Tips for Strengthening Landing Page Conversions

For some organizations, as few as 10 percent of the people who land on the donation page actually complete the transaction. That represents an incredible amount of money left on the table.

Increasing donation page conversion rates even just 10 percent would double fundraising revenue from existing traffic, something no nonprofit can overlook.

This according to the report "Landing on Gold — Optimizing Your Donation Landing Pages to Increase Giving: A Bright Spot in a Tough Economy" published by Donordigital in April. The report was a follow-up to one published in May 2008 on findings from an 18-month multivariate (where more than one component of a Web page was tested at the same time) testing project DonorDigital did with Amnesty International USA that sought to improve conversion rates across the organization's Web, e-mail and search donation landing pages.

Key testing takeaways cited in the report include:

• A horizontal gift string layout performed significantly better than a vertical gift string layout.
• Supporters with no online giving history respond better to more conservative gift string values ($35 to $250) vs. a wider-ranging gift string ($35 to $1,000).
• Including copy that lays out an organization's mission is vital.

The report recommends the following best practices to lifting conversion rates on landing pages:

• Use large, colorful donate buttons to attract more attention and convert more donors.
• Streamline forms. Remove unnecessary fields from the donation form.
• Stay focused. Give landing page visitors only one action to take.
• Avoid distractions. To prevent donors from leaving the donation page before donating, avoid putting navigation and links on landing pages that could lure visitors away from the page.

For organizations looking to start a testing program, Donordigital suggests the following seven rules of thumb:

1. Before testing, make sure your Web analytics program can accurately track traffic to your Web donation pages and collect historical data to establish your benchmark conversion rate.
2. Test landing pages that receive strong traffic and conversions so you can really gauge results.
3. Take risks, testing elements that will get noticed, like the headline, different graphics, new page layout, etc.
4. Only test a few variables at first, with two values for each variable you test.
5. Don't combine multiple values in one variable. For example, size and copy when testing page components. Doing this will make it impossible to determine which value is impacting the results.
6. Track revenue and average gift size along with conversion rate.
7. Seasonality may affect test outcomes if traffic during a particular season is significantly different. The report also noted to be aware that different kinds of traffic (e.g., paid search audience vs. your e-mail list audience) can produce different results from the same variable, so avoid jumping to conclusions without thorough testing.

Click here to download the report, which features testing results in detail, along with actual samples of the landing pages Amnesty International USA tested.