We finally did it! By "we', I meant Surya who finally managed to figure out why the initial landing page photos were out of focus (thanks Adobe XD). To make a stronger comeback, our heroshots have been upgraded to a cool little gif.
Context: We had our first Learning in Public post focusing on our experiences with Google Ads and Google Analytics in order to make sure that we are communicating our value via our landing page.
And it worked!
Previously our email sign ups were sitting at an abysmal-ish 20-30 and after making that, very obvious in retrospect, change, we had 73 signups last week! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Some important observations and changes:
Ditch the glitch
Most of our earlier views through Google Ads were people finding funding which is a very natural observation because if funding wans't an issue, interseed.co would never have materalised. The issue is that.... it was 80% of the keyword searches and it was worrying. We werent getting searches related to clean energy etc at all!
We tried to add in "SDGs" but for some odd reason, Google Ads forecasted a huge drop in Impressions which didn't make sense. SDGs is a huge and well-known movement by the UN so it *SHOULD* give us the traffic that we want.
Nevertheless, I was very stubborn and kept adding and removing "SDGs" until the forecasted Impressions increased, which it did... by a lot and we clicked "save". (I think it jumped by 30k or something)
Basically we just kept doing something until it reinforced our gut reaction and instinct. It did work, actually. Now the majority of the search terms are related to sustainability and not *just* funding.
Sidenote, Google Ads had a change in UI and somehow we don't get to see the forecasted Impressions anymore so thats a concern. Anyone's relative works at Google? We would love to have the potential audience size feature back. Please. We can't imagine making decisions without the forecast.
Speaking of search terms, it was also important for us to clean up the irrelevant search terms. We were getting charged $14 because people were clicking on "interseed potatoes". That's real potatoes that we could have bought with $14.
We should have turned this feature on ASAP: Audience Interests!
Google Analytics let us see the interests of users but it was something that we had to request and we missed out on 2 weeks worth of data. It's definitely something very important because we write blogs relatively often and we do want to try and cater some posts to food related ones such as our kale pasta cooking session. And find an excuse for me to cook.
Form conversions
Our form conversion was abysmal because we were showing eager audiences blurry hero shots and it has drastically improved when we made our landing page more top heavy and we communicated our strong punches from the get-go.
We literally could have removed the form at the bottom and it wouldnt have made any difference. Subscribing to the "show-not-tell" mindset, leaving the blurry heroshots all the way at the bottom was a painful loss.
We also felt the importance of highlighting our blog content at the bottom of the page to show that we are real people. Trust us, we aren't bots. The hard working people behind this page are Surya and Irsyad.
Here's a little before and after with data from Yandexa. We went from boo to woo.
(between you and me, i'm RELIEVED that the changes are working. can you imagine me making my boss change up our landing page and not getting any returns out of it? HA)
Up next: Surya is going to create an About Us page to enforce more legitimacy to our landing page. I'm realising that I take trust for granted and I should think from the prospective customers' point of view of them giving away personal information like emails without having enough reasons to trust that we are not bots out to spam.
We are not bots, we will do all the captcha and whatnots to prove that.
PS. this is Dim Sum the cat who has done nothing wrong in her life, ever!
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