By Anne Holland, Content Director

First, the good news: 46% of the 4,203 MarketingSherpa readers who answered our survey this September say their landing page conversions are up. Another 14% say conversions are holding steady, despite increased Web clutter and competition. (See link below for more study information.)

Bravo, guys! You may consider yourselves the elite.

Now here’s a stark list of the Top 10 Worst Landing Page Stats I never wanted to see in print:

#1. 48% - Can’t do any A/B testing at all
#2. 44% - Can’t measure landing page test results properly
#3. 42% - Ask more questions than needed on registration forms
#4. 40% - Only test landing pages at launch and then leave forever
#5. 35% - Send foreign-language ad clicks to English landing pages
#6. 35% - Use a single landing page for many traffic sources
#7. 25% - Don’t reflect big offline promos on their homepage
#8. 24% - Give affiliates zero landing page content or aid
#9. 21% - Require landing pages to match regular site layout 100%
#10. 16% - Don’t share landing page test results with their agency

Plus, here’s a bonus tremendously bad stat:

18% of surveyed marketers told Sherpa, “No one [in the department] knows our landing page results.”

These marketers are neither nobodies nor newbies. They work for often well-known brands, including B-to-B, ecommerce and consumer advertising. They have significant online budgets. And, typically their brands have seven or more landing pages live for campaigns at any one time.

Nearly all of them –- yes, including that 18% whose entire departments had no idea how their landing pages were doing -- invest significantly in pay-per-click search marketing.

I don’t know. I feel like we should call for a moment of silence or something. Let us bow our heads for all that wasted budget, wasted clicks, wasted potential conversions.

I was brought up in New England where you save bits of string too short to be tied. Because waste not, want not … you know?

Squandering hard-won traffic on a non-tested, non-measured, non-optimized landing page seems to me to be almost an immoral thing.

However, I know it’s not your fault. Perhaps you are badly understaffed. Or IT can’t provide the analytics or Web support you need. Or maybe your CEO doesn’t believe in testing.

Whatever the reason, good luck in resolving things. I would dearly love to see all of these bad stats turn into thin little shadows of their former selves.

Related link:
The second edition of MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook, which contains the stats mentioned above, plus instructions on how to optimize landing pages for up to 40% conversion improvement is now available at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/RevisedLandingPageHB.html