The Conversion Scientists are reading some good stuff at the moment. Do you have any to add?

From Venngage – “7 Reasons Why Clicking This Title Will Prove Why You Clicked This Title”

“I don’t know about you, but anytime I see or hear mention of a story about a dog or a cute panda sneezing or a hippo farting, I get excited and immediately need to read or see more.”
The kind of traffic that comes to a “Clickbait” headline is often not well qualified. People come because of the headline’s hook, not because they need a product or service.
Having said that, the psychology of these headlines can be used to draw a more qualified audience to a content piece or landing page. Many of the best-performing headlines we’ve tested are abrupt and unexpected. It’s something they have in common with clickbait headlines: 79% of the ones analyzed in the Venngage used the element of shock.
So I offer this little study of click bait headlines. It’s worth the read if only for the dog videos. (Plus it turns out the farting hippo thing is real.)
Read more.

From Medium – “Making a Murderer: 7 Hilarious Things Wrong with Ken Kratz’s Website”

We don’t normally advocate for website redesigns. In fact, we think there are only two good reasons to do them:

  1. Rebranding or repositioning
  2. A poor content management system (CMS)

Kratz’s website might fall into both of those categories.
“If Ken Kratz had a child build his website without his awareness and did not make changes at the fear of hurting their feelings, then that would be a permissible excuse.”
Enough said.
Read more.

From The Washington Post – “The surprising psychology of shoppers and return policies”

“Overall, a lenient return policy did indeed correlate with more returns. But, crucially, it was even more strongly correlated with an increase in purchases. In other words, retailers are generally getting a clear sales benefit from giving customers the assurance of a return.”
It’s counterintuitive that sales increase when you give people more chances to return what they buy, but the data is there. Return policies are important: two thirds of eCommerce shoppers look at them, and these policies are a large part of how consumers choose where to buy what they want.
Read more.
[forfurtherstudy]

One video can be the source of all kinds of marketing content

Now, we all know that video is a great way for us to tell a story and communicate with our prospects, with our customers, and with suspects – people who may not even know what our business does. But have you thought about how powerful video is in terms of communicating with the rest of the team?

A content strategy includes content from a number different sources – blog posts, infographs, reports, white papers, e-books. Your options are almost unlimited.

Watch all lessons in this series on converting with video.

Solving the Subject Matter Expert Problem

The biggest challenge is what I call the subject matter expert problem. How do you get the knowledge out of the subject matter experts heads — either in your company or in your industry — and get them to turn what they know into these content?
The good news is you’ve got video.

It could be video like the talking head video above. It could be explainer videos that you’ve made, and even something as simple as webinar videos – videos captured while somebody delivered a webinar. The beauty of all of these forms of video is that the subject matter expert has sat down and thought about how they would explain what they want to teach on video.

Business Video Provides Everything Your Content Team Needs

Now, if you take that video and you hand it to the people who are producing your content, they should have everything they need, everything from how to lay it out and how to organize the explanations, and the thoughts, and the education, plus the graphics that come along with video.

Think about making video that’s not just for your prospects and clients. Think about making it for your internal team so that one video can cascade  and turn it into whole bunch of other kinds of content. This page was ripped from the above video.

The Blue Line is a Metaphor for Conversion

The Conversion Function is the number of actions taken for an online property divided by the number of visits to that property.
Here is where we find the solid blue line in our websites.
It runs through our sites and our landing pages. It slices our prospects’ mobile phones, their tablets and their computers.

We Pay for Our Visitors

We charter the digital transportation that will bring people in under the line, these confounding and complex people we call visitors.
This is not an inexpensive undertaking.
We cajole Google with it’s menagerie of penguins, pandas and hummingbirds. We cast our banners and our ads across the internet, chasing prospects as they surf. We create the content, we share on social, and we send the emails that bring them to us.
We pay their fares promising them a trip to a place meant for them. Our place.

Our Visitors Want to Convert

They arrive below the line, looking for that solution, that thing that will make them feel better, that product to adorn themselves, that moment of entertainment when they can let go.
The blue line stands as a ceiling to our visitors and they image how things might be different if they could just get up there.
Above the line.
They are always tempted by the exit, the back button, the next search.
It is this blue line that our visitors struggle with, which means that we as online businesses struggle with it, too.
Some will climb. Others will accept the help of friends and strangers.
We create the line. We draw our blue line. Sometimes higher. Sometimes lower.

Conversion Optimization Helps Them Rise Above the Line

It is our duty help of our visitors to rise above this line.
We choose the tools that will elevate them.
Will we give them just enough rope to hang themselves?
Will we provide the clear steps, to boost them in their efforts?
Will we ask them to make a leap of faith and trust in their agility to spring safely above our blue line?
Will we try to make it effortless using the machinery of our websites to transport them above the line?
And what will drive them take that leap, to step on, to push the “up” button.
The vision we have for our blue line is one in which many make the journey. They come with their money in hand, ready to spend, ready to engage.
We see them coming with ample intuition and a nourishing supply of common sense, all calibrated by the way we see our business, ourselves and our world.
As it turns out what we “call sense” isn’t that common.
These frustrating people we call visitors aren’t like us. They aren’t even like the people we know. They come with their own rules, with their own ideas of beauty and their own sense of how things should work.
They are not here to be manipulated. They are here to be understood.

