One of my most requested and highest rated presentations for online sales is The Chemistry of the Landing Page. It’s part of our Conversion Course.
The elements combine to make an effective landing page. Here’s the equation for a successful landing page:
Our tried and true formula for a landing page uses several elements from our periodic table of conversion optimization.
This formula tells us that an effective landing page takes a Web Page (Wp), adds an Offer (Of), a Form (Fm), an Image (I) of the product plus Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) to get the visitor to take action. You may ask, “Where did these elements come from?”
We have a palette of things to work with that help us when we’re developing marketing campaigns that deliver sales, leads and subscribers. For us, it’s like a game.
This chart provides a vocabulary and methodology to work through ideas for higher and higher converting online properties. You’ll find it in our Landing Page ROI Checklist, which you can download for free.
Now you can play.
Download the Elements of Conversion Optimization PDF, cut out the elements, and start having some fun.
Click to Download a colorful palette of elements for writing, designing and strategizing for conversions.
We want to create a reaction with our visitors. See what I did there? When optimizing for conversions, we don’t want visitors to interact, we want them to react.
Start with the Basic Elements
These core elements are found in every reaction.
If we cut out Motion (M) and Image (I) to create a powerful kind of content.
It’s simple to combine elements to make new elements. Adding Motion (M) to Images (I) gives us Video (V).
Video (V) is found in the table under Content. Not all video is created equal.
Fun with Content
The set of elements in the Content section are powerful resources for getting visitors to take action.
Content comes in many forms, including the more interactive type.
The bottom row of Content is interactive. It engages the visitor in unique ways.
If we combine all of the basic elements plus a very special kind of content called Music (Mu), we get the recipe for an explainer video for our business. Explainer videos include the features and benefits of our product or service.
An explainer video requires a variety of content to be successful.
Pick a Container or Two
Where does this explainer video live? We can place it onto a web page or a Social Network (Sn) like YouTube.
Containers are the places where we mix our elements to spark reactions that generate new elements.
We can load our video onto YouTube, which is a social network.
As a Social Network (Sn), YouTube can turn Video content into Attention (Att) a semi-precious metal.
We’ve generated some precious attention as well as two kinds of User Generated Content, Comments and Likes. User-generated Comments (Cm) amplify the amount of Attention (Att) your business gets from a social posting.
This doesn’t get us much in the way of conversion. We may get some social content and some awareness, some Attention. For the sake of conversion, we need visits to our website. We need Traffic.
Dealing with the Precious Metals
Our main goal when combining elements is a bit of alchemy. We want to generate precious metals, Sales ($) and Leads (Pb). Those of you familiar with the periodic table of elements should get why I chose “Pb” for Leads.
The Metals represent our most valuable elements.
The precious metals represent some sort of conversion: a suspect to a prospect, a prospect to a lead, a lead to a sale. We’ll be doing more with the precious metals in future articles.
The Offer Leads the Conversion
The content that invites visitors to take action is an Offer of some kind. We can add the offer to the video or to the page. In a social network like YouTube, we don’t have much control over how offers are displayed on the page. Adding the offer to the video is considered a best practice in all situations.
The offer magically turns attention into traffic.
Putting an Offer in front of our attentive viewers can generate traffic for us.
I told you this was going to be fun. However, when we start asking visitors to do something, we introduce some contamination into our reaction.
The Traffic has to have someplace to go. So we can use our handy equation, shown above, to create a landing page.
When we combine our traffic with an effective landing page, sales and leads are created.
When playing the conversion game, we want Leads and online Sales as our reward. Qualified traffic plus an efficient landing page can deliver that for us.
The Inert Gases Get in the Way
If our video is longer than it is entertaining, we may generate a contaminant called Bordom (Bo). If we spend more time talking about our business and products than solutions for our viewers, we are generating Melium (Me). If we go on and on, we’re generating Hot Air (He).
All of these can generate the most disappointing contaminants, called Abandon (Ar). We give it the same symbol as the element Argon (Ar), because when someone abandons your content, they “Are gone.”
The Inert Gases just get in the way of our reactions and our conversions.
We can see these contaminants in our analytics. Here’s the attention graph for one of our explainer videos. This graph tells us what percentage of visitors are watching at any given time (blue line). The red line indicates replays of portions of the video.
Here is evidence of Inert Gases in the data from our explainer video. You be the judge.
At the beginning, we lose those viewers who are just in the wrong place, though viewers abandon the video throughout. There’s a place where we spend too much time drawing because we like to draw. This is producing Hot Air (He). Toward the end of this four-minute video we see evidence of Bordom (Bo). We should shorten things up.
Then, at the end, when we make the Offer (Of), we see some abandonment due to Melium (Me). We’re talking about ourselves at this point.
