Web search precedes over 70% of considered purchases. Search engines surpass even the Yellow Pages as a means for finding local businesses. But, any given web page has to compete with over a trillion others to be found.

I think the best way to think of converting web searchers to customers is as a two stage process:

• Attracting search-based visitors to your web site.
• Converting these visitors to customers once on site.

For over a year, I have been teaching a successful course on using AdWords to acquire search based visitors. We are just now completing the pilot for a course on converting those visitors to customers. The process for doing that is called landing page optimization. The landing page is the first page the customer sees when arriving from the search engine.

In the rest of this post, I'm going to lay out current plans for the new landing page optimization course as it has been shaped by our experience in the pilot. We plan to launch Fall, 2009. This PDF gives a summary of how we expect the AdWords and landing page optimization courses to work together.

Goals

Students should exit the landing page optimization course able to:

• Analyze landing pages relative to business goals.
• Design landing pages with a good chance of improving performance.
• Rigorously test landing page performance against business criteria.
• Coherently articulate this whole procedure to managers.

General Course Outline

Over 14 weeks, students work with non-profit managers to analyze and improve landing pages for their successful AdWords advertising accounts. These accounts are typically generating 700 to 4000 visits per week.

The course has three phases of 4 to 5 weeks duration:

• Landing page selection and analysis
• Experimental design and launch
• Final recommendation after experiment analysis and refinement

Course Measurement Points

The course uses three streams of activity to measure student progress:

• Blog and twitter posts concerning progress and issues faced.
• Progress presentations weekly in class.
• Management milestone presentations at the end of each of the phases indicated above.

Course Resources

We will be using a combination of books, websites, and blogs in the course.

The foundation resources are:

• Don't Make Me Think
• Wider Funnel's LIFT Model
• Justin Cutroni's soon to be revised Google Analytics Shortcut
• Head First HTML and CSS, the last 4 chapters

Additional resources for specific technical skills are:

• Head First Javascript, Chapter 1
• Google's Conversion University
• Google's Website Optimizer Help Center
• Google Website Optimizer Techie Guide

We welcome suggestions for additional or alternative resources. We are developing a resource page for these and other related materials.

Next Steps

After collecting feedback from various industry partners, I intend to undertake the following:

• Lay out the details of the 14 week calendar.
• Pass some additional certifications in Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

Seeking Feedback

Do you think this course is useful? Do you think others will find it useful? What can we do to improve it?