Why Visitors Leave Your Site

When they are not understood, they seem mesmerized by the exit, transfixed and hypnotized. We paid to bring them here and they, in their flagrant individuality choose not to stay.
In our hubris, we create the quicksand that will trap them. Did our navigation confuse them, do our words lack clarity, did we call them to act in the way they like to act?
We are opaque to them, and this is scary. Our visitors fear us like a bad dream on Halloween. Are we lurking behind our website, ready to pounce, to steal from them or, worse, to make them feel stupid and incompetent?
Do we fear being known for who we really are? For it is the unknown that allows our visitors imaginations to run to places we did not expect them to go.

A Complex Problem

How are we dealing with this complexity? For this is a complex problem.
How high will we set our line? What distance must these lost souls cover to find their solution?
What have we provided them? Why should they put their fears aside? How will we transport them above the line?
For it is their journey from below the blue line that tells us who they are and who we should be for them.
Our job at Conversion Sciences is Conversion Rate Optimization.
Our job is to get your visitors above the Blue Line.

Find out how Conversion Sciences gets more of your visitors above the Blue Line.


Editor’s Note: For our new year, we thought we would look back, way back to November 29, 2009. Did I ever really look that good?

“Conversion is a science and an art. If you get the science right, you get to have fun with the art.”

Jonas Lamis at Tech Ranch invited me to sit down with him and talk about my favorite topic: conversion.

For some unknown reason, I was succinct and somewhat articulate. Go figger.

Watch the video to find out why you might need a Conversion Scientist in your business. I also give my best advice to any entrepreneur who wants to make the Web a key strategy in their business.


Brian Massey and Jonas Lamis talk Conversion

Register for BYOContent: The Extreme Conversion Makeover and see for yourself how to turn content into leads and sales.

What are the Conversion Scientists reading these days?

Forbes: Why CRO Is Absolutely Essential in 2015

Forbes doesn’t mince words when talking about CRO. Author Niel Patel has built several online businesses, including CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics. He would know.
The article starts off with a great insignt: “Conversion optimizaiton works.”
So, how did you do this year?
Read more.

Conversion Conference: 8 Qualities of Successful Conversion Rate Optimizers

Lance Loveday’s keynote presentation at Conversion Conference this year shared eight traits that gifted CRO experts share. Wouldn’t you know it that Conversion Science’s own Brian Massey and Joel Harvey both ranked in Conversion Conference’s top 25 conversion experts in 2015, so they’ve definitely hit all of Lance’s high points.
Which of these qualities most helps you excel at CRO?
Read more.

The optimization industry is plagued most by a  poor acronym: CRO. Here is my reasoning for changing this damaging moniker.

The Importance of Acronyms

The three letter acronym (TLA) that defines an industry or organization is crucial to its success.

We all know of organizations who’ve been carried by their TLA. IBM comes immediately to mind. Here is a company that is universally recognized by its TLA. More recently, the search engine optimization industry has enjoyed significant success with the SEO TLA.

Industries with poor TLAs have fared much worse. Remember the WOM industry? Neither do we. In fact the entire social media industry has fallen on hard times due in part to the lack of a compelling TLA. SMM? Please! It’s basically a mumble.

Several industries have even consolidated their TLAs in an effort to get traction. Social media teamed up with local search and mobile to create Social Local Mobile, or SLM. When this didn’t work, they tried to slip a few more letters in. Hey, SoLoMo people, lower-case letters are still letters! This is really an acronym haiku.

Today, the TLA for the conversion optimization industry is CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization. This is a sad moniker for a set of disciplines that offers so much promise. The conversion rate is the number of transactions or leads generated divided by the traffic for a given period of time. It is a metric of optimization, not the thing we are optimizing. Anyone can easily increase the conversion rate of any ecommerce site by cutting all prices in half. This would bankrupt almost any business, however.

Why Conversion Rate? It’s like naming our industry Bounce Rate Optimization (BRO) or Revenue Per Visit Optimization (RPVO). No, we don’t optimize conversion rates alone, so CRO is fundamentally flawed.

CRO Alternatives

Despite the cool allusion to a black carrion bird, it cannot stand. We can say we optimize for conversion, and could call the industry “CO”, but a quick letter count reveals that this is a two-letter acronym (TA). We spend most of our time optimizing websites, so website optimization, or WSO would work. But we have to come clean and admit that “website” is just one word, and “WO” is a TA. Furthermore, WSO is owned by the World Safety Organization.

We can upgrade our TAs to TLAs by adding ancillary words. Online Conversion Optimization gives us OCO. Since we’re really optimizing for revenue, we might embrace Online Revenue Optimization, or ORO. We could use the SoLoMo approach and call it OReO, but the makers of a certain sandwich cookie may take issue with this.

Join the Cross-out Protest

In addition, I recommend that you write CRO with the “R” crossed out anytime you use it on the web. This is our visible protest. Here is the HTML:

C<strike>R</strike>O

or

C<span style=”text-decoration:line-through;”>R</span>O

Use this in your blog posts, marketing or anywhere you want people to know that YOU DO NOT OPTIMIZE CONVERSION RATE ALONE.

We just finished a webinar on PPC and CRO that was, for me, one of the most fascinating I’ve participated in.
The reason is that Jim McKinley of 360Partners brought in some very interesting data on the relationship between PPC and CRO. You know how data gets me excited.
We also got some good questions that I’ll answer in this post. But first, the data.

The “Market Clearing” PPC Bid Range

This is the graph that got me excited.

The "S" graph of CPC vs. Clicks

The “S” graph of paid search CPC vs. Clicks


If you took a keyword set, slowly changed the maximum bid and recorded the volume of clicks you were getting, you’d likely get a curve like this. The gray area indicates the part of the curve in which small changes in cost per click (CPC) deliver large changes in the traffic volume.
This is the price range at which more of your ads win, at which you get more traffic for your money. Traffic “clears” at these market prices.
Jim showed us an example from real life.
Many PPC campaigns have bid-ranges in "no-mans land."

