Jon

The type of design it is.

We've actually JUST started to accept this too, and it's weird because people in this industry like tech/design saturated stuff, and we poke fun at things that are badly designed and not beautiful or flashy. Well, that's just the opposite on "the outside".

For younger crowds, very web 2.0'ish or media/flash saturated pages do well, whereas for the baby boomers or older crowds they tend to like pages that look like they were made in 1996. I'm not totally sure why, but that's what's been converting and not converting as weird as it sounds.

Also, the type of traffic is a huge part in increasing or decreasing conversions. A landing page made for PPC needs to be done differently than a landing page for a mailing. Why? Because PPC clickers have the attention span of a kid with ADD. I think it's like 3 seconds or less. But someone getting an email advertisement has a much longer one, because they opened the mail, read through it, clicked it, and now they want to read more. So you can pack lots more details and information on a landing page for email subscribers, but you have to get straight to the point and only focus on "deciding factors" or "key points" (main ideas) with the PPC crowd, otherwise they are going to leave and click elsewhere. Not to mention the cost per user is a significant difference, but PPC is much safer in terms of legalities versus email which has anti-spam laws.

Your best bet is to set up 2 budgets for every campaign. The first one is for testing purposes, and the 2nd one is for the real thing.

If your time is limited and this is a niche you don't plan on sticking around for very long, then don't even bother testing it so accurately, but if it's a longer term deal, then it's better to learn the secrets on what works and what doesn't work as well earlier on instead of later.

But that's just my take on it. I'm sure other people have a different opinion on it.

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