Book Review – Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash

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Book Review – Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash

There are a few books out there on landing page optimization. Optimizing your front page is a key aspect of having a powerful web design.

Here is a quick definition of landing page optimization:

Better conversions – the work you do to your web pages to increase the rate at which you get your readers to do what you want them to do after reading your web page.

If you begin with a 2% conversion rate and increase that to 3% you have increased your conversion rate by 50 percent.

There are many recommendations for the expensive ‘Landing Page Report’ published by MarketingSherpa. But at just under 0 this is simply too steep for many budgets.

Tim Ash’s new book is a very good alternative. In fact, it is probably a good idea to start with this book and make the decision if you need more information after reading it.

Tim’s book gives a very good outline of all aspects of landing page optimization and conversion and is divided into three sections:

Background – includes setting the stage and understanding your website and your audience
What and How to Tune – includes why your site needs a tune up, elements to tune, the math and methods of tuning
Getting it Done – includes building a team and an action plan as well as the pitfalls to avoid.

As a reader, you will appreciate covering the following points:

where to start and what to do,
the roles of the different team players,
the skills of each team player and their overlapping roles.

This book is totally business focused and all about getting more sales and keeping clients. You learn how to do the measurements and how to use them to improve your conversion.

This book is great to read if you are beginning to intermediate level.

The truth is, until you hit a 100% conversion rate you can always work on increasing your page conversion.

Tim reminds us all of the important things to do for good conversion, and draws our attention to the points we often skip over or need to come back to regularly.

I also particularly liked two parts:

His reminder of where to start – it makes you want to keep this book to check through every 6 months or so. As an inspiration to continually try to tweak your conversion and to verify that your website is still on course.
His take on deciding whether to outsource your conversion testing or not. As a marketer I know this is always a tough call.

This is a very easy to read book even for non-native English speakers.

The overview on tuning and multivariate testing sections represent half of one chapter. These are the only technical sections of the book. The rest is non technical and all is very well explained.

If this subject interests you, I’m sure you will want to read all of the 300 odd pages.

As Tim Ash says, this next year will see many companies studying their landing page optimization. Businesses always focus on all sorts of traffic acquisition and client retention strategies.

But most businesses tend to forget about the conversion process. Or at least they think they have worked on it, when in fact they have barely scraped the surface. Companies should give just as much attention to all aspects of conversion as they do acquisition and retention.

Using internet marketing to develop international sales is often thwarted due to bad international conversion. The game rules are the same for both domestic and international websites.

Spend some time developing, testing and adjusting good conversion strategies, and your skills will be good for both domestic and international clients.

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