Pure Flo's Brian Grant Discusses Landing Page Optimization
November 4, 2009 By Heather Fletcher, Senior Editor, Target MarketingThe search marketing firm Pure Flo uses was telling it as much. Pure Flo President Brian Grant says San Diego-based Engine Ready suggested the landing page optimization in June, and by August 2009, Pure Flo was seeing a continuous stream of leads and conversions flow in from its Web site.
Target Marketing: Which landing pages did Pure Flo test and why?
Brian Grant: We have such a complex product ... that sending [people] to our homepage was kind of confusing for a potential customer. They don't know where to go. So to customize the landing page to what they're looking for made a lot of sense. ... We have a whole office coffee service line, and then we have a bottled water line and then we have a filtration line. And those are three separate lines. And it was just consumers staring at three different places to put their ZIP code in on our homepage. It's not real[ly] attractive. ... [We tested] those three. The coffee, the filtration and water delivery. ... There may be more [landing pages] coming, I would imagine. I mean, we could get [more refined] than that. ... Since we wanted to improve conversion rates, we wanted to take them directly to the product they were searching for, and at that point, they could fill out a form to create a lead for our sales people to go close, or they could click into the store and actually make an order right on the spot.
TM: How was optimization of search, both paid and organic, involved in the fine-tuning of landing pages?
BG: It was pretty much pay-per-click only, but looking at SEO, as well. We switched a lot of the keywords ... to see what the conversion rate was of each one. We did the testing for several months ... June through August 2009.
TM: Considering that after a month of going live with the newly designed landing page Pure Flo experienced a 118 percent increase in online conversion rates and a 253 percent increase in the number online leads, is there any more Pure Flo needs to do to improve its landing pages?
BG: We're continually looking to improve. There's no end to that, of course. As search engines change, as we refine our landing pages, we can actually split those into several more categories. I could see us creating as many as six more, if we want to get that [targeted] with it. We've just got to figure out what's the most valuable to do. We're also doing call tracking so that the people get a customized telephone number, depending on which ad they came from. We have a call center that takes calls, and we can track that to see how many people are calling in off of the pay-per-click [ads], not just clicking. ... We do get a certain amount of people that click or call that are already our customers. And so, we're always trying to figure out ways to not have them pay for a click. ... You have to take a look at what you're getting out of [a keyword] and how much it's costing you. And sometimes [picking negative keywords is] a tough choice, but you want people to find you, regardless.
TM: Considering this landing page optimization effort appears to be an integrated marketing effort, how is it integrated into Pure Flo's overall direct marketing strategy?
BG: Well, 90 percent of our leads come from Internet marketing. So that's our leads, which is not the biggest part of our business. But for that many leads to come off of Internet marketing, that tells you that we've got to do more of that.




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