Marketers have always relied on testing.
But let’s be honest. It’s probably only in the last few years that they’ve begun discussing conversion rates rather than golf scores over a beer.
The Austin #CRO community is a dedicated bunch:
@peeplaja @jtrondeau @mercertweets @bmassey
The level of measurement and testing that we now have wasn’t even possible in the “old” days. Now that it is, CRO (conversion rate optimization) is clearly a “thing”.
And yes, I’ve got the data to back that up!
According to Econsultancy, in the last five years, the number of companies using A/B testing has more than doubled. Two-thirds (67%) of the companies surveyed use A/B testing, making it the top optimization method used today. Compare that to five years ago, when only a third of businesses were testing.
You might say it’s the golden age of conversion optimization.
Cool thought, I know. And it sounds like it should benefit businesses across the board. But that’s not what we’re seeing.
Whenever any tactic becomes a “thing,” it gets adopted by newbies and wanna-bes as well as the pros. So beware! You could be paying good money for “website optimization” services from an agency who just learned last month how to run a test.
The Truth About Testing and Website Optimization
The truth is, CRO is hard. You can’t learn it in a month, and you won’t be an expert until you’ve done it for years.
Let me say that again: It takes YEARS to become a pro.
What does that mean? It means lots of agencies are making mistakes without even knowing it because they’re so new to the game. Here are some of the mistakes we see most often.
1. “Best practices” landing pages
Best practice is NOT the same thing as conversion rate optimization. PPC agencies, SEO agencies, UX and UI people—they’re all claiming to do CRO.
But calling it CRO doesn’t make it so. Here’s what Brian Massey told me the other day:
“Here at Conversion Sciences, we’ve stopped doing best practices consulting because it’s so unreliable. Even if someone asks for it, we won’t sell it to them.
As brilliant as we are, when we implement best practices, we’ll be wrong on half of them.
Every audience is different. You have to test to know what’s working. Period. End of story.”
As an example, best practice says videos are good and sliders, or carousels, are bad. It says that sliders distract visitors, are hard to read, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. Not so, according to a DeviceMagic case study, published by VWO.
This test pitted a slider against a video to see which would work better on the home page.
DeviceMagic was pretty sure the sliders were a better fit for their purposes, but they knew better than to make the change without testing. Interestingly, the video seemed to be an early winner. But after reaching statistical significance, the slider was the clear winner.
- Conversions from homepage to signup page increased 35%.
- Subsequent signups increased 31%.
Another example comes from one of my own projects. I had been commissioned to rewrite a collection of landing pages and, sadly, discovered that we were using best practice as our guide. The results? We nailed SEO, but conversions dropped to half of what they were before the rewrite.
Agencies fall into the same trap. They hear that something is working on another website, and they adopt it, no questions asked.
A landing page built on best practices rather than a solid testing strategy isn’t going to get you the results you’re looking for.
If it does, it was just dumb luck!
2. Testing the Wrong Things
When you rely on hearsay rather than data, it’s easy to make another mistake as well—testing the wrong things.
Experienced Conversion Scientists™ know which data gives them the insights they need. And they know which tools will give it to them.
Some agencies try to shave expenses by cutting out the data-collection tools—things like click testing, heatmaps and user-session recording tools. As a result, they don’t have the data to make smart decisions about what to test. These agencies pick something out of the blue to test instead of using analytics to figure it out.
In other words, they’re testing for the sake of testing.
Science should be based on hypotheses, not guesses or busy work. So you gotta ask, if your tests aren’t based on data, what’s the point?
Honestly, that’s the case for a lot of tests. Alex Turnbull, Groove’s founder, gives a great example of this. He lists some tests that are often considered “easy wins.” But for Groove, he says, they were pointless.
Typically, these tests are the first tests newbies try to run, not because they’re relevant to the website or the audience, but because they seem like easy wins. Remember: trust the data, not someone else’s results.
