You know all about the value of testing your marketing copy, but are you doing it on your landing pages?

Let’s talk about some tests you can run having to do with placement. Don’t worry about the copy at the moment. Just where things go on the page.

First thing is to know what your visitors are already doing on your landing page. So throw up some analytics. Google Analytics is quite good – and quite free. (If you have a Google AdWords account, Google Analytics is part of it.)

I like Crazy Egg for visually friendly analytics. I especially like their Confetti feature, which shows me where people are clicking on my page. I can view that info in aggregate, by keyword, by time to click, or by browser. With that info, I can figure out if the links and forms and BUY buttons are in the right place, or if my visitors are bailing before getting to the good stuff.

Once you can see where the problems are, set up tests that aim to overcome them. The first iteration of my home page, for example, featured a giant “Buy the Book” promo near the top right. I wasn’t getting many opt-ins, and since I make about 90 cents royalty per book, it wasn’t the best use of that real estate. It wasn’t even what most people wanted to do on my site, as I found out from Crazy Egg.

Nobody was trying to buy the book. Nobody was signing up for my free first chapter. But everybody wanted free advice from the chat box. So I removed the chat box (if you want advice, now you have to pay for it), removed the book promo, and changed the offer for the opt-in.

As a result, my subscription rate has quadrupled, and I now have over a 10 percent subscribe rate on my home page.

[Ed. Note: Howie Jacobson (www.askhowie.com) is an Internet marketing expert specializing in pay-per-click advertising. In fact, he literally wrote the book on the subject: AdWords for Dummies.]

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