Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

I have a hard time deciding whether to give this 4 stars or 5 stars, so I’ll say 4.5 and round up to 5.It’s very dry, but it’s one of the most thorough books I’ve ever read for landing page and website optimization.There are large sections of it that seem unnecessary, especially in the last quarter of the book. There’s even a subchapter for sneakily doing A/B tests in a company that won’t let you do A/B tests lol.I suppose that’s the price to pay for being thorough. There’s bound to be sections you might not find useful, but someone else will. The book is so long and thorough that you’re bound to find large sections that ARE useful to you.

This second edition (published 2012) version of Landing Page Optimization covers the full array of topics within the science and art of optimizing landing pages.The information presented is excellent for the middle level digital marketer looking to up their game or as the first step into becoming a landing page optimization subject matter expert.The seasoned senior digital marketer will also find this book useful as an excellent refresher course that is sure to cover some area of expertise you have not touched in some time, while also providing more than a few nuggets of genuinely new learnings, as it did for this reviewer.Interesting and more importantly informative sections of the book I enjoyed covered the psychology of landing page optimization (Chapter 6, Misunderstanding Your Visitor – Looking for Psychological Mismatches) and the ever important mathematics of testing (Part IV The Mechanics of Testing). Let’s just say that the mathematics section spurred me to purchase MBA Fundamentals Statistics by Paul Thurman (who by the way is an incredible speaker that I’ve been lucky enough to have met at a New York Technology Council meeting).Small business owners, while finding this book informative may not find it completely tactically useful. Many of the techniques require either a strong digital marketing team or large agency budget. Additionally significant traffic is needed to produce test results that are of value and that is something that nearly all small (and most medium) sized business struggle with.For medium to large businesses and the digital marketers supporting them, I highly recommend this book.A welcomed addition to my professional library.John O'Farrell is an interactive marketing expert in the metropolitan New York area. You can visit his blog: AllThingsInteractive.com

While this book was only somewhat helpful for me as freelance consultant who helps small- to mid-size businesses take their clunky sites to the next level, I still give it 4 stars. The authors' conceptual framework was spot-on and written at just the right level. They make an excellent case for clarity and simplicity and gave solid explanations for each of their points. Their profiles of the different types of managers that consultants must deal with--IT, Design, Marketing, etc.--were so perceptive they made me laugh.But the book has a split personality. The first half seems to be written for a wide audience, the second half for high-level consultant practitioners. When the book jumped to the formulas, statistical considerations, and significant limitations of each optimization technique it became clear that they were talking to a different audience.Their optimizing techniques require large traffic volume--in the thousands of visitors. The techniques are impossible to apply for smaller businesses. Large sites can gain significant advantage from slim rates of improvement. Smaller sites don't have the same opportunities. The return on investment isn't there.From my perspective, I would have appreciated suggestions for how to optimize (and perhaps it would need to be another term) sites that just don't have a high volume of traffic and I was disappointed that the book did not address the volume issue more thoroughly. I ended the book knowing that my clients could not benefit from true optimization, and perhaps that's not a bad thing. I've been warned away from scattershot A/B testing of button colors! One less thing to worry about.On my wish list for this book, I would have appreciated more insights on the different kinds of landing pages, the special needs of the homepage as a landing page for different types of businesses and volume of products and services, and optimizing for leads vs. sales. More real-life examples with specific information on the actual results and return on investment for the optimization effort would have made the book more "definitive". Perhaps in the next edition!

And, that I had started reading it, when I first received it, promptly from Amazon Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.Once you start reading the first few chapters, you start realizing why Tim Ash gets mentioned all over the Web, on anything related to PPC, SEO, SEM, and Landing Pages. He is a true authority on the subject. What I like the most, is that it is completely void of any "high end" technical jargon. It makes for real easy reading and understanding of his concepts, as well as how to implement them. After 12 years of trying to keep up with the latest Internet marketing technologies, and providing online marketing for auto repair - service shops, this is one of the best books about the subject. I still have a lot of reading, implementing, and testing, but now I know, I am definitely on the right track.Whether you are a business owner, trying to get the best results of your online marketing, or a PPC, SEO, SEM expert, this book is definitely a "Must Have".