Adding Some Catalysts
Catalysts don’t actually react with anything, they help the other elements react faster, hotter or more efficiently. You shouldn’t buy our product just because others have, but social proof is a key motivator in many reactions. It’s a catalyst in our message. Search Engine Optimization (Seo) is invisible to the reader for the most part, but it can catalyze a page to create more Traffic (Tf).
Catalysts make reactions faster, hotter and more efficient.
Videos are great for Storytelling (St), so this might be a great catalyst for our explainer video. We know from our landing page formula above that Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) are important and should be included in our landing pages.
On our blog, we’ve used Gamification (Gm). Using a badges as a reward, we encourage visitors to come back and read more. This addition that has accelerated the growth of our subscriber list and traffic.
Our Explainer Video
We chose to put our explainer video on a landing page with an offer and a form. There is also an offer in the video. We transcribed the soundtrack to provide text for the page.
The formula is this:
The formulas for our explainer video Not how elements from one reaction feed another. See the landing page.
The traffic comes from this page and our weekly educational email, which you should subscribe to.
A Checklist for Effective Online Sales
These equations are your checklist for producing effective marketing. It also allows you to have some fun mixing and matching elements that may not seem to go together.
Download the PDF, cut out the elements, and get creative about how you make your online properties more profitable.
How to Create a Hypothesis List and Get a Date, Too
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingAs a Conversion Scientist, I used my background in Conversion Rate Optimization and Landing Pages to create the first draft of my OkCupid profile, the landing page of me. I utilized the chemistry of a successful landing page formula to make sure I hit all the known conversion points. OkCupid’s setup will limit me in the type of test I do. We’ll be doing pre/post testing so I started by putting my best page up, letting it run for two weeks and calculating my “pre” conversion rate.
During the first 14 days my profile was live, I had 104 visitors with nine messages. Those nine messages resulted in four qualified leads. My starting overall conversion rate is 8.65%. My qualified lead conversion rate is 3.84%.
My first stop in testing was a critique with an expert in landing pages. Lucky for me, I work for one. Sometimes, it’s difficult to asses your own work, so calling in an outside expert is always a great place to start.
The Conversion Scientist, Brian Massey, was nice enough to do one of his famous live critiques. In his video critique he pointed out blind spots and a few things that might be troubling.
If you’re not ready to call in an expert, there are tools you can use to give you a better sense of what might be happening. As a Conversion Scientist, I always start with analytics, click-tracking heatmaps, and screen capture sessions. These data points allow me to come up with a hypothesis list.
When creating a hypothesis list for a client, analytics is always the first stop. It allows me to identify key pages and performance metrics. I look at landing pages, all pageviews, audience channels and conversion metrics for each. This is where I start to see patterns and look for what pages I should be testing.
Questions to ask when looking at analytics:
I use this data to compile a list of key pages I want to look at more closely.
With OkCupid — and most landing pages — it’s pretty easy to know what to target. Visitors are coming from /match or /quickmatch pages and coming to my profile landing page.
Once I know what pages I will focus on, I switch to another set of tools. Heatmaps and Session Recordings provide a lot of insight into where visitors are getting hung up. The data these tools generate is a hot bed for hypothesis generation.
They allow me to see if a key call-to-action is in blind spot or if something on my page is getting surprise attention. Check out the Conversion Lab for a list of awesome conversion tools options.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
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Normally the resources I can install on a client’s website inform the hypothesis list and the recommendations I come up with, so I have to be creative by relying on my own experience and on an expert’s opinion, namely Brian Massey.
Here are a few hypotheses from his analysis.
I create a list of hypotheses to test when I begin optimizing
Brian’s critique gave me some great ideas on what to test. I know that my copy needs a bit of work, as does my landing page’s scannability. This is the first hypothesis I’m testing:
Hypothesis: If I change the copy to be about the visitor, instead of myself and improve scannability with bold text and paragraph breaks I can improve conversions.
I carefully changed all of the “I” statements and made them about the visitor. I also added more paragraph breaks and highlighted key words in my text allowing a visitor to more easily scan my profile.
My revised profile
When testing, it’s important to isolate as many variables as possible, so for now the copy is the only thing I changed. I could have swapped out my headshot for a party shot, but if I see an increase in conversion rate, I won’t know if it’s the photo or the copy that’s improving my numbers.
For our testing purposes, my primary goal will be to beat my qualified lead conversion rate of 3.84%, but I will be tracking my overall conversion rate and visitor count as well.
I’m going to want to test more than one hypothesis to get this profile just right. For my next test, I’ll focus on images. Choosing the right images are vital to the success of a landing page, maybe even more so on this particular type of landing page. Since my next test will focus on the images. I did some research, scouring the internet for articles from online dating experts and determined the best profile photos were a smiling woman looking at the camera, showing some skin but not too much skin.
