Experience a lift on your contact form conversion rate. Know what form of form you should have on your lead generation site. These best practices designed to increase contact form conversion will definitely help.
Contact forms are the most common way of beginning a conversation between a company and a prospect. In this article, we’ll show you how to get more prospects to fill out your form without reducing the quality of those leads.
What’s the big deal with forms? They have fields. You fill out the fields and you get something you want.
So, why do so many of your visitors fail to fill out your forms?
There is some psychology and some science to getting more form fills, whether you are trolling for leads or asking your visitors to buy something. The folks at SingleHop have done a study and it is exactly what we’ve seen in our testing of contact forms. You’ll learn a lot about increasing contact form conversion from this little infographic.
Contact Form Fields: How Many is Too Many?
As a general rule, the more fields you have, the lower your conversion rate. However, the leads you do acquire will be better qualified. The best way to find the right mix is to A/B test your contact forms.
Generally speaking and to increase contact form conversion, you should avoid:
Fields that ask for qualifying information that can be found out on a phone call, such as purchase timeframe.
Drop-down fields that may not contain an answer accessible to the visitor, such as title.
Drop-down fields that imply something, such as number of employee ranges.
“None of your business” fields, such as mobile phone, yearly revenue or social security number.
Best Practices to Increase Contact Form Conversion
While you may think your website is selling your product or service, what it’s really selling is a sales call. You must convince the visitor to complete your form.
There are four components that will help you achieve this.
Build Trust
You can build trust by including your phone number and contact information. Sometimes they will call you.
On a mobile device you should optimize for phone calls.
Provide Social Proof
Your contact page should present testimonials and endorsements to make visitors feel comfortable completing the contact form.
Add Value
Make sure you are building value. What’s in it for the visitor if they fill out the form?
Who will contact them? A salesperson? A consultant?
Will there be a hard sell?
How long will the call be?
What questions will be answered?
Sell the call to increase contact form conversions.
Use Risk Reversal
You can significantly remove barriers to completion by simply presenting your privacy policy on the form. While these are rarely read, they indicate that you care enough to have one.
On a contact form, the call to action usually lives on the contact form button. The call to action should communicate what will happen when it is clicked.
Studies indicate that using first person improves conversion rates. Test changing “your” to “my”.
For example “Download your free report” is second person. “Download my free report” is first person.
Contact forms infographic.
The Best Lead Capture Forms
The best contact forms don’t assume the visitor wants to fill out the form. Only lonely people fill out such forms.
Instead, your form should give visitors a good reason to complete the form, and build trust with them and explain the value of completing the form.
This is an important step in their journey to solve a problem.
Treat it as such.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
Heatmaps are just the first step to obtaining useful insights on your website visitors. Today we’ll find out how heatmaps helped increase prospective student inquiries by 20% for a University and have a chat with Andrew Michael of Hotjar. Find out what he has to say.
Andrew Michael | Understanding Your Users: Leveraging Tools to Grow Your Website
How Heatmaps Helped Increase Prospective Student Inquiries by 20%
We were looking at the heatmap report for the website of Northcentral University, a non-profit online university headquartered in Arizona.
Reading a heatmap report is like looking at a weather radar, but instead of blobs of green, red and yellow showing us where rain is falling around us, a heatmap report shows us where visitors are clicking on a web page.
And it was raining clicks in an unexpected spot on the NCU website.
Specifically, visitors were clicking on one of the fields in the middle of a form, and only on that field. Not the name field, not the email field. The majority of them weren’t completing the form.
So, why were visitors so interested in this one field?
It was an important question, as this form was the primary invitation to get more information on the University. It was on almost every page, ready to start a more in-depth conversation with any visitor.
The field visitors were clicking on was “program of interest”, a dropdown field that listed the degrees offered by NCU. It was meant as a way for prospective students to tell NCU which degree program they were interested in.
These prospective students were using it as an information source.
While the copy on the page was regaling visitors on the value of NCUs one-on-one learning, it’s 100% doctoral professors and it’s diversity, visitors were telling us that they had one question first.
Do you offer a degree program I’m interested in?
At least, this was the hypothesis. So we designed a test.
At the top of every page, we placed a dropdown menu that listed the university’s programs, just like that on the form. When a degree program was selected, we took them to the part of the site that described that degree program.
Half of NCUs visitors would see this dropdown. The other half would not. They’d have to use the dropdown in the form.
When we measured the results, the visitors who saw the dropdown in the page were 20% more likely to fill out the form completely, requesting information.
This indicated that the change would increase prospective student inquiries by 20%, a very significant improvement in the key metric for the site.
The current site offers a complete section designed to help visitors find a degree program they’re interested in.
This is something that we would not have been able to find any other way than through a heatmap report. It doesn’t show up in analytics. No one would have complained.
This is the power of a class of report called user intelligence reports.
Anyone who knows how to read rain chances from a weather radar can use this kind of report. More and more of us are doing this.
These reports are surprisingly easy to generate and the tools are inexpensive.
You can bring people to websites all day long but if it’s not optimized and it’s not user friendly and you’re going to lose all day and you just can end up throwing money down the drain.
Leading the way is a company called Hotjar. On today’s show we’re breaking down HotJar with Andrew Michael. A tool focused on helping you understand your users. Andrew got into marketing because he’s intrigued by psychology – understanding what drives people’s decisions.
An Insightful Chat with Andrew Michael from Hotjar
Intended Consequences podcast with Hotjar’s Andrew Michael
Time is precious for overburdened marketers. On this show, we seek to understand which tools are truly valuable, and which are just giving us “interesting” insights.
We install something like Hotjar on every one of our client sites when optimizing.
Tools like Hotjar are a part of what I call ‘the golden age of marketing’. These tools are continually evolving, getting easier to use and less expensive.
These are the tools that buy you more time to be creative, ground breaking and successful.
We start off the podcast talking about all of the things Hotjar brings to the table under a single subscription. Then we talk about the outcome of leveraging tools like this – how do they actually empower marketers serve their online prospects better?
Listen to the Podcast. It’s well worth it.
When You Get Back To The Office
I’m not a shill for Andrew. I just know these tools are a great value and easy to learn.
When you get back to the office, i recommend that you do a trial of Hotjar. Add it to your homepage, or one of your “money” pages where you ask visitors to take action. Setup a heatmap report on it.
Let it run for a few days, and then look at the scroll report. This report tells you how far visitors are scrolling on your page. This is one of the first things we look at when we start analyzing our clients’ sites.
Where is the report turning blue? This is the place on the page that visitors stop reading. Look in the blue area. What key content are they missing?
If more than half of your page is blue, you have a scroll problem. Visitors aren’t being engaged enough to get through your content.
Reasons for this include: false bottoms, where visitors think the page ends when it doesn’t. It can mean that your content isn’t engaging them enough high on the page. It can mean that you’re not handling a key objection.
Your strategies include moving key content to the top of the page, putting arrows, chevrons and “v”s on the page to tell visitors to keep going, or re-thinking the story you tell on this page.
Don’t be discouraged. This is progress! Next, share this report with your design team and see what they think.
This is how pages get better and businesses grow.
You can get all these links discussed on this week’s episode in our shownotes. One thing to remind you all of is that Hotjar is a freemium model so it’s one you can definitely
Alright scientists, that’s it for this week.
Andrew Michael | Understanding Your Users: Leveraging Tools to Grow Your Website
Every industry has them. Your company may be one of them. They are the whack-a-mole companies, sticking their virtual neck out, and striving to do things better, driving online sales with an evolving ecommerce conversion marketing strategy.
And they often get whacked.
But the companies I’m talking about hunker down in their holes and plan their next chance to pop out again, with more force. It’s in their blood. The Internet is becoming the place they stage their emergence.
These whack-a-mole companies may sell products that range from the common to the mundane. Zappos was a whack-a-mole company. They started out in online sales of shoes. In ten years, Zappos outshone their competitors and sold an almost $1 billion business to Amazon.
Wikipedia calls Whac-a-mole a “Redemption Game”
The GoodLife Team is a whack-a-mole company in the very competitive real estate market. They are small by the standards of their peers, but like Zappos, I expect them to pop out of their hole with such force that they will leave the table altogether, flying free of the hammers that seek to drive them back.
Patience and Impatience: Ecommerce Conversion Marketing Strategy for Online Sales
Whack-a-mole companies are both patient, and remarkably impatient. They are remarkably impatient to try new things. They aren’t careless. Successful whack-a-moles seek to find out what works and what doesn’t quickly.
Yet, they are patient in the long run. They know that they’re going to get whacked a few times, and they prepare for the blows. Theirs is a journey of learning and persistence.
I am drawn to these kind of companies. It is them that I find myself writing for.
Ecommerce Whack-a-moles
If you are a budding whack-a-mole in your industry and want to turn the Web into a powerful sales channel, find out how the highest-converting sites on the Web use ecommerce marketing strategy to maximize conversion rates and online sales. “Conversion” is the magic that makes you stronger than your competitors.
The E-commerce Pattern: Core Conversion Marketing Strategies
Here are the three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for e-commerce web sites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.
The third of the five “core” conversion marketing patterns is the e-commerce pattern. The two patterns I’ve already discussed are the Brochure site and the Portal site. As a refresher, the Brochure pattern is a known as the “sales support” pattern. The purpose is to provide information during the sales process and tell prospects how to get more information. The Portal pattern, also known as the “advertising model” and “subscription model,” monetizes content.
For this discussion, I assume a site is generating reasonably qualified traffic and that the offering has a demand in the marketplace.
The E-commerce pattern
Also known as “online shopping,” “eRetail” and “eTail,” e-commerce sites are designed to handle the online purchase of a product or service. For purposes of this discussion, you are building a site with the e-commerce pattern if:
You accept payment on your website for a product or service
The buyer consumes the product offline. The “site as a service” pattern is targeted at businesses that deliver their product directly through the site.
You are selling more than one item, more than one version of an item, or more than one product line. A single item site should look at the Portal Pattern, or the up-coming “Considered Purchase” pattern.
My goal here is to explore three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for e-commerce websites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.
Category pages
For sites that feature dozens or thousands of products, it is critical that visitors at all stages of the buying process find their way to specific items on your site. Category pages are the traffic cops, driving shoppers to the right product areas and eventually to the products they seek.
Are category pages more important than the home page? For visitors who are just becoming aware of your online brand, the home page serves as the top-level category page, or the “featured products” category page. A quick survey of the highest converting retail sites on the web reveal some interesting similarities in their category page and category page design.
The home pages are filled with specific offers. The page is essentially designed like a circular you would find in your newspaper.
Intuitive categories are displayed to help visitors dive deeper into the site.
Some sites use a BAH (big ass header) that cycles through offers. Flash banners can sink your conversion rate unless you are using them to provide specific offers.
Pricing is put front and center on product “ads.”
Copy is included with the products that are displayed. Even if there is only space for a few words, some value proposition is put forward with each product. A product image and the price often isn’t enough.
Search is present on every page.
Defining the right categories is critical. Most of the high-converting sites have between five and eight categories in their top-level navigation. Office Depot gets it down to four. More refined categories are listed in the left column; “specials,” “best sellers,” “brands,” etc.
For e-commerce sites that don’t have the brand strength of these large retailers, it is tempting to spend space talking about the company and its unique value proposition. Keep this brief. Avoid the temptation to add ancillary items to navigation, such as “about us.” Let your offers and categories do the talking for you.
In summary, specific offers, smart category choices and search are the hallmarks of strong category pages.
Product pages
Just as landing pages are crucial to increase the conversion rate of advertising efforts, well designed product pages are crucial for the e-commerce website. With best search engine optimization practices, product pages become the landing pages for searching shoppers.
Product pages typically ask the visitor to “add to cart” and “buy now.” These should be the most tested pages on your site.
The elements that make for a great product page differ from industry to industry, but there are some rules of thumb.
Show the product. There is a correlation between the conversion rate of a page and the number and quality of product images available.
Provide all of the information a visitor needs to say “yes.” Price, shipping, return policy, ratings and reviews; what you include on your product page depends on what you’re selling, and to whom.
Test to find the right balance of information. Providing too much information can distract buyers from clicking “buy now,” and even introduce reasons not to buy.
Product pages serve two masters: people who are already exploring your site and those who have landed there due to a search engine query. Test these pages to find your best converting product page design.
