Landing page optimization: a hypothetical use case

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  • Optimizely Web Experimentation

Design and implement a landing page experiment and set up geo-targeted landing page experiments.

Landing pages are standalone pages that serve a specific purpose, such as generating leads or promoting product-specific offers. Organizations can have several landing pages live at once and can target each to a specific offer or customer segment. Because of this, landing pages offer opportunities to experiment for optimization.

Design and launch a landing page experiment

Imagine this scenario, Andrea is in charge of the digital marketing team at Adler Bragdon Insurance, a company that sells health insurance in nineteen states. She wants to test a discounted rate to see if a visitor buys two policies at the same time. However, the specific rates and requirements are different for each state, so Andrea creates landing page experiments for each state Adler Bragdon operates in.

Optimizely Web Experimentation provides the tools needed to create and deploy many experiments by using pages and audiences.

Set up a landing page template

Create a reusable template—named Pages—that tells Optimizely Web Experimentation to deliver this experiment to all the landing pages that supports this special offer.

Ensure that at least one landing page is prepared on the Adler Bragdon website since setting up a page in Optimizely Web Experimentation requires a valid URL; without one, you cannot use the Visual Editor to make content changes for each variation.

The following steps describe how to create an initial page that you can re-use for similar landing pages. These landing pages can exist in multiple experiments aimed at consumers in different states.

  1. Go to Implementation > Pages.

  2. Click Create New Pagecreate-new-page.png

  3. In the Name field, enter a descriptive name, such as offer_1_landing_page.

  4. In the Editor URL field, type the URL of the pre-existing landing page that already exists on the Adler Bragdon site.

  5. Select Substring Match from the match type drop-down menu.

  6. Enter the URL for the landing page on which you want to run the experiment in the URL Match field. All the landing pages on Adler Bragdon's site are in different subdirectories within the landing directory. These subdirectories are named according to the purpose of the landing page. Because Andrea wants Lars to apply this experiment to all the landing pages supporting this special offer, the URL Pattern should look like:
    http://www.adlerbragdon.com/landing/offer_1/.create-new-page-substring-match.png

  7. Click Create Page.

Create the first experiment

In this experiment the goal is find out which variation of landing page works best in each state.

After you create an experiment for one state, you can duplicate it for the other states. Use the Visual Editor on each variation to make adjustments to the copy and layout for consumers in each state. See how to create an experiment for more details.

  1. Go to Experiments. Select Create New Experiment.

  2. Select A/B Test from the drop-down and name your experiment.

  3. (Optional) Add a description. As a best practice, add your hypothesis in the description.
  4. Under Targeting, select Saved Pages from the drop-down list.

  5. Select offer_1_landing_page, which you created in the set up a landing page step.create-a-b-test.png
  6. Click Create Experiment.

Configure the first experiment 

In your newly created experiment,

  1. In the Audiences tab, create an audience that targets visitors based on geographic location to limit participants in the experiment to only those visitors from the appropriate state. Then add that audience to the experiment. See Target group visitor behaviors for more information on audience selection.

  2. In the Metrics tab, Add a metric to your experiment. Since this experiment tests the effectiveness of different landing page offers, you can track total conversions as your primary metric.

  3. In the Traffic Allocation tab, set your traffic allocation to specify the percentage of visitors included in the experiment. You can set up your variation traffic distribution, which controls the proportion of traffic sent to a particular variation.

  4. In the Variations tab, create a variation. A variation is a different version of the page where your experiment runs. Optimizely Web Experimentation measures the differences in user response between variations to determine winners and losers. Each experiment needs at least one variation.

  5. Test your experiment with the Preview tool and click Start Experiment.

Duplicate the experiment

Complete the following to duplicate the experiment for each state where Adler Bragdon sells policies:

  1. Go to Experiments.

  2. Find the experiment you want to duplicate that you created in the previous steps.

  3. Select the More Options menu and select Duplicate from the drop-down menu. duplicate-experiment.png

  4. In the Duplicate Experiment modal, select the current project name from the Select a Project drop-down list. 

  5. Click Duplicate. Optimizely Web Experimentation duplicates the experiment.

Rename the duplicated A/B test to include the name of the state it targets. 

Repeat the duplication process for each state. Make the necessary copy and content changes using the visual editor one experiment at a time.