3. Reliance on Self-Reported Data
Data is important. But you can’t depend on just any data.
Self-reported data—such as responses from focus groups, user testing, surveys, and forum feedback—is gathered from people’s stories, not their behavior.
The problem is people lie.
They may not mean to, but they do. If you ask them how they spend their money, they give a best-case scenario or what they wish to be true. Not the absolute truth.
Compare their answers to your analytics and you get another story. The real story.
That’s why Conversion Scientists don’t put much stock into self-reported data. Qualitative data (self-reported) is great for generating hypotheses, but it needs to be validated with testing.
Here’s where you need to be careful: A lot of agencies (especially UX and UI) redesign a site using only self-reported data. A true Conversion Scientist uses analytics and split testing to verify assumptions before deciding they’re true.
The Marks & Spencer 2014 redesign proves the point: Costing £150 million (about $230 million), this redesign took two years and led to an 8% decrease in online sales.
Based on the fact that this project took two years, I’m guessing that most decisions were made from self-reported data plus the design team’s own opinions.
It’s unlikely A/B testing was involved because testing delivers incremental changes rather than one massive change. And it allows you to mitigate technical errors, because you know for certain whether the changes you’re making are helping.
DigitalTonic says it well in their analysis of the redesign:
“Drastic changes can never be monitored meaningfully and you won’t be able to separate the variables that are causing the positive or negative impact on conversions. With testing on your current site prior to redesign, you will hit a local maxima meaning that you have optimised the site as best as you can in its current incarnation. It’s at this stage that you would take the learnings and move towards the global maxima with the redesign process.”
The issue here is really about behavioral versus attitudinal data. Look at this chart, which illustrates the landscape of 20 popular research methods, and you can see why this is such a common mistake. Self-reported data looks like a scientific approach.
Behavioral versus attitudinal testing
Surveys and focus groups give useful information, but since the data is both attitudinal and qualitative, it should never be the foundation for testing.
Use it to help you develop smart hypotheses. Use it to understand your users better. But alone, it’s not valid. Behavioral (or quantitative) data is your most reliable source of information.
As Christian Rohrer states, “While many user-experience research methods have their roots in scientific practice, their aims are not purely scientific and still need to be adjusted to meet stakeholder needs.”
4. Not Understanding the Scientific Process
Agencies are time and materials companies. They bill by the hour. Understandably, they want every hour of their employees’ time to be accounted for and assigned to a winning project.
The problem is, this focus on the bottom line can actually dampen results.
Scientists need time to be curious, follow their hunches and understand the reason things are happening. A successful A/B testing agency needs to give them that time, even if some of those hunches turn out to be pointless.
In the long run, it’s cheaper to eliminate hypotheses early, before testing. If experienced Conversion Scientists are given time to “play,” they can usually do that with analysis alone, saving time and money.
In other words, a few hours of analysis beats 2 weeks of testing every time.
True inspiration requires time. Time to follow dead ends. Time to dive into the data. Time to think and ask questions. If your agency doesn’t allow that, be aware, you’re probably not getting the best results.
5. Offering a Completely Done-For-You Model
This one sounds more like a premium service than a mistake. But when it comes to CRO, it reads more like a mistake.
Some agencies believe they have more “job security” if they make the client completely dependent on them. So they do it all: collect the data, make the hypotheses and, supposedly, deliver results.
Alone.
There’s no collaboration with clients. Which means they’re only using half the information they should be using to create hypotheses.
Here’s the thing: The best results come when the agency and client work together. The agency has the expertise to collect the data, but the client has the intimate knowledge of the customer. It takes both.
Seriously. If your agency is doing everything for you, they may be creating issues rather than solving them.
Does your agency see you as a money tree? Collaboration, rather than DFY services get the best results.
6. Not Bothering to Influence the Client Culture
Similarly, some agencies appear to collaborate with the client, but they draw the line before influencing client culture.
In reality, there’s a huge advantage to having an agency work so closely with you that they actually change the way you do things.
