A Neat Trick for Fine-Tuning Website or Landing Page Copy and Design
By Sid Smith

While watching a webinar from Hubspot (check them out), I learned about a very cool website where you can get real, live “user interaction analysis” for your landing page.

The site is called “The Click Test” and you can find it here:

http://www.theclicktest.com

What it Does

One of the trickiest things about creating a landing page for a sales letter, a squeeze page to build a mailing list, or a home page for a website is to figure out the best ways to get people to actually click on the right buttons or links.

This challenge is especially profound with website home pages. Where will the visitor click when he arrives at the page?

While eye-tracking studies can show you where people look, they won’t necessarily tell you where they’ll click on the page.

And, a recent update to Google Analytics shows a “heat map” of real clicks on each web page. Unfortunately, it’s only valuable for a website that’s actually getting traffic.

But, what do you do if a website (yours or your client’s) is still in production? How can you know where people might actually click on the page to get information or take a desired action?

That’s where Clicktest comes in.

How it Works

Clicktest is a free, user-managed tool in which you can do live click tests of a web page that’s not even up live yet.

When you sign up for a free account, you’re given an option to “build” or “buy” what they call “karma points.”

Each karma point allows you one live click test of your web page. So, the first thing you’ll want to do is either buy or get karma points. You get free karma points by participating as a user in other people’s tests, thus helping the community so they’ll help you. Since each click test takes no more than 30 seconds to complete, you can build up free karma points quickly.

Or, you can buy 100 responses per month for $20 per month. You do get extra features and faster results if you pay, but you can sign up for free to check it out.

Once you get (or buy) karma points, you’ll set up your test.

Click Tests

There are three types of tests you can perform on your page. To get started, you’ll want to create a screenshot of your web page and put it into a .jpg or other image file format.

Then, you can conduct these tests:

• “Fivesecondtest” — In this test, you show the web page to the user for five seconds and then ask them a specific question about what they remember. For example, “What is this website about?” As a user, I saw several of these tests, and to some I had to answer, “I have absolutely no idea” because the page was a jumble of colors and words.
• “Navflow” — In this navigation flow test, you want to know how users will complete a particular process. Here’s an example they have on the site: “You're travelling from Los Angeles to New York next month. Your mission: find and book the cheapest one-way ticket available.” With this kind of test, you want to know if you’ve made it easy for the user to navigate your site.
• “Clicktest” — Here, you give them a view of your web page and say something like, “You’ve come to this site looking for clues on how to get results with your cold calling. Where will you click to get what you need?” Then, you get to see where real people will click on your site!

I used the “clicktest” with a client’s site recently. It was revealing beyond my expectations. As a result of the test, I realized I needed to add additional copy to a secondary page because it wasn’t where I thought they’d go based on the question.

You don’t have to be a web designer to make good use of this tool. It’s great for squeeze page and landing page testing, and to see if the copy you wrote is going to result in the actions you expect from real users.

It’s also a great way to get brownie points with your clients because it’s not something they’ll expect from you.

Have fun.

This article, A Neat Trick for Fine-Tuning Website or Landing Page Copy and Design, was originally published by Wealthy Web Writer.