Shopping cart
E-commerce shopping carts have traditionally been a thorny issue with conversion scientists and web site optimizers. Too many businesses choose shopping cart software that is rigid and difficult to customize. Many of the most popular shopping carts on the market seem to have been designed by engineers, and they don’t consider that buyers may be on the brink of abandoning the transaction.
The purchase process is the needle point for your success. The wary shopper is always on the lookout for red flags, reasons to reconsider their purchase decision. Alarms are sounded by what is missing from your shopping cart pages.
The shopping cart is often used as an information resource. Prospects will add a product and then start the checkout process to uncover information that they didn’t find elsewhere on the site.
What are my shipping options and what will it cost me?
What will tax be?
Are there any catches?
Is the product in stock?
Provide this information on your product pages to reduce these informational probes into your shopping cart and decrease your abandonment rates.
Flexibility is the key with shopping cart systems. They should be easy to customize, provide places for “reinforcing” copy, and be able to answer questions like those above. If your shopping cart can support A/B split testing, all the better.
The shopping cart is so important, that almost any business should consider replacing their system if they can’t easily and quickly change the sequence, layout, button location, button text, page copy, promotion codes, trust badges, etc. As with product pages, small changes in these elements can result in big increases in conversion rates.
As of this writing, I can’t recommend any shopping carts systems that meet these criteria. Please offer your recommendations in the comments.
There are a variety of tactics to be explored within each of these make-or-break strategies: category pages, product pages and the purchase process. There are other strategies that may be equally important, and I welcome your input through the comments. Building an email list is one such strategy that comes immediately to mind. It can be a powerful conversion tool for businesses whose customers purchase frequently. I’ll write more about this strategy in my next installment when we talk about the “considered purchase” pattern.
It gives you the force to fly free of your industry Whac-a-mole table by slashing your online sales costs.
Let’s see why knowing your customer is key to marketing and conversion success and from this insight you can begin to find opportunities for growth.
Valentin Radu is a businessman, a successful businessman, who believes knowing your customer is fundamental. He has built the first online car insurance company in Romania and sold it to within a few years.
So, if you’re Valentin, what do you do for an encore?
You build the tools you wish you had when you were building your business and offer them to other businesses so that they can be successful.
You can lead a horse to water, but he still won’t look good in a bikini.
Valentin Radu believes we spend too much time chasing new customers, when we should be spending our time and energy on our “true lovers”. Listen and see if you agree.
The Human Biases Holding You Back. Learn more about human biases, how they work together, and why it impacts your role as a marketer.
Gain Executive Buy-In. How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? And when you get the answers to these questions – how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data?
Understanding What Drives. It’s important to know which calls to action tend to drive the most clicks, and which pages (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are getting the most ad traffic.
It turns out that these exciting tools bump up against something less procedural, and more… human.
Imagine this: You are offered a magical machine that lets you read the thoughts of the people coming to your website. Not the personal stuff, just the stuff that applies to your business.
You can see how they solve problems. You can try different designs, different copy, different calls to action to see if they find it easier to buy. And you don’t have to redesign your website.
You can hear what they are trying to do and what is confusing them.
You can point them to the information they need at any time.
And the magic tools wouldn’t violate their privacy in any way.
You might be skeptical, of course. But would you be resistant to this?
The answer is, that you probably would be. This is human. There are a number of biases that all humans harbor. These biases — confirmation bias, availability bias, novelty bias, survivorship bias — work together to keep us doing what we’ve always done, even when we clearly need change.
Fortunately, humans are also social animals. Our biases can be up-ended by the behaviors of others. When we talk about using social signals to change human behavior, we are talking about Culture.
In a company, culture is a huge, powerful lever. This also makes it difficult to move, especially if you are not a leader in your company. You can feel like Sisyphus, pushing that bolder up the hill. Over and over agin.
The opportunity, however, is great. Marketing has always been about knowing your customer. We’ve never had access to more information about our customers. Will you be an agent of knowledge or will you remain mired in your biases?
Understanding Your Customers
When a visitor arrives on your site what is it that you want them to do? Well most marketers would say first, you want them to buy. And then you want them to come back.
This is the charge.
So how do we take our customers — our site visitors — and turn them into ‘true lovers’ as our guest today, Valentin Radu from Omniconvert calls them?
Getting them to buy and come back is the charge. But here’s the challenge.
How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? How do you know the action they took when they first landed on your site? How do you get the freedom as a marketer to experiment, to look at the data, to understand the data in order to make decisions to increase conversions?
And when you get the answers to those questions, how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data?
Knowing your customer is key to marketing and conversion success.
Experimenting with Your Marketing
These are the questions we explore in this episode. Experimenting with your marketing is the only way that you can truly know what is working. It’s the only way you can succeed. Marketing and status quo cannot go together. At least for my listeners.
You might be thinking, that all sounds great Brian, but how do I influence change to allow for more more experimentation and effect true company growth?
Omniconvert is a CRO tool that helps marketers increase conversion rates. From surveys to overlays – it’s a marketers sandbox. You can find out more by connecting with me or head on over to omniconvert dot com.
When you get back to the office.
When you get back to the office, I suggest that you start using a little data in your decision-making process. You can start with some data that is already “laying around.”
When was the last time you looked at what your PPC and Facebook ad team were doing? Many digital marketers don’t spend a lot of time with the advertising, but there are some real gems of growth here.
And most of us are doing some sort of advertising.
Call down to your ad team and ask them for a spreadsheet of all of the ads they’ve been running. Go back six months or even a year. Ask for the ad text, the number of impressions, the number of clicks, the cost per click and the link URL. This is easy for them to generate. If they can track conversions, definitely ask for conversions for each ad.
Then spend some time with this data. You’ll understand:
Which calls to action tend to drive the most clicks.
What pages are getting the most ad traffic. You’ll want to go and see how these pages are performing in analytics.
How many ads are sending traffic to the home page.
From this, you can begin to find opportunities for growth.
Are you using words like the best clicked ads? Are you sending good clicks to bad pages? And is there a better place to send traffic than the home page? The answer is yes, by the way.
Then share your findings with at least one other person.
You have just begun culture change. You radical, you.
When considering investing in a web business, consider the following.
Traffic source: Is it dependent on free search?
Proft
On-going development: Does it require additional investment?
Dependence on Third-party API’s: Facebook, Twitter and others can change access to data at any time.
There are other considerations for website due diligence as well.
Calculate Revenue per Visit
The Revenue per Visit (RPV) is the revenue generated by a site divided by the number of visitors. If this number is small, you may have trouble building traffic, because the cost of the traffic is higher than the revenue.
For a better analysis, consider measuring Profit per Visit.
Avoid Traffic Arbitrage
If the site is not something you would use, you might have a business built on traffic arbitrage. Arbitrage is acquiring traffic, and then sending it advertisers or affiliates for more than you paid.
This is not a web business.
Does the Website have a Future?
Sites with a limited future are not a good long-term investment. When performing website due diligence, be careful of sites that are at the mercy of time or other businesses.
Websites that focus on a single event have a built in expiration date.
Sites that fix something in someone else’s product can be eliminated by upgrades to that product.
Sites tat provide a product that is simply “better” than the competition can be marketed out of existence
Websites that depend on loopholes should be avoided, as loopholes can be closed.
Avoid trying to figure things out after you buy.
— Bryan O’neil, Flippa.com
Website Due Diligence: 7 Business Buying Myths
O’Neil offer seven myths about buying a business that you should avoid.
Myth #1: The site’s backlink profile is important
Dependence on organic traffic is dangerous.
Myth #2: Financial verification is most important
Businesses with good financial verification can fail if they don’t have a future.
Myth #3: Escrow can save you from a bad decision.
Escrow is where you give money to a third party during a period of inspection and verification.
Do your due diligence before you enter escrow. Don’t make yourself a target for scammers.
Entering escrow also tie up your capital, limiting your options.
Myth #4: Website due diligence is just too expensive.
Due diligence is expensive, especially if done by a third party.
But, when you compare it to the purchase price, it can be quite affordable.
Calculate your Website Due Diligence Percent:
DDP = Cost of Due Diligence / Purchase Price of Website.
Myth #5: Screen shots are viable proof of financial performance.
Business owners can forge screen shots showing success. This is a sign of a scammer.
Make the seller jump through hoops.
— Bryan O’neil, Flippa.com
Myth #6: Your broker can do due diligence.
Avoid any broker that claims they have done due diligence for you.
Brokers work for the SELLER.
Myth #7: You can rely on apps to do your website due diligence.
Nope. You need the human element in the process.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’neil of Flippa.com
Here is my instagraph infographic of his presentation on due diligence mistakes when buying Websites.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’Niel
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
Discover how to use Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts. Find out which ad extensions should you be using and when.
We will start by reviewing the various ad extensions available. Then, we’ll discuss the implications of ad extensions on customer acquisition. And finally, we’ll uncover how to use these Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Let’s first review this concept and then analyze the different ways of using Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
What are Google Ad Extensions?
Extensions expand your ad with additional information – giving people more reasons to click on your ad.
You’ve seen these before. Those extra lines below the Google ad text that displays the store address closest to you? Or maybe a few reasons that entice you to click on their ad? Something like, Free Consultation or 24/7 or Free Shipping.
According to Google, ad extensions “typically increase an ad’s click-through-rate by several percentage points.” But Google is taking the liberty of choosing which extensions to show on your ads for you. “To maximize the performance of your text ads, Google Ads selects which extensions to show in response to each individual query on Google.”
They have enough information on a prospect’s search intent, history and geo in order to have their algorithms work in favor of advertisers.
But first, you need to set them up. Here is a current list of Google Ad Extensions. They do add more on a regular basis.
Location extensions (automated)
Affiliate location
Sitelink (automated)
Price
Callout and dynamic callout
Structured snippets
Call extensions (automated)
Message extensions (automated)
Seller Ratings (automated only – but you can do things to help make them appear)
Don’t worry trying to figure them out right now. We’ll dive into them later in the article.
Why is Google so confident that they can increase click-through rates for your ads?
They make the point that ads with extensions provide “greater visibility and prominence.” This means your ad is more likely to be seen. Makes sense, you have more lines than your competitor ads (unless they have Google ad extensions too.)
It also means that you’re pushing competing ads below yours down the page.
Google also makes the case that you can offer the visitor more clicks to choose from, or offer “interactive ways of reaching you — as with maps, SMS or calls” and this will increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad.
Setting up ad extensions doesn’t mean they will show on your ad. Google lists two possibilities for ad extensions to appear:
When the extensions are predicted to improve the ads performance
When your Ad Rank is above a minimum level.
So, you see. It’s not all under your control. You gotta trust Google to present the best extension for your business goals at the right time, place and query.
We say, they better.
What’s the best thing about Google Ads extensions? They are FREE. So setting the right ones up is always an advantage.
Get a higher return from your ad campaigns. Start implementing CRO for advertising today.
Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts with Ad Extensions
The goal of ad optimization efforts is to gain more customers at a lower cost. The lower this acquisition cost, the more profit you make on each new customer or on each transaction and you can afford to spend more on ads – which implies more volume or more competitive bids. Or you can just pocket the difference.
There are two ways to reduce these acquisition costs
Spend less on ads for the same number of conversions.
Get more conversions from your ad spend.
The first is accomplished by refining bids, eliminating low-converting ads, and designing offers that deliver better qualified visitors.
The second is accomplished by refining the websites and pages to which you send your ad clicks.
In both cases, the higher your conversion rate, the lower your customer acquisition costs. We may choose to spend less on low-quality visitors that convert poorly, or do a better job of converting the ad traffic we are getting.
And this is where Google ad extensions can help improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Evidently, Google Ads extensions let you add more information to a typical text ad. They allow advertisers to say more about the offer made in the ad so that searchers make better choices about whether to click or not.
Ad Extensions that add Links to More Targeted Landing Pages
Three Google ad extensions add additional links to your ads.
Sitelink Extensions
Price Extensions
Promotion Extensions
Sitelink extensions are great for broad match keywords. They allow the searcher to click on narrower topics than their search phrase might return. The example below, shows sitelink extensions with an additional description. A great feature that entices advertisers to convert their campaigns to enhanced campaigns.
Example of sitelink ad extension with description.
An eCommerce site can use a variety of pages as landing pages: product pages, category pages, search results pages, and even specific informational pages for those not ready to buy just yet.
Sitelink ad extensions used in eCommerce.
Tip: Consider targeting your primary segments with sitelink extensions.
Price Extensions allow you to feature pricing right in your ads. This is a great feature to weed out those prospects that may not go through with their purchase because of price. And an additional element to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Example of a Price Ad Extension on a mobile device.