Many PPC campaigns have bid-ranges in “no-mans land.”


Here, you can see that “Client X” is in a marketplace in which the “Market Clearing CPC” is between $1.00 and $2.00 for a group of brand keywords. Yet, this client can’t be profitable at that level. They only make money on clicks prices between $0.30 and $0.60.
What are their choices? They can invest in other advertising strategies, or they can increase the number of clients they get from these clicks, making each click more profitable.
Jim’s team recommended that they NOT invest in paid search until they took some time to optimize their website.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can move your bid range into the sweet spot by reducing acquisition cost.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can move your bid range into the sweet spot by reducing acquisition cost.


This is the effect that conversion rate optimization has on paid search. It allows advertisers to bid at those high-return rates, the “market-clearing” rates.
If this doesn’t get you excited about the possibilities of combining PPC and CRO, you should have someone check your pulse.

Conversion + Search is a Natural Match

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. The conversion rate is a function of both the traffic quality and the website effectiveness.
Paid search traffic is high-intent traffic. With the right ad this traffic can be phenomenal. Add to that an amazing landing page that keeps the promise of the ad and you have a powerful revenue-generating engine.

Conversion rate is calculated by dividing action (conversions) by visits (searches).

Conversion rate is calculated by dividing action (conversions) by visits (searches).

It’s Hard to do in One Agency

We talked at some length about the pros and cons of doing everything under one agency roof. It’s not easy.
The bulk of PPC services is billed on a “percentage of spend” model. Search traffic is bought like broadcast media, TV and Radio. Agencies have typically done their work and taken a percentage of the advertising fees paid to the TV or Radio networks. And now they take a percentage of fees paid to Google and Bing.
One thing we were clear on is this:

You can’t optimize a site for a percentage of spend.
You can’t optimize a site for a percentage of spend. Jim’s team did the numbers, comparing the hours worked on projects to the percentage of spend coming from them. There was no more room for the kind of optimization that will make a difference.
Why do search agencies claim to do conversion optimization?

Three Types of Conversion Optimization

There are several levels of conversion optimization. The first is “better than nothing” optimization in which someone with experience applied conversion best practices. We stopped doing this at Conversion Sciences because it just doesn’t work, unless you get lucky.
The second is data-driven optimization, in which you make changes to a site based on data from analytics, mouse-tracking heat maps, session recordings, and surveys. In essence, you’re deducing best practices for a site.
The third is test-driven optimization. Those ideas you want to try that don’t have the support of data should be tested. We see split tests as the Supreme Court of data. This tells us exactly what will increase conversion and revenue, and by how much.
The fourth type of conversion optimization require a small team. A data scientist, a developer and a designer. This assumes the data scientist knows how to setup and QA a test. This doesn’t come cheap.

CRO Tools are New-ish

A PPC agency is going to have team members familiar with the collection and exercise of data. A design and development team is also common in such an agency.
However, the tools that make test-driven optimization affordable are relatively new, coming to maturity in the last four years. They are powerful and easy to misuse. Experience is the key.
The marketplace has a supply of experienced search experts. Conversion optimization experts are currently harder to find.

Conclusions

If I were to sum up our conversation, it would probably be that you must invest in both search marketing and conversion optimization to be competitive in the marketplace. The value proposition is just too strong.
Today investing in SEM and CRO will usually mean hiring two different agencies to do the work, or one agency charging a flat rate or time-and-materials for the combined service.
Agencies that staff for conversion optimization as a service offering will find it much more profitable than their search services, and this will be true for some time.

Questions from the Webinar

Bobby asked, “Once the in-house talent / resource gap is tighter where do you see CRO going next?”

The industry has been enabled by tools. I think the tools will get better and smarter, including using machine learning for real-time personalization. The role of the data scientist won’t go away, though. The machines can’t come up with hypotheses to test nor creative to try.

Rachelle noted that, “You are identifying the challenges between CRO and SEM services, however, many clients are looking for a packaged solution. What do you see as the offering around those type of requests? Are the clients going to need to continue to look for separate agencies to handle both segments?”

We think it will be separate agencies for now, but the value proposition of the combined service, and the profitability of conversion optimization in particular make integration a strong candidate.

PJ said, “I’m involving the sales team and using a CRM to take CRO to revenue.”

It is crucial to drive search and conversion down to the bottom line. For long-sales cycle offerings, the CRM is a requirement. You can pump more and more leads into the system, but if they are closing at a lower rate, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Marketers have always relied on testing.

But let’s be honest. It’s probably only in the last few years that they’ve begun discussing conversion rates rather than golf scores over a beer.

The Austin #CRO community is a dedicated bunch: @peeplaja @jtrondeau @mercertweets @bmassey

The Austin #CRO community is a dedicated bunch:
@peeplaja @jtrondeau @mercertweets @bmassey

The level of measurement and testing that we now have wasn’t even possible in the “old” days. Now that it is, CRO (conversion rate optimization) is clearly a “thing”.

And yes, I’ve got the data to back that up!

According to Econsultancy, in the last five years, the number of companies using A/B testing has more than doubled. Two-thirds (67%) of the companies surveyed use A/B testing, making it the top optimization method used today. Compare that to five years ago, when only a third of businesses were testing.

You might say it’s the golden age of conversion optimization.

