How to Test a Business Idea with a Simple Landing Page or Microsite

Landing pages for testing ideas

Validating business ideas with a landing page or microsite means creating a simple webpage that presents your potential product, service, or project.

What matters is that it leads users toward a conversion that lets you measure their interest. A landing page should always have one conversion goal. It can be used to collect a client's contact details or to gauge their interest in a product or service. Examples of such goals include a newsletter signup form, a product order, or a file download (such as a report or study) in exchange for an email address.

Advantages of testing with a landing page

If you need to verify that your hypothesis will work and you're purely interested in assessing its potential, standard customer research is unnecessarily costly and complex to execute.

Creating a landing page, by comparison, is:

• Simpler – beyond execution, even the evaluation is easier. You're mainly interested in hard data, such as the number of people who leave you their email address and thereby express interest.
• Faster – a landing page can be built in a matter of days. The results then come as quickly as you can drive enough people from your target audience to the page.
• Cheaper – a large portion of the overhead associated with conducting research is eliminated. You build the page without respondents, then simply drive visitors to it and evaluate the results.

You can test an idea that's still just a thought or on paper. You don't need to create a prototype product, set up a service, or do anything to get the idea off the ground. This means you eliminate the risk of putting time and money into something that then doesn't work.

Another big advantage is that a landing page or microsite tests actual visitor interest and behavior. This avoids the cognitive biases that can arise with methods that only simulate the situation.

How to validate ideas with a landing page

The success of testing business ideas with a landing page depends on several factors:

• page design,
• content quality,
• relevance to visitors,
• number of visitors driven to the page,
• a clearly defined goal.

A general process for validating your business plans with a landing page might look like this:

1. First, clarify what you want to communicate to visitors. Be clear and keep in mind that less is more — in the first phase, you just need to find out whether there's any interest in the product or service. Other details don't matter yet.
2. Decide what action you'll ask visitors to take. The landing page or microsite should have one goal.
3. Choose the right technical solution. A simple landing page can be built using a template in your website's CMS, purchased on a specialized platform, or commissioned from experts. Keep cost⁠-⁠effectiveness in mind — in most cases, you're just building a test page that you'll discard afterwards.
4. In the design, pay attention to clear layout and content organization. Don't forget the conversion action, which you'll use to measure user interest. It's also a good idea to collect emails or other contact information so you can start building a database of potential interested parties.
5. Plan how you'll evaluate the data and set the right metrics. The basics include deploying Google Analytics; heatmaps from Hotjar can also help.
6. Publish the landing page and promote it to drive as many visitors as possible.
7. When evaluating, watch out for correct interpretation. If you defined your goal well and evaluated the data correctly, you'll find out how much interest there is in your idea and whether it's worth pursuing the project.

Methods for testing interest in new products and services

Because landing page testing is typically used at the stage when you're still just thinking through an idea, the fake door test method is often used:

1. You present the product or service on the landing page.
2. You then let the visitor go through a simple purchase or inquiry process, during which they also provide their email address.
3. After submitting, you notify them that the product or service isn't available yet, but that you'll reach out as soon as it is.
4. You offer other valuable content that may be useful to the visitor.

This lets you quickly and effectively gauge customer interest in an idea without investing in its execution upfront. At the same time, you're building a database of potential customers. However, you risk that the fake offer triggers negative emotions. These can be softened with a more personal response to the submitted email, or better yet by offering something that at least partially helps the customer — though it should be relevant to the product or service they expressed interest in.

An even bolder approach is the 404 test, where you direct the visitor to an error page, making the test even faster and cheaper. We generally don't recommend it, because:

• it tends to cause even stronger negative emotions,
• it's harder to evaluate, since you're only measuring click⁠-⁠through rate,
• you can't follow up with interested parties, as you're not collecting any contact information. 

What to watch out for when testing with a landing page

The main limitation is that you won't uncover users' motivations — i.e., why they're interested in your idea. It's a quantitative testing method, so you'll only find out what proportion of users are interested. That's why it's important to ensure sufficient traffic to the landing page, so you can feel more confident in the results.

It's also a good idea to test multiple versions of the landing page and see if any performs better. You can use A/B testing or multivariate testing for this, which we'll cover in a future article. Instead of minor nuances, evaluate the impact of larger differences — for example, whether it makes sense to communicate different benefits or to present the product or service in a completely different way.

The most important thing, however, is to set a clear goal for what you want to test with the landing page. Otherwise, you'll easily find yourself adding more ideas, features, and options to the page. Instead of a simple landing page, you'll end up building an entire website.

A clear goal also helps with interpreting the test results. If you haven't fully thought through your idea and don't know what you want to find out from testing, testing with a landing page is pointless.