1 Conversion Saving Tip For Older Demographics

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:

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

  • Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!

  • Make sure you check out the newly redesigned Finch Blogs, which is now a mesmerizing portal of lifestyle design and 3am brainfarts for the online professional.

  • If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

About the author

Finch
Finch

A 29 year old high school dropout (slash academic failure) who sold his soul to make money from the Internet. This blog follows the successes, fuck-ups and ball gags of my career in affiliate marketing.

3 Comments

Leave a comment
  • you give very many useful tools here. This is where i got to know about simply noise and now these useful sites. Thanks martin… err i mean finch

  • Finch – nice blog!

    Thanks for sharing some of the details of your business.

    I have about 500 domains in legal and finance, which cpa network has the offers would you reccommend to try and convert my organic traffic? parking revenue sucks and adwords doesn’t pay enough on the content network.

    Looking for the best paying insurance leads, mortgage, credit, tax returns, etc.. all organic traffic…

    ideas welcome

  • @smac – That’s a tough one. There’s quite a few networks out there with offers in those fields. And more importantly, the best converting offers are liable to change on a week to week basis (unless you go CPS). I don’t specialise in the legal and finance market personally, so I’m probably not the best person to advise you!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Copyright © 2009-.