PPC landing page testing strategy

Business Benefits

Test your landing pages to improve your conversion rates and return on ad spend.


Use Google Analytics to identify the candidate pages for testing.

Go to Behavior > Site content > Landing pages and look at the Bounce rate and Goal conversion rate columns and identify the pages with the lowest values. Look at the Sessions column to identify the landing page with the highest traffic.

Create an experiments backlog to document your experiments.

Create a table in Excel, Google Sheets, or an intranet site with columns:

  • Page
  • Hypothesis
  • Experiment Idea
  • Metric
  • Result
  • Follow-up tasks

Add the pages that you identified in the first step to the Page column.

Develop hypotheses about your landing pages, like why those with a high bounce rate and low conversion rate perform poorly, or how you can improve the landing pages with the highest traffic.

Use session recording tools like CrazyEgg or Mouseflow to better understand user behavior. For example, if you have a long landing page with a lot of information, you can see if the users actually scroll down and read the content before leaving the page.

Add your hypotheses to the backlog document.

Brainstorm ideas for improvement and analyze them with your team.

Develop an experiment idea for each hypothesis. Some examples of the things that can be improved on the landing page replacing long texts with bullet points:

  • Making the CTA buttons more prominent.
  • Making the unique selling proposition clear and more understandable.
  • Adding product images or videos.
  • Making site navigation less cluttered.
  • Better alignment between the message in the ads and the content on the landing page.

Add the improvement ideas to the backlog.

Select an A/B testing tool and implement the experiment ideas.

Google Optimize is a free tool that is integrated with Google Analytics. Optimizely and CrazyEgg are common alternatives, but are paid tools. CrazyEgg has session recording and heat mapping features.

Define the goal of your experiments and the metrics to measure it.

For a better understanding of the experiment results, add both primary and secondary experiment goals. The number of transactions or ecommerce conversion rate can be viewed as a primary goal, crucial for your business goals. Bounce rate or time on page can be viewed as secondary goals.

Launch and evaluate the experiments.

Make sure that enough data is collected. Tools typically notify you when the results are statistically significant.

Document the results of the test in your backlog and follow up on the experiments.

Implement the winning variations and see which elements of the winning variations can be implemented on other pages. For example, a specific text lay-out, or CTA button.

Experiment on an ongoing basis and implement the experimentation culture.

Review your experiment list once a month. Involve other stakeholders in the brainstorming process to come up with new experiment ideas. Share the experiment results in a meeting, via email, or on an intranet site, to demonstrate the value of experimentation. Always have at least one experiment running on your website.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:35:28Z

I feel like there is a missing stage here. After you have identified candidate pages for testing, the next step is to identify exactly what is going wrong on that page. This can be done using heatmaps, watching back sessions or carrying out usability testing. Only after you have done that can you start forming hypothesis of how to fix these issues.

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