4 Effective Elements to Test on Your Category Landing Page

4 Effective Elements to Test on Your Category Landing Page

Now that marketers have embraced the idea of sending customers from paid search to targeted landing pages whenever possible, managing those landing pages has the potential to become almost as complex as managing a PPC campaign itself -- but it doesn’t have to be.

Generic vs. Customizable Landing Pages
Rather than settling for rather generic landing pages for large groups of keywords, or sending visitors to internal pages that are even less targeted, we talked in last month’s newsletter (3 Steps to a Customizable Landing Page Plan) about a customizable landing page plan you can create in order to offer visitors targeted content based upon their origination keyword and intent.

We suggested that you create a series of landing page templates geared toward visitors with specific intentions, and that you then customize them for keyword or keyword group as necessary.

One of those templates -- and perhaps one of the most ubiquitous landing page types -- is the category landing page.

Why Create Customizable Category Landing Pages?
Bringing visitors to category pages can be difficult because they may be searching broadly -- by a general keyword such as “accounting” rather than a specific keyword like “QuickBooks” -- or they could be narrowing in on a specific category -- “Puma,” for example, rather than “sneakers.” That gives you very little information on what their goal is.

When a visitor arrives from search, they’re likely to be high-intentioned, but in this instance, it is difficult to discern just what that intention is: To research? To buy? To waste time until lunch?

You can’t assume that someone who uses broad search terms is less purchase-focused than someone who uses specific ones. Broad search terms may simply be an indication of the type of person -- less specific person in nature -- rather than an indication of what their goal is. Likewise, someone who searches with targeted keywords may simply be a strategic surfer who knows how to find just what he wants, and not necessarily someone with more desire to buy.

How to Begin Testing a Customizable Category Landing Page
So when customizing a category landing page template that will meet your needs for many types of visitors, you'll need to encourage them to self-select and define for you just what they’re hoping to accomplish.

Consider testing these four basic elements:

Element #1. Key product

Since you can’t tell what their goal is, try testing a single key product or key offer. Guess, as best you can, what might give a visitor what they are looking for, and then test it.

For example, you might test a single hero shot of your absolute best product (The Sharper Image, say, might show the Ionic Breeze) versus a beautiful image that entices a visitor to click more deeply into the site (a happy couple playing with a child and a golden retriever) versus a value proposition (“lowest rates guaranteed!” or “free shipping all the time!”)

Element #2. Depth of category offering

Whether you have hundreds or thousands of products or only two or three main offerings, you want to convince your visitor to give you a little more information on what they're seeking. Showing them the depth of your category offerings is a good way to get them to self-select.

Ask, What device should I use to get them into the dept of my content or products? You might consider testing:

º Traditional tabs with categories and subcategories
º A gift finder
º Staff picks or recommendations
º “Most purchased” recommendations or “most viewed articles”
º Editorial content

When you use one of these devices, what you're really saying to the visitor is, “I have more things to offer than I can actually show on the page.” You’re attempting to entice them to make another click to get them to the next level of interaction.

Element #3. General branding and treatment

Remember, a visitor coming from search is arriving from a whole different experience, on a page that you didn’t control. No matter how excited they are to land on your page, the experience can be jarring, because you will likely have a different mode of interaction than the site from which they arrived.

If you’re trying to persuade them to do something with you, each step calls for a different nature of interactivity.

This means that you need to make an impact not only about your brand experience, but also about how they’re interacting with you. The goal here is to make the experience seem continuous.

At the same time they have to recognize that they’re at the next step of interaction. It’s a tricky balance. You might try testing:

º whether you’re very spare like Google or dense with content
º whether it looks more like a homepage or more utilitarian like a general category page
º whether you use very interactive elements or traditional, static ones.

Element #4. Off-navigation

There are two schools of thought, here: do you want to offer only content as targeted as possible in the hopes that you’ll funnel the prospect right on to the sale, or do you want to show the other categories in the hopes of snagging their interest in another area?

This is a simple, relatively straight-forward element to test.

Then What?
Test and optimize these elements to find which work best for your visitors. Then, when the category landing page template has been finalized (at least until you decide to test again), simply switch content out for new landing pages, depending on keyword group -- remove all content relevant to books and swap in content relevant to CDs, for example.

You’ll find that you have created a simple and effective way to increase conversions and average order value by sending visitors to targeted landing pages -- that behave as though they know just what the visitor is seeking -- without having to create those landing pages from scratch for each and every keyword group.