
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They are the landing pages of the site and so need to make a good impression.
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There’s a lot we can do with your product pages to increase conversion and if you want to learn more about this please watch our case study video http://go.markhammersley.co/get-started