But it's important to remember that landing pages are just the beginning of the online sales process, and optimising the pages subsequent to it is just as important. To be concerned only about improving your landing page would be the equivalent of trying to build a great football team by only investing in a world class midfielder who can win the ball and both hold and distribute it effectively. Such a player can make things happen, but a team will have much better success if it also has players that can then collect the ball, pass it on to other good players and ultimately score a winning team goal.

Likewise, it's important to think about product pages, shopping cart pages, billing pages, and other pages in your website's line-up. Optimising these pages can pay equally as high dividends as optimising a landing page. When you consider that many companies lose 90 per cent of their customers on credit-card pages alone, it should become clear that even the slightest improvements on these pages can make a major improvement to your bottom line.

There are three characteristics of the pages beyond the landing page that make them particularly ripe for optimisation:

1) Transactional pages
People enter a site many ways — via a customised landing page, via a home page, and directly into a product page, to name a few. But for many websites, just about every transaction needs to pass through a billing page and a shopping cart page. So improvements in these pages reap major rewards in your site’s overall performance. A 2.5 per cent improvement in conversion on a billing page can lead directly to a 2.5% improvement in overall sales for the website.

2) Pages at risk of ‘burnout’
For many sites, a frequent visitor might visit a home page or a landing page many times in a month. So you must keep these pages fresh with new products and new promotions. In contrast, pages deeper in the sales funnel, such as a credit-card page, are viewed far less frequently and don't burn out as quickly. The lifespan of an improvement on one of these deeper pages, then, can be significantly longer than that of a typical landing page.

3) Pages that require fewer creative resources
Creating an effective landing page often requires resources for graphics, images, and copy, which may be in short supply, time-consuming or expensive to create, or subject to politically charged approval processes. In contrast, substantial improvements on a billing page or a shipping page often require no new creative elements at all. Sometimes simple HTML-based changes can do the trick. And making changes on these pages is less likely to raise the hackles of a creative director. Changing your website's slogan might require weeks of meetings and heated debate; changing the order of fields on a credit-card page is probably going to be of interest to a much smaller group of stakeholders.

Through optimisation of its billing page, BuildDirect, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based wholesaler of building products, was able to increase its overall website conversion rate by 10.6 per cent. The multivariable test that BuildDirect performed on its billing page involved testing 11 variables and more than 90 million permutations of the page. Yet virtually no original artwork was required to accomplish this sophisticated test.

So what can make a difference on these key pages? Here are some things to consider:

Try to reduce buyer anxiety

Many people get cold feet right at the point of purchase. Sometimes it's good to remind them of policies that will lessen their fear of commitment. For example, book, music, and video/DVD merchant Time Life was able to increase sales nearly 8 per cent by more prominently showcasing its money-back guarantee policy on its product page. As Brad Sockloff, the vice president of e-commerce at Time Life, observed, "Just having a money-back guarantee was not enough. Making sure it was promoted at the right point in the sales funnel made a major difference."

Remind the user that there is a light at the end of the tunnel

Many checkout processes are multistep affairs. You need to ask for shipping information, billing information, sizes, personalisation, and more. In the short-attention span world we live in, we run the risk that the prospect will decide it's just not worth the effort. Sometimes just adding simple reassuring copy along the lines of "almost done!" at the right point can boost conversion rates.

Remove unnecessary form fields

For every field you ask a prospect to fill out, ask yourself why you are requesting that piece of information. Do you really need the prospect's fax number? Are you ever actually going to use it? Do you really need to know your prospect's title? Every additional question you ask has the potential to provide another excuse for some percentage of your visitors to exit the sales funnel.
So "after landing page optimisation" is here to stay. While it still may be in search of a great acronym ("ALPO" probably doesn't cut it), there's no question that it should be an integral part of every company's online marketing efforts.