Cool thought, I know. And it sounds like it should benefit businesses across the board. But that’s not what we’re seeing.

Whenever any tactic becomes a “thing,” it gets adopted by newbies and wanna-bes as well as the pros. So beware! You could be paying good money for “website optimization” services from an agency who just learned last month how to run a test.

The Truth About Testing and Website Optimization

The truth is, CRO is hard. You can’t learn it in a month, and you won’t be an expert until you’ve done it for years.

Let me say that again: It takes YEARS to become a pro.

What does that mean? It means lots of agencies are making mistakes without even knowing it because they’re so new to the game. Here are some of the mistakes we see most often.

1. “Best practices” landing pages

Best practice is NOT the same thing as conversion rate optimization. PPC agencies, SEO agencies, UX and UI people—they’re all claiming to do CRO.

But calling it CRO doesn’t make it so. Here’s what Brian Massey told me the other day:

“Here at Conversion Sciences, we’ve stopped doing best practices consulting because it’s so unreliable. Even if someone asks for it, we won’t sell it to them.

As brilliant as we are, when we implement best practices, we’ll be wrong on half of them.

Every audience is different. You have to test to know what’s working. Period. End of story.”

As an example, best practice says videos are good and sliders, or carousels, are bad. It says that sliders distract visitors, are hard to read, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. Not so, according to a DeviceMagic case study, published by VWO.

This test pitted a slider against a video to see which would work better on the home page.

DeviceMagic was pretty sure the sliders were a better fit for their purposes, but they knew better than to make the change without testing

DeviceMagic was pretty sure the sliders were a better fit for their purposes, but they knew better than to make the change without testing. Interestingly, the video seemed to be an early winner. But after reaching statistical significance, the slider was the clear winner.

  • Conversions from homepage to signup page increased 35%.
  • Subsequent signups increased 31%.

Another example comes from one of my own projects. I had been commissioned to rewrite a collection of landing pages and, sadly, discovered that we were using best practice as our guide. The results? We nailed SEO, but conversions dropped to half of what they were before the rewrite.

Agencies fall into the same trap. They hear that something is working on another website, and they adopt it, no questions asked.

A landing page built on best practices rather than a solid testing strategy isn’t going to get you the results you’re looking for.

If it does, it was just dumb luck!

2. Testing the Wrong Things

When you rely on hearsay rather than data, it’s easy to make another mistake as well—testing the wrong things.

Experienced Conversion Scientists™ know which data gives them the insights they need. And they know which tools will give it to them.

Some agencies try to shave expenses by cutting out the data-collection tools—things like click testing, heatmaps and user-session recording tools. As a result, they don’t have the data to make smart decisions about what to test. These agencies pick something out of the blue to test instead of using analytics to figure it out.

In other words, they’re testing for the sake of testing.

Science should be based on hypotheses, not guesses or busy work. So you gotta ask, if your tests aren’t based on data, what’s the point?

Honestly, that’s the case for a lot of tests. Alex Turnbull, Groove’s founder, gives a great example of this. He lists some tests that are often considered “easy wins.” But for Groove, he says, they were pointless.

Pointless easy win email sign up

Pointless easy win email borrowed trust

Pointless easy win prices

Typically, these tests are the first tests newbies try to run, not because they’re relevant to the website or the audience, but because they seem like easy wins. Remember: trust the data, not someone else’s results.

3. Reliance on Self-Reported Data

Data is important. But you can’t depend on just any data.

Self-reported data—such as responses from focus groups, user testing, surveys, and forum feedback—is gathered from people’s stories, not their behavior.

The problem is people lie.

They may not mean to, but they do. If you ask them how they spend their money, they give a best-case scenario or what they wish to be true. Not the absolute truth.

Compare their answers to your analytics and you get another story. The real story.

That’s why Conversion Scientists don’t put much stock into self-reported data. Qualitative data (self-reported) is great for generating hypotheses, but it needs to be validated with testing.

Here’s where you need to be careful: A lot of agencies (especially UX and UI) redesign a site using only self-reported data. A true Conversion Scientist uses analytics and split testing to verify assumptions before deciding they’re true.

The Marks & Spencer 2014 redesign proves the point: Costing £150 million (about $230 million), this redesign took two years and led to an 8% decrease in online sales.

Based on the fact that this project took two years, I’m guessing that most decisions were made from self-reported data plus the design team’s own opinions.

It’s unlikely A/B testing was involved because testing delivers incremental changes rather than one massive change. And it allows you to mitigate technical errors, because you know for certain whether the changes you’re making are helping.

DigitalTonic says it well in their analysis of the redesign:

“Drastic changes can never be monitored meaningfully and you won’t be able to separate the variables that are causing the positive or negative impact on conversions. With testing on your current site prior to redesign, you will hit a local maxima meaning that you have optimised the site as best as you can in its current incarnation. It’s at this stage that you would take the learnings and move towards the global maxima with the redesign process.”

The issue here is really about behavioral versus attitudinal data. Look at this chart, which illustrates the landscape of 20 popular research methods, and you can see why this is such a common mistake. Self-reported data looks like a scientific approach.

20 Popular Research Methods

Behavioral versus attitudinal testing

Surveys and focus groups give useful information, but since the data is both attitudinal and qualitative, it should never be the foundation for testing.

Use it to help you develop smart hypotheses. Use it to understand your users better. But alone, it’s not valid. Behavioral (or quantitative) data is your most reliable source of information.

As Christian Rohrer states, “While many user-experience research methods have their roots in scientific practice, their aims are not purely scientific and still need to be adjusted to meet stakeholder needs.”

