Customer Reviews

Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book may be the best thing since sliced bread for you, or can be practically useless. It has an extensive focus on Joe web surfer's persona, on why and how he behaves on the web. It also explains basic concepts such as A-B split testing, ROI, and gives a few examples from author's consulting background. There's a few mathematical formulas, which I am sure are excellent for marketing folks.

But what completely lacks from this book is THE WHAT and THE HOW. The "Uncovering Problems" section is surprisingly small and has no real value. It is explainable - the later part of the book is nothing but a marketing promo of author's consulting business. This costs author 1 star in my review.

The second star I remove because this book is completely useless for small to medium business. If you are a company with under $20 million in revenue - which is where 99% of websites belong - this book is not going to help you much.

This is a very important book. It helps you understand why the landing page is so impacting on the final actions of your visitors and what a landing page is for that matter. The book provides you with excellent guidance for analyzing your current website and determining how to make it easier for the visitor to use and, more importantly, easier for the user to do what you need them to do.

I loved the section titled, "Why your site is not perfect". It provides excellent information on how to uncover hidden problems in your site that your users are experiencing even though you may not have noticed them. Let's just say that it goes way beyond dead links.

Finally, "the math of tuning" shows you how to make logical decisions for next steps and make sure you're not wasting time fixing things that aren't broken or don't matter. Overall... a great book.

The book was written by Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com, a web analytics and site optimization service who does landing page optimization among other things for his living.

It is a real-world and practical guide to landing page testing and optimization without any fluff. It is really for the folks who do the testing and the ones who have to sell it to their boss and need to know about the details of the process of landing page testing, what is involved, what are the risks and how it should be approached and why.

It is very useful and complimentary to the "Landing Page Handbook" by MarketingSherpa, the $500 "bible" for folks who do serious landing page optimization for their business.

They also overlap in a few areas. This means that it is also a good buy for people who are not doing enough business that involves using landing pages to justify and recoup the $500 investment in the MarketingSherpa book. It's not exactly an alternative, but it is a start that cost a lot less.

If you are doing serious business with landing pages, I recommend getting both books. The return (increase in conversion = increase in business and profits) you will get out from it will pay for the initial investment quickly and then over and over again for the time to come.

If you know absolutely nothing about marketing or web commerce, this may be the book for you. It touches on a great many important subjects, and provides a useful -- if brief -- introduction to each.

If, on the other hand, you have ANY experience at all with basic marketing principles and the concepts and techniques behind optimizing your web site to maximize customer response, you will find this book quite tedious.

Simply put, nothing in this book gets more than surface treatment. Hundreds of very valuable concepts are introduced but none is ever fleshed out in a useful fashion. Practical examples are almost non-existent. Case studies are not used. Techniques are described in the broadest terms so that they may apply to any of a million different contexts or scenarios. This approach renders the book nearly useless to anyone who has even a little bit of knowledge in this area.

After reading a few chapters, I was simply bored out of my mind. I switched to scanning sections and dropping in periodically to see if the level of detail increased, but it did not. I do not consider myself an expert by any means, but there was nothing here that I found enlightening or even useful. It's all too bland and general.

I started the web site for my small business about five years ago, and constantly seek out new sources of insight into how I can improve it. The information in this book was just too generalized to be of any use.

If you are new to web marketing, use this as a primer, but you will soon be itching for a more practical resource. A shorter but infinitely more helpful (and entertaining) primer might be something like Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. From there, you will need individual books on things like analytics, keywords, SEO, pricing, copywriting, etc.

In that vein, I thought I was buying a book about optimizing my landing pages (a very big and complex subject all its own). This book touches on that, but not in a way that I found particularly detailed or useful. A better title for this book might be, "Introduction to Marketing (Web Edition)".

