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.
Increase Conversions on Low-Traffic Websites
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingHere’s a common question: “How do you increase conversions when you only get a small amount of traffic?”
The first answer is, go get more traffic.
You can do statistical optimization using split testing if you have enough conversions, but this usually comes with more traffic.
The second answer is to get more conversions so you can do conversion optimization to get more conversions. Which came first, the conversion or the optimizer?
This last point is, of course, the proverbial “rub.”
Here’s how to get started if you are running low-traffic websites.
Get Accurate Data
Be sure your analytics is setup properly. I offer an analytics setup checklist to help with Google Analytics. You’ll want to avoid blind spots such as overlay windows, tabbed content, and subdomains on separate analytics accounts.
You’re going to need a good source of data when you start picking things to test.
Compare your analytics data to a secondary dataset. Compare lead conversions to your CRM. Compare transactions reported to your accounting system. Your analytics should be within 15% of reality. Don’t be afraid to install a secondary analytics package to verify your main analytics setup.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
"*" indicates required fields
Get Some Qualitative Data
Low-traffic websites need to get more qualitative data. Right now, the one-stop-shop for qualitative data is HotJar. It offers click-tracking, session recording and feedback surveys. For alternatives, check out the ConversionDashboard.com.
Low-traffic Websites Use Serial Tests
If you don’t have the conversions to do split testing, you’ll want to do serial testing. This simply means making a single small change to your site and letting it run for at least two weeks. Since you have solid analytics (see above), you can see if there is an improvement in performance.
Measure More Than Conversions
There are some predictive metrics that you can use to gauge the performance of your serial tests.
Time on page, time on site, and pages per visit are to be taken with a grain of salt. Increasing these may correlate with lower conversion rates.
Start with the Message
Nothing works until your value proposition is strong. I recommend testing changes to your value proposition. I’ve done hundreds of free strategy consultations over the years. Most of the time, I ask the consultee to tell me about their business. Typically, I get a concise, clear statement of the offering and value.
Rarely does this clarity appear on the website.
Sit with a copywriter and tell your story. Then, don’t edit them. Whatever they come up with, try it.
You should also test:
Don’t bury the lead. A great headline — called the “lead” — is the core of a strong value proposition. Often the headline that would best “grab” a reader is buried somewhere in the copy.
Find the headline that gets visitors to read your value proposition, and you’ll have the cornerstone of conversion in place.
Look for Big Wins
You’re going to have to find what we call “big wins.” This means that your change increased conversions by more than 50%. Rich Page wrote on low-traffic testing. My comment on his post was as follows:
Technically, it’s OK to make a treatment with, say, a 30% increase the new control. Just know that you’re not likely to continue to see such an increase with small transaction amounts.
Ditch Your Outliers
You’re going to have to eliminate “outliers” in your data. Outliers include extreme orders in ecommerce sites and rushes of leads from activities such as email blasts and bursts of word of mouth.
For an ecommerce site, you should look at orders that are one or two standard deviations away from the mean.
So, what does that “mean?”
Here is two weeks of daily sales data for a site that gets about one sale per day.
There are two obvious outliers: One day with no sales in the first week, and one with $160 in sales the second week. Statistically, a 16% increase is irrelevant, but the point is driven home when you calculate the standard deviation range.
For this data, an outlier will be lower than $27.90 or higher than $86.89.
When we remove outliers we see a drop in sales of six percent. This is statistically uninteresting as well, but illustrates how outliers can affect results.
If you’d like to see how I calculated the min and max, download Example of Outliers-Conversion Scientist-low-traffic post.
Don’t Let it Run
Split testing can be done on low-transaction sites. However, don’t let the test run for more than, say, six weeks. The results just aren’t reliable. There are too many other variables mucking with your data over such long timeframes.
Always Be Testing
Just because you have few transactions per month doesn’t mean you can’t be learning. In fact, not learning may well be the reason you have few transactions per month. Never stop trying things, and use good data to decide what you keep and what you throw away.
Feature image by Shaun Garrity via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.
Sliders, Greeters, and Headlines – Dos and Don’ts
Conversion-Centered DesignLast week was back-to-school for students all over the country, and they’ll soon be held accountable for how they spent their three months of freedom: exams and essays on their summer reading will be graded any day now.
We stayed productive and sharp the past few months between trips to the beach because we’ll always be students at heart, and here’s the proof. For Further Study…Summer Reading Edition!
Conversion Conference: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Writing Compelling Headlines
We almost always test headlines on the landing pages we optimize. It’s how we get some of our best wins to increase conversion rates. This orthography is a great primer for writing headlines that you can test on your pages.Getting headlines right is so important that someone in a webinar once asked me about some of my favorites. I answered that question by giving some tips of my own and also sharing some pretty ineffective headlines (plus how to avoid writing them).
Jeremy Said: Let’s Talk About Image Sliders and Conversions
Rotating headers, called “sliders” are losing their favor on landing pages. Ultimately, this is a good thing. But these hedges don’t have to be conversion killers.
In the article’s summary of our tests on sliders, we’ve been able to make rotating hero images work by first testing the order. A large part of the increase in revenue per visit was from putting the most important panels first.
Notice that the two panels that delivered the best result were offer oriented (Same Day Shipping and Super Saver Shipping). It’s possible that we could remove the conceptual panels (“Make a bold outdoor impression” and “Leader in digital mesh banner printing”) without impacting the revenue per visit. This would save some load time.
Read more about the actual research behind sliders and how they affect conversion rates.