4. Not Understanding the Scientific Process

Agencies are time and materials companies. They bill by the hour. Understandably, they want every hour of their employees’ time to be accounted for and assigned to a winning project.

The problem is, this focus on the bottom line can actually dampen results.

Scientists need time to be curious, follow their hunches and understand the reason things are happening. A successful A/B testing agency needs to give them that time, even if some of those hunches turn out to be pointless.

In the long run, it’s cheaper to eliminate hypotheses early, before testing. If experienced Conversion Scientists are given time to “play,” they can usually do that with analysis alone, saving time and money.

In other words, a few hours of analysis beats 2 weeks of testing every time.

If you're not into making mistakes, then you're not doing anything

True inspiration requires time. Time to follow dead ends. Time to dive into the data. Time to think and ask questions. If your agency doesn’t allow that, be aware, you’re probably not getting the best results.

5. Offering a Completely Done-For-You Model

This one sounds more like a premium service than a mistake. But when it comes to CRO, it reads more like a mistake.

Some agencies believe they have more “job security” if they make the client completely dependent on them. So they do it all: collect the data, make the hypotheses and, supposedly, deliver results.

Alone.

There’s no collaboration with clients. Which means they’re only using half the information they should be using to create hypotheses.

Here’s the thing: The best results come when the agency and client work together. The agency has the expertise to collect the data, but the client has the intimate knowledge of the customer. It takes both.

Seriously. If your agency is doing everything for you, they may be creating issues rather than solving them.

Does your agency see you as a money tree? Collaboration, rather than DFY services get the best results.

Does your agency see you as a money tree? Collaboration, rather than DFY services get the best results.

6. Not Bothering to Influence the Client Culture

Similarly, some agencies appear to collaborate with the client, but they draw the line before influencing client culture.

In reality, there’s a huge advantage to having an agency work so closely with you that they actually change the way you do things.

True collaboration involves getting together on a frequent basis and discussing ideas. Over time, you begin to see the thought process that goes into each website optimization effort. You begin to understand how to make decisions based on data and to value the insight numbers can give you.

When that happens, whether you consider yourself a numbers person or not, you’re hooked.

That’s the point at which you stop making random marketing decisions. Instead, you call your agency and ask what data needs collecting and when you can start testing. (Congratulations! You’re a conversion geek!)

As we talked about before, a done-for-you or non-collaborative service may not be giving you the best results—and they may be charging premium rates to do so.

Always remember, you’re the resource for testing. Not many agencies actually try to influence your company’s culture. Make sure yours does.

7. Not Staffing for CRO

This is a biggie. An agency that doesn’t staff for CRO shouldn’t offer CRO. You see, the best Conversion Scientists are skilled in two areas. They’re good with numbers and they’re excellent communicators.

Good with numbers. Getting high marks in high-school math isn’t enough. Conversion Scientists are masters of data and statistics.

They know when numbers are reliable and when they’re not. So they know how long to run a test and when the results are statistically valid. They know when the math is bad, which means you can be sure you’re getting positive results.

But being good with numbers isn’t everything. Great Conversion Scientists are also…

Excellent communicators. All too often, Web developers are recruited to do analytics, and sure they understand the numbers—but not much else.

It takes a conversion optimizer to turn data into stories. Frankly, that’s where the magic happens.

At Conversion Sciences, the team spends much of their time going through the numbers to tease out the stories. If there’s a hole in the plot, they design a test to figure out what’s missing. The goal is to find the story in the data—and tell that story well.

Conversion optimizers are fortune tellers

Conversion optimizers are fortune tellers

If you think about it, conversion optimizers are really fortune tellers. They predict the future based on the data your site gives them. Is your agency converting analytics to customer stories? If not, you may be dealing with Web developers rather than conversion optimizers.

8. Failing to Test Before Going Live

Pros test and validate everything before going live. That avoids costly mistakes like Finish Line’s 2012 Web redesign, which cost the chain around $3.5 million in sales and a huge hit to its reputation.

Four days before Black Friday, Finish Line launched a freshly redesigned website, supposedly planning to “reinvent the shopping experience.” Instead, customers complained about lost orders and other technology glitches, and Finish Line had to revert back to the old design just prior to the Christmas shopping season.

Granted, that level of mistake isn’t likely for smaller brands, but bad usability can still impact reputation and profitability.

My guess is a brand agency was responsible for that redesign. It would have been smarter to work with conversion optimizers, who understand how to use data to decide on incremental changes, validating each one before moving on to the next.

9. Making Rookie Mistakes

Since CRO is now a “thing,” everyone and their office cat now offer website optimization services. Most don’t know the difference between conversions and sales, which means they’re making a lot of mistakes.

Now don’t get me wrong. We all make our fair share of junior mistakes when we’re starting out—things like delivering results without statistical validity, not analyzing traffic enough, and the like.

But this is the “golden age” of conversion optimization. Don’t you want pro results?

Again, not everyone who claims to be a conversion optimizer is. Unless your team is experienced and has a structured approach for improving conversions, they’re likely making some mistakes that could be easily avoided—if they were more experienced.

Pro CROs use a structured approach to improving conversions.

Pro CROs use a structured approach to improving conversions.

Download a free copy of our eBook Four Rookie CRO Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs.

Website Optimization Mistakes Bottom Line

As you can see, mistakes are more common than not. That’s because website optimization is hard work.

If you want to get the big results CRO promises, you need an agency that has the experience and know-how to do it right. Period. (BTW, I recommend talking with Conversion Sciences about whether they can help.)