I had a small selection of photos I thought would fit the bill so I decided to take an informal poll of men that fit the type I was looking for: I asked a bunch of my guys friends to help me choose a photo. The photo of me in a black sleeveless dress smiling warmly at the camera was the clear winner. I filled out the rest of my profile photos with a variety of activities and a few shots of me dressed up a bit to show that while I may wear a lab coat to work, I do clean up okay for a night on the town.
This first test isn’t about the images, but after Brian’s critique, I knew that my images might not be saying what I wanted them to say. For this initial pre/post test, I left the photo winners from my poll as they were but added captions to clarify what I wanted the viewer to get from each image.
I’ve shared what I was doing when this photo was taken and also indicated that it’s a fairly recent photo.
With my changes made and my visitor count ticking up, there’s nothing to do but wait and see. We’ll check back in a week (and I’ll look every day in between) to see how my text changes have fared. With any luck (or in my case, with science), I’ll have upped that 3.8% conversion rate.
Are Your PPC Ads and Landing Pages in Alignment?
Advertising CRO, Landing Page OptimizationPay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a highly effective way to get your products in front of new prospective customers and drive sales, but only when campaigns are set up with the right touch. Depending on what keywords you want to target with your bids, search ads are generally not prohibitively expensive, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of blowing through your budget on PPC without justifying your media spend with enough sales.
The PPC management mistakes that most commonly ruin advertisers’ chances of respectable ROI involve text mismatches. All too often, an ad’s keyword settings do not match the language used in the ad’s creative, or the landing page content does not match the language used in the ad’s creative.
Search marketing spending in the US from 2014 to 2019.
Why Matching Terminology Matters
Successful PPC marketing hinges on continuity across all touch points. Web searchers enter search terms into Google based on a need they are trying to fulfill. By the time users have formulated their queries as lines of text, they have already been forced to think about what they’re looking for as being specific to certain terminology. Thus, if your message is going to resonate with them, it has to use the very same terminology.
Google users naturally gravitate towards organic search results. To catch people’s eyes, your ad needs to convey that it addresses the exact issue that the searcher is trying to solve. What’s more, search terms that appear within ad copy appear in bold letters, adding to their visibility and click-throughs.
When people click on the ad, they are expecting to find a matching solution on the other end. You know that dirty feeling you get when you click on a content headline that over-promises and the article ultimately under-delivers? That’s a similar feeling to what happens when there’s a disconnect between search ad copy and landing page copy.
When you get that feeling, you’re unlikely to do business with whoever gave it to you. And that’s why it’s so important that the landing page refer to the exact need at hand and offer an appropriate solution, all using the same terminology. This is one of those landing page best practices that tends to be right every single time.
PPC Ads and Landing Pages in Alignment: The Power of Maximized Continuity
Lack of continuity will result in customers leaving your conversion funnel before opting in to your lead capture offer or purchasing your products.
If a customer searches for “cyan polo shirt summer sale” and you show him an ad for “men’s clothing,” he is not likely to click on it, even though your online store might very well offer cyan polo shirts in the men’s section. Even ad creative touting a “blue polo shirt” product won’t perform as well as the phrase “cyan polo shirt” would – the closer to an exact match you can get, the more effective your ads will be.
Use the word “cyan” to describe the color of this shirt, not just “blue”.
The same principle applies to matching ad copy with landing page copy. If your ad promises a “cyan polo shirt summer sale” but you send people to your homepage, where there are 25 different apparel products being showcased and no trace of any type of sale, the visitor is likely to bounce out extremely quickly.
Customized Ecommerce Text Variations
Using standardized language across your website is necessary to maintain an atmosphere of professional polish and so that your internal search engine will work well. On the other hand, when you set up your search ad campaigns, you should be performing some extensive keyword research to reveal all of the alternate wording that people use for the same thing.
Going back to the same example, you may learn that people often search for polo shirts that are “sapphire,” “teal,” or “turquoise,” which are all reasonably close matches to the “cyan” that appears on your product pages. It totally makes sense to bid on ads to appear on search results for “sapphire polo shirt,” but in cases like these, you may want to create alternate versions of your product pages that only visitors referred by this specific ad will see.
Just make sure to keep these variations out of sight of the search engines, so you won’t get penalized for duplicate content – and out of sight in the website navigation, so visitors do not get confused. Apply a meta “No Index” tag to the head of the landing page to make sure that variations don’t get indexed. Better yet, make sure all your PPC ad campaign landing pages are noindex, follow. Until you have chosen the one you would like to drive organic traffic to.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion
A helpful tool in this process is a Google Adwords feature called Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This tool will adjust your ad text to reflect keywords in the user’s search, potentially accomplishing the same goals we just discussed.