True collaboration involves getting together on a frequent basis and discussing ideas. Over time, you begin to see the thought process that goes into each website optimization effort. You begin to understand how to make decisions based on data and to value the insight numbers can give you.
When that happens, whether you consider yourself a numbers person or not, you’re hooked.
That’s the point at which you stop making random marketing decisions. Instead, you call your agency and ask what data needs collecting and when you can start testing. (Congratulations! You’re a conversion geek!)
As we talked about before, a done-for-you or non-collaborative service may not be giving you the best results—and they may be charging premium rates to do so.
Always remember, you’re the resource for testing. Not many agencies actually try to influence your company’s culture. Make sure yours does.
7. Not Staffing for CRO
This is a biggie. An agency that doesn’t staff for CRO shouldn’t offer CRO. You see, the best Conversion Scientists are skilled in two areas. They’re good with numbers and they’re excellent communicators.
Good with numbers. Getting high marks in high-school math isn’t enough. Conversion Scientists are masters of data and statistics.
They know when numbers are reliable and when they’re not. So they know how long to run a test and when the results are statistically valid. They know when the math is bad, which means you can be sure you’re getting positive results.
But being good with numbers isn’t everything. Great Conversion Scientists are also…
Excellent communicators. All too often, Web developers are recruited to do analytics, and sure they understand the numbers—but not much else.
It takes a conversion optimizer to turn data into stories. Frankly, that’s where the magic happens.
At Conversion Sciences, the team spends much of their time going through the numbers to tease out the stories. If there’s a hole in the plot, they design a test to figure out what’s missing. The goal is to find the story in the data—and tell that story well.
Conversion optimizers are fortune tellers
If you think about it, conversion optimizers are really fortune tellers. They predict the future based on the data your site gives them. Is your agency converting analytics to customer stories? If not, you may be dealing with Web developers rather than conversion optimizers.
8. Failing to Test Before Going Live
Pros test and validate everything before going live. That avoids costly mistakes like Finish Line’s 2012 Web redesign, which cost the chain around $3.5 million in sales and a huge hit to its reputation.
Four days before Black Friday, Finish Line launched a freshly redesigned website, supposedly planning to “reinvent the shopping experience.” Instead, customers complained about lost orders and other technology glitches, and Finish Line had to revert back to the old design just prior to the Christmas shopping season.
Granted, that level of mistake isn’t likely for smaller brands, but bad usability can still impact reputation and profitability.
My guess is a brand agency was responsible for that redesign. It would have been smarter to work with conversion optimizers, who understand how to use data to decide on incremental changes, validating each one before moving on to the next.
9. Making Rookie Mistakes
Since CRO is now a “thing,” everyone and their office cat now offer website optimization services. Most don’t know the difference between conversions and sales, which means they’re making a lot of mistakes.
Now don’t get me wrong. We all make our fair share of junior mistakes when we’re starting out—things like delivering results without statistical validity, not analyzing traffic enough, and the like.
But this is the “golden age” of conversion optimization. Don’t you want pro results?
Again, not everyone who claims to be a conversion optimizer is. Unless your team is experienced and has a structured approach for improving conversions, they’re likely making some mistakes that could be easily avoided—if they were more experienced.
Pro CROs use a structured approach to improving conversions.
Download a free copy of our eBook Four Rookie CRO Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs.
Website Optimization Mistakes Bottom Line
As you can see, mistakes are more common than not. That’s because website optimization is hard work.
If you want to get the big results CRO promises, you need an agency that has the experience and know-how to do it right. Period. (BTW, I recommend talking with Conversion Sciences about whether they can help.)
What CRO fails have you seen? And what are you doing to keep from making bonehead testing mistakes? Share in the comments below.
8 Posts That Affect Your Blog’s Organic Traffic
Lead GenerationHow does one build traffic to a blog? That’s easy. One writes. One posts. One shares.