What CRO fails have you seen? And what are you doing to keep from making bonehead testing mistakes? Share in the comments below.

Search engine algorithms are evolving at higher paces than ever before. The frequent updates to these algorithms – especially Google’s search algorithm updates – have made it harder to “game” the system using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This has forced companies to bring at least one SEO specialist on board in order to gain and keep high rankings for their websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

At the same time, advances in data-collection tools has made conversion rate optimization (CRO) one of the highest returns on the marketing investment (ROI). Ironically, CRO is one of the most underused activities in the marketing department.

This paradox becomes apparent once you consider that obtaining the click that brings someone to your website is only the first step toward converting the visitor into a paying customer. From this perspective, CRO carries the burden of managing the entire user interaction, as opposed to SEO, which arguably only brings the visitor to the “front door.”

SEO and CRO Are Meant to Work Hand-in-Hand

With SEO, the basic point of focus is the webpage. In conversion optimization, the central concept is a PPC ad and a matched landing page. Nevertheless, the principles of search engine and conversion rate optimization are undeniably compatible. In fact, here are a few fundamentals that apply to both SEO and CRO:

  • A conversion optimized page will prove user friendly and more likely to receive inbound links and referrals, thus improving SEO.
  • Having clear and relevant headlines, as opposed to excessively creative ones, will improve both SEO and CRO.
  • Using clear content hierarchy with proper heading tags will help with SEO and keep focus on the progression of the message, which will help with conversion.
  • A conversion optimized page should be using plenty of relevant keywords that match what visitors are searching for.
  • Replacing complex presentations with digestible pieces of content will improve your SEO and conversion rate.
  • Search engines will favor pages that are updated frequently. Keeping layouts and content fresh will prove beneficial for both SEO and CRO.
  • Pages that focus on a single topic or product achieve better search engine rankings and improve conversion rate.

SEO Factors Inform CRO Efforts

The SEO field has been revolving around the standards imposed by search engines, especially Google’s ranking factors. Some of these are documented by Google, some are relatively obvious, others are not confirmed, and some sit at the brink of speculation or wishful thinking.
Since SEO revolves around ranking factors, which basically dictate the actions and tools needed in this field, it’s only natural that the SEO insights most relevant to CRO are rooted in these ranking factors.

1. Focus on User Behavior

Conversion optimization is data-driven, much like SEO. Web analytics are your greatest asset, but you will need to do additional research into user behavior. Segmentation analysis becomes quite important. Ask yourself this: “How do different segments interact with your website, and how can you optimize their particular experiences?”
The user interaction factors most likely to be useful in CRO and impact on conversion optimization are:

  • Dwell time and click backs focus on how long people spend on your page before returning to the original SERP. Session duration is also important. It measures the amount of time people spend on your site and may be used as a quality signal by Google.
    Average session duration in Google Analytics

    Average session duration in Google Analytics

    If you’re having trouble differentiating dwell time, session duration, and bounce rate, read this article published by Neil Patel on Search Engine Journal. It will clarify the topic.

  • Bounce rate is used to calculate the percentage of users who navigate away from your site after viewing a single page. Bounce rate probably cannot be a ranking factor by itself. Metrics that can’t be applied broadly, with the objective of identifying relevant and quality content, usually are not Google algorithm factors. However, bounce rate will surely influence the way you strategize for conversion, especially in creating the A/B tests fundamental to CRO.
  • Direct and repeat traffic are powerful indicators of quality for Google. They use data collected through Chrome to determine how often users visit any particular site. Pages with a lot of direct traffic are favored in SERPs, because they are much more likely to contain quality and engaging content.

2. It’s Not Just the Landing Page, It’s Also the Website

Conversion optimization extends beyond single pages, creating what we call conversion paths throughout the website. SEO dictates that breaking up content into multiple steps is usually a bad idea. CRO specialists tell us that multiple-step landing pages can convert better, by engaging respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitating proper segmentation. For this reason, some form of consensus needs to be achieved in order to allow both SEO and CRO specialists to reach successful results.
Some of the site-level SEO factors most likely to influence CRO are:

  • Site Architecture and Sitemap improve your site’s relationship with Google, since they allow the engine to index your pages and more thoroughly organize your content. Make sure your website can accommodate conversion paths without messing up its logic.
  • Domain TrustRank is a very important ranking factor. TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in the famous paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank by researchers Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University, and Jan Pedersen of Yahoo!. SEO by the Sea tells us more about TrustRank.
  • Google indexes SSL certificates and uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. People are reluctant when offering credit card details and other personal data over the Internet. Obtaining an SSL certificate is crucial to offering assurance to customers and letting Google know that you are running a legitimate business.
  • Mobile friendly sites rank better with Google. Even before the April 2015 “Mobile Friendly” Google algorithm update, it was not unthinkable to assume that mobile friendly sites had an advantage in searches from mobile devices. Google actually displays “Mobile friendly” tags next to mobile search results.
    Google's mobile friendly tags

    Google’s mobile friendly tags

    Also, keep in mind that Google has precise standards for evaluating what constitutes mobile friendly design. Google WebMaster Central offers details about mobile friendly requirements. To assess your website’s current mobile performance, check out this Mobile Friendly Test.


21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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3. If Content Is King, the Webpage Is Its Kingdom

In both SEO and CRO, content is king. In SEO, this wins you links. In conversion optimization, it wins you customers. You should never allow technical aspects to eclipse what is truly important: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences.

