Over the last few months, we’ve been steadily working on improving our website. With the aid of our website statistics we found out that most of our visitors enter our website on the main product page of SmartInspect (more than 60% last month). This is expected since all advertisement like Google AdWords and most announcements and press releases link to this page. So it seemed natural to concentrate on this page first.
Before starting to optimize the landing page of your product, it’s important to set clear goals. In my opinion, it’s best to concentrate on two, maybe three actions. In our case we decided to set the focus on:
- Downloading the trial version of SmartInspect
- Taking the SmartInspect tour
At first, we analyzed the toolboxes on the right. In the early days of the website we had a toolbox for the Personal edition, a combined toolbox for the tour with a small screenshot and a hard-to-find link to the trial in our download section and finally a button which linked to our order page. As result, visitors took the tour quite often but the download rate was low. Downloading our Personal edition or the trial was simply too complicated. You needed to click on the link to our download section, once again on the link to the download itself and finally accept our general business and licensing conditions.
We did two things to correct this. At first, we split the combined toolbox into two independent toolboxes and removed the Personal edition toolbox to set the focus on the trial download. Then we simplified the three-click download adventure to a single click. There’s no reason for us to link to the download section and asking for agreement on the licensing conditions instead of linking to a file directly.
After changing the toolboxes, we focused on the actual content of the landing page. Originally, the trial download and the link to the tour were hidden between a list of SmartInspect benefits and links to features and how-it-works pages. To correct this we removed the benefits list, moved the link to the how-it-works page to the bottom of the page and introduced two colored boxes, one for the trial download and one for the tour.
After uploading the new landing page, we noticed the benefits of the changes within a few days. The download rate of the trial increased and the tour was still visited as often as before. Our current landing page is anything but perfect and we are currently working on further improvements, but it’s by far more successful than the first one. What we’ve learned is that it’s enormous important to have specific goals for the landing page and to not distract visitors with less important information.
