by: AskPat 141 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, hey, what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 141 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
We have another great question, from Jeff, but before we get to that I want to thank today's sponsor, which is 99designs.com. You know, cause working with an individual graphic designer for your graphic design needs, it's great, you know, you get the one on one attention, they're fantastic. I work with a number of individual graphic designers myself for my projects. However, they do come with their limitations, especially when you're first starting out, and timing is one of them. So if you want dozens of designs to choose from for your next design project, in just seven days, visit 99designs.com/pat, and get a $99 power pack of services free.
Now, let's get on to today's question from Jeff.
Jeff: Hi Pat, my name is Jeff Demaree, over at SalonBusinessPodcast.com, and I just have a quick question about landing pages. I have a information product that I've just completed and am trying to sell, and there's all these factors involved with it, and one of them is the landing pages. And I'm just curious, when you do set up landing pages and split test them, etc, how long do you wait on a page to see if it does work? And I guess really the easiest way for me to tell if it does work is if I just get one sale on that page. If I give it a week and I have a reasonable amount of traffic going to the page and I don't make any sales, is it time to try a totally different page, or should I kinda wait it out? Or what are your thoughts on, again, how long should you wait for a landing page to see if it converts, and how to figure that out? Thank you very much for everything you do, I love both your podcasts, listen to them all the time, and thank you very much.
Pat Flynn: Jeff, thank you so much for the question. And first of all, I want to commend you because a lot of people, when they put up these landing pages, they don't think about how they're performing. They just kinda put them up there and hope for the best, so it's awesome to know that you're actually being conscious about what's going on behind the scenes. It's very important to do so, because it's one thing to take action, but it's a second thing to track that action and see what the results are like, and if they're not to your liking, to make changes and adapt. That's exactly what being an entrepreneur, and doing online business, is all about.
Now, in terms of how long you should wait for your landing page to go up there and see if it converts before making changes, it's interesting, because if you wait too long, you might be wasting time and money. But if you wait too short, or if you pull it quickly, you might not give it a chance to get the results that you're looking for. So for instance, for too short, if you just put it up and you get ten visitors, and it's been a day and you haven't made any sales, well, what does that really tell you? Well, it just didn't make any sales that day for those specific sets of visitors. But what does it tell you overall? It's hard to tell.
Now, as far as too long, well maybe you put up a landing page and it's not converting, but you leave it up there anyways, because you're hoping, or you believe, that it will work. You are really enjoying the design, and you're like, “Yes, I know this is going to work.” And you put it up there and you leave it for like three months and it doesn't convert at all. Obviously that's too long. But where do you draw the line?
Well, for one, I think before we start to talk about the length, or how long you should wait, I think it's important to split test. I think split testing will give you the ability to see right away what's working and what's not. And after a certain period of time you'll be able to select one version of a landing page over another. So always split test. For everybody out there listening to this, you should always be split testing. If you're creating a landing page, maybe using something like Leadpages, you have the ability to split test, and you should always be split testing, you know, putting half of that traffic coming to that page to one version, half to another, that's what they call A/B testing, there's version A and version B. The percentages into conversions will tell you exactly which one works best, you go along with the highest performing one, then you do another test, change another variable.
Now, there are things you can do to increase, or actually decrease the amount of wait time, especially when you're split testing. So there's two things. The first thing is just increase traffic. So, increasing traffic to that particular test, or landing page, will show you what the results are much faster. So that might mean that you might have to pay for some advertising to go to that particular landing page, or you might do a campaign directly on your site and direct traffic, for a short period of time, to those particular pages with that landing page that you created. That way you get the results much faster, and it'll be much more clear, sooner, as far as which one performs better and what to do next.
The second thing you could do is also make sure to decrease the variables, because there are, you know, programs out there that you can use to test many different things, all at the same time. The results become much more clear when you're just testing version A and version B, and there's one difference, and you could see which one performs better, go with the new one, and then change another variable and conduct another split test.
Now, so how long should you wait? Well, I don't think it's really about time, I don't think it's about time at all. And I'm going to take a little note here from Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is a great tool that we should all be using, it creates heat maps and confetti maps for us to understand how our users are actually using our site, how our visitors are going through our site, what they're clicking on, what they're seeing, what parts of our site, even what parts of a page they're sticking around on. Or they're just, you know, plowing through and they aren't useful to them. Again, that's CrazyEgg.com. And they run their tests not by how long, but by how many visitors reach that page. And the tests end after a certain amount of visitors have gone through that particular page, and then you get the reports for them, you could see all the heat maps and confetti maps and stuff, and it's really cool.