Wordstream ran a case study testing the effectiveness of DKI with a client, and found that using this strategy had the following results:
DKI more than tripled conversions.
The results speak for themselves.
In the context of continuity, the key is to have a very small number of keywords in your ad groups. For top performers, you may even want to use Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS).
Customized Lead Capture Page Variations
If your offer is for a service, a B2B product or something otherwise relatively expensive, then you don’t need to send visitors to ecommerce-integrated product pages at all. In these cases, a sparser landing page is likely to perform better, and it’s easy and inexpensive to create new versions of your landing pages for each keyword combination that you bid for.
Landing pages like these are generally aimed at capturing leads rather than driving sales, since major purchases require more pre-sale relationship building to establish trust and to educate prospects. Many of the better marketing platforms available in the open market offer modules for both landing page creation and autoresponder marketing emails.
If lead capture is your goal, focus your Adwords strategy on your prospects’ pain points rather than your offer’s specifications. For instance, a financial consulting firm could run PPC ads for the search term “family budgeting help” or “debt advice.” These ads could lead to landing page variations for each search term, with each one offering visitors the option to download an eBook that provides practical tips on family budgeting and saving money on household bills.
A campaign of this type takes into account that the prospect is having trouble balancing his or her household budget, and it offers a quick and easy solution that also positions the advertiser as a trustworthy expert in the field of family finance. This paves the way for follow-up messaging.
Another benefit of this type of hyper-specific targeting is that it allows marketers to segment the entire customer journey and serve up nurturing emails that match the subscriber’s specific interests. A post-campaign analysis of the relevant conversion data can reveal which segments represent the advertiser’s most valuable customers, thereby informing subsequent marketing strategies.
Doesn’t Have to Be a Bottomless Pit
You do need a landing page for every important ad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should set up hundreds of landing pages. Instead, focus your campaign on a select number of lead nurture audience personas (three or four) and create an ad that’s optimized to speak to each one of them. Create a unique landing page for each of these ads and set up an autoresponder to send follow-up emails with relevant content to each persona.
If you’re marketing an ecommerce property with a diverse product line and a shopping cart system, start by trying these tactics for just a few products. If it serves you well, then you can focus on making your work flow scalable down the road.
PPC campaigns that are set up for maximum terminology variations are likely to enjoy boosted conversion rates and revenues, so that ad dollars are less likely to go to waste.
Graph image by Statista (via Skitch)
Get More Online Sales with the Elements of Conversion
Conversion-Centered DesignOne of my most requested and highest rated presentations for online sales is The Chemistry of the Landing Page. It’s part of our Conversion Course.
The elements combine to make an effective landing page. Here’s the equation for a successful landing page:
Our tried and true formula for a landing page uses several elements from our periodic table of conversion optimization.
This formula tells us that an effective landing page takes a Web Page (Wp), adds an Offer (Of), a Form (Fm), an Image (I) of the product plus Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) to get the visitor to take action. You may ask, “Where did these elements come from?”
We have a palette of things to work with that help us when we’re developing marketing campaigns that deliver sales, leads and subscribers. For us, it’s like a game.
This chart provides a vocabulary and methodology to work through ideas for higher and higher converting online properties. You’ll find it in our Landing Page ROI Checklist, which you can download for free.
Now you can play.
Download the Elements of Conversion Optimization PDF, cut out the elements, and start having some fun.
Click to Download a colorful palette of elements for writing, designing and strategizing for conversions.
We want to create a reaction with our visitors. See what I did there? When optimizing for conversions, we don’t want visitors to interact, we want them to react.
Start with the Basic Elements
These core elements are found in every reaction.
If we cut out Motion (M) and Image (I) to create a powerful kind of content.
It’s simple to combine elements to make new elements. Adding Motion (M) to Images (I) gives us Video (V).
Video (V) is found in the table under Content. Not all video is created equal.
Fun with Content
The set of elements in the Content section are powerful resources for getting visitors to take action.
Content comes in many forms, including the more interactive type.
The bottom row of Content is interactive. It engages the visitor in unique ways.
If we combine all of the basic elements plus a very special kind of content called Music (Mu), we get the recipe for an explainer video for our business. Explainer videos include the features and benefits of our product or service.
An explainer video requires a variety of content to be successful.
Pick a Container or Two
Where does this explainer video live? We can place it onto a web page or a Social Network (Sn) like YouTube.
Containers are the places where we mix our elements to spark reactions that generate new elements.
We can load our video onto YouTube, which is a social network.
As a Social Network (Sn), YouTube can turn Video content into Attention (Att) a semi-precious metal.