Google Ads Sitelink Extensions Improve Ad Quality Score
Ad extensions also allow advertisers to send searchers to more relevant pages on their websites. These are called Sitelink extensions.
First of all, Google uses the performance of your landing page to determine how high they will place your ad on the page. Higher placement is better. If you have visitors clicking on your ads but then “pogo-sticking” immediately back, Google will penalize your ads by assigning a lower quality score. You may have to increase your bids if you have lower quality scores and your sitelinks may not show until your score goes back up.
Thus, if you can send them to a more relevant page, they are less likely to click away. And this signals to Google that you deserve a higher quality score.
The following ad for “kitchen countertops” has one link.
This ad has one link, the headline link.
The following ad for “choosing kitchen countertops” has a sitelink extension that includes five more links:
This ad uses a sitelink ad extension to get five links.
Contact Us
Featured Projects
Info & Prices
News Center
Products Catalog
This approach allows advertisers to help searchers make better choices about what to click on based on their needs therefore, improving their customer acquisition efforts. In this example, we have a link to “Contact Us” for contractors working on a project, and “Products Catalog” for those who want to know their options.
These extra sitelinks must go to different pages according to Google’s rules. That means you must have two, three, four, or more different landing pages for any ad that uses a sitelink extension. You may see this as a burden. We see it as an opportunity.
Avoid Sitelinks to the Homepage
Many of the ads we see take a visitor to the website’s homepage. We have demonstrated over and over again that a landing page will convert more ad clicks than the homepage, thus improving your customer acquisition efforts.
Sitelink extensions force advertisers to think about the needs of various searchers, and develop pages for those specific needs.
The Ad Extension Halo Effect
Sydney Sheedy, Senior Account Manager at (un)Common Logic, tells us that ad extensions can have a halo effect on your online ads.
Sitelink ad extensions can increase clicks on the ad. But Sheedy’s data shows that, even when sitelinks are present, most clicks are on the headline itself. In the following table, Sheedy shows four accounts that use sitelink extensions, and how the clicks break down.
Click data for ads with sitelink extensions.
Overall, only 10% of clicks go to the sitelinks. That means 90% are on the headline.
Of course, Sitelink ad extensions can increase clicks on the ad. Let’s keep that in mind and keep on increasing your chances of improving your customer acquisition efforts.
Ad Extensions for Mobile Visitors
Call Extensions
Message Extensions
App Extensions
Structured Snippets
While these extensions will appear on desktop and tablet devices, they are well targeted to our small-screen visitors. Your ad strategy should be different for small-screen mobile and large-screen visitors.
For example, Girikon presents call extensions and a drop-down ad extension to mobile visitors:
Example of a click-to-call ad extension.
But on the desktop the click-to-call ad extension is not presented.
The desktop version of this ad has no click to call extension.
Call extensions give your ads the ability to connect searchers with your business using a special app on smartphones called Phone.
Our customers find higher close rates and larger order values when they get a prospect on the phone. It’s great for mobile lead generation and considered purchases.
Message extensions leverage another handy app found on smartphones: Text Messages.
Why not let mobile visitors text you directly? When the searcher taps the message extension, they text you first and they will receive a message that you create as an auto-reply.
Example of mobile message ad extension.
App extensions invite the visitor to download and install your app.
This ad contains a mobile app extension.
Google Ad Extensions to Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts in the Real World
Location Extensions
Affiliate Location Extensions
For those visitors that are wandering around the city looking for a physical location, these two location ad extensions will deliver. They improve customer acquisition efforts by getting people in the door who want to shop in the real world.
Location extensions let the visitor open a map to your physical stores, offices and sites.
Example of an ad with location ad extension.
Affiliate location extensions do the same for stores that carry your products or offer your services.
Other Ad Extensions that Improve Acquisition Efforts
Callout Extensions
Structured Snippet Extensions
Callout extensions increase the real estate of your ad, giving you more lines of text. The more you can explain the fewer clicks to your landing page are required.
Reducing poorly-qualified clicks is a great way to reduce your acquisition cost while improving your customer acquisition efforts.
Structure snippet extensions provide more detailed information on your offer, but don’t provide additional links. If they see what they want in your structured snippet, their click will be more relevant, increasing conversion rate and dropping acquisition cost.
Structured snippets can use one of the following headers:
Amenities
Brands
Courses
Degree programs
Destinations
Featured hotels
Insurance coverage
Models
Neighborhoods
Service catalog
Shows
Styles
Types
Stacking Ad Extensions: Is it Even Possible?
If one ad extension is good, isn’t two better? Ad extensions are free, so why not use them all, and use them all of the time?
Not necessarily.
We want to consider the paradox of choice. Providing too many choices can cause visitors to become paralyzed.
Second, Google is the one that decides if and when to show them.
They better.
Example of an ad with multiple ad extensions.
Here are some tips for deciding if you want to stack ad extensions or not.
Don’t Repeat Yourself (too much)
If you have a good reason for extending your ad, use it. But be careful about introducing too much repetition. Ad extensions may work best when they add additional information rather than repeat it.
These ad extensions are probably too repetitive.
Don’t Ask Them to Call if No One is Home
Call extensions can be very effective, especially for mobile searchers. But make sure there is someone to answer if you’re providing a phone number. This is a great tip. Use it when stacking up or when flying solo.
Example of an ad using a call extension with 24-hour service.
Test Stacking Ad Extensions
It’s the 21st century. Adwords is a great platform for testing ad creative. Try a variety of ad extension combinations and go with the stack that delivers the best bottom-line results.
Google will take the liberty of adding ad extensions to your ads if they feel it’s a good idea. If you don’t have a team that can give thought to your ad campaigns, this may seem like a good thing.
But we have to ask, “Why spend the money on ads if you don’t have the bandwidth to be smart about the spend?”
To avoid these automated extensions, turn them off and add your own extensions. Just know that the ones Google Ads created automatically before you turn them off may still appear. (Pesky little things)
When do Ad Extensions Hurt?
As a general rule, Google ad extensions should be used on all of your ads.
They increase your visual footprint on search engine results pages (SERPs)
They push your competitors down the page
They can generate a halo effect to increase clicks on your ads
They increase qualified clicks reducing acquisition cost
When should you avoid extensions?
When you don’t have relevant pages to send visitors to
If you don’t have calls to action on your landing pages
If you don’t have the resources to apply what you learn
Google Ad Extensions to Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts Summary
Here are the takeaways from our discussion on using Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Use ad extensions to reduce your customer acquisition cost.
Use ad extensions to increase the performance of your ads overall.
Use sitelink extensions to target specific segments of your audience.
Use mobile ad extensions to engage your growing smartphone audience.
Use ad extensions to develop effective landing pages.
Running a business website is no different from a Monopoly game. You have scarce resources to spend building the site and attracting traffic. Find out how to optimize for scarcity and win the game!
Monopoly is the quintessential game of American capitalism. For better or worse, it focuses the player on one goal: maximizing the number of dollars in your pile. Everyone has their own strategy and their preferred properties to own and build. Your little sister may only buy properties if she likes the color.
Excellent monopoly players learn their opponents’ strategy and then adapt to respond to the environment they are in.
If you look beyond the “greed is good” focus on money, you will realize that playing the game teaches the principles of scarcity and optimization.
The number dollars you start with is scarce. You must make the most of your limited resources.
You want to be ready when lady luck glances your way. When a dog, a car, or a hat finally lands your property, you better be ready.
Running a business website is no different. You inevitably have scarce resources to spend building the site and attracting traffic.
And when those visitors finally land on your site, you better be ready. This is the job of optimization.
If you viewed your web page as a Monopoly board, would it change your priorities and behavior?
Like houses and hotels, would the right elements be on your page be there?
Too often, we don’t think about our web pages as scarce resources that have to be optimized. Too often, we use our little sister’s “pretty property” strategy. Trust me. She still hates to lose.
Discover how to optimize for scarcity and grow your business.
What is Scarcity
Scarcity means having less resources than needed to achieve a goal. In Monopoly, we can’t own all the properties and have hotels on all properties. We have to deal with scarcity. Our money supply is limited, as is our opportunity to buy properties. The desire to compete brings out our analytical nature and we scheme to make the most of the resources we have as opposed to the resources we want. We do this because we know we have an opponent that is actively working to undo us. Again, do we think about our web page the same way?
Examples of Scarcity on our Web Pages
In reality, we do have opponents in our web strategy. Not just one, but many. In fact, we usually have more opponents than competitors. Some of these opponents include:
Limited attention span
Lack of common reference and knowledge base
Low-resolution computer monitors
Negative emotional association with specific words or images
Slow connection speeds
As you think about the opponents listed above, you will recognize scarcity working against your ultimate goal. Vigorously compete against these opponents on your site with the same vigor you compete in Monopoly, and you’ll be more likely to “pass GO and collect $200.”
How to Optimize for Scarcity
Something amazing happens on the Monopoly board that doesn’t naturally happen on our web page.
In Monopoly, we quit caring about how glamorous a property is and instead focus on how much money it will make for us.
In contrast, it is the very rare individual who walks into a web planning meeting without being focused on making the most beautiful page possible. If we played Monopoly the same way, we would focus on acquiring and building hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and be done. If you try this approach, either in Monopoly or on your website, you lose.
If you don’t pull your weight, you’re gone!
Without emotion, we require properties to pay their way. They have a job to do and we expect them to do it well. The properties’ job is generating revenue.
Is there an element on your web page that isn’t pulling its weight? As optimizers, our job is to identify the converting elements on a page and remove the non-converting elements.
How to Optimize for Scarcity: Testing to see which properties are performing
Such was the case for one client’s site, when we set out to improve the home page. We followed this process to find out which elements led to conversions:
We set up Google to score on bounce rate while watching conversions.
We used click-tracking software heat mapping to identify content that was not getting clicked. This website has 4 clickable icons that take the user to additional content. We found that the 2 outer icons had low activity and decided to test them against alternate icons.
The experiment executed quickly with the following results:
10% improvement in bounce rate
56% improvement in conversions
Fig 1. Small changes have a big impact on conversions.
That felt good – let’s do it again
After experiencing success, it seemed like a good idea to try again. This time we identified one icon that was under-performing, so we replaced it with another one that led to a converting page. The result here is interesting. Looking at the heat map alone indicates the replaced icon is more desirable. But looking at the numbers reveals it was not the right choice.
Fig 2. More clicks do not necessarily mean more conversions.
As shown on the heat map above, replacing the 3rd icon attracted many more clicks on the “B” version of the page. However, both the bounce rate and the conversion rate took a hit.
Bounce rate degraded 4%
Conversion rate decreased 56%
This experiment shows why it is essential to test and scrutinize the results. Two nearly identical hypotheses with two nearly identical changes led to opposite results. My initial inclination was to ignore the results and push the change through. But I put on my Monopoly head and determined the measurable results of the change should trump how I felt about the change.
No Experiment is a Failure
It would be easy to walk away from the second experiment and view it as a total loss. In the same way that losses are our teachers in Monopoly, losses should be our teachers in web optimization experiments. Just as every Monopoly opponent is unique, our clients and website visitors are unique.
To better understand the behavior we observed, we sought to learn more by asking some basic questions:
Why did higher clicks on the replaced icon also correspond to a higher bounce rate? (Hint: something else didn’t get clicked as much!)
What was appealing about the new icon?
Why did the site conversion rate drop?
What was the net gain/loss of each individual conversion metric?
Did the new copy corresponding to the new icon have a negative impact?
Would alternate copy change the site performance?
Did the new icon and copy add clarity and relevance?
Did the new icon and copy add anxiety or distraction?
It is important to learn from each experiment regardless of the results. Applying this discipline is critical in understanding the unique functionality of your website and what increases or decreases conversions.
Failing to learn from a “failed” experiment is like failing to learn the tactics of your Monopoly opponent. You will face them again, and you want to be prepared when you do.
So What Should You Do?
Like many 12-step programs, the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem. Say out loud, “I care more about how pretty my web page is than how much money it makes.” Let that sink in and prepare to change. Make a personal commitment to website profitability based on hard data. Then approach your web pages with the kind of profit-focused attention to scarcity and optimization that wins Monopoly games.
Make a list of the individual components on your web page – especially above the fold.
Write the purpose of each component next to it.
Ask yourself if each component contributes to profit – and eliminate those that don’t.
Ask yourself if there is anything that could replace the existing components that would drive more profit.