Taking note from them, I don't think we should worry about how long, as far as time, I think we should worry about the sample size: How many people are actually going through that site. And when you think about that, that obviously makes sense. If you have a page and it's up there for three months, but only five visitors ever visited that landing page, how much time it was there doesn't matter at all, and you've obviously got a very small sample size. Now, there is obviously a different range here, depending on your audience and how much your usual traffic is, but you have to be realistic, and you have to understand that not everybody who visits your website is going to go to that landing page, no matter how great your campaigns and promotions are for it. But at the same time, you know that you can feed traffic to that particular page through things like Facebook ads. So you have to be realistic.
And so, if you have existing landing pages to your site and you know they've performed certain amount of—you know, they've converted at X amount, or X percent, you know, see what it would be like to feed that much traffic through it, and just ask yourself, “Is this an adequate amount of visits to this page to tell me whether or not it's going to work or not?” Obviously, five visits, if you get zero sales out of the first five visits, you know, don't freak out, you know it's only five. But, obviously if you get 1,000 people visiting that page, and you've only had one sale, then you might know that there's room for improvement.
So again, I can't give you an exact number Jeff, or for anybody out there, but it might be a certain percentage of what you have, based on what you already have on your site as well. So just take that into account but also, just be conscious and think to yourself, “Okay, if this many people go through this particular page, and I only make this many sales . . . ” And I think it's good to set a goal for yourself too, you know, what are your goals, how many would you expect? And there's actually a really interesting tool out there. If you go to VWO.com, which stands for Visual Website Optimizer, which is a really great A/B split testing tool that I've gotten a little bit involved with—it is very, very cool. They have a free tool on there, if you go to VWO.com and then highlight the sort of resources tab at the top, it will open up a bunch of things that you could use for free. And one of them is an A/B testing duration calculator. Now, it's interesting because it gives you a lot of variables and things like that, like, you know, your estimated . . . you need to select your estimated existing conversion rate, minimum improvement that you want on your new page, minimum number of variance and variations, the average number of daily visitors to that page, and the percent visitors to include in the test, which is usually 100. And you click ‘calculate,' and it tells you exactly how many days you should be running it, which is really interesting, 'cause that kinda goes against what I had just said. You know, I think you should go for how many people go through it, and what might be a reasonable amount of people to make a wise decision, and make educated, sort of, action adjustments from there, but you know, Visual Website Optimizer is, you know, they're in the split testing game, so that's another thing you could look at as well.
So Jeff, I hope that helps you, I know I didn't give you an exact number, but I think you can sort of decide based on that what would be a reasonable number of visitors going through that page to help out for your landing page, and the actions that you take after that. Now, another thing to think about before I let you all go is, how much do you make per sale, and then how much do you spend to get that many visitors on that page until you get that sale. So for example, let's say that every sale you make is $110. You make $110 for every sale. Well, maybe it costs you $100 to get enough traffic on that page to make a sale. So if you spend $100 and make $110, you've profited $10, so you basically have a money machine.
And this is how people are really making it big on Facebook right now; they've got it down to a science as far as how much they're paying per lead, and also how much they're spending until they make a conversion. And so what happens is, if you spend $100 you make $110, that's $10, you spend another $100, and make another $110, so another $10. You got $20 total, and that's kind of how it works. So, not only is it important to understand how these conversions are going, but let's say, for example, you make $1,000 per one sale. Well then, a very low percentage might work for you. So you have to think about those things as well.
So Jeff, thank you so much for your question, an AskPat teeshirt is going to be headed your way. Thank you to all of you out there who are listening. If you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, and you might get a teeshirt as well, head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there from that page using the SpeakPipe widget. You can use any microphone you have, or even the internal mic you have on your laptop, or even your mobile device, or your computer.
I also want to thank 99designs.com today, 99designs.com/pat to get your $99 Power Pack of services for free. This is a company that I've used in the past for many logos and landing page designs, and you could even use it for web page designs too, teeshirt designs, car wrap designs, anything designed that you want, it's really cool. Just put in your job there and many people from around the world, who are designers, will try to design the one that you're going to choose, and then the winner gets the prize money, I guess you could say. That's why it's kinda fun and exciting, you can get other people involved and vote on their favorites as well, you can work with designers along the way if they're close, and you know, it's just really cool. So again, 99designs.com/pat.
Now, as always, I'm going to end with a quote, and today's quote is from Tim Ferriss, and he says, “The ability to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner.” So very, very appropriate for today's episode. If you have a landing page and, you know, if a number of people have gone through it and it's just not working, even though you want to believe it works, because you've perhaps spent money on it, or somebody else said it was going to work, the numbers don't lie. So keep track. Jeff, again, proud of you for keeping track. I hope everybody else out there is keeping track, cause how will you know what to do if you don't know what's going on? So again, thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.