As crazy as it may sound to you, I love those moments where I discover that I need to learn way more on a topic I thought I knew relatively well. It means that my knowledge in that field is growing, Im closing the gap from being proficient to being an expert, and that I can make sharper decisions as a business owner.

I recently experienced this around building and optimizing landing pages.

To be sure, my team knows a good amount about the fundamentals of landing page optimization. Weve been fortunate to have a lot of success with our testing and optimization experiences, especially for our individual subscription service for our EasyBib product.

A few years ago we changed our pricing model from a yearly subscription to an optional model of monthly, semi-annual and yearly. This increased our revenue by 111%. Two years later, we put the sign up form on a landing page, instead of a secondary page, and increased revenue by 35%. Last year, we changed our credit card processing from Paypal to native processing, which improved revenue by 27%. And most recently, we added a modernized look with imagery and PR social proof, which improved conversions by 22%.

Therefore, when our team developed the homepage for our new product GetCourse, which provides deep analytics on your presentations through user tracking and questions, I felt confident that we knew what we were doing.

Breaking our confidence on our new product

We followed a number of conversion rate optimization processes. For instance, we tried honing in our user language by asking prospective customers on calls and in person how they would describe the product and why they would use it. We showed initial versions of the homepage to people and asked what confused them and why they wouldnt sign up, hoping to find and dispel any areas of confusion.

When we drove traffic to GetCourse, and the conversions didnt come, we turned to Feedback Army. We found that some people found the product useful for enhancing presentations with questions and voice overs, while others thought hosting was valuable. However, our unique selling proposition of tracking and analytics was not as obvious as we hoped.

Our bubble was popped by UserTesting.com

A bubble. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The rest is here:

Your Website Is Failing: How User Testing Will Improve Everything