Unfortunately, not all posts are created equal. Not all topics interest the same number of readers. And not all keyword phrases get the attention of the great granter of traffic, Google.
Having blogged since 2005 on marketing topics, from email to conversion optimization. Every post has it’s own signature when I look at it in Google Analytics. There are Eagles, Icebergs, Burps and more.
I thought I would share them with you.
How We Look at Traffic
Our subscriber list gets an email each week of with new posts. We publish new posts three times per week. We put new posts on LinkedIn and Facebook, and will generally share with on Twitter multiple times over the course of a week or two. Our most active posts will get reposted on LinkedIn.
We count on this initial outreach to drive relevant backlinks for search engine optimization. I use Referral Traffic as a proxy for backlinks. While backlinks aren’t about generating referral traffic, there is a correlation between the amount referral traffic and the number of backlinks a post has.
So, when evaluating the performance of our blog posts, I’m examining:
With these segments, I look at the Google Analytics Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages report for individual posts that rank high in traffic generated, and go back more than a year.
The Google Analytics Landing Pages report can be used to isolate the most visited entry pages on the blog.
Separating Social Referrals from Referral Traffic in Google Analytics
First of all, Google Analytics seems to include social referrals in it’s “Referral Traffic” filter. I want to look at social separately, so I created a filter based on the social networks that send traffic to us.
^t\.co|facebook\.com|twitter|pinterest|disqus|linkedin|
lnkd\.in|quora|plus.*\.google\.com|digg|netvibes|
scoop\.it|slideshare|instapaper|
meetup\.com|paper\.li|stumbleupon
This article shows that Google’s “Referral Traffic” advanced segment includes social referrals.
The Kinds of Posts You Find in Analytics
Every post is unique. Each has its own signature in analytics. However, there are some common themes I’ve seen in the data and I’m going to share them with you here.
The Burp
The Burp is a post that gets all of it’s juice from email and social media. There is a spike of activity followed by near “silence,” if you can say visits make a sound.
These are topics that may have been interesting to people when shoved into their inbox or social media timeline, but didn’t grab the attention of the search engines.
Burps are the most unsatisfying of all blog posts.
Burps can be blamed on poor search optimization, poor choice of keywords or just boring content. The post shown above had a nice email spike and got some referral traffic. But the referrals didn’t seed organic visitors like some. See below.
The Burp and Fizz
A variation of the Burp is the “Burp and Fizz.” This traffic pattern burps when email and social sharing are being done. Then it sizzles with search traffic – just a little – over time.
Strong email, social traffic and referral traffic resulted in only a rumbling of organic visits.
Only a small amount of organic traffic emerged from this post.
These may be long-tail topics, or the small amount of search traffic may be driven by less-relevant backlinks.
The Iceberg
Like its frozen namesake, the iceberg is massive and floats through your analytics, slowly melting over time. In our case, the iceberg has been one our most visited post since it was published in March of 2011. It has generated a large volume of search traffic, decreasing slowly.
Icebergs can be misleading. In our case, email is not how potential prospects find us, so traffic to this post is largely poor quality from a lead generation standpoint. As more visitors come to this post, our conversion rates drop.
This Iceberg generated a great deal of traffic, but is slowly melting over time.
We can see the influence of key backlinks here in driving search relevance. A new resurgence in traffic came after a swelling of referral traffic.
Beach Ball at a Concert
Sometimes a post just won’t fly without frequent support. Here’s a topic – Generating Mobile Phone Calls from the Web – that looked like it was going to iceberg on us (see below). However, every couple of months we did a presentation on the topic of mobile and generating phone calls from the web.
This topic kept trying to die, but was buoyed by presentations and publication on other sites.
Each presentation included being mentioned in blog posts and online show marketing. So, we got new life from each, like popping a beach ball back into the air at a concert.
The Celebrity Curve
This post mentioned SEO celebrity, Rand Fishkin.
I did one of my live Instagraph while Rand Fishkin was presenting at Business of Software 2014. Rand is well known in our industry as the founder of MOZ and it’s various products.