Page-level SEO factors that will prove crucial for conversion

Using keywords correctly throughout webpages is critical when trying to improve your search engine ranking and your conversion rates as part of your online marketing strategy. Keywords must be used in:

  • URLs.
  • Title tags. Place top-performing keywords in descending order and make sure that the title tag reflects the most important keywords used on that particular page. Here are 9 best practices for optimized < title > tags (Search Engine Land).
  • Description tags. This MOZ article states, “While not important to search engine rankings, [Meta Description Tags] are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs.”
  • Heading tags. The heading tag is useful in outlining whole sections of content. It impacts both the SEO and usability of websites. For information on how to use these tags, consult this article from Woorank.com.
  • The body text. Fairly distributing the keywords throughout the content is crucial. You may want your keywords to be the most frequently used elements on the page. However, do not overstuff content with keywords. Use them intelligently and always favor usability. A link or review from an established source – thanks to the quality of your content – will weigh much more than keyword density. On the other hand, keyword prominence might be an important relevancy signal. Make sure to include your keywords in snippets and in the first 100 words of your content.

A great page layout influences rankings and conversion, if not directly as a quality signal, at least by scoring in the “user friendly category.” This keeps readers coming back for more. The page layout on highest quality pages makes the main content immediately visible.
Content length. While life on- and off-line speeds up and our attention span keeps narrowing, you would expect content to get shorter in order to efficiently catch the attention of users. On the contrary, long articles rank and convert better than short ones. Review the results of an A/B testing experiment conducted by Neil Patel, demonstrating the superior efficiency of long copy.

4. Build Links, Build Trust, Build Rapport

One of the driving goals of SEO is link building. Conversion optimization deals with links mostly in terms of conversion paths. Landing pages usually do not contain links themselves other than for the call to action (CTA). However, many SEO factors concerning link building can apply to CRO in crucial ways. Here are some examples:

  • The quality and word-count of the linking content make a big difference in link value. For example, receiving a link from a 2,000+ word well-written article weighs in much more than a link from a short comment or a poorly written blog post.
  • “Poisonous” anchor text pointed toward your site may be a sign of spam or a hacked site. Either way, it can hurt your ranking and your conversion rates, particularly when the anchor texts in question are stuffed with pharmaceutical keywords.
  • If there are low-quality links pointing to your landing pages, or you receive unnatural links warnings from Webmaster Tools, you can always use the Disavow Tool. It will not remove the harmful links themselves, but at least it will eliminate them from Google’s assessment of your site.

    You have the option to disavow links

    You have the option to disavow links

  • Contextual links – links placed within the content of pages – are more valuable than links found in sidebars, footers, or anywhere else on the page. So on top of the PPC ads, try getting your landing pages mentioned in relevant content on relevant websites.

5. Your Brand Needs a Social Identity to Attract and Convert

In terms of the decision to purchase, user behavior has been shifting toward a multi-source, multiple stage process over the last few years. Regardless of how persuasive your landing pages are and how well they bring customers to the realization that you have the answer to their specific needs, your brand needs to back up its claims with a healthy social media presence and an SEO effort that encompasses social factors. Here are a few of the factors that can inform CRO specialists on what needs to be done:

  • Google officially favors real brands and real businesses, with real offices and real people, so it only makes sense they would verify businesses and brands by their website and social media location data. MOZ goes even further and suggests that Google looks at whether a website is associated with a tax-paying business.
  • Brands have Facebook pages with many likes and Twitter profiles with many followers. Moreover, serious businesses have proper company Linkedin pages. Interestingly, Rand Fishkin, co-founder of MOZ, states that having many Linkedin profiles that list working for your company will improve your rankings and might actually constitute a brand signal.
  • Social media account authority weighs considerably in SERPs, especially since social media has become a major influencer of consumer behavior. An infographic published by Social Media Today shows how social media influences consumers, the types of content that deliver the most impact, and more.
A link shared on multiple accounts will be more valuable than the same link shared multiple times on one account.

A link shared on multiple accounts will be more valuable than the same link shared multiple times on one account.

Wrapping It Up

Looking ahead, experts predict a major detachment from traditional ranking factors to a much deeper analysis of perceived site value, authority, structured data, and social signals. Automation is transforming digital marketing, turning SEO and CRO into much more precise and effective fields in the process. Ideally, within this decade Google’s services and search algorithm will evolve to a level that will allow us to fully customize our proposals according to our customers’ buying cycles.

Feature image licensed by Bgubitz through Creative Commons and adapted for this post.

You want to improve your conversions but no money to fund this effort. We’ll walk you through 4 sure-fire ways to get a CRO budget for next year.

If you ever went to the government and asked them what your fair share of taxes should be, they would first ask you how much you made last year.

And that would likely be the answer.

Likewise, a conversion optimizer would probably be the last person to ask how much to budget for conversion optimization. “How much budget do you have?”

Nonetheless, I’m going to give you the tools to add conversion optimization to your budget next year. Then, when you call us next year, you’ll be ready.

Where to Get Your CRO Budget

One key question you need to ask is, where will I get my CRO budget? I have some suggestions.

1. From IT

The basis of any conversion optimization effort is a sound analytics and measurement foundation. This consists of tools that slide under your website and are bolted in place. This is IT stuff.

Our research has shown that most businesses’ websites have some level of implementation of analytics. You don’t want to be left behind. This is a crucial behavioral database that will be invaluable as you begin to vet ideas for testing.

2. From the Things You Should be Testing Anyway

It is a golden age of marketing. We have more tools, data sources and shiny objects to drive our online businesses than any marketers have ever had. We can mobile gamify our ratings and review process using direct visitor feedback to drive personalization throughout our content funnels.

