Can your landing page do this? (Convert)
unbounce.com
unbounce.com
It's easy to forget that YAGNI also applies to landing pages. Don't waste your time giving secondary information. They can get to it later. If they don't convert, they ain't gonna need it.
When I integrated Mixpanel, I saw why immediately and was able to fix it, but by that point I'd already wasted an easy $10-20 on Facebook ad clicks leading to the page. Tiny sum of money, but those were good clicks. Implementing error handling, better button text, and slightly different text on the input box caused the conversion rate to go way up, and the rate of people clicking the button without filling in an email dropped to nearly zero.
Long story short, measure everything and be very, very smart about your messaging.
Basically the most important thing I've learned is that I have to understand why my users are coming to my site, and from there tailor my site around that.
I have a very high bounce rate of around 75%, but most of that is due to smartphone users and the fact my site is pretty hard to use for them. Creating a simplified page is my #1 goal over the next couple of weeks.
Looking at logs, I also realized that my landing page was hard to use for a significant percentage of my new visitors. I could see from the logs that they were getting confused, trying it out a couple of times and bouncing. I was working on this last week, and tried a couple of GUI changes, but decided that having unintrusive error boxes would probably help better. Hopefully that will help those users having trouble.
But from the ones that stick around, I do have a few pretty regular users, and that leads to what I think is a kind of nice ad clickthru rate. I've paid a good chunk of all my costs in the first two weeks (of course, my costs are only around ~$30).
Thanks for the pointer to Mixpanel. I was looking for a better type of analytics than Google Analytics which doesn't offer me a great deal of information. The only hesitation I have is whether or not having all this javascript client-side tracking will cause users to question their privacy. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
What is HN's opinion on using a free version of a Unbounce (or other service)? (Coming from a student creating a start-up, no savings what so ever right now)
Does it distract from the purpose of the landing page heavily? Does it add credibility? My quick and unprofessional opinion is that I would rather have the paid version, but since I have to really value what little money I have, I'm unsure if paying for a landing page service is wise or not.
I think they see this and are pushing this as a tool for the masses of people who can't code, but love to sell, and want to do it better.
I mean, there's not a whole lot more to it than what you see. You sign in, pick some clothes, and they ship it to you on a schedule. Saves me a trip to Costco every 6 months (or from feeling guilty about not going on that trip that often).
https://www.openrent.co.uk/home/index
We're a week or two from launching, hence the slightly masked url. But any feedback before we put it in front of customers would be greatly appreciated.
I hope this is an appropriate place to ask!
Perhaps highlighting the "learn more" buttons will make it clearer what our buttons are meant to look like.
The Copyhackers book has an interesting section on buttons (preview here: http://www.copyhackers.com/web-writing-ebook-sample/). I'm not involved with Copyhackers, but I read the book this weekend and found it very interesting.
I've seen copy hackers mentioned, but am yet to read it myself. Will take a look ASAP, and see what insights I can garner. Thanks again.
Overall, the site is fast to use, now that the button issue is largely fixed it's easy to navigate. Question though - why make the headings with a solid blue colour? Seems a bit jarring... wouldn't a bold heading do just as well?
Another thing: If there were more links to dive right into searches at https://www.openrent.co.uk/Tenants this would be grand. As a suggestion, a standard link to the "Browse properties by location or by commute time" page would be great, and perhaps consider making the image into a link also.
One last thing: the grey text on white background is OK - but it would be better to make it a little less light. It can make legibility a problem for some folks.
Overall though, love the site - great work!
Edit: one more idea... why not make the link to the blog more prominent? Right now it's right at the bottom alongside the legalese that almost nobody looks at. Blogging may be a pretty good way of getting repeat business. It looks like you've got some pretty decent blog posts already, why not highlight this to show that you are adding content all the time? Just a thought :-)
Thanks, we're launching very soon, and if all goes VERY well, we'd love to expand into Australia!
> Are you planning on adding links to the tenants and landlord pages? Links to the searches from within the text would be really good - I looked for some in the text, but couldn't find anything.
Great suggestion. I will put in some example searches. We have a different concept for our tenant and landlord page in the works, so I might hold off a couple of days.
> Overall, the site is fast to use, now that the button issue is largely fixed it's easy to navigate. Question though - why make the headings with a solid blue colour? Seems a bit jarring... wouldn't a bold heading do just as well?
It was just an aesthetic thing, but have definitely taken your feedback on board.
> One last thing: the grey text on white background is OK - but it would be better to make it a little less light. It can make legibility a problem for some folks.
Point taken, and unfortunately with greys, a lot comes down to your monitor. Have done my best to ensure it looks good on all monitors, but will keep trying.
> Why not make the link to the blog more prominent? Right now it's right at the bottom alongside the legalese that almost nobody looks at. Blogging may be a pretty good way of getting repeat business. It looks like you've got some pretty decent blog posts already, why not highlight this to show that you are adding content all the time? Just a thought :-)
My co-founder will love to hear this (he wrote the posts), so will suggest it. We just don't want the top links getting too numerous and overwhelming, hence the current set up. I think you're right though, it makes sense to move it to the top!
> Overall though, love the site - great work!
Thanks again for looking over it, much appreciated. Look forward to having you as our first Aussie customer in 6-12 months!
It's personal taste but the text-align:center on that first heading screws with me too.
Also, on usability, when arriving at the site I'm thinking you'll not have anything in my area ... which is presumably the big problem with such sites, seeding them. So, perhaps you'd consider putting your strap line inside the header and having an optionally displayed "we have 234 rentals near you" or something; sniff IP and show it went it's over a threshold.
The headers are meant to look highlighted, rather than like buttons, I really need to think about this. Personally, I thought they looked good, but if it's causing usability issues, then they need updating.
You're right, we have the classic chicken and egg problem, but we're focusing on landlords for now. Love the idea about pre-searching for users. Wouldn't want it to impact page load times though, so perhaps it could be a client side call once the page has loaded. The one issue is that people may not search for properties in their current location - but it's a starting point.
If we know the user is a landlord or a tenant, we will send them to their sub-pages:
I'm hoping when I improve the situation with the headers, the call's to action will stand out a little better. Otherwise, as you say, I will introduce another colour to the homepage (green seems sensible!).
Also, make your text boxes bigger, you have all of this large text surrounding them, why not scale them appropriately as well?
Will look at the input boxes more carefully, they're currently just default bootstrap size, but I see your point.
For anyone interested in trying out Unbounce, I wanna give you a coupon code (somewhat sheepishly as this isn't the usual forum). But if you do wanna check us out, use "hn503" to get 50% off for 3 months.
If you flame me I'll either kiss you or hug you... #JustSayin
Basically, it states "an organisation must set out in a document clearly expressed policies on its management of personal information. The organisation must make the document available to anyone who asks for it".
In general, the best way is for a link to the site's privacy guidelines. Crikey has one at http://www.crikey.com.au/about/privacy/ - they could easily have published a short link to it on the site shown in the article. I'd say this was an oversight on their part, but from my POV quite a big one!
I don't believe there's any legislation to force people into providing their privacy policy online. Though I would say the effort taken to get people to come into the office to view the privacy policy on the sheepskin would be prohibitively expensive. :-)
Note: still waiting for the before/afters and copy to get here, disregard that please.
Or See some before and afters - you really need to change that text colour. It's almost black on black... sign up or sign in is out of alignment and bleeding over the rectangular box with curved corners. Seems to be an issue with the div with id=main and class=grid_12.
Just my 2c :-)