Our email list gravitated to his name, which you can see in the orange line below. His our social channels responded with less enthusiasm. However, we were on the search engines’ radars for his name, at least until his next thing became more relevant.
Celebrity posts offer short-lived organic traffic.
Celebrity is a fickle master, even when creating content.
The Eagle
These are the posts you write for. You seed them with some email and social media attention, and then they spread their wings, riding the winds of the search engines.
The Eagles are the posts that your blog is built on.This post took on a life of its own thanks to the search engines.
Eagle posts take flight and drive organic traffic to your site.
It’s hard to tell what causes Eagles to soar. Some enjoy early social traffic. Others get early referral traffic. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to jump starting an Eagle post. However, most of our Eagle posts are not on conversion-related keywords, but focus on Adwords, Facebook, Live Chat, and Exit-intent Popovers to name a few.
The Blue Bird
It’s unclear how a blue bird post gets started. There’s little support in the way of email, social or backlinks. Yet, it nonetheless finds an updraft and takes flight.
Even with little help from email and social outreach, some posts will fly. We call these Blue Birds.
A blue bird is just a gift of the search engines.
Dodo Bird
This form of post takes a while to get off the ground, but soon evolves into a workhorse.
It took a while, but this post eventually caught on with search traffic.
For some reason this post didn’t take off for months, and it’s unclear what got it going some seven months after it was published. Who are we to argue. This looked like a classic Burp Fizz post for most if that time.
Identifying Blog Posts that Drive Organic Traffic
The signatures you use to grade your blog posts may vary from ours, though this approach has proven to be very effective for the business.
You need to take a long-term approach to content. It’s never obvious when a Burp Fizz is going to turn into a Dodo Bird.
When you understand what makes Eagles, Blue Birds and even Dodos soar; when you understand the impact of icebergs on your reports; when you can see the impact of celebrities on your traffic, then you can select the right mix of content to grow your site.
Build a Landing Page with a 50% Conversion Rate
Landing Page OptimizationTalking about landing pages that convert is one of a Conversion Scientist’s favorite conversation topics. It’s even something that plays a huge part in their dating lives, and one of Conversion Scientist Brian Massey’s most popular presentations is still the Chemistry of the Landing Page (replay).
Your Conversion Rate Will Make or Break Your Campaigns
Conversion Sciences doesn’t just talk a big game when it comes to giving advice about landing pages: we have the data to back up what we’re saying. Having high-converting landing pages has made our webinar series Lab Coat Lessons a big success.
28.62% conversion rate on our landing page for our CRO & SEM webinar
42.41% conversion rate on our landing page for our UX vs. CRO webinar
50.92% conversion rate on our landing page for our Mobile 2.0 webinar
Just think of what would happen to your revenue if your landing pages had a 50% conversion rate.
Helping people build high converting landing pages just never stops being interesting, so next week, on Thursday, October 15th, Brian will be joining Avangate for a free webinar that will teach you how to do just that. watch the replay now, and you’ll learn:
Driving eCommerce Sales Through Online Quizzes
Ecommerce CROOnline Sales have a growth rate that’s 10 times more than their brick and mortar counterparts. This in turn encourages retailers to do everything they can to optimize their selling capabilities. With an emphasis on driving e-commerce sales, finding new and innovative ways to spur online sales requires an effective strategy.
If BuzzFeed hasn’t made it apparent already, quizzes have really started to re-emerge over the last couple of years, driving a ton of social traffic and interaction. Using interactive content like quizzes can to attract and engage audiences, generate leads, and increase e-commerce sales.
Here are five examples of successful online quizzes, all built by a quiz building app by Interact.
How Z Gallerie Personalized Their Site to Bring Tons of Leads Per Day
Z Gallerie is a company that offers customers creative furniture and household products from all around the world. They cater to both professional and amateur interior designers alike, with 57 physical stores across the United States