Test, test, test.
Nobody is immune to personal biases and individual favorites. If you want to maximize the functionality of your website, you need to put a structure in place that always tests and always trusts data over opinion. When you earn how to optimize for scarcity, you win. When you make a habit of doing that, you will be the same formidable opponent that you are in Monopoly.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
In this episode of Intended Consequences, we discover how to implement website surveys without affecting conversions and we evaluate some great tools to measure and analyze the gathered data.
Implementing website surveys is always a great idea. Unfortunately, if wrongly implemented, they may lower conversions. Our visitors may decide to respond to the survey and forget what they added to the shopping cart. Today, we’ll analyze the importance of well crafted website exit survey questions that will shield results. We will also share with you some AI-powered tools that can help you find out how to diagnose your webpages and get visitors past the obstacles that most of us unintentionally create.
Intended Consequences: Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
How to Implement Website Surveys without Affecting Conversions Key Takeaways
Thank you page survey: Find out why this should be a part of every website that processes sales, subscriptions or registrations of any kind.
What almost kept you from buying today?: In this episode, learn what’s more effective than Net Promoter scores or pre-sale feedback queries.
“Liking” In Action: Curtis shows us when is the best time to ask someone to take desired action.
Data Tools: Find out which tools to use that allow you to be more creative, all while gathering data to be effective.
An Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
Curtis Morris formerly with Qualaroo
Qualaroo let’s you discover issues — good and bad — that are affecting your prospects and customers. It provides a business with the ability to ask website visitors questions, collect answers, and process high quantities of input. The tools uses sentiment analysis and AI-driven text recognition to summarize inputs from hundreds or thousands of participants.
There is no better focus group than your prospects and customers. Qualaroo keeps you in touch with them.
How Automatic Solved Their Sales Problem with a Website Exit Survey
The people at a company called Automatic had an idea. What if we created a device that would connect your smartphone to your car’s computer. The idea was great, but then they ran into a problem.
How do you get people to buy the more profitable version of your product? How do you get people to click on the things you want them to click on? How do you get them to
When you take any car built since 1996 to a mechanic, one of the first things they will do is plug your car into a computer. The mechanics computer will essentially ask your car what’s been going on.
This makes me think of Star Wars, when Han Solo tells C-3PO that he needs him to talk to the Millennium Falcon.
It turns out that there’s a lot that your car can tell the mechanic, most of it uninteresting to the mechanic.
When one of the many sensors around your car detects a problem — your oil is low, or your engine temperature is getting high — your car shows you a “check engine” light, as if you couldn’t handle the details.
But your car knows more. Much more.
You car knows how fast you’re accelerating. It nows how fast you’re slowing down. It knows if your airbags have been deployed. It knows the levels of all of the fluids, the pressure in the tires, even the quality of the emissions coming out the tailpipe.
For your mechanic, all of this information becomes available through a special port in your car, called the OBD-II port. They get an engine code from your car’s computer and can lookup the problem, probably online.
The people at a company called Automatic had a idea. What if we created a device that would plug into the port on your car, and connect your smartphone to your car’s computer. Then your pocket C-3PO could talk to your four wheeled Millennium Falcon, translating engine codes and much more.
It turns out that Automatic was on to something. Their device connected your car’s computer to your phone, and then their app tracked your trips, monitored your acceleration and deceleration — to help you save gas — and even connected to a variety of apps so you could expense travel miles and turn on your Nest thermostat when you pulled into the driveway.
How Implementing Website Exit Surveys Increased Conversions
In 2016 the company released a more advanced version of the product. Automatic Pro had its own always-on 3G connection. This meant that it didn’t need your smartphone to communicate with the internet. This opened up new opportunities.
Automatic Pro could alert someone if your airbags deployed, even if your phone was broken in an accident. If your car was stolen, you would know exactly where it is. The site touted “event-based apps” and “streaming apps” and “parking tracking.”
The old device was recast as Automatic Lite and sold online for $80 beside the Automatic Pro at $130.
And most people bought the Lite version.
This was a bit of a problem as the Lite version was a lower margin product. Why weren’t people buying the clearly superior Pro version of the product? Should Automatic just accept that car owners are cheap and adjust their expectations?
Fortunately, Conversion Sciences was working with them, and tackled this problem for them. Using our sophisticated scientific minds, we devised a strategy for finding out why buyers weren’t jumping on the Pro product. We asked them.
Whenever someone bought an Automatic Lite, we served up one question in a popup box: “Why didn’t you choose the Automatic Pro?”
Within two weeks, we had over 150 responses. And these responses were from people who had already been all the way through the purchase process. The popup had no negative effect on conversion, because it appeared AFTER THE SALE.
And it told us what was wrong.
After analyzing the responses, one comment really summed things up.
“I don’t think I need crash alert. I have apps that track where I park just fine, nor have I ever needed it. I don’t know what Live vehicle tracking means. I don’t know what event-based apps means. I don’t know what streaming apps mean, either.”
In short, the site wasn’t doing a good job of helping them choose the right solution for them. So they defaulted to the cheapest option. This is the classic problem of the Pricing Page. The job of the pricing page is not to show off all of the features. It’s to help the buyer choose the right plan, the right level or the right feature set.
By modifying the way the features were presented on Automatic’s pricing page, we were able to significantly increase the number of units sold overall, and increase sales of the profitable Automatic Pro as a percentage. This was proven with an AB split test.
This is the power of qualitative data. Qualitative data is that delicious, juicy input that comes directly from buyers, prospects and pretenders. It’s typically gathered in surveys, focus groups and polls. These can deliver quantitative data, but qualitative data is prized for its messiness. It helps us understand how people think about products, how they talk about their problems, and what really is important to them.
The downside of this kind of data is that it is harder to process. We had 150 responses to analyze for Automatic. Imagine if you got thousands a day. Every day.
These are the problems that Curtis Hill thinks about. He is CEO of Qualaroo, and believes, as I do, that quantitative data means nothing if it’s not supplemented with qualitative data. So, listen to the Podcast for all the juicy details on how to implement website surveys without affecting conversions.
Intended Consequences: Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
Don’t miss the first episode of the first Podcast season, where we chat with Mouseflow, a user-behavior analytics tool and cover recordings, heatmaps, funnels. Plus, how to manage helicopter executives.
Intended Consequences Podcast Season 1 Episode 1: Key Takeaways
Exit Intent: Not sure what this means? You’ll learn about that and why it matters.
What Happens When a Site Bug Goes Unchecked: You’ll hear stories on the impact a site bug can have on your website – and we’re talking a $1.2 million impact.
Tips on Conversation with Executives: Gain knowledge and tips from Evan on how to have conversations with your marketing executives.
Excerpts from our Conversation with Mouseflow
Avoid the Bias
This stuff really fascinates me just because it’s a psychological. It’s diving into the minds of of your visitors. And one thing that I always encourage people to do when they’re using Mouseflow on their website is PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT go in with any bias. You have to be willing to test and identify ways that you can improve your form or specific parts of your Web site.
The Add-to-Cart Bug
This is going to have to remain anonymous, so I can’t share the company. But there is e-commerce store in America that uses Mouseflow and they were recording 100 percent of all visitors. So lots of data coming in. We’re talking millions and millions of sessions per month. And there was a pretty serious bug / error that was deployed live onto the Web site after they had finished a redesign. And Mouseflow picked it up. They had notifications set to send to one of their product marketers e-mails whenever a JavaScript error occurred.
All of the sudden at 2:00a.m. on Monday night their e-mail just starts getting absolutely blown up. It turned out that there was an Add to Cart button that was not working on about 40% of their product pages.
It was a huge huge error.
Mouseflow estimated it ended up being like $400K revenue loss. So, it ended up being a serious deal . And if that had gone further unnoticed, obviously this would have stretched into the millions of dollars.
Get ready, Marketers
“So I would I think that’s one of the most exciting things for a marketer who finally grabs this tool installs it, because they’re about to get the data they need to have a really really interesting meetings.”
Conversion Sciences Podcast with Mouseflow, a user-behavior analytics tool.
Helicopter Executives
That executive who doesn’t feel comfortable with the work that a marketer has done, because that marketer doesn’t have any data, will come in and change things based on their experience with a customer their experience or their own preference.
In other words executives are coming in with all their biases and making changes to a campaign, and that’s really frustrating to a marketer marketing team who’s worked hard on a redesign, to have a sample size of one person come nin and upend those assumptions.
Celebrating Design
“But there’s something to be said for installing this tool before you launch a redesign, and then going in and celebrating, with heatmap and session recordings, where the redesign has really improved things. That’s going to get the design team and the UX team more interested in working with you.”
“It’s going to make your boss look good because he or she shepherded this fantastic redesign. And then you can go and say here’s the next things we can be improving on.”
Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist™, shares how to combine data from video hosting services with Google Analytics to measure video impact on your revenue and conversions.
In this episode of The Conversion Scientist Podcast, Brian Massey tells you how to gain insights from third-party tools in Google Analytics. He uses several video hosts as an example to show step by step how to integrate these “In-App” video metrics with Analytics. And how to use Google Analytics to measure the impact of video content on your revenue.
Remember to check the very last section of this article to watch the free eight-part bit-sized video mini-course, “Video that Converts”
When “In-App” Analytics Are Not Enough to Gauge Impact on Conversions and Revenue
We were working on a client that sells a software application. After completing a test, we identified a single change that could increase the number of demo requests by 29%.
What was the change that would cause such a dramatic lift in conversion rate?
We removed a video from their demo request page.
Why? A quick look at the analytics showed that only few visitors were watching the video. We had a hunch that it was probably a barrier to conversions. And it was blocking more important information — information that could persuade more visitors to fill out the form on the page.
Video is just one of the many third-party services commonly implemented on ecommerce websites. Others include exit-intent overlays, live chat, ratings and reviews, faceted search or personalized and predictive product recommendations services.
The vast majority of third-party services will offer “in-app” analytics to help you assess their impact on your visitors’ behavior. Even though these “In App” analytics can provide insight into your online customers, they cannot show you the tools’ impact on leads and sales.
Integration with primary analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, is a must when identifying opportunities to optimize.
Using Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Revenue
Now, let’s take a deeper look at how integration of third-party analytics with Google Analytics can help answer difficult questions about our video ROI.
In-App Analytics
The vast majority of third-party tools offer useful analytics.
Let’s consider video hosts first. These services host your marketing videos and allow you to embed them on your site, landing pages and/or social media channels. Their promise is simple: faster, more reliable streaming than your basic website servers. Plus in-app video analytics.
We have used a variety of these providers in our video conversion projects, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Ooyala, Wistia and Vidyard. While YouTube is free, it gives your visitors too many opportunities to leave the webpage. The rest require a monthly video hosting fee.
All of these services offer some kind of dashboard with basic in-app analytics. Some of the metrics they share are:
Number of times a video is loaded
Number of times a video is played
Percentage of visitors who clicked Play
Average percentage of video watched
Geo distribution of your video audience
A Wistia Analytics Example
We can see on the Vimeo graph below, the load counts, play counts and social sharing counts for this particular video.
The graph shows how many visitors saw the video, how many watched and how many shared it.
More interestingly, the Wistia report below, on an eight-part video series shows that viewers did not watch them in order. And we can deduce which of the topics captured our visitor’s interest.
Audience Retention Analysis: Vidyard and YouTube Examples
Wistia in-app analytics allows you to compare plays and play rates for multiple videos in a series.
If you are interested in finding which part of a video is less interesting to your video viewers, Vidyard and YouTube have a viewer drop-off graph. You may use it to gather how many stick around until the end.
In this Vidyard chart we can see that almost half of my viewers dropped off within 20 seconds. This video needs a stronger intro.
The results can be quite informative.
Consider this audience retention graph from a YouTube account. See the pronounced viewer drop-off in the first few seconds? Something made more than 10% of video viewers leave within seconds of starting the video. What could it be?
YouTube audience retention graph.
This audience retention visual report can be found inside your YouTube channel, synced with the video you are analyzing.
Our hypothesis was that viewers lost interest due to a vanity logo sequence. And it was costing us viewers.
We picked another video without vanity intro and we noticed a much smaller initial drop-off at the beginning. This supported our hypothesis.
The YouTube chart for the video without a vanity intro shows a slight engagement lift at the very beginning.
Vanity, thy name is logo. Even we at Conversion Sciences have given in to our egos with similarly unpleasant results.
We were chasing our viewers away.
