Product Description

How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, you’ll learn all the skills necessary to dramatically improve your bottom line, including identifying mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, defining important visitor classes and key conversion tasks,   gaining insight on customer decision-making, uncovering problems with your page and deciding which elements to test, developing an action plan, and avoiding common pitfalls. Includes a companion website and a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1755 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From the Back Cover
OPTIMIZE YOUR LANDING PAGES TO TURBOCHARGE YOUR PROFITS

How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, you will learn all the skills necessary to dramatically improve your bottom line:

• Identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value

• Define important visitor classes and key conversion tasks

• Gain insight on customer decision-making and make your page friction-free

• Uncover problems with your page and decide which elements to test

• Understand the power and limitations of common optimization approaches

• Develop an action plan and get buy-in from all key players

• Avoid common real-world pitfalls that can sabotage your test

Packed with case studies, practical strategies, a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool, and a comprehensive companion website, this one-of-a-kind resource will help you make your landing pages more profitable.

"Tim has figured out what so many people don't understand: your website can (and should) get better. Every single day."
—Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae

"This book is a must-read for the modern Internet marketer."
—Kevin M. Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

"This is the best business-focused, measurement-based guide to website design I have seen."
—Don Norman, cofounder of Nielsen Norman Group and author of The Design of Future Things

"Stop guessing at the best landing page designs and embrace true customer centricity. This book shows you how!"
—Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist and author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

"Tim's Landing Page Optimization is a must-have for your bookshelf."
—Bryan Eisenberg, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author

About the Author
Tim Ash is a recognized expert in the field of landing page optimization. He is the president of SiteTuners.com, a company that improves the conversion rates of website landing pages through state-of-the-art scientific testing. Tim has spoken internationally at such industry events as Search Engine Strategies, PC Expo, the Affiliate Summit, and Internet World. Visit Tim's book site at LandingPageOptimizationBook.com

Customer Reviews

An instant online marketing classic
Tim truly "gets it" when it comes to landing page optimization. This book is "right on the money".

Broad but extremely thin -- beginners only
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)".

Design websites for visitors & not for yourself...
Tim Ash provides an exhaustive study of design & testing so you can learn how to compel your websites' visitors to take action. This book inspired a paradigm shift in my web design philosophy. Before I really had no philosophy - only designs. Now I am in the process of retooling all of my sites to focus on usability & the needs of visitors. I hope I can maintain the discipline to test for more than just functionality & actually look at testing for conversions.