How to Create a Test Hypothesis for Landing Page Optimization

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Up until now, we’ve discussed how to define your landing page goals, how to create a successful landing page, and how to measure landing page performance. This week, we continue in the five step landing page process with how to create a test hypothesis for landing page optimization.

Remember your fifth grade science fair project? You had to come up with a hypothesis before you dove into the experiment. Today, that lesson serves you well because in marketing, you’re required to do the same.

It’s been awhile since fifth grade so here’s a quick refresher. Your hypothesis is the specifics of what you are going to test and why you think it’ll make a difference. For example, your hypothesis statement might read, “Changing the headline into something more tangible will increase the number of subscribers.”

Formulating Your Hypothesis

Let’s break it down a little more to help you formulate your own hypothesis statement for your landing page. MarketingExperiments has a strong three-part outline to help you define the specific areas of a strong statement.

1. What is the presumed problem?

Looking at your current landing page, what do you think is hindering your success? Is it your headline? The color of your call-to-action button? The call-to-action copy? Your imagery?

Choose only one presumed problem to test at a time.

2. What is the proposed solution?

Once you’ve identified the problem, it’s time to identify how you’ll fix it. It could be something as simple as tweaking a few words of your copy. Or, you might want to make it a little more complex, such as switching out all of your cartoon style pictures for stock photos. In either case, define how you will solve the presumed problem.

3. What will the result be?

How do you anticipate this change benefiting your key performance indicator? Define the exact results you hope to see by making the change to ensure it’s in line with what you’re measuring for landing page success.

Bringing it Together

Using these three steps, you can craft a well-written, clear hypothesis. Here are the three elements weaved into one statement.

Changing the images on the page into black-and-white instead of color will draw more attention to the call-to-action button and increase the number of leads.

Include the three underlined words in your hypothesis to ensure you answer all of the relevant questions. This way, you’ll have a clear way of knowing the specific things you want to change and the specific results you anticipate seeing afterward.

Stay tuned to next week’s post (the final post in this landing page series) where we’ll dive into how you can test this hypothesis most effectively.