It goes without saying that we no longer use the cool branding sequence in our marketing videos.
Measuring the Impact of Video on your Bottom Line: Integrated Analytics
The biggest barrier in-app analytics have is that they cannot be linked to our revenue metrics, namely leads and sales.
Predictive metrics like Engagement or Attention are not definitive. They can only suggest what might happen.
These are the questions we need answered by our analytics:
Do those customers who view the video buy more often?
Are they more likely to complete a lead form?
Are they buying more or less?
Does their buying behavior change if they only watch part of a video? If so, how?
Which videos generate more sales than others?
Time to bring in this third-party vendor data and integrated with Google Analytics.
The good news is, most of these third-party platforms or applications provide a way to generate Google Analytics events on visitor interaction. Events like watching a video, performing a filtered search or starting a live chat.
Integrating Google Analytics could be as simple as entering your Google Analytics ID, enabling a Google Tag Manager pre-written tag or adding some Javascript tracking code to your page.
Integrate Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Conversions
Video platforms generally fire Events when somebody plays the video, for the duration of the play and when the video has been watched to completion. Therefore, we don’t have much control over the type of Events the video platform provides.
Nevertheless, this is usually enough for us to create some advanced segments and assess the impact of the video on our sales or lead conversions.
We tested both Wistia and Vidyard in-app analytics integrated with Google Analytics on our eight-part video mini-course.
To see the Events generated by either of the embedded video players, choose Behavior > Events in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Events menu.
Here you will be able to see which Events are being generated by either of the video platforms. In this case, both send us Events when a video was played and for how long.
A screenshot of the Events sent by Wistia and Vidyard to Google Analytics.
Now, switch from Event Action to Event Label as the Primary Dimension on your Google Analytics report to see which videos are being watched.
Both video analytics are sending the videos that are being viewed.
But all of the above data can be found within the respective tools’ dashboards. Let’s dive into more interesting information by creating Advanced Segments.
Creating a GA Advanced Segment with Wistia’s Events
To measure and isolate sessions in which the visitor played a video, we built an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. This is particularly useful for online shops. It allows us to find out the impact of these videos on customer’s purchasing habits.
We used Wistia’s Play Event to isolate those sessions in which any of the eight videos in our series was viewed.
By creating an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics, we can look at sessions that include visitors who watched a video.
Our Wistia’s Played Video Advanced Segment includes sessions where a visitor played a video.
Use this segment to filter your ecommerce site Revenue, Conversion and Transaction data. Identify those visitors who watched one or more videos. Now, discover if this affected their buying behavior.
Comparing a buyer who interacted with a video to the “average” site visitor, we observe a drop in conversion rate and average order value.
In this example, the report strongly implies that website buyers who watched the video were less likely to make a purchase and bought less.
A simple integration of you video platform’s data with Google Analytics can derive stronger insights to find out the true impact of video on your bottom-line. Which ones will you find in your analytics now? Is your third-party app helping or hindering your sales or leads?
For more on Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Your Revenue, Listen to the Podcast
In this episode of The Conversion Scientist Podcast, Brian Massey tells you how to gain insights from third-party tools in Google Analytics. He uses several video hosts as an example.
What Form of Form Will Get You More Conversions?
Lead GenerationContact forms are the most common way of beginning a conversation between a company and a prospect. In this article, we’ll show you how to get more prospects to fill out your form without reducing the quality of those leads.
What’s the big deal with forms? They have fields. You fill out the fields and you get something you want.
So, why do so many of your visitors fail to fill out your forms?
There is some psychology and some science to getting more form fills, whether you are trolling for leads or asking your visitors to buy something. The folks at SingleHop have done a study and it is exactly what we’ve seen in our testing of contact forms. You’ll learn a lot about increasing contact form conversion from this little infographic.
Contact Form Fields: How Many is Too Many?
As a general rule, the more fields you have, the lower your conversion rate. However, the leads you do acquire will be better qualified. The best way to find the right mix is to A/B test your contact forms.
Generally speaking and to increase contact form conversion, you should avoid:
Best Practices to Increase Contact Form Conversion
While you may think your website is selling your product or service, what it’s really selling is a sales call. You must convince the visitor to complete your form.
There are four components that will help you achieve this.
Build Trust
You can build trust by including your phone number and contact information. Sometimes they will call you.
Provide Social Proof
Your contact page should present testimonials and endorsements to make visitors feel comfortable completing the contact form.
Add Value
Make sure you are building value. What’s in it for the visitor if they fill out the form?
Sell the call to increase contact form conversions.
Use Risk Reversal
You can significantly remove barriers to completion by simply presenting your privacy policy on the form. While these are rarely read, they indicate that you care enough to have one.
Get the Call to Action Right
On a contact form, the call to action usually lives on the contact form button. The call to action should communicate what will happen when it is clicked.
Studies indicate that using first person improves conversion rates. Test changing “your” to “my”.
For example “Download your free report” is second person. “Download my free report” is first person.
Contact forms infographic.
The Best Lead Capture Forms
The best contact forms don’t assume the visitor wants to fill out the form. Only lonely people fill out such forms.
Instead, your form should give visitors a good reason to complete the form, and build trust with them and explain the value of completing the form.
This is an important step in their journey to solve a problem.
Treat it as such.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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How Heatmaps Helped Increase Prospective Student Inquiries with Hotjar
Lead Generation, Web AnalyticsHeatmaps are just the first step to obtaining useful insights on your website visitors. Today we’ll find out how heatmaps helped increase prospective student inquiries by 20% for a University and have a chat with Andrew Michael of Hotjar. Find out what he has to say.
Andrew Michael | Understanding Your Users: Leveraging Tools to Grow Your Website
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Resources and links discussed
How Heatmaps Helped Increase Prospective Student Inquiries by 20%
We were looking at the heatmap report for the website of Northcentral University, a non-profit online university headquartered in Arizona.
Reading a heatmap report is like looking at a weather radar, but instead of blobs of green, red and yellow showing us where rain is falling around us, a heatmap report shows us where visitors are clicking on a web page.
And it was raining clicks in an unexpected spot on the NCU website.
Specifically, visitors were clicking on one of the fields in the middle of a form, and only on that field. Not the name field, not the email field. The majority of them weren’t completing the form.
So, why were visitors so interested in this one field?
It was an important question, as this form was the primary invitation to get more information on the University. It was on almost every page, ready to start a more in-depth conversation with any visitor.
The field visitors were clicking on was “program of interest”, a dropdown field that listed the degrees offered by NCU. It was meant as a way for prospective students to tell NCU which degree program they were interested in.
These prospective students were using it as an information source.
While the copy on the page was regaling visitors on the value of NCUs one-on-one learning, it’s 100% doctoral professors and it’s diversity, visitors were telling us that they had one question first.
Do you offer a degree program I’m interested in?
At least, this was the hypothesis. So we designed a test.
At the top of every page, we placed a dropdown menu that listed the university’s programs, just like that on the form. When a degree program was selected, we took them to the part of the site that described that degree program.
Half of NCUs visitors would see this dropdown. The other half would not. They’d have to use the dropdown in the form.
When we measured the results, the visitors who saw the dropdown in the page were 20% more likely to fill out the form completely, requesting information.
The current site offers a complete section designed to help visitors find a degree program they’re interested in.
This is something that we would not have been able to find any other way than through a heatmap report. It doesn’t show up in analytics. No one would have complained.
This is the power of a class of report called user intelligence reports.
Anyone who knows how to read rain chances from a weather radar can use this kind of report. More and more of us are doing this.
These reports are surprisingly easy to generate and the tools are inexpensive.
Leading the way is a company called Hotjar. On today’s show we’re breaking down HotJar with Andrew Michael. A tool focused on helping you understand your users. Andrew got into marketing because he’s intrigued by psychology – understanding what drives people’s decisions.
An Insightful Chat with Andrew Michael from Hotjar
Intended Consequences podcast with Hotjar’s Andrew Michael
Time is precious for overburdened marketers. On this show, we seek to understand which tools are truly valuable, and which are just giving us “interesting” insights.
We install something like Hotjar on every one of our client sites when optimizing.
Tools like Hotjar are a part of what I call ‘the golden age of marketing’. These tools are continually evolving, getting easier to use and less expensive.
These are the tools that buy you more time to be creative, ground breaking and successful.
We start off the podcast talking about all of the things Hotjar brings to the table under a single subscription. Then we talk about the outcome of leveraging tools like this – how do they actually empower marketers serve their online prospects better?
Listen to the Podcast. It’s well worth it.
When You Get Back To The Office
I’m not a shill for Andrew. I just know these tools are a great value and easy to learn.
When you get back to the office, i recommend that you do a trial of Hotjar. Add it to your homepage, or one of your “money” pages where you ask visitors to take action. Setup a heatmap report on it.
Let it run for a few days, and then look at the scroll report. This report tells you how far visitors are scrolling on your page. This is one of the first things we look at when we start analyzing our clients’ sites.
Where is the report turning blue? This is the place on the page that visitors stop reading. Look in the blue area. What key content are they missing?
Reasons for this include: false bottoms, where visitors think the page ends when it doesn’t. It can mean that your content isn’t engaging them enough high on the page. It can mean that you’re not handling a key objection.
Your strategies include moving key content to the top of the page, putting arrows, chevrons and “v”s on the page to tell visitors to keep going, or re-thinking the story you tell on this page.
Don’t be discouraged. This is progress! Next, share this report with your design team and see what they think.
This is how pages get better and businesses grow.
You can get all these links discussed on this week’s episode in our shownotes. One thing to remind you all of is that Hotjar is a freemium model so it’s one you can definitely
Alright scientists, that’s it for this week.
Andrew Michael | Understanding Your Users: Leveraging Tools to Grow Your Website
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Ecommerce Conversion Marketing Strategy for Online Sales
Ecommerce CROEvery industry has them. Your company may be one of them. They are the whack-a-mole companies, sticking their virtual neck out, and striving to do things better, driving online sales with an evolving ecommerce conversion marketing strategy.
And they often get whacked.
But the companies I’m talking about hunker down in their holes and plan their next chance to pop out again, with more force. It’s in their blood. The Internet is becoming the place they stage their emergence.
These whack-a-mole companies may sell products that range from the common to the mundane. Zappos was a whack-a-mole company. They started out in online sales of shoes. In ten years, Zappos outshone their competitors and sold an almost $1 billion business to Amazon.
Wikipedia calls Whac-a-mole a “Redemption Game”
The GoodLife Team is a whack-a-mole company in the very competitive real estate market. They are small by the standards of their peers, but like Zappos, I expect them to pop out of their hole with such force that they will leave the table altogether, flying free of the hammers that seek to drive them back.
Patience and Impatience: Ecommerce Conversion Marketing Strategy for Online Sales
Whack-a-mole companies are both patient, and remarkably impatient. They are remarkably impatient to try new things. They aren’t careless. Successful whack-a-moles seek to find out what works and what doesn’t quickly.
Yet, they are patient in the long run. They know that they’re going to get whacked a few times, and they prepare for the blows. Theirs is a journey of learning and persistence.
I am drawn to these kind of companies. It is them that I find myself writing for.
Ecommerce Whack-a-moles
If you are a budding whack-a-mole in your industry and want to turn the Web into a powerful sales channel, find out how the highest-converting sites on the Web use ecommerce marketing strategy to maximize conversion rates and online sales. “Conversion” is the magic that makes you stronger than your competitors.
The E-commerce Pattern: Core Conversion Marketing Strategies
The third of the five “core” conversion marketing patterns is the e-commerce pattern. The two patterns I’ve already discussed are the Brochure site and the Portal site. As a refresher, the Brochure pattern is a known as the “sales support” pattern. The purpose is to provide information during the sales process and tell prospects how to get more information. The Portal pattern, also known as the “advertising model” and “subscription model,” monetizes content.
For this discussion, I assume a site is generating reasonably qualified traffic and that the offering has a demand in the marketplace.
The E-commerce pattern
Also known as “online shopping,” “eRetail” and “eTail,” e-commerce sites are designed to handle the online purchase of a product or service. For purposes of this discussion, you are building a site with the e-commerce pattern if:
My goal here is to explore three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for e-commerce websites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.
Category pages
For sites that feature dozens or thousands of products, it is critical that visitors at all stages of the buying process find their way to specific items on your site. Category pages are the traffic cops, driving shoppers to the right product areas and eventually to the products they seek.