We’ve generated some precious attention as well as two kinds of User Generated Content, Comments and Likes. User-generated Comments (Cm) amplify the amount of Attention (Att) your business gets from a social posting.
This doesn’t get us much in the way of conversion. We may get some social content and some awareness, some Attention. For the sake of conversion, we need visits to our website. We need Traffic.
Dealing with the Precious Metals
Our main goal when combining elements is a bit of alchemy. We want to generate precious metals, Sales ($) and Leads (Pb). Those of you familiar with the periodic table of elements should get why I chose “Pb” for Leads.
The Metals represent our most valuable elements.
The precious metals represent some sort of conversion: a suspect to a prospect, a prospect to a lead, a lead to a sale. We’ll be doing more with the precious metals in future articles.
The Offer Leads the Conversion
The content that invites visitors to take action is an Offer of some kind. We can add the offer to the video or to the page. In a social network like YouTube, we don’t have much control over how offers are displayed on the page. Adding the offer to the video is considered a best practice in all situations.
The offer magically turns attention into traffic.
Putting an Offer in front of our attentive viewers can generate traffic for us.
I told you this was going to be fun. However, when we start asking visitors to do something, we introduce some contamination into our reaction.
The Traffic has to have someplace to go. So we can use our handy equation, shown above, to create a landing page.
When we combine our traffic with an effective landing page, sales and leads are created.
When playing the conversion game, we want Leads and online Sales as our reward. Qualified traffic plus an efficient landing page can deliver that for us.
The Inert Gases Get in the Way
If our video is longer than it is entertaining, we may generate a contaminant called Bordom (Bo). If we spend more time talking about our business and products than solutions for our viewers, we are generating Melium (Me). If we go on and on, we’re generating Hot Air (He).
All of these can generate the most disappointing contaminants, called Abandon (Ar). We give it the same symbol as the element Argon (Ar), because when someone abandons your content, they “Are gone.”
The Inert Gases just get in the way of our reactions and our conversions.
We can see these contaminants in our analytics. Here’s the attention graph for one of our explainer videos. This graph tells us what percentage of visitors are watching at any given time (blue line). The red line indicates replays of portions of the video.
Here is evidence of Inert Gases in the data from our explainer video. You be the judge.
At the beginning, we lose those viewers who are just in the wrong place, though viewers abandon the video throughout. There’s a place where we spend too much time drawing because we like to draw. This is producing Hot Air (He). Toward the end of this four-minute video we see evidence of Bordom (Bo). We should shorten things up.
Then, at the end, when we make the Offer (Of), we see some abandonment due to Melium (Me). We’re talking about ourselves at this point.
Adding Some Catalysts
Catalysts don’t actually react with anything, they help the other elements react faster, hotter or more efficiently. You shouldn’t buy our product just because others have, but social proof is a key motivator in many reactions. It’s a catalyst in our message. Search Engine Optimization (Seo) is invisible to the reader for the most part, but it can catalyze a page to create more Traffic (Tf).
Catalysts make reactions faster, hotter and more efficient.
Videos are great for Storytelling (St), so this might be a great catalyst for our explainer video. We know from our landing page formula above that Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) are important and should be included in our landing pages.
On our blog, we’ve used Gamification (Gm). Using a badges as a reward, we encourage visitors to come back and read more. This addition that has accelerated the growth of our subscriber list and traffic.
Our Explainer Video
We chose to put our explainer video on a landing page with an offer and a form. There is also an offer in the video. We transcribed the soundtrack to provide text for the page.
The formula is this:
The formulas for our explainer video Not how elements from one reaction feed another. See the landing page.
The traffic comes from this page and our weekly educational email, which you should subscribe to.
A Checklist for Effective Online Sales
These equations are your checklist for producing effective marketing. It also allows you to have some fun mixing and matching elements that may not seem to go together.
Download the PDF, cut out the elements, and get creative about how you make your online properties more profitable.
Headlines: 14 Ways to Make Them Amazing
Persuasion ScienceOne of my webinar attendees asked the question, “What are some of the best headlines you’ve tested?”
Of course, most of the best headlines I’ve found were the ones I’ve written. Well, that’s not completely true. They were the best until I tested them. Often my favorites didn’t win.
Nonetheless, headlines are one of our favorite things to test because
We learn what words get past the bouncers in our readers’ brains.
Some of the best headlines we’ve tested were emotional, abrupt and unexpected. In one of our more famous tests for an addiction treatment center, we found that a conceptual headline such as “Ready to start healing?” performed poorly compared to “Speak to a Compassionate Rehab Specialiast.” The latter delivered a 32% increase in phone calls.
What could beat that? It was “Ready to Stop Lying? If so, we can help,” which delivered a 43% boost in calls.
