Increasing traffic and engagement on your website is typically thought of as a zero sum game where traffic is considered the essential fuel to make your engine run faster. However, all the fuel in the world won’t make a poorly tuned engine run better. Even an unlimited supply of high-octane fuel can’t change what’s already happening under the hood.
The same can be said for a poorly tuned, or optimized website. Whether it’s organic or paid traffic, even if you’re getting the absolute perfect visitor to your site, it doesn’t matter unless your site has been properly calibrated to get that visitor to do what you’re looking for. In fact, you can actually be hurting yourself by sending highly qualified traffic to a poorly optimized site. Most visitors typically give you one chance to make an impression; most will never return if they have a bad experience.
One new tool that I’ve been testing recently that could make a significant impact in this area of testing and optimization is from Unbounce.com. I’ve been using their system to split test contest landing pages that I easily create using their highly flexible templates.
I literally created two contest landing pages and started testing in less than an hour – without any previous experience with Unbounce.com. The other truly valuable feature is that since the pages are hosted on their servers, I needed virtually no help from our developers. I’m even using a custom subdomain using our URL that points to the Unbounce landing pages, which helps somewhat retain the confidence and credibility with our audience.
What happens after the pages are launched? Unbounce sends traffic to my two landing pages and then tracks the competition including visits, unique visits and form executions. They even offer a connection to RapLeaf, which automatically inserts some really cool user info such as visitor age and location.
Once the winning landing page is decided, I’ll create a new page to keep the competition, and the ROI, improving. Unbounce also connects to Mailchimp, which is a great way to automatically manage your list – now and in the future.
Another great aspect of this system is that it allows you test all kinds of text, images and layouts to see what works. You can then import that knowledge into your website to help directly optimize your website. Unbounce is an excellent, affordable tool to help tune-up your website quickly and efficiently.
Visit unbounce.com for more information.