Are category pages more important than the home page? For visitors who are just becoming aware of your online brand, the home page serves as the top-level category page, or the “featured products” category page. A quick survey of the highest converting retail sites on the web reveal some interesting similarities in their category page and category page design.
Defining the right categories is critical. Most of the high-converting sites have between five and eight categories in their top-level navigation. Office Depot gets it down to four. More refined categories are listed in the left column; “specials,” “best sellers,” “brands,” etc.
For e-commerce sites that don’t have the brand strength of these large retailers, it is tempting to spend space talking about the company and its unique value proposition. Keep this brief. Avoid the temptation to add ancillary items to navigation, such as “about us.” Let your offers and categories do the talking for you.
In summary, specific offers, smart category choices and search are the hallmarks of strong category pages.
Product pages
Just as landing pages are crucial to increase the conversion rate of advertising efforts, well designed product pages are crucial for the e-commerce website. With best search engine optimization practices, product pages become the landing pages for searching shoppers.
Product pages typically ask the visitor to “add to cart” and “buy now.” These should be the most tested pages on your site.
The elements that make for a great product page differ from industry to industry, but there are some rules of thumb.
Show the product. There is a correlation between the conversion rate of a page and the number and quality of product images available.
Provide all of the information a visitor needs to say “yes.” Price, shipping, return policy, ratings and reviews; what you include on your product page depends on what you’re selling, and to whom.
Test to find the right balance of information. Providing too much information can distract buyers from clicking “buy now,” and even introduce reasons not to buy.
Product pages serve two masters: people who are already exploring your site and those who have landed there due to a search engine query. Test these pages to find your best converting product page design.
Shopping cart
E-commerce shopping carts have traditionally been a thorny issue with conversion scientists and web site optimizers. Too many businesses choose shopping cart software that is rigid and difficult to customize. Many of the most popular shopping carts on the market seem to have been designed by engineers, and they don’t consider that buyers may be on the brink of abandoning the transaction.
The purchase process is the needle point for your success. The wary shopper is always on the lookout for red flags, reasons to reconsider their purchase decision. Alarms are sounded by what is missing from your shopping cart pages.
The shopping cart is often used as an information resource. Prospects will add a product and then start the checkout process to uncover information that they didn’t find elsewhere on the site.
Flexibility is the key with shopping cart systems. They should be easy to customize, provide places for “reinforcing” copy, and be able to answer questions like those above. If your shopping cart can support A/B split testing, all the better.
The shopping cart is so important, that almost any business should consider replacing their system if they can’t easily and quickly change the sequence, layout, button location, button text, page copy, promotion codes, trust badges, etc. As with product pages, small changes in these elements can result in big increases in conversion rates.
As of this writing, I can’t recommend any shopping carts systems that meet these criteria. Please offer your recommendations in the comments.
There are a variety of tactics to be explored within each of these make-or-break strategies: category pages, product pages and the purchase process. There are other strategies that may be equally important, and I welcome your input through the comments. Building an email list is one such strategy that comes immediately to mind. It can be a powerful conversion tool for businesses whose customers purchase frequently. I’ll write more about this strategy in my next installment when we talk about the “considered purchase” pattern.
It gives you the force to fly free of your industry Whac-a-mole table by slashing your online sales costs.
Be free, my plastic mole friends!
Photo courtesy O Mighty Crisis Blog.
This article by Brian Massey was first published on Search Engine Land
Knowing Your Customer (Podcast)
Conversion Marketing Strategy, CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingValentin Radu is a businessman, a successful businessman, who believes knowing your customer is fundamental. He has built the first online car insurance company in Romania and sold it to within a few years.
So, if you’re Valentin, what do you do for an encore?
You build the tools you wish you had when you were building your business and offer them to other businesses so that they can be successful.
You can lead a horse to water, but he still won’t look good in a bikini.
Knowing Your Customer with Valentin Radu
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Resources and Links Discussed
Key Takeaways
It turns out that these exciting tools bump up against something less procedural, and more… human.
Imagine this: You are offered a magical machine that lets you read the thoughts of the people coming to your website. Not the personal stuff, just the stuff that applies to your business.
You can see how they solve problems. You can try different designs, different copy, different calls to action to see if they find it easier to buy. And you don’t have to redesign your website.
You can hear what they are trying to do and what is confusing them.
You can point them to the information they need at any time.
And the magic tools wouldn’t violate their privacy in any way.
You might be skeptical, of course. But would you be resistant to this?
The answer is, that you probably would be. This is human. There are a number of biases that all humans harbor. These biases — confirmation bias, availability bias, novelty bias, survivorship bias — work together to keep us doing what we’ve always done, even when we clearly need change.
Fortunately, humans are also social animals. Our biases can be up-ended by the behaviors of others. When we talk about using social signals to change human behavior, we are talking about Culture.
In a company, culture is a huge, powerful lever. This also makes it difficult to move, especially if you are not a leader in your company. You can feel like Sisyphus, pushing that bolder up the hill. Over and over agin.
The opportunity, however, is great. Marketing has always been about knowing your customer. We’ve never had access to more information about our customers. Will you be an agent of knowledge or will you remain mired in your biases?
Understanding Your Customers
When a visitor arrives on your site what is it that you want them to do? Well most marketers would say first, you want them to buy. And then you want them to come back.
This is the charge.
Getting them to buy and come back is the charge. But here’s the challenge.
How do you know what made your customer buy to begin with? Who is your buyer? How do you know the action they took when they first landed on your site? How do you get the freedom as a marketer to experiment, to look at the data, to understand the data in order to make decisions to increase conversions?
And when you get the answers to those questions, how do you get buy-in from leaders in the organization to make the pivots needed based on the data?
Knowing your customer is key to marketing and conversion success.
Experimenting with Your Marketing
These are the questions we explore in this episode. Experimenting with your marketing is the only way that you can truly know what is working. It’s the only way you can succeed. Marketing and status quo cannot go together. At least for my listeners.
You might be thinking, that all sounds great Brian, but how do I influence change to allow for more more experimentation and effect true company growth?
Omniconvert is a CRO tool that helps marketers increase conversion rates. From surveys to overlays – it’s a marketers sandbox. You can find out more by connecting with me or head on over to omniconvert dot com.
When you get back to the office.
When you get back to the office, I suggest that you start using a little data in your decision-making process. You can start with some data that is already “laying around.”
When was the last time you looked at what your PPC and Facebook ad team were doing? Many digital marketers don’t spend a lot of time with the advertising, but there are some real gems of growth here.
And most of us are doing some sort of advertising.
Call down to your ad team and ask them for a spreadsheet of all of the ads they’ve been running. Go back six months or even a year. Ask for the ad text, the number of impressions, the number of clicks, the cost per click and the link URL. This is easy for them to generate. If they can track conversions, definitely ask for conversions for each ad.
Then spend some time with this data. You’ll understand:
From this, you can begin to find opportunities for growth.
Are you using words like the best clicked ads? Are you sending good clicks to bad pages? And is there a better place to send traffic than the home page? The answer is yes, by the way.
Then share your findings with at least one other person.
You have just begun culture change. You radical, you.
Alright scientists, that’s it for this week.
Knowing Your Customer with Valentin Radu
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Website Due Diligence: Avoid Doo Due Diligence When Buying Websites [INFOGRAPHIC]
Conversion Marketing StrategyI’m at the Ungagged Conference and enjoyed sitting in on a presentation by Bryan O’Neil of Flippa.com.
Website Due Diligence Issues to Consider
When considering investing in a web business, consider the following.
There are other considerations for website due diligence as well.
Calculate Revenue per Visit
The Revenue per Visit (RPV) is the revenue generated by a site divided by the number of visitors. If this number is small, you may have trouble building traffic, because the cost of the traffic is higher than the revenue.
For a better analysis, consider measuring Profit per Visit.
Avoid Traffic Arbitrage
If the site is not something you would use, you might have a business built on traffic arbitrage. Arbitrage is acquiring traffic, and then sending it advertisers or affiliates for more than you paid.
This is not a web business.
Does the Website have a Future?
Sites with a limited future are not a good long-term investment. When performing website due diligence, be careful of sites that are at the mercy of time or other businesses.
Websites that focus on a single event have a built in expiration date.
Sites that fix something in someone else’s product can be eliminated by upgrades to that product.
Sites tat provide a product that is simply “better” than the competition can be marketed out of existence
Websites that depend on loopholes should be avoided, as loopholes can be closed.
Website Due Diligence: 7 Business Buying Myths
O’Neil offer seven myths about buying a business that you should avoid.
Myth #1: The site’s backlink profile is important
Dependence on organic traffic is dangerous.
Myth #2: Financial verification is most important
Businesses with good financial verification can fail if they don’t have a future.
Myth #3: Escrow can save you from a bad decision.
Escrow is where you give money to a third party during a period of inspection and verification.
Do your due diligence before you enter escrow. Don’t make yourself a target for scammers.
Entering escrow also tie up your capital, limiting your options.
Myth #4: Website due diligence is just too expensive.
Due diligence is expensive, especially if done by a third party.
But, when you compare it to the purchase price, it can be quite affordable.
Calculate your Website Due Diligence Percent:
Myth #5: Screen shots are viable proof of financial performance.
Business owners can forge screen shots showing success. This is a sign of a scammer.
Myth #6: Your broker can do due diligence.
Avoid any broker that claims they have done due diligence for you.
Myth #7: You can rely on apps to do your website due diligence.
Nope. You need the human element in the process.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’neil of Flippa.com
Here is my instagraph infographic of his presentation on due diligence mistakes when buying Websites.
Due Diligence when Buying Websites by Bryan O’Niel
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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Google Ad Extensions to Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts
Advertising CROWe will start by reviewing the various ad extensions available. Then, we’ll discuss the implications of ad extensions on customer acquisition. And finally, we’ll uncover how to use these Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Let’s first review this concept and then analyze the different ways of using Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
What are Google Ad Extensions?
You’ve seen these before. Those extra lines below the Google ad text that displays the store address closest to you? Or maybe a few reasons that entice you to click on their ad? Something like, Free Consultation or 24/7 or Free Shipping.
According to Google, ad extensions “typically increase an ad’s click-through-rate by several percentage points.” But Google is taking the liberty of choosing which extensions to show on your ads for you. “To maximize the performance of your text ads, Google Ads selects which extensions to show in response to each individual query on Google.”
They have enough information on a prospect’s search intent, history and geo in order to have their algorithms work in favor of advertisers.
But first, you need to set them up. Here is a current list of Google Ad Extensions. They do add more on a regular basis.
Don’t worry trying to figure them out right now. We’ll dive into them later in the article.
Why is Google so confident that they can increase click-through rates for your ads?
They make the point that ads with extensions provide “greater visibility and prominence.” This means your ad is more likely to be seen. Makes sense, you have more lines than your competitor ads (unless they have Google ad extensions too.)
It also means that you’re pushing competing ads below yours down the page.
Google also makes the case that you can offer the visitor more clicks to choose from, or offer “interactive ways of reaching you — as with maps, SMS or calls” and this will increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad.
Setting up ad extensions doesn’t mean they will show on your ad. Google lists two possibilities for ad extensions to appear:
So, you see. It’s not all under your control. You gotta trust Google to present the best extension for your business goals at the right time, place and query.
We say, they better.
What’s the best thing about Google Ads extensions? They are FREE. So setting the right ones up is always an advantage.
Get a higher return from your ad campaigns. Start implementing CRO for advertising today.
Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts with Ad Extensions
The goal of ad optimization efforts is to gain more customers at a lower cost. The lower this acquisition cost, the more profit you make on each new customer or on each transaction and you can afford to spend more on ads – which implies more volume or more competitive bids. Or you can just pocket the difference.
There are two ways to reduce these acquisition costs
The first is accomplished by refining bids, eliminating low-converting ads, and designing offers that deliver better qualified visitors.
The second is accomplished by refining the websites and pages to which you send your ad clicks.
In both cases, the higher your conversion rate, the lower your customer acquisition costs. We may choose to spend less on low-quality visitors that convert poorly, or do a better job of converting the ad traffic we are getting.
Ad extensions clearly offer the hope for more clicks and conversions without increasing spend. Their impact on websites and landing pages is less plain.
Evidently, Google Ads extensions let you add more information to a typical text ad. They allow advertisers to say more about the offer made in the ad so that searchers make better choices about whether to click or not.
Ad Extensions that add Links to More Targeted Landing Pages
Three Google ad extensions add additional links to your ads.