Testing is the only way we have found to improve headlines, but a few guidelines can keep you from starting with stinky headlines.
Never ask a question for which the answer is “Yes” or “No.”
Neither entices the reader to keep reading. The proper response a reader should have to a headline question is, “Whaaaat??” or “How will you do that?”
Your question headline shouldn’t elicit a “Yes” or “No” answer. It should certainly never make the readers say, “Um, I don’t know,” or “Let’s not take a look.”
“Ready to Stop Lying?”
Don’t try to carpet bomb with headlines.
Pick one. Your subheadlines should follow from one strong headline.
Three headlines that don’t seem to follow each other. This is headline carpet bombing.
Echo the promise
Your headline should echo the promise made by the link, ad or email that brought the visitor to the page in the first place.
The promise of a Web Trial seems broken by an ignored landing page headline.
If you’re goal is to get a visitor to call, put the phone number in the headline.
“Welcome” is not a headline.
If “Welcome” is in your headline, you’ve probably “buried the lead.”
Specific headlines generally outperform conceptual headlines.
Transform my lecture into what? Conceptual headlines lose the reader from the start.
Don’t be cute.
If you are not a copywriter — a professionally trained copywriter with a proven track record of generating sales — don’t try to write a cute headline.
Cute. If I was a bolted assembly technician, I still doubt I would find this headline intriguing.
Don’t reveal the ending.
Your headline should not be complete without the following sentence or sub-headline.
I’ve got to watch the video to find out what 40,000 NRA members know that I don’t.
Defend your headlines.
Just because your boss owns a copy of Microsoft Word does not make him a copywriter. Be ready to defend your headlines from executive bloat.
A strong premise, but too many words make this headline a stinker. The question is, “Would you invest one day to avoid a law suit?”
Write a lot of headlines.
Write 20-50 headlines for every page. Keep one.
Concise headlines don’t have to be cute. They are the result of iteration after iteration.
Test.
Test your headlines. Be ready to be disappointed at the winners.
Get an outside opinion.
Have someone outside the company read your headlines.
NEBOSH IGC? IOSH? This from a company who teaches Mars safety. They sound like they’re from another planet.
Don’t bury the lede.
If you’re having trouble coming up with a headline, it’s can probably be found buried in the copy.
“Get yourself organized” sounds like a lot of work.
“Over 317,988 small businesses use inFlow Inventory” means I better read on.
Why bury the most compelling reason to use the software?
Translate carefully.
Study the rules of grammar for the language you’re writing for.
Is it “a great customer experience,” or “great customer experiences?” Not even the editor made it past this unexciting headline.
These rules will get you started, providing the best headlines you can write without testing.
What rules would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments.
Feature image by woodleywonderworks via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.
The Conference Where it’s OK to Get Emotional
News & EventsDoes it pay to criticize Google? Probably not. But Brian Massey thinks that Google is doing website owners a disservice by almost forcing them to move to responsive web design (RWD) to support a “mobile friendly” website.
Here, Brian says “It’s an irresponsible policy for many reasons.” In private, he says Google is scaring businesses into potentially wrecking their websites. At Ungagged, he’ll use words that are not safe for the children’s ears.
There is a conference that affords thought leaders a forum to let their passions run. It’s called the Ungagged conference. As the name implies, it seeks to take the gag off and let us say what we really think.
Not only will Brian be in rare form, but you can expect rants from Kristine Schachinger, Roland Frasier, Ruth Carter, John Rampton, Aleyda Solis, and more.
Why You Can't Ignore Mobile Web Traffic
Conversion Marketing StrategyThis is a common question, and requires an understanding of the definitions of bounce rate.”
The bounce rate is a bit slippery and requires some examination. The intention of measuring the bounce rate is to figure out how many of your visitors are leaving almost immediately after arriving at your site. This metric provides for a lot of error in interpretation.
“A high bounce rate means you’re site is crappy.”
This is rarely the case. A more accurate explanation is that your site doesn’t look the way your visitors expect it to look. Understanding what your visitors expect is the way to reduce your bounce rate.
Instead, there are usually some more valid reasons for your high bounce rate. Here are the things we examine when confronted with uncomfortably high bounce rates.
You’re measuring it wrong.
How you measure your bounce rate can give you very different insights. For example, blogs often have high bounce rates. Does this mean that visitors don’t like the blog?
Many analytics packages measure a bounce as a visit, or session, that includes only one page. Visitors who take the time to read an entire article would be considered a “bounce” if they then left, even though they are clearly engaged.
We set a timer for our blog traffic, so that any visitor who sticks around for 15 seconds or more is not considered a bounce.
Technical Difficulties
We are fond of saying that you don’t have one website, you have ten or twenty or thirty. Each device, each browser, each screen-size delivers a different experience to the visitor. If your website is broken on one of the more devices popular with your visitors, you will see a bump in overall bounce rate.