As a project lead for a Microsoft team that works with adCenter clients, I read a lot of technical books about online advertising. A lot. I've never referred to any of those books as a page turner. Never. "Landing Page Optimization" is a book with weight and substance without being dead weight. When I finished the book I had a working knowledge of the rationale and testing methodology for landing pages including a better understanding of the math than I had expected. I have a background in search engine advertising and web analytics but lacked a clear understanding of multivariate testing. With this book I could step into a search engine advertising production environment and feel comfortable with the learning curve.

Website conversion rates are the key to my job. In the past, the only landing page guidance I could get was from books that talked about web design or usability, or specific case studies that were not helpful for my field. Many of them were fluff or too generic.

This is the first comprehensive book about TESTING landing pages. This is a very different beast than just DESIGNING them. Ash is right when he says that your audience should "vote" for the best design - it does not matter what you like best as the site creator.

The book covers a lot of material in depth. I was a bit in over my head in the chapters about statistics in math. But at least I understand the limitations of different testing methods now, and won't buy into the hype anymore. This was the densest part of the book, but absolutely essential to anyone who is actually setting up and running multivariate tests.

This book is not a quick read. You will have to spend some time to get the most use out of it. You will probably come back to it again and again because there is so much good material in there.

I wish the screenshots were bigger and in color, but that is only a small formatting gripe. Overall this book is very solid - there is no other one out there that even comes close in terms of the ambition and scope.

I believe Landing Page Optimization will become the bible for Internet marketers who wish to dramatically improve their online sales. As a frequent internet shopper, I am constantly frustrated by confusing, difficult-to-use and uninformative sites even though I want to buy a product.

Here is a clear, logical and often humorous tutorial on how to assess, test, improve and verify your site's ability to generate sales. Mr. Ash gives examples of actual sites with poor landing pages and contrasts those with sites with effective pages. He also fills in important background about the psychology and math of testing that most people are not even aware of.

This book illustrates just how sophisticated landing page optimization has become and is a must-read for everyone in the online marketing business.

Most books on improving landing page conversion rates are very tactical. They give you specific prescriptions for how to change your site, without providing a comprehensive framework first.

This book is very broad and deep at the same time. It covers human psychology and decision making, identifying problems with your website, usability and writing style for the web, the math behind landing page testing, as well as extensive chapters on how to assemble the right team and create a whole landing page testing program within your company.

If you are looking for a quick fix, this book is not for you. But if you want a deep understanding of all issues that are critical for landing page testing success, then you should definitely read this.

If you do anything online in the way of making money, this book is a must have. I run a CPA network and our lifeblood is converting offers, Tim's book is like a Bible for Online Conversions. It is simple to follow and gives not only the basics of understanding measurement and design, but goes deep into the psychology behind why a user performs the way they do on a page. If you are lucky enough to have found this book, you will certainly agree that it will change the way you look at your website and your business. You MUST have this book if you want to blow past all the mistakes others have made and get right to the information that can seriously affect your bottom line. I have been at the web since 1997, and this is the first book I have read that elegantly and simply explains all of the factors involved in making your website's pages drip with sales, leads or clicks. Thanks Tim for finally putting it all in one place. Seth Godin has nothing on you!

So, let's say you have a website and want to improve the landing page.
Perhaps you're not sure about the best style of landing page for your type of product and would like a discussion about what kinds of pages work best with products like yours. You won't find ANY answers here. In fact, you won't even find a hint.

If you can't do the math to figure out what optimization is worth, then maybe you should read this book. But even then I have to believe that this material is covered on the web for free. It includes the typical fodder about team buy-in. Hey, guess what? If you have a team you need it. Next topic please.

There is even a gratuitous section on Meyers Briggs personality types. How that ties in to landing page optimization was not revealed.

Save your money. I normally don't review books negatively, but this one has so many positive reviews that I thought somebody should warn the unsuspecting. If you spend a couple of days reading this book you will not be much farther than you are right now. It just goes to show that there are a lot of people in this business who really don't have a clue.

I gave this book 2 stars because I believe that it would be useful to a corporate user who knows absolutely nothing about the web or web marketing. For me it was excruciating. I want my money back.