Recently, we decided to take our own medicine and test out our ebook conversion pages to see if we could capture more leads. To do this we used Google Website Optimizer which is now part of Google Analytics. Our most popular ebook to date is What is Pinterest? and we used the below landing page linked off numerous blocks and blog articles.

Our original thesis was that the original landing page had too much information and because the form required users to pan down to it we were losing them before they had a chance to convert. So we designed the below page in a minimalist style to give the user less information about the book but what we felt was just enough to get people to download.

Starting the Experiment

After we constructed both pages, we dropped in some JavaScript from Google and started the experiment where 50% of visitors would see the oringal page and 50% would see the experimental page. After three weeks, Google sent us an email telling us they had found a winner:

Now, it’s easy to say, well no wonder they didn’t download the book! They didn’t know what they were getting. But if the opposite result had happened; we could justify the result by saying all the information on each landing page was overkill and preventing us from getting more conversions. The point is, we actually have data to show what our website visitors prefer; and we can use that data to run other experiments on other landing pages. Without the data, we would still be feeling our way through the dark. This is with no concrete idea on whether a landing page was converting well or could use some help.