Olark: How Clever Greeters Increase Conversion Rates
What is the equivalent of a good headline when you’re talking about online chat? It’s the questions your greeters ask. Like headlines, greeter questions provide better results when they are:
Often, being relevant and specific is surprising enough to meet the last requirement: unexpected.
Read more about how greeters can increase conversions.
Dear America, Don't Worry About Mobile Commerce [INFOGRAPHIC]
Ecommerce CRO“We’ve got mCommerce covered. Sincerely, the rest of the world.”
What if I told you that there was an under-served segment of your marketplace, a segment that is growing three times faster than your current visitors? What if I told you this segment was using mobile apps at an alarming rate?
Would you be interested in knowing more about this segment? Worldwide venture capital firms are investing in this segment, more than any other right now.
Yes, it’s the mobile commerce segment, that portion of your visitors that will purchase from their phones, install apps for your marketplace and fuel the growth of all of our industries. Mobile commerce is exploding in the US, but this growth pales in comparison to other countries.
If you think mCommerce is important outside the US because they have more mobile users to begin with, you may be missing the point. All countries have a lot of mobile users, and that portion willing to buy on their phone or tablet is growing. While the rest of the world would like to see us resting on our desktop laurels, you can’t afford to oblige them, according to this infographic.
The global trend in online shopping favors mCommerce over desktop eCommerce. That’s not to say that eCommerce isn’t also growing – both mobile and desktop online shopping are steadily increasing, but mobile growth eclipses desktop with a projected growth that’s 300% greater than traditional eCommerce over the next few years.
mCommerce is expected to grow at 300% the rate of traditional eCommerce
mCommerce is such an international trend that you might be surprised to see that several of the top mobile retailers of 2014 are companies that would be unfamiliar to the average American shopper. (Though the number one retailer is hardly shocking.)
The top 10 mobile retailers of 2014
It’s true that this mobile trend is all over the world – some Scandinavian countries will see growth of over 50% – but there’s one part of the world that is seeing increases at an especially aggressive rate.
China has the highest number of mobile shoppers
With China’s ever increasing role in our international economy, its number of mobile shoppers compared to other countries is to be expected, and the rest of Asia isn’t far behind.
Asian users are dominating the mobile marketplace
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about why we like adaptive web design (AWD) better than responsive web design (RWD) for mobile websites, and one trend we are seeing is the tendency for successful mobile websites to look and behave like apps, so the popularity of apps over browser could signal a change in approach for some companies.
Mobile shopping through apps
Check out the full infographic, courtesy of Coupofy.com.
Feature image by Philippe Put via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.
Hypotheses: Deciding what to Test
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingToday’s question is at the heart of AB testing. “How do you decide what elements of a site to test?” We call the test “hypotheses.”
But, a better question is, “How do you determine what NOT to test.”
It’s relatively easy to come up with ideas that might increase your conversion rate. We typically come up with fifty, seventy-five, one-hundred or more ideas for each of our client sites. Filtering through this list is the hard part.
Subscribe to Podcast
The Five Steps
In this week’s podcast, I take you through the five steps we use to determine what to test on a website.
We’re pretty good at picking low-hanging fruit. Last year 97% of our clients continued working with us after our initial six-month Conversion Catalyst program that uses this approach.
Each of our hypotheses gets an ROI score using the following formula:
ROI = Evidence + Traffic Value + History – Level of Effort
Once we’ve ranked all of our hypotheses, we classify them into buckets.
The top ten hypotheses reveal an interesting pattern when you bucket them.
Bucketing Your Hypotheses
I also talk about how we classify hypotheses into buckets.
This helps us understand what the primary areas of concern are for visitors to a site. Are there a lot of high-ranked hypotheses for Credibility and Authority? We need to focus on building trust with visitors.
There’s much more detail in the podcast and my Marketing Land column 5 Steps to Finding the Hidden Optimization Gems.
Seasonal Online Retailers’ Optimization Habits
Ecommerce CROWe can hear the bells! With just a few days left in summer, parents are now easing their way out of summer camps, Disney vacations, and scrambling to prep their kids for the new school year.
Retailers reliant on the back to school rush have run out of time to prepare.
How have online retailers done in the months leading up to this peak period in their sales? Our report gives us a hint.
Preparing for Peak Season
There are two ways an online retailer can make the peak season it’s most successful.
We can determine the amount online retailers are spending for clicks on back-to-school keywords. We can also snoop to see if their websites are configured to maximize revenue from that traffic.
This report is meant for managers of websites with a strong seasonal component. While the report specifically addresses the back-to-school shopping season, the conclusions can be applied to bathing suit sales, Valentines retailers and any online retailer that gets a bump during the holidays.
Online Retailers Vulnerable to Competitors
At least 95% of competing organizations are collecting website analytics. However, only 13% of these organizations have a website optimization tool installed.
Organizations with larger ad spends are more likely to have website optimization tools installed. Oddly enough, those spending above $50,000 a month in online ads are sloppy. They barely out-spend retailers spending as little as $5000 per month on website optimization tools.
The largest segment of retailers is keeping up with bigger spenders in terms of website optimization tool use.
The website optimization tools we look for in the report are:
There are a number of questions to be raised from this data. Do they not have the budget because they don’t invest in website optimization, or do they have fewer tools because they don’t have the budget?
We believe that the lessons learned here can be applied to any online retail business with seasonal sales. Download this report for free by clicking the image below. Let us know what you think.
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
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
"*" indicates required fields
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.