Segment Your Audience

We in Canada are familiar with this concept. On many Canadian sites, the first page offers a choice between French and English. That’s segmentation.

How should segment your audience

No one can answer that for sure. You can try a number of different ways, such as by:

• Age
• Interests, i.e. sports fan, culture vulture, shopoholic
• Profession, i.e. medical student, pharmacist, dentist, doctor
• Product, i.e. shoes, bags, accessories

You won’t know which one will work until you’ve tested some variations.

People are impatient

Have you ever observed your own search patterns. How long do you wait for a page to load? How long do you hang around a site if you don’t find what you’re looking for immediately?

Statistics show that people will give you approximately 20 seconds of their time. If you don’t deliver within that time, you’ve lost your chance with them. They’ll back out of your site, go back to their search engine result and try a different source. That’s it! They may never come back.

So, how can you keep them?

Give ‘em what they want and give it FAST! If there’s something they came to your page to do, then make sure they can easily find where to do it. Even if you have a hundred things on your page, make sure you have the fewest major categories possible. Tell them immediately what’s new.

Let them know where they are. If your ad offers a free trial, make sure the first thing they see is a free trial. The landing pages for people who find your site by chance (organic search results) and the landing pages for people who come from an ad should be different. On the generic landing page, you’ll have more options and more navigation options. For people who come from an ad, be sure to give them what they want and few options.

Give them reasons to trust you

When people land on your site they want to know if you’re some sort of scam or spam. Give them a reason to trust you. If you’re affiliated with known professional organizations, show that. If you use VISA or MasterCard, show that. Have a link to your privacy policy. You can also have a testimonial or two.

How do you know if you have good landing pages?

Ask yourself these questions and if the answer to them is, “no”, then you need to put some time into improving your landing pages.

1. Does our site have different pages for chance (organic) visitors and for visitors arriving from an ad?
2. Does our site have different landing pages for different ads?
3. Do our landing pages allow for quick and easy segmentation?
4. Do our landing pages for ad related visitors have fewer than four alternatives?
5. Have we kept choices to a minimum?
6. Have we kept our contact form short and ask for only the bare essentials?
7. Is our bounce rate (rate that people leave your site without engaging) lower than 30%?

What should you do first?

I suggest that you first create some excellent landing pages for your ads. Each ad should have it’s own very specific page. Remove everything extraneous. Be tough.

Next, take another look at your goals and the main page of your website. Can you simplify it? Can you make it load faster? Can you offer an outline of what’s available without a clutter of confusion? If you can do any of these, then do it.

Finally, run tests. To learn more about this, go to Google Website Optimizer. You can find all the information you need to get started.

Thanks for reading. Please comment or share this article.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under General, Google, Landing Pages, SEO - Search Engine Optimization, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.