In other words, we’re overwhelmed, and the first sign of a marketing department that is overwhelmed is the decision to redesign.

Your website probably doesn’t need a redesign. It probably needs to be optimized.

Put the redesign money into an optimization program and see immediate results.

There is a good way to get your head around all of the things you could be doing to your site. You could test the ideas. Instead of blindly pouring money into exit-intent popovers, live chat, or personalized recommendations, you should test them. We have seen these work and we have seen them fail.

Your conversion optimization team will know how to use data to make good decisions on where to spend your money. Budget for optimization first.

3. From Your Ad Spend to Get a CRO Budget

Paid search is a great way to generate qualified traffic. However, our success in search causes our fundamentals to “regress”. It becomes harder to increase traffic, and the new traffic often is less qualified, less profitable.

Borrow from your ad spend to get a CRO budget. When you spend more, get less traffic and make less money, it's time to try optimization.

When you spend more, get less traffic and make less money, it’s time to try optimization.

When your traffic is flat, ad spend is rising and profit is dropping, you know you should be putting some of that into optimization.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but there is a period of sweat and anxious hand-wringing.

You see, conversion optimization takes time. There is a very real dip in performance. When you reduce spending on ads you reduce your traffic and your revenue. For a period of time, your revenue drops until your optimization efforts get traction.

It might look something like the graph below. This assumes a modest 5% increase in revenue per visit (RPV) each month for one year, and that 8.9% of ad spend, or $8900, is invested in optimization each month. In this example, we began with a conversion rate of 1.7%.

If you can make it through a short valley of death, borrowing from your ad spend can be very profitable.

If you can make it through a short valley of death, borrowing from your ad spend can be very profitable.

Monthly revenue dips due to the reduction in PPC traffic. Revenue returns to baseline levels in month four. Revenue is positive in month six compared to investing in PPC only.

The Return on CRO (green line) turns sharply north, even though we are still investing 8.9% of ad spend each month.

This is what powers conversion optimization. You have a compounding effect working in your favor, but you have to invest on the front end.

Send me an email if you want to see all my assumptions.

It’s this four-to-six month dip that marketers and managers fear. How do you sell a drop in revenue to your boss?

4. Pony Up

The other option is to reach into your own profits and slap down some cash on your conversion optimization team.

I’m not going to sugar coat this. There are three costs you must deal with when investing in optimization.

The Components of a Conversion Optimization or CRO Budget

The Software

The first cost is the least bothersome. Conversion optimization requires a certain amount of data to succeed.

Testing is not that hard. Deciding what to test is quite difficult.

The competition in the marketplace is pretty brutal. Each year, we get more functionality from cheaper and cheaper tools. At a minimum, you’ll want a good click-tracking tool, a good session recording tool, a strong analytics database and a split-testing tool.

Depending on your traffic, these can be had for a few hundred dollars each month up to several thousand dollars each month.

The Team

None of these tools matter if you don’t have someone to pull the levers, turn the knobs and read the graphs. The main functions found on a conversion optimization team are:

  • A researcher to collect qualitative data.
  • A statistically-responsible person to collect and evaluate quantitative data.
  • A developer to create the changes in each test.
  • A designer to implement design changes.
  • A patient QA person to be sure nothing is broken by a test.
  • A project manager to keep the momentum going.

It is possible to have one super-amazing person who can do all of this. It is the death-knell of your conversion optimization program to ask someone to do all of this in addition to another job. Your PPC person is not going to be able to do all of this and their job too.

These are fairly expensive employees. Consider hiring an outside agency, like us, to get started. As of this writing, Conversion Sciences can provide these functions for less than ten-thousand dollars a month.

The Opportunity Costs

There is a cost to testing that is not seen in reports. It’s the cost of losing treatments. In any list of “good” ideas for increasing your conversion rate and revenue per visit, fully half will actually do more harm than good. We don’t know which of our ideas are “losers” until we test them. When we test, some percentage of your visitors will see these losers, be turned off, and won’t buy.

This is lost revenue. With proper management, this downside can be minimized, but it is the cost of doing business. It’s the price of admission, the overhead, the burn, that funny smell in the kitchen.

It’s hard to budget for this particular line item, but it should be part of your discussion.

Be Clear About Your Upside

If I haven’t scared you off, there is good news. We call it the upside, the green bling, statistical bignificance, and sometimes we just dance.

You should understand what your statistical significance is. You must know the answer to the question, “What happens if my conversion rate goes up a little?” We call this a Basic Unit of Upside.

Conversion Upside Calculator
Click for a Conversion Optimization Upside Report that does the math for you.

We offer our Conversion Optimization Upside Report to help you understand your upside. It calculates what your yearly increase in revenue would be if you only added 0.1 to your conversion rate or revenue per visit. Plug in a few numbers and you’ll see what small changes mean for your bottom line.

A Little More Motivation to Get a CRO Budget

For most businesses, conversion optimization is a ten-thousand-dollar a month investment or more. Many businesses are spending a whole lot more than that.

If conversion optimization is on your “maybe next year” list, consider what might happen if you give your competitors a year’s head start on you.

The business with the highest conversion rate has the lowest acquisition cost and can profitably boost bids on their paid advertising. Plus, Google favors high-converting landing pages when assigning ad placement.

With a realistic understanding of the costs of conversion optimization and a real appreciation for the potential upside, you should be able to make the case for adding it to your shopping list this year.

Brian Massey

 

 

Feature image by frankieleon via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.

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