What is the right way to test an idea using a landing page?

I know there is a method to test your product idea using a landing page that describes your product, and asks for the user to enter his email if he would like to register for the beta. Then there is the thing that you provide links and then you analyze who from total users did what.

What I'm missing is step by step examples. How should I do this? What should this landing page contain? How should it look?

Has someone here actually used this method and can share their experience?

Ideas Validation Landing Page

asked Apr 2 '12 at 04:55

Meir
238 points

i cant publish the landing page i guess .. – Meir 12 years ago

3 Answers

You are asking a simple question with a very complex answer. There are three steps to accomplishing your goal, each of which requires a great deal of background and detail in order to be done effectively:

First step would be to create a PPC (pay per click) campaign on relevant ad networks (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo1, etc...) to drive traffic to your page. This needs to be done against very carefully selected and well-researched keywords.
Second, you need to build the landing page. This too is a very involved process that requires a strong, emotionally convincing headline that makes a clear offer. The conversion from needs to be low-friction and your page should include trust factors, social proof and supporting visual imagery. Ideally, you would want to create multiple landing pages and perform some A/B testing against multiple ad groups so that you can test different keyword performance against different landing page configurations.
Finally, you need to be using strongly integrated analytics throughout the whole process so that you can measure the search results, click-through rates and conversion rates for each scenario in your A/B testing.

Providing step-by-step details for all of these would take an awful lot of space, but that is the framework for accomplishing your task.

answered Apr 2 '12 at 05:35

Jon Di Pietro
1,697 points

Thank you for the answer , i just need to tutorials that helped people to do this stuff , for example the section 2,3 i can manage but section 1 i have no idea how to do good PPC campaign – Meir 12 years ago
Here's an article that might help - at least with the keyword research: http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide You can focus on the sections that cover the Google Adwords tools. Do your keyword research and figure out which ones you want to target using this article. Then, they have a new suggestion tool that will help you set up your ad groups based on the keywords you've selected. – Jon Di Pietro 12 years ago

Others are very good answers, but if you want step by step instructions, Start Small Stay Small has a chapter on the subject.

EDIT: summary of approach - The Mini Sales Site *Works best for downloadable or web-based (SaaS) app.

create a few pages (details are given)
downloadable products have a Buy button on the pricing page (high priced/+40$ may have a Try for Free button)
Create AdWords campaign
track conversions using Google AdWords
let users know product is "in development" and get their email so you can notify them when it is ready
- feel free to indicate your product is "Coming Soon" if you don't want to feel deceitful.

All of these data you're gathering can be used to try and calculate conversion rates. This is not intended for social media or networking sites.

answered Apr 3 '12 at 23:18

Jeff O
6,169 points

Your answer would be much more useful if you included a brief summary of what is in the book. – Jonny Boats 12 years ago

JonDiPietro's answer is correct and the steps can be complicated to do 'right' but if you just need to get going and get started here are some ideas.

a) Consult a local web developer... OR

b) Follow these steps:

Create an account at http://google.com/adwords
Create a Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com account
Use the web based website builders to choose a theme and write some marketing content for your product or service you are looking to test.
Make a www.wufoo.com account and create a basic form.
Embed that Wufoo form into your WP or Tumblr page.
Create Google Adwords ads to drive traffice to your page to test your idea.

You can Google or probably YouTube tutorials and educational articles on any one of these individual items. This will get you started at least.

answered Apr 2 '12 at 07:02

Ryan Doom
5,472 points

I'm not sure Adwords exact TOS but I imagine if it's clear it's a pre-registration, private beta, get notified when we launch, or 'sold out' - get notified when we have stock you would probably be ok. I first read about the strategy from the book 4 hour work week. – Ryan Doom 12 years ago
Thanks for the replay well i have set up Landing page and domain , i will post it later , my question now is how do i drive traffic to the site without addword. i don't what to take a risk with them when i still don't have product – Meir 12 years ago
i finally manage to build some first prototype of the landing page its kind of bad i know .. but its my first ever so please tell me what i need to changes , i updated my question – Meir 12 years ago