If your pages load slowly, especially on mobile devices, you can expect a higher bounce rate.
If your page breaks out in a chorus of Also Sprach Zarathustra when the page loads, you may enjoy a higher bounce rate.
How to diagnose
Your analytics package will track the kind of device your visitors are coming on.
Is there a problem with this site when viewed with the Safari (in app) browser?
The Google Analytics report Audience > Technology > Browser & OS shows that there may be a technical issue with Safari visitors coming from within an app. This may also reflect visitors coming from mobile ads, and they may simply be lower quality. See below.
With Google Analytics Audience > Mobile > Devices report, we see mobile devices specifically. The Apple iPhone has an above-average bounce rate, and we should probably do some testing there, especially since it’s the bulk of our mobile traffic.
With an above average bounce rate, visitors on an Apple iPhone may be seeing a technical problem.
Traffic Quality
If you’re getting the wrong visitors, you will have a high bounce rate.
Remember StumbleUpon? Getting your site featured on the internet discovery site often meant a flood of new visitors to your site… and a crash in your conversion rate. Stumble traffic was not qualified, they were just curious.
Your bounce rate is a great measure of the quality of your traffic. Low quality traffic bounces because:
We take a closer look at the source of traffic to diagnose a traffic quality problem using Google Analytics Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels report.
Display and direct traffic are our biggest traffic sources and bring the most bouncers.
Here we can see that traffic coming from Display ads and those visitors coming “Direct-ly” have a high bounce rate. These two sources also make up 50% of our traffic. Ouch.
In the case of Direct traffic, we expect most of it to come to the home page. With a click, we can see that indeed 50% of Direct visits are to home.
Filtering for Direct traffic, we see that 50% of it is entering on the home page.
Clearly we need to do more to get visitors on their way into the site. As Tim Ash says, “The job of the home page is to get people off of the home page.” He didn’t mean by bouncing.
With regard to Display ads, we my have a problem with broken promises.
Broken Promises
Do your entry pages consider the source of visits?
If your traffic is clicking on an ad that promises 20% off on a specific propane grill, and they’re directed to your home page, you’ve broken a promise. You might think that they will search your site for the deal. You might even think they’ll search your home page for the deal. You’re wrong. Many will jump.
Every ad, every email invitation, every referral link is a promise you make to your visitor. If they don’t come to a page that lives up to the promise, they are likely to bounce.
This Dispaly ad takes the visitors to a page that is almost designed to disappoint.
Looking at your ads on a page-by-page basis is necessary to diagnose and correct this kind of bound-rate problem.
Vague Value Propositions
Ultimately, if you’re not communicating your value proposition to your visitors clearly, you are going to enjoy a monstrous bounce rate.
Your value proposition typically does not address your company or your products. It should be targeted at your visitor, why they are there, and why they should stick around.
Each page has it’s own value proposition. Your business may have a powerful value proposition, but each page should stand on its own.
A contact page should talk about what will happen after you complete the form. Who will contact you? How long will it take? Will they try to sell you something?
A landing page should clearly state that you are in the right place and provide reasons for you to stay and read on.
This landing page delivered a strong value proposition in above the fold. See the full case study and video.
A home page should help you find your way into the site. Most home pages are treated like highway billboards. No wonder people just drive on by.
Ultimately, we don’t want to reduce our bounce rate. We want to improve our conversion rate by bringing the right traffic, to the right page, with the right message, and avoid technical issues that get in the way.
Richard Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
What I Learned About Conversion Optimization from a Dating Profile
Landing Page OptimizationBrian Massey does a live markup of an OK Cupid dating profile using the same criteria that he uses when critiquing a business landing page.
Conversion Sciences employee Megan Hoover has agreed to be the test subject, using conversion optimization techniques on her dating profile.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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There are five key takeaways that you should consider on your landing pages.
1. Don’t talk about yourself and your company
How often do you mention your company or your product names? Add to the that number of times you say “we”, “us”, “our”, etc. Have you forgotten your reader?
Are you talking about yourself or what you have to offer the reader?
In the video, we transform the sentence “(I’m) a northern yankee in the south…” to “Northern Yankees are known for having warm hearts.” Both communicate the same thing, but one does so and states why this is a good thing.
2. Design your copy for scanners
Much of your copy is invisible to scanners.
Scanners won’t see most of your copy without help.
Help them out by using things to keep their wandering eyes on track.
Don’t over-do it, but help a scanner out.
3. Repeat the call to action in key places
If you’re asking the visitor to take action at only the top and bottom of a long page, you may be missing key conversions.
Repeat the call to action with each relevant proof point or section.
