The Danger of Optimizing the Wrong Page

[Music] thank you for joining us again today I'm looking at a page for the very first time fortunately just a moment ago the organization page was shared with me by one of our team members and they mentioned who or what this idea is our goal is to try and help this site achieve objective clearly on the right is it get a quote button but I'd like to begin with the top half of the page what's the first thing that occurs to you when you see this image if you don't have an immediate answer that's probably part of the problem you have to work hard to try and make meaning of the first half of this page I mean this respectfully to the person that submitted it but we don't understand what the woman with the pole means I don't know why there are ostriches and various farm animals and I'm not really sure what we're trying to communicate with the large crowd of people it does look fun but you've got to sell more than fun and when the first word in your headline is lucky what does that have to do with this picture do these are these lottery winners or have they somehow had some form of good fortune that I can connect with when you say you're with a ami perhaps in this this pages market that name is synonymous with its with its actual business model and its value proposition but I'm going to assume it's not and tell you that this top half the page has an image that doesn't do the work it's supposed to be doing moreover the the headline communicates nothing meaningful there should be a sub headline and there should be some sort of text that begins to get me into a mental conversation with the marketer behind this message I do see some sort of transparent box where new pay policy find your policy make a claim more then I see another button to the far right to get a quote I would suggest that if the primary goal of this page is to generate new business I would make the get a quote feature much stronger and I would probably move what you see on the center of this page to a different location where it wasn't primary in the iPad typically you want to divide this page up by the elements connected to the objectives and then prioritize them with the percentage equal to a hundred and use a split of not more than 70 30 70 percent for the primary objective you might split something else twenty ten something of that nature but 70 percent of the of the visitors attention should be focused by the design of the page on the key element that will help you communicate the key message now we're just talking about the top half of the page but if you somehow get through the top half and it really is not clear what this page is about and what it is that you sell that's a problem but it's not the main problem because even if I knew that you want to sell insurance to me by scrolling down and by the way you might say well us right there in the page no it's not white text superimposed over an image on a page that's full of color and full-color images hardly gets read you have to look for it the eyes don't naturally go there so the fact that this is connected to insurance is not immediately clear but even if it is you have to remind yourself that anyone coming to this page has a choice for 20 years we've been researching choice even longer than that here within MEC labs we've been asking a single question why do people say yes given a set of options why do they choose one option over the other and I can tell you that someone coming to this page has a choice and there is not a single thing you have done to help me make the most important choice you said choose your insurance if I really get past everything at the top then I get to choose between home insurance car insurance and perhaps if I scroll down some other form of insurance I don't know yet but that misses the point because before I'm interested in choosing the type of insurance I have to choose you and you've not given me a single reason to do that now bear with me because I'm on your side if it sounds as though I'm being harsh it's only because the marketplace will be harsh the visitor to this site is not on your side and they are tired and weary and busy and you've got to answer a single most important question to even get me to engage if I am the ideal customer why would I choose from you rather than any of your competitors now if you can't immediately begin to answer that question with this page you're losing a golden opportunity because before I'm interested in your offer I have to be interested in you and let me just sort of scroll down to see what else we can discover here Wow it gets harder you can barely read the a I am in my lucky Club we don't even know what that means and I it could be easily misunderstood and then all around it are other types of insurance in a square box that look like they're independent ads I don't even know if it's with the same company coz this win 10k down here looks like a cook or a chef or somebody in the kitchen I don't know what it is it looks like an ad for a cafe and to the right of it is skilled drivers the problem with this page is not only does it not tell me what I need to know but it doesn't make meaning with what it tells me it leaves me to make the meaning on my own so if I were going to redesign this page I would start by giving it a strong headline a rich sub headline that makes it easy for me to understand the beginning of one of the most important questions why I should even engage a bit further into the content and if I did once I got into that content that content has to give me a reason why I should stop in fact you have to sometimes appeal to me from the opposite direction what is there about this organization it's so important I can't afford not to take a little time and investigate what it has to offer me once you've done that and communicated that you can support that with credibility indicators there are none with insight here and you can give me a clear call-to-action I don't know where to click I can't even tell what it's a button and what is not so this is one of those pages that you don't optimize you terminate it and start over and again please don't be upset with me I'm I'm just trying to help you this isn't a page where you do an incremental improvement you have to rethink it all the way through don't waste your time marketer trying to optimize the wrong page to start with you've got to get into the high-performance own an optimized