Scott Brinker makes an interesting point about pay per click advertising landing pages and optimization.
You may have had multiple ads and multiple landing pages that didn’t convert, yet their touch points with the prospect — and the (hopefully positive) brand impressions that they created — may very well have been an integral part of the marketing equation that eventually led to conversion on some later ad and landing page.
This concept is really nothing new. Marketers have always measured ROI at various levels and customer touch points has always played an integral role in the sales and marketing funnel. It’s something that is difficult to measure and you don’t really know how successful a landing page might be until you discontinue it. When you see your conversions fall on another landing page as a result then you know that the role of the former was to “set the stage” for the sale later on down the road.
This is where sophisticated testing can come in handy. You don’t want to sell yourself short on either end of the marketing stick. Landing page optimization is important and if you have underperforming landing pages then don’t assume that by doing away with them you will increase your overall ROI or conversion numbers. Run a test before you make any permanent changes.
Thanks for the mention of my post (“optimizing yourself out of a brand”). I agree with you: testing is probably the single greatest tool a marketer has to ferret out the answers to these questions. My only caveat is that a lot of times testing is viewed with a relatively narrow scope (i.e., a specific ad, or a specific landing page); particularly for long-cycle sales or brand building, the relevant scope of testing should be much broader.