I don’t want to stereotype, but it goes without saying that some demographics are more able users of the Internet than others. If you’ve ever witnessed your parents attempting to navigate The Facebooks for the first time, you’ll be quite aware that too many options can turn in to Next Step Paralysis. The ability to be completely and utterly unpredictable.

The best way to remedy this confusion is to build every landing page with the attitude that simple is best.

It’s important to build landing pages for the lowest common denominator. And by that, I mean sacrificing your creative urges and making your sales pitch as sweepingly digestible as can be.

Here in the UK, The Guardian has a reading age of 14. The Sun is lower at 8. There are many tools where you can measure the reading age of your copy, with my favourite being the readability test at Juicy Studio. If your reading age is too high, you’ll be losing too many conversions on mindblown casual surfers.

Reading age is one variable, but where older demographics are concerned, the actual structure of your landing page is even more important.

Have you ever stood over the shoulder of a user in your target demographic and watched as they stumbled across your landing page? Try it, you’ll probably be surprised by the results.

This isn’t always convenient, and I’m not suggesting you load up on binoculars and go all fucking Rear Window on your suburban neighbour folk. Thankfully there are services out there that specialise in tracking live footage of users on your site.

Behold:

• Crazy Egg
• Mouse Flow
• ClickTale
• ClickHeat

We all know the importance of split testing, but witnessing the actual screen footage of users on your site is another leap in to the realm of truly getting your target market. These sites allow you to track the mouse, view hotspots of clicks and really drill down for usability data.

I managed to uncover a common flaw in my own landing pages, particularly with older demographics, where there were simply too many options on the page.

Are you building landing pages using the traditional bold Call-to-Action, with separate bullet points calling out various other incentives? I used to do this all the time. I’d have about five different anchor links, each trying to capture different sectors of the market. In the end, it was just too confusing.

Like your great grandmother staring blankly at The Facebooks, too many options is a bad thing. You will often enjoy much more success by having one simple Call-to-Action clearly defined, with a progressive sales funnel that leads the user on to the next step.

Or maybe you won’t.

If you’ve ever sat tearing your hair out at where all your ad clicks are disappearing to, the tools above should uncover some handy clues. If you’re still confused, here are those half price binoculars. Go hide in a hedge and collect some data.

Recommended This Week

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