Testing Your Lead Capture Pages

Nicole S. Cooper of The Mailbox Money Blog is a lady who understands the importance of tracking site metrics, adapting her approach to improve the statistics, and enabling her to profit from following some simple steps. Her recent blog post 'A Valuable Lesson Learned About List Building & Popups on your Lead Capture Page' hammers home the point in spectacular fashion.

Like many internet marketers, Ms. Cooper has her site set up to offer visitors the opportunity to sign-up to a mailing list (I've signed up, and will report back!) in order to share her savvy view of internet marketing with prospective customers.

To do this, she uses a scripted pop-up that has quite some customization options, from layout and colors, through to the actual time between the visitor landing, and the pop-up being shown. At the outset, the pop-up was set to appear (almost) immediately.

Important Statistics

When Nicole checked her statistics, she noticed that the average visitor time was around three and a half minutes, and that the bounce rate was around 30%. This means that around 3 in every 10 visitors clicks away immediately, and that of those who stay, they usually don't start around longer than the length of an average pop song.

Being savvy in the ways of testing and tracking, she wondered what would happen if she delayed the pop-up. The result was a reduction in the bounce rate (by 10%) and an increase in the average visit time by more than the delay added to the pop-up.

There's a few things to note here. The first is that the before and after opt-in rate wasn't related in the blog post, but it would be something that needs checking. The assumption that just because the bounce rate has decreased and the visit time increased the number of sign-ups will also have increased needs to be tested.

That said, any time the bounce rate can be reduced, and the visit time increased, by small tweaks such as adjusting the time-out on a pop-up, it's a step worth taking as long as the sign-up rate doesn't decrease. Other points to test would be:

• changing the page at which the pop-up appears on
• testing the performance of pop-ups vs. pop-unders or exit boxes
• checking conversion rates (i.e. is the quality of each sign-up remaining constant or increasing?)

The importance of testing, tracking, and respecting your traffic cannot be over emphasized. Readers will benefit from taking a look at Ms. Cooper's site, starting with the aforementioned blog post.