The Marketing Experiments Journal just published a white paper on which page improvements Boost Response   today on the IMediaConection.

From the above chart there’s really three main things you can do that will affect 80% of any lift you in Conversion (at least, that’s the way I read it).

51% boost from optimizing your Landing Pages

30% boost from optimizing your ad copy

16% boost from improving your site copy

These are just changes made to each factor and then the measurement of the change being made (if you add up all the changes you’ll have way more than 100%).  But just changing your landing pages, improving you copy, that can make profound differences.

It’s interesting that some of my clients have the most problem believing these changes will amount to anything.  One client thinks more traffic equals more conversions.  No matter what I say or what proof I show, they stick to the traffic idea and would rather have me spend my time on  tweaking search engine rankings by changing titles and descriptions - then changing the site by improving the design of pages and the ways one gets to and from them.

A lesson to learn out of this is change comes to people at the rate they can accept it.  Tweaking pages for search positioning will  have some effect - but I’d rather spend my energies elsewhere - where I see much bigger payoffs and that’s the way I do SEO/SEM and Metrics - it’s a combo deal.  I’m not a  persistant page tweaker - but I will do it at the beginning and at selected points of an engagment.