Sitelink extensions are great for broad match keywords. They allow the searcher to click on narrower topics than their search phrase might return. The example below, shows sitelink extensions with an additional description. A great feature that entices advertisers to convert their campaigns to enhanced campaigns.
Example of sitelink ad extension with description.
An eCommerce site can use a variety of pages as landing pages: product pages, category pages, search results pages, and even specific informational pages for those not ready to buy just yet.
Sitelink ad extensions used in eCommerce.
Tip: Consider targeting your primary segments with sitelink extensions.
Price Extensions allow you to feature pricing right in your ads. This is a great feature to weed out those prospects that may not go through with their purchase because of price. And an additional element to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
Example of a Price Ad Extension on a mobile device.
Google Ads Sitelink Extensions Improve Ad Quality Score
Ad extensions also allow advertisers to send searchers to more relevant pages on their websites. These are called Sitelink extensions.
First of all, Google uses the performance of your landing page to determine how high they will place your ad on the page. Higher placement is better. If you have visitors clicking on your ads but then “pogo-sticking” immediately back, Google will penalize your ads by assigning a lower quality score. You may have to increase your bids if you have lower quality scores and your sitelinks may not show until your score goes back up.
Thus, if you can send them to a more relevant page, they are less likely to click away. And this signals to Google that you deserve a higher quality score.
The following ad for “kitchen countertops” has one link.
This ad has one link, the headline link.
The following ad for “choosing kitchen countertops” has a sitelink extension that includes five more links:
This ad uses a sitelink ad extension to get five links.
This approach allows advertisers to help searchers make better choices about what to click on based on their needs therefore, improving their customer acquisition efforts. In this example, we have a link to “Contact Us” for contractors working on a project, and “Products Catalog” for those who want to know their options.
These extra sitelinks must go to different pages according to Google’s rules. That means you must have two, three, four, or more different landing pages for any ad that uses a sitelink extension. You may see this as a burden. We see it as an opportunity.
Avoid Sitelinks to the Homepage
Many of the ads we see take a visitor to the website’s homepage. We have demonstrated over and over again that a landing page will convert more ad clicks than the homepage, thus improving your customer acquisition efforts.
Sitelink extensions force advertisers to think about the needs of various searchers, and develop pages for those specific needs.
The Ad Extension Halo Effect
Sydney Sheedy, Senior Account Manager at (un)Common Logic, tells us that ad extensions can have a halo effect on your online ads.
Sitelink ad extensions can increase clicks on the ad. But Sheedy’s data shows that, even when sitelinks are present, most clicks are on the headline itself. In the following table, Sheedy shows four accounts that use sitelink extensions, and how the clicks break down.
Click data for ads with sitelink extensions.
Overall, only 10% of clicks go to the sitelinks. That means 90% are on the headline.
Of course, Sitelink ad extensions can increase clicks on the ad. Let’s keep that in mind and keep on increasing your chances of improving your customer acquisition efforts.
Ad Extensions for Mobile Visitors
While these extensions will appear on desktop and tablet devices, they are well targeted to our small-screen visitors. Your ad strategy should be different for small-screen mobile and large-screen visitors.
For example, Girikon presents call extensions and a drop-down ad extension to mobile visitors:
Example of a click-to-call ad extension.
But on the desktop the click-to-call ad extension is not presented.
The desktop version of this ad has no click to call extension.
Call extensions give your ads the ability to connect searchers with your business using a special app on smartphones called Phone.
Message extensions leverage another handy app found on smartphones: Text Messages.
Why not let mobile visitors text you directly? When the searcher taps the message extension, they text you first and they will receive a message that you create as an auto-reply.
Example of mobile message ad extension.
App extensions invite the visitor to download and install your app.
This ad contains a mobile app extension.
Google Ad Extensions to Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts in the Real World
For those visitors that are wandering around the city looking for a physical location, these two location ad extensions will deliver. They improve customer acquisition efforts by getting people in the door who want to shop in the real world.
Location extensions let the visitor open a map to your physical stores, offices and sites.
Example of an ad with location ad extension.
Affiliate location extensions do the same for stores that carry your products or offer your services.
Other Ad Extensions that Improve Acquisition Efforts
Callout extensions increase the real estate of your ad, giving you more lines of text. The more you can explain the fewer clicks to your landing page are required.
Structure snippet extensions provide more detailed information on your offer, but don’t provide additional links. If they see what they want in your structured snippet, their click will be more relevant, increasing conversion rate and dropping acquisition cost.
Structured snippets can use one of the following headers:
Stacking Ad Extensions: Is it Even Possible?
If one ad extension is good, isn’t two better? Ad extensions are free, so why not use them all, and use them all of the time?
Not necessarily.
We want to consider the paradox of choice. Providing too many choices can cause visitors to become paralyzed.
Second, Google is the one that decides if and when to show them.
They better.
Example of an ad with multiple ad extensions.
Here are some tips for deciding if you want to stack ad extensions or not.
Don’t Repeat Yourself (too much)
If you have a good reason for extending your ad, use it. But be careful about introducing too much repetition. Ad extensions may work best when they add additional information rather than repeat it.
These ad extensions are probably too repetitive.
Don’t Ask Them to Call if No One is Home
Call extensions can be very effective, especially for mobile searchers. But make sure there is someone to answer if you’re providing a phone number. This is a great tip. Use it when stacking up or when flying solo.
Example of an ad using a call extension with 24-hour service.
Test Stacking Ad Extensions
It’s the 21st century. Adwords is a great platform for testing ad creative. Try a variety of ad extension combinations and go with the stack that delivers the best bottom-line results.
Automated Extensions: Yes or No?
Google will take the liberty of adding ad extensions to your ads if they feel it’s a good idea. If you don’t have a team that can give thought to your ad campaigns, this may seem like a good thing.
But we have to ask, “Why spend the money on ads if you don’t have the bandwidth to be smart about the spend?”
To avoid these automated extensions, turn them off and add your own extensions. Just know that the ones Google Ads created automatically before you turn them off may still appear. (Pesky little things)
When do Ad Extensions Hurt?
As a general rule, Google ad extensions should be used on all of your ads.
When should you avoid extensions?
Google Ad Extensions to Improve your Customer Acquisition Efforts Summary
Here are the takeaways from our discussion on using Google ad extensions to improve your customer acquisition efforts.
How to Optimize for Scarcity: The Monopoly Web Page Strategy
Conversion-Centered DesignMonopoly is the quintessential game of American capitalism. For better or worse, it focuses the player on one goal: maximizing the number of dollars in your pile. Everyone has their own strategy and their preferred properties to own and build. Your little sister may only buy properties if she likes the color.
Excellent monopoly players learn their opponents’ strategy and then adapt to respond to the environment they are in.
If you look beyond the “greed is good” focus on money, you will realize that playing the game teaches the principles of scarcity and optimization.
The number dollars you start with is scarce. You must make the most of your limited resources.
You want to be ready when lady luck glances your way. When a dog, a car, or a hat finally lands your property, you better be ready.
Running a business website is no different. You inevitably have scarce resources to spend building the site and attracting traffic.
And when those visitors finally land on your site, you better be ready. This is the job of optimization.
If you viewed your web page as a Monopoly board, would it change your priorities and behavior?
Like houses and hotels, would the right elements be on your page be there?
Too often, we don’t think about our web pages as scarce resources that have to be optimized. Too often, we use our little sister’s “pretty property” strategy. Trust me. She still hates to lose.
Discover how to optimize for scarcity and grow your business.
What is Scarcity
Scarcity means having less resources than needed to achieve a goal. In Monopoly, we can’t own all the properties and have hotels on all properties. We have to deal with scarcity. Our money supply is limited, as is our opportunity to buy properties. The desire to compete brings out our analytical nature and we scheme to make the most of the resources we have as opposed to the resources we want. We do this because we know we have an opponent that is actively working to undo us. Again, do we think about our web page the same way?
Examples of Scarcity on our Web Pages
In reality, we do have opponents in our web strategy. Not just one, but many. In fact, we usually have more opponents than competitors. Some of these opponents include:
As you think about the opponents listed above, you will recognize scarcity working against your ultimate goal. Vigorously compete against these opponents on your site with the same vigor you compete in Monopoly, and you’ll be more likely to “pass GO and collect $200.”
How to Optimize for Scarcity
Something amazing happens on the Monopoly board that doesn’t naturally happen on our web page.
In contrast, it is the very rare individual who walks into a web planning meeting without being focused on making the most beautiful page possible. If we played Monopoly the same way, we would focus on acquiring and building hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and be done. If you try this approach, either in Monopoly or on your website, you lose.
If you don’t pull your weight, you’re gone!
Without emotion, we require properties to pay their way. They have a job to do and we expect them to do it well. The properties’ job is generating revenue.
Is there an element on your web page that isn’t pulling its weight? As optimizers, our job is to identify the converting elements on a page and remove the non-converting elements.
How to Optimize for Scarcity: Testing to see which properties are performing
Such was the case for one client’s site, when we set out to improve the home page. We followed this process to find out which elements led to conversions:
Fig 1. Small changes have a big impact on conversions.
That felt good – let’s do it again
After experiencing success, it seemed like a good idea to try again. This time we identified one icon that was under-performing, so we replaced it with another one that led to a converting page. The result here is interesting. Looking at the heat map alone indicates the replaced icon is more desirable. But looking at the numbers reveals it was not the right choice.
Fig 2. More clicks do not necessarily mean more conversions.
As shown on the heat map above, replacing the 3rd icon attracted many more clicks on the “B” version of the page. However, both the bounce rate and the conversion rate took a hit.
This experiment shows why it is essential to test and scrutinize the results. Two nearly identical hypotheses with two nearly identical changes led to opposite results. My initial inclination was to ignore the results and push the change through. But I put on my Monopoly head and determined the measurable results of the change should trump how I felt about the change.
No Experiment is a Failure
It would be easy to walk away from the second experiment and view it as a total loss. In the same way that losses are our teachers in Monopoly, losses should be our teachers in web optimization experiments. Just as every Monopoly opponent is unique, our clients and website visitors are unique.
To better understand the behavior we observed, we sought to learn more by asking some basic questions:
It is important to learn from each experiment regardless of the results. Applying this discipline is critical in understanding the unique functionality of your website and what increases or decreases conversions.
So What Should You Do?
Like many 12-step programs, the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem. Say out loud, “I care more about how pretty my web page is than how much money it makes.” Let that sink in and prepare to change. Make a personal commitment to website profitability based on hard data. Then approach your web pages with the kind of profit-focused attention to scarcity and optimization that wins Monopoly games.
Nobody is immune to personal biases and individual favorites. If you want to maximize the functionality of your website, you need to put a structure in place that always tests and always trusts data over opinion. When you earn how to optimize for scarcity, you win. When you make a habit of doing that, you will be the same formidable opponent that you are in Monopoly.
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How to Implement Website Surveys without Affecting Conversions – Intended Consequences
Artificial Intelligence, Conversion OptimizationImplementing website surveys is always a great idea. Unfortunately, if wrongly implemented, they may lower conversions. Our visitors may decide to respond to the survey and forget what they added to the shopping cart. Today, we’ll analyze the importance of well crafted website exit survey questions that will shield results. We will also share with you some AI-powered tools that can help you find out how to diagnose your webpages and get visitors past the obstacles that most of us unintentionally create.
Intended Consequences: Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
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Resources and Links Discussed
How to Implement Website Surveys without Affecting Conversions Key Takeaways
An Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
Curtis Morris formerly with Qualaroo
Qualaroo let’s you discover issues — good and bad — that are affecting your prospects and customers. It provides a business with the ability to ask website visitors questions, collect answers, and process high quantities of input. The tools uses sentiment analysis and AI-driven text recognition to summarize inputs from hundreds or thousands of participants.
There is no better focus group than your prospects and customers. Qualaroo keeps you in touch with them.
How Automatic Solved Their Sales Problem with a Website Exit Survey
How do you get people to buy the more profitable version of your product? How do you get people to click on the things you want them to click on? How do you get them to
When you take any car built since 1996 to a mechanic, one of the first things they will do is plug your car into a computer. The mechanics computer will essentially ask your car what’s been going on.
This makes me think of Star Wars, when Han Solo tells C-3PO that he needs him to talk to the Millennium Falcon.
It turns out that there’s a lot that your car can tell the mechanic, most of it uninteresting to the mechanic.
When one of the many sensors around your car detects a problem — your oil is low, or your engine temperature is getting high — your car shows you a “check engine” light, as if you couldn’t handle the details.
