Squeeze Page Formula Revealed (Part 03) – Goals, Conversions and Tracking – Oh My!

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So, remember where above that it was pointed out that there would be one common theme of TEST, TEST, TEST?  Well, here’s where it comes into play.

The first fact that you must admit is that this is merely a numbers game – math.  Sorry, but you will have to have some basic math skills to be effective in business <grin>.  The purpose of a squeeze page is to……….. GET AN OPT-IN! That’s right.  Many people miss this very basic point.  Many people confuse a squeeze page with a sales page.  A squeeze page is not designed to close a sale, it is only designed to get the user to take that one step forward and get them to the sales page – that’s it. Once they arrive at the sales page, then it is the responsibility of the sales page to “close” the deal and make the sale.

So what are the numbers you are concerned with?  Here they are, plain and simple:

1. Optin Percentage
2. Conversion Rate

Really, it all comes down to those two items.  Now, you can have an extremely effective sales page, but if your squeeze page has a terrible optin percentage you’re not going to be effective.  Likewise, you can have a very effective squeeze page and a poor sales page.  But the purpose of this document is to discuss squeeze pages, so let’s just focus on that.

The optin percentage is straightforward and should be self-explanatory.  Simply put, it is the percentage of users that come to your squeeze page and submit their person information to continue.  As an example let’s say that you send 1000 visitors to your squeeze page and 100 of them opt in.  Well, you have a 10% opt-in rate, and that’s pretty darn good.  Anything above about a 5% opt-in rate is considered to be a successful squeeze page. However, true success is measured when you pay the bills, so if the numbers aren’t working for you then you will have to keep tweaking and improving them.

The conversion rate refers to how many sales are made for the traffic sent to your site.  So, using the same example above of a 1000 visitors, if 3 of them purchased your product from the sales page then you would have a 3% conversion rate – again, a very good rate.  Generally speaking 1% and above is a decent conversion rate and 3% and above is a “good” conversion rate. But, like mentioned earlier, that all depends on your product and your price point.

To start with, you should have goals going in and you need to make sure that they work financially.  So you need to figure the cost of your traffic, and then estimate a 1% conversion rate and see if the dollars make sense.  Let’s say you’re selling a $97 info product and that you are having to pay an average of 30 cents per visitor.  Well, for a 1000 visitors you would pay $300 and if you only converted at 1% you would only make one sale – or $97.  Thus that would be a losing campaign.

However, if you were able to get that same traffic for 10 cents you would have a “break even” campaign.  Depending upon your business goals that might be determined in and of itself to be a “success”.  Many marketing campaigns are not designed so much to make money on the front end but rather to fund themselves and add to the client list.  Or, perhaps to break even on the front end and make their profits on the upsell or long term email marketing campaign.

Now that you have the basic math figured out and have mapped out your plan, you need to put it into action and devise a strategy (before you start spending money) to improve your odds from the beginning.  This all comes down to tracking, making small changes and observing the impact.

Let’s just take a very small example.  Let’s go back to your insurance short form squeeze page.  Let’s assume that you have a Title, 3 bullet points and a video with a large opt-in button and form.  In order to properly test this squeeze page, you need to have several different variations of each element prepared in advance so that you can quickly evaluate one versus the other and monitor your results.  So, let’s take the title for example.  Before starting your campaign, have at least 10 or more titles created.  You never know which one is going to perform better, so have several ready to go and test.  The same is true with your “benefits” (the three bullet points) and the video (try several different presentation styles, formats, lengths, etc…).

Now, testing is really all about small changes that are tracked.  DO NOT every change more than one thing at a time. Please go back and reread that – yes, it’s that important.  If you make two changes to your form and it does worse (had a lower conversion rate), how do you know which change was responsible?  Was it the different video?  Or did the title cause the problem?  Bottom line is that you simply will not know unless you limit your changes to one at a time.

An advanced tracking technique called split testing will dramatically improve your testing routine.  A split test works like this.  You use a software program called a rotator (or URL rotator) to divide your incoming traffic and split it up – send 50% to one variation of your squeeze page and the other 50% to the other variation.  There are several very key points that need to be emphasized with split testing.  For one, you must have a way of tracking the results.  That is outside the scope of this document, but there are several ways of easily and freely tracking such as Google Analytics Conversion tracking, for one.  The second key point is that you can only test one and only one modification at a time and never have more than two variations.  In other words, let’s say you’re split testing the effectiveness of the title.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Setup a URL rotator to evenly distribute* the traffic to two different squeeze pages.
2. Make sure that the squeeze pages are IDENTICAL except the title variation.
3. Observe and track the results and pick a winner.

* “evenly distribute” – this is very important.  Some URL trackers or even Google Adwords will give you the option of sending the majority of the traffic to the ad or version performing the best – you do NOT want to do that.  If you do, how will you truly know what the real results are?  Leave it as a pure 50/50 distribution so that you can see that title variation one had a 1.3% conversion rate and title variation 2 had a 1.1% conversion rate.

Now, it may seem silly to think of the importance of such small differences in conversion rates, but do the math and you will see that it is *very* important to the success of your overall campaign.  In the example above of going from 1.1% to 1.3%, what does that really mean?  Well, let’s go back to our $97 product and 10 cent traffic cost.  At 1.1% that equates to just $9.70 of profit per 1000 visitors sent to the squeeze page.  But, at just 1.3%, you would be making $29.70 per 1000 visitors.  That .2% difference in conversion rate results in a big difference in net profits.

So, pay attention to the details and have a good set of variables in place and a strategy for how to test them *before* you roll out your site.  Then take a very scientific approach to it and through many iterations you will gradually keep improving your conversion rate as long as you are methodical and devoted.

Related posts:

1. Squeeze Page Formula Revealed (Part 02) – What is the Difference Between a Squeeze Page and a Landing Page?
2. Squeeze Page Formula Revealed (Part 04) – Elements of a Good Squeeze Page
3. Squeeze Page Formula Revealed (Part 05) – Squeeze Page Design Concerns with Google