4. “Show the product” with images and use Captions
Use images to explain your value proposition but don’t leave the meaning to your reader’s imagination.
Use captions to explain the point of your images.
Use captions and in-image text to spell out what they should take from each image.
5. Avoid distractions and irrelevant links
Landing pages have one goal. Focus on that goal and resist irrelevant distractions, such as social media icons, newsletter signups and links to other parts of the site.
Distractions and irrelevant links work against your landing page.
All of this should work on your dating profile
These are solid practices when designing a landing page, and should apply to a dating profile as well. Readers are people.
Our next step is to modify Megan’s dating profile based on my suggestions and see if we get a higher conversion rate.
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Get Around Website Blind Spots with Split Testing Software [PODCAST]
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingHow many goals do you set when you’re designing a split test for your website?
We’re goal-crazy here in the lab at Conversion Sciences. It is not unusual for our tests have dozens of goals. Why is that?
We see split testing as a data collection activity, not a tool that gives us answers. It’s not like wikipedia. The split-testing software on the market to day is amazingly agile when it comes to tracking, targeting and snooping on visitor behavior. We certainly want to track transactions, revenue and leads. But we learn so much more from our tests.
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In my new Marketing Land column The Multi-Goal Magic Of Split Testing Software, I describe how we use some of these goals to find sweet spots in a website.
You can listen to the column or read it for yourself.
Mobile Web 2.0: Judgment Day Video
Conversion-Centered Design[cs-black-band]
About the Amazing Presenters
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Conversion Optimization is Like Retirement Planning, Just More Exciting
Conversion OptimizationA shocking graph; The power of compound interest; What 7% a month growth gets you.
I had to study the graphic two or three times before my brain registered what it was saying. We recently enacted a new retirement plan here at Conversion Sciences — a Safe Harbor 401(k) for you odd ducks that find this sort of thing interesting.
I thought I understood the value of saving at an early age, especially since I have acquired the wisdom that is lacking among early-agers. Yet, a little graphic buried in the heavy pages of our retirement plan manual made me wish I could jump on George Orwell’s time machine.
Any young whippersnapper who can scrounge up $2,400 a year for ten years will have more party money at retirement than I will if I put away $2,400 every year until I am 80.
It’s just not fair.
I hope this next sentence will help my retirement problems, because it will make everyone want to call Conversion Sciences.
Any business who can scrounge up $10,000 or $15,000 a month for website optimization will have far more revenue in thirty months than a business who waits ten months before they start.
Conversion optimization is like compounding interest. New increases in revenue per visit or conversion rate are built on top of last month’s wins.
An increase in conversion rate of just 7% each month will double your revenue in one year.Time is your Friend
Time is not the enemy. It is your friend. Every business is a whippersnapper in the optimization game. The tools we use have been around for less than ten years.
If this makes you feel better about waiting, then I have bad news for you. Ten months will pass faster than you think.
Like proto-retirees, there are a number of rationalizations working against you when considering conversion optimization.
Juicy Rationalizations
The rationalizations that keep us from investing for retirement are the same as those that keep us from investing in website optimization.
I have time.
If you don’t have competitors, you have time. A higher conversion rate means a lower cost of acquisition. A competitor who has optimized, will spend less in advertising and still generate more leads and sales than you. As more time passes the odds of you catching up to them are, well, look at the graph.
I don’t have the money this month.
If your son or daughter was telling you this, you’d have a long list of “discretionary” expenditures that they could cut out to find $200 a month for retirement. The same is probably true for your business.
Budget for conversion optimization. Borrow from your advertising spend (gasp). Ask your rich Grandmother for a business loan. The money is there.
I’m investing. We have tools.
This is like signing up for your company’s 401(k) but not putting any money in. It makes you feel better, but not for long.
I was recently asked what my favorite Conversion Rate Optimization tools were. I listed “The human brain” as my number one tool. “Train it. Feed it. Let it run wild,” were my substantiating thoughts. Cheeky, yes, but oh so appropos.
Get the right people in place and they’ll grab the right tools for the job. It doesn’t work the other way around.
I don’t have the traffic.
This actually increases the imperative of starting early. Low traffic sites require longer to optimize. You may have to think in terms of quarters instead of months. The rules are the same: start now. Collect the right data and get someone to help you evaluate what you’re learning.
The Fine Print
Like the stock market, conversion optimization doesn’t give you a steady increase month after month. Your efforts will see agonizing plateaus as well as some jaw-dropping wins.
But, if you invest in reputable resources with a track record of success you can expect to see unfair gains over the long term.
Now, you should ask us for a free conversion strategy session. We’ll go over your current situation and help you decide how to get started, whether we’re involved or not.
Someone once said, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.”
It’s now.
Retirement image provided by ADP.