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

The book was written by Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com, a web analytics and site optimization service who does landing page optimization among other things for his living.It is a real-world and practical guide to landing page testing and optimization without any fluff. It is really for the folks who do the testing and the ones who have to sell it to their boss and need to know about the details of the process of landing page testing, what is involved, what are the risks and how it should be approached and why.It is very useful and complimentary to the "Landing Page Handbook" by MarketingSherpa, the $500 "bible" for folks who do serious landing page optimization for their business.They also overlap in a few areas. This means that it is also a good buy for people who are not doing enough business that involves using landing pages to justify and recoup the $500 investment in the MarketingSherpa book. It's not exactly an alternative, but it is a start that cost a lot less.If you are doing serious business with landing pages, I recommend getting both books. The return (increase in conversion = increase in business and profits) you will get out from it will pay for the initial investment quickly and then over and over again for the time to come.

If you've ever read a marketing book the lesson is not on the lines of the book but what's written between them. If you can deconstruct how the book was sold to you you win. The content is seldom useful for much more than getting excited about learning the lesson that never arrives.And this is no accident. Marketers are magicians, and magicians never give away their best secrets. So we shouldn't be surprised when we don't get the deepest darkest secrets in a book they so willingly published to have us buy.Having said that this book did in fact provide facts (yes, actual facts) about online marketing design and implementation. Much more than other book son the subject. So many in fact, that the book is half full of them. While you can't buy just half the book, I would recommend you buy the entire book and learn what you can from one of the best in the industry. You're not going to get the whole picture, but you're going to get more than most other books are going to offer you. Remember, think "Why is he telling me this? What is he not telling me?"Go forth and advertise.

Though I had given this book 5 stars, I really mean it - this book is everything you need about the topic.But.A warning here. Author goes on for a lot of math, theory and things, what can scare you away, in case your mind is prepared to see a lot of pictures & comics style reading like you probably saw in this book:Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd EditionI would say - if you want easy book to read on a topic - take a Steve's book, but of you are ready to serious brain wash with a topics starting from Myer/Briggs personas (same topic is covered by another great book - Waiting for your cat to bark, from Eisenberg brothers), probability theory, quantitative approaches, and other similar issues - then this book is for you.Just do not expect the easy go read. This is what I wanted to say

If you know absolutely nothing about marketing or web commerce, this may be the book for you. It touches on a great many important subjects, and provides a useful -- if brief -- introduction to each.If, on the other hand, you have ANY experience at all with basic marketing principles and the concepts and techniques behind optimizing your web site to maximize customer response, you will find this book quite tedious.Simply put, nothing in this book gets more than surface treatment. Hundreds of very valuable concepts are introduced but none is ever fleshed out in a useful fashion. Practical examples are almost non-existent. Case studies are not used. Techniques are described in the broadest terms so that they may apply to any of a million different contexts or scenarios. This approach renders the book nearly useless to anyone who has even a little bit of knowledge in this area.After reading a few chapters, I was simply bored out of my mind. I switched to scanning sections and dropping in periodically to see if the level of detail increased, but it did not. I do not consider myself an expert by any means, but there was nothing here that I found enlightening or even useful. It's all too bland and general.I started the web site for my small business about five years ago, and constantly seek out new sources of insight into how I can improve it. The information in this book was just too generalized to be of any use.If you are new to web marketing, use this as a primer, but you will soon be itching for a more practical resource. A shorter but infinitely more helpful (and entertaining) primer might be something like Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. From there, you will need individual books on things like analytics, keywords, SEO, pricing, copywriting, etc.In that vein, I thought I was buying a book about optimizing my landing pages (a very big and complex subject all its own). This book touches on that, but not in a way that I found particularly detailed or useful. A better title for this book might be, "Introduction to Marketing (Web Edition)".

An easy read, summarises techniques and can be used to help design new or review existing web designs.Yet to implement my plan to improve an existing site although can recommend the product.

Need to know something about the subject to be able to understand the book.

This is a great book and should be used along with always be testing the Eisenberg book. Its strength is about setting out a nice clear methodology for testing.