But your car knows more. Much more.
You car knows how fast you’re accelerating. It nows how fast you’re slowing down. It knows if your airbags have been deployed. It knows the levels of all of the fluids, the pressure in the tires, even the quality of the emissions coming out the tailpipe.
For your mechanic, all of this information becomes available through a special port in your car, called the OBD-II port. They get an engine code from your car’s computer and can lookup the problem, probably online.
The people at a company called Automatic had a idea. What if we created a device that would plug into the port on your car, and connect your smartphone to your car’s computer. Then your pocket C-3PO could talk to your four wheeled Millennium Falcon, translating engine codes and much more.
It turns out that Automatic was on to something. Their device connected your car’s computer to your phone, and then their app tracked your trips, monitored your acceleration and deceleration — to help you save gas — and even connected to a variety of apps so you could expense travel miles and turn on your Nest thermostat when you pulled into the driveway.
How Implementing Website Exit Surveys Increased Conversions
In 2016 the company released a more advanced version of the product. Automatic Pro had its own always-on 3G connection. This meant that it didn’t need your smartphone to communicate with the internet. This opened up new opportunities.
Automatic Pro could alert someone if your airbags deployed, even if your phone was broken in an accident. If your car was stolen, you would know exactly where it is. The site touted “event-based apps” and “streaming apps” and “parking tracking.”
The old device was recast as Automatic Lite and sold online for $80 beside the Automatic Pro at $130.
And most people bought the Lite version.
This was a bit of a problem as the Lite version was a lower margin product. Why weren’t people buying the clearly superior Pro version of the product? Should Automatic just accept that car owners are cheap and adjust their expectations?
Fortunately, Conversion Sciences was working with them, and tackled this problem for them. Using our sophisticated scientific minds, we devised a strategy for finding out why buyers weren’t jumping on the Pro product. We asked them.
Whenever someone bought an Automatic Lite, we served up one question in a popup box: “Why didn’t you choose the Automatic Pro?”
Within two weeks, we had over 150 responses. And these responses were from people who had already been all the way through the purchase process. The popup had no negative effect on conversion, because it appeared AFTER THE SALE.
And it told us what was wrong.
After analyzing the responses, one comment really summed things up.
In short, the site wasn’t doing a good job of helping them choose the right solution for them. So they defaulted to the cheapest option. This is the classic problem of the Pricing Page. The job of the pricing page is not to show off all of the features. It’s to help the buyer choose the right plan, the right level or the right feature set.
By modifying the way the features were presented on Automatic’s pricing page, we were able to significantly increase the number of units sold overall, and increase sales of the profitable Automatic Pro as a percentage. This was proven with an AB split test.
Things were going well enough that Automatic was acquired by SiriusXM, the satellite radio people, for 100 million dollars.
This is the power of qualitative data. Qualitative data is that delicious, juicy input that comes directly from buyers, prospects and pretenders. It’s typically gathered in surveys, focus groups and polls. These can deliver quantitative data, but qualitative data is prized for its messiness. It helps us understand how people think about products, how they talk about their problems, and what really is important to them.
The downside of this kind of data is that it is harder to process. We had 150 responses to analyze for Automatic. Imagine if you got thousands a day. Every day.
These are the problems that Curtis Hill thinks about. He is CEO of Qualaroo, and believes, as I do, that quantitative data means nothing if it’s not supplemented with qualitative data. So, listen to the Podcast for all the juicy details on how to implement website surveys without affecting conversions.
Intended Consequences: Interview with Curtis Morris of Qualaroo
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Intended Consequences Podcast Season 1, Episode 1: Mouseflow
Conversion OptimizationCollecting Qualitative Data on Your Visitors
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Intended Consequences Podcast Season 1 Episode 1: Key Takeaways
Excerpts from our Conversation with Mouseflow
Avoid the Bias
This stuff really fascinates me just because it’s a psychological. It’s diving into the minds of of your visitors. And one thing that I always encourage people to do when they’re using Mouseflow on their website is PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT go in with any bias. You have to be willing to test and identify ways that you can improve your form or specific parts of your Web site.
The Add-to-Cart Bug
This is going to have to remain anonymous, so I can’t share the company. But there is e-commerce store in America that uses Mouseflow and they were recording 100 percent of all visitors. So lots of data coming in. We’re talking millions and millions of sessions per month. And there was a pretty serious bug / error that was deployed live onto the Web site after they had finished a redesign. And Mouseflow picked it up. They had notifications set to send to one of their product marketers e-mails whenever a JavaScript error occurred.
All of the sudden at 2:00a.m. on Monday night their e-mail just starts getting absolutely blown up. It turned out that there was an Add to Cart button that was not working on about 40% of their product pages.
It was a huge huge error.
Mouseflow estimated it ended up being like $400K revenue loss. So, it ended up being a serious deal . And if that had gone further unnoticed, obviously this would have stretched into the millions of dollars.
Get ready, Marketers
“So I would I think that’s one of the most exciting things for a marketer who finally grabs this tool installs it, because they’re about to get the data they need to have a really really interesting meetings.”
Conversion Sciences Podcast with Mouseflow, a user-behavior analytics tool.
Helicopter Executives
That executive who doesn’t feel comfortable with the work that a marketer has done, because that marketer doesn’t have any data, will come in and change things based on their experience with a customer their experience or their own preference.
In other words executives are coming in with all their biases and making changes to a campaign, and that’s really frustrating to a marketer marketing team who’s worked hard on a redesign, to have a sample size of one person come nin and upend those assumptions.
Celebrating Design
“But there’s something to be said for installing this tool before you launch a redesign, and then going in and celebrating, with heatmap and session recordings, where the redesign has really improved things. That’s going to get the design team and the UX team more interested in working with you.”
“It’s going to make your boss look good because he or she shepherded this fantastic redesign. And then you can go and say here’s the next things we can be improving on.”
Use Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Your Bottom Line
Web AnalyticsIn this episode of The Conversion Scientist Podcast, Brian Massey tells you how to gain insights from third-party tools in Google Analytics. He uses several video hosts as an example to show step by step how to integrate these “In-App” video metrics with Analytics. And how to use Google Analytics to measure the impact of video content on your revenue.
Remember to check the very last section of this article to watch the free eight-part bit-sized video mini-course, “Video that Converts”
When “In-App” Analytics Are Not Enough to Gauge Impact on Conversions and Revenue
We were working on a client that sells a software application. After completing a test, we identified a single change that could increase the number of demo requests by 29%.
We removed a video from their demo request page.
Why? A quick look at the analytics showed that only few visitors were watching the video. We had a hunch that it was probably a barrier to conversions. And it was blocking more important information — information that could persuade more visitors to fill out the form on the page.
Video is just one of the many third-party services commonly implemented on ecommerce websites. Others include exit-intent overlays, live chat, ratings and reviews, faceted search or personalized and predictive product recommendations services.
The vast majority of third-party services will offer “in-app” analytics to help you assess their impact on your visitors’ behavior. Even though these “In App” analytics can provide insight into your online customers, they cannot show you the tools’ impact on leads and sales.
Using Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Revenue
Now, let’s take a deeper look at how integration of third-party analytics with Google Analytics can help answer difficult questions about our video ROI.
In-App Analytics
The vast majority of third-party tools offer useful analytics.
Let’s consider video hosts first. These services host your marketing videos and allow you to embed them on your site, landing pages and/or social media channels. Their promise is simple: faster, more reliable streaming than your basic website servers. Plus in-app video analytics.
We have used a variety of these providers in our video conversion projects, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Ooyala, Wistia and Vidyard. While YouTube is free, it gives your visitors too many opportunities to leave the webpage. The rest require a monthly video hosting fee.
All of these services offer some kind of dashboard with basic in-app analytics. Some of the metrics they share are:
A Wistia Analytics Example
We can see on the Vimeo graph below, the load counts, play counts and social sharing counts for this particular video.
The graph shows how many visitors saw the video, how many watched and how many shared it.
More interestingly, the Wistia report below, on an eight-part video series shows that viewers did not watch them in order. And we can deduce which of the topics captured our visitor’s interest.
Audience Retention Analysis: Vidyard and YouTube Examples
Wistia in-app analytics allows you to compare plays and play rates for multiple videos in a series.
If you are interested in finding which part of a video is less interesting to your video viewers, Vidyard and YouTube have a viewer drop-off graph. You may use it to gather how many stick around until the end.
In this Vidyard chart we can see that almost half of my viewers dropped off within 20 seconds. This video needs a stronger intro.
The results can be quite informative.
Consider this audience retention graph from a YouTube account. See the pronounced viewer drop-off in the first few seconds? Something made more than 10% of video viewers leave within seconds of starting the video. What could it be?
YouTube audience retention graph.
This audience retention visual report can be found inside your YouTube channel, synced with the video you are analyzing.
Our hypothesis was that viewers lost interest due to a vanity logo sequence. And it was costing us viewers.
We picked another video without vanity intro and we noticed a much smaller initial drop-off at the beginning. This supported our hypothesis.
The YouTube chart for the video without a vanity intro shows a slight engagement lift at the very beginning.
Vanity, thy name is logo. Even we at Conversion Sciences have given in to our egos with similarly unpleasant results.
We were chasing our viewers away.
It goes without saying that we no longer use the cool branding sequence in our marketing videos.
Measuring the Impact of Video on your Bottom Line: Integrated Analytics
The biggest barrier in-app analytics have is that they cannot be linked to our revenue metrics, namely leads and sales.
Predictive metrics like Engagement or Attention are not definitive. They can only suggest what might happen.
These are the questions we need answered by our analytics:
Time to bring in this third-party vendor data and integrated with Google Analytics.
The good news is, most of these third-party platforms or applications provide a way to generate Google Analytics events on visitor interaction. Events like watching a video, performing a filtered search or starting a live chat.
Integrating Google Analytics could be as simple as entering your Google Analytics ID, enabling a Google Tag Manager pre-written tag or adding some Javascript tracking code to your page.
Integrate Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Conversions
Video platforms generally fire Events when somebody plays the video, for the duration of the play and when the video has been watched to completion. Therefore, we don’t have much control over the type of Events the video platform provides.
Nevertheless, this is usually enough for us to create some advanced segments and assess the impact of the video on our sales or lead conversions.
We tested both Wistia and Vidyard in-app analytics integrated with Google Analytics on our eight-part video mini-course.
To see the Events generated by either of the embedded video players, choose Behavior > Events in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Events menu.
Here you will be able to see which Events are being generated by either of the video platforms. In this case, both send us Events when a video was played and for how long.
A screenshot of the Events sent by Wistia and Vidyard to Google Analytics.
Now, switch from Event Action to Event Label as the Primary Dimension on your Google Analytics report to see which videos are being watched.
Both video analytics are sending the videos that are being viewed.
But all of the above data can be found within the respective tools’ dashboards. Let’s dive into more interesting information by creating Advanced Segments.
Creating a GA Advanced Segment with Wistia’s Events
To measure and isolate sessions in which the visitor played a video, we built an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. This is particularly useful for online shops. It allows us to find out the impact of these videos on customer’s purchasing habits.
We used Wistia’s Play Event to isolate those sessions in which any of the eight videos in our series was viewed.
By creating an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics, we can look at sessions that include visitors who watched a video.
Our Wistia’s Played Video Advanced Segment includes sessions where a visitor played a video.
Use this segment to filter your ecommerce site Revenue, Conversion and Transaction data. Identify those visitors who watched one or more videos. Now, discover if this affected their buying behavior.
Comparing a buyer who interacted with a video to the “average” site visitor, we observe a drop in conversion rate and average order value.
In this example, the report strongly implies that website buyers who watched the video were less likely to make a purchase and bought less.
A simple integration of you video platform’s data with Google Analytics can derive stronger insights to find out the true impact of video on your bottom-line. Which ones will you find in your analytics now? Is your third-party app helping or hindering your sales or leads?
For more on Google Analytics to Measure the Impact of Video on Your Revenue, Listen to the Podcast
In this episode of The Conversion Scientist Podcast, Brian Massey tells you how to gain insights from third-party tools in Google Analytics. He uses several video hosts as an example.
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Link to Article on Marketing Land
Watch the free eight-part bit-sized video mini-course
Since you are a student of our Conversion Course, you get the entire mini-course Video that Converts.
An important eight-part series on creating marketing videos that convert visitors to leads and sales from Conversion Sciences.
Special thanks to Vidpow for producing the videos in our Video that Converts Mini-course.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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