Very deep and informative but not for the small business

I found this book more helpful for big corporations and did nothing for me as a small business owner. I felt the writing style was PHD level and should have been written for the masses. It went into too much explaining about the history and landing page philosophy but there wasn't much on how to actually do things. And the chapter on math formulas was way over the average person's head and difficult to follow.

The most I got out of this book is to continue testing elements of your landing page, but that should already be a no-brainer.

What would be helpful to smaller businesses is more examples of landing pages designs and implementations, what works and what doesn't. If you are looking for more of a step by step, simple beginners guide, then this book is not for you.

No Help

I picked up this book in Barnes & Noble, bought a coffee, and took a look at the Table of Contents. As others have reviewed, there is much discussion about the persona of the website visitor. There is much discussion of statistics and probability. There are some helpful suggestions that, on face value, seem valuable. However, there is no indication how to implement the discussions on YOUR website. I went directly to the sections whose titles seemed to indicate that I would see specific landing page optimization techniques. There was scant information available: lots of theoretical comments but no practical "this is how you do it."
After 45 minutes of looking at various sections of this text, I was really angered. I was looking for a book about "Landing Page Optimization" not a psychological patchwork of who visitors to a website might be and what their anticipated response might be. Granted an A/B test is valuable, and, for a user who has no idea what that is, the book is passable; however, there is scant information on how to create one, let alone two, pages to test. Ah, I did not buy the book.

A "foot in the door" for getting started with landing page optimization

You've built your Web site, but are you still waiting for them to come? In this book, Tim Ash dispels the "If you build it, they will come" myth and provides guidelines for creating well-optimized landing pages. However, buyer beware: this is not a "quick fix" compendium, but rather a discourse on the fundamentals of what the author describes as "this challenging and rewarding field" (xix).

Tapping into an area for which you'll find few but increasingly numerous titles, Ash provides a valuable perspective that more than lives up to the promise that this step-by-step book will teach you the skills necessary to realize greater profit from your landing pages.

After helping you realize that the site that you and others in your organization have worked so hard to create is ugly, Ash encourages you to go a step further in your design. He shows, through a discussion of personality styles and excellent examples, how users judge your landing pages, as well as how your users reach their decisions. While maintaining that your site should adhere to usability standards, he suggests testing discrete factors and tuning pages to include what compels your users to make purchasing decisions.

Very beneficial is Ash's specific roadmap through analyzing the results of your multivariate testing. In this very meaty chapter, he gives you a foundation for performing a statistical analysis of your test results. Those of you who "don't do math" will likely need to read this chapter several times so that you can interpret your tests accurately and ultimately use the results to get buy-in from your development team.

Using the sound principles Ash presents, medium and large businesses with designated departments may be able to move forward with his suggestions right away. The biggest criticism for this work is that small and other businesses with limited financial resources, personnel, and time may find it difficult to do the extensive multivariate testing he recommends. Ash's discussion, in an appendix, of Google Web site Optimizer provides hope that anyone can delve into landing page optimization. Encouraging his readers to go forth and test no matter the method, he writes, "A little bit of something is better [than] a whole lot of nothing" (310).

a clear way to think about the topic for a newcomer

I've heard lots about landing pages, but had not seen anyone tie together the ideas into a coherent set of steps to take to produce results from internet marketing. This book did that.

Ad -> landing page -> action taken by person viewing your information.

As a 20 year veteran of application software development, the author's ideas about keeping in mind the user's experience resonated with me. This book is full of good advice about how to proceed, how to measure how you're doing, how to improve going forward.

Nothing too exotic or esoteric, this was all very helpful.

Landing pages are the key to successful lead-gen

Great landing pages can be the difference between success and failure in a lead-gen program. Having great landing pages is, as Ash clearly explains, is a matter of art and science. He spends a lot dealing with the psychology of the visitor since this is such a critical part of good landing page design. This is not a landing page how-to manual. It is mostly a conceptual book with a lot of food-for-thought items and topics that will require more research on the part of readers. Even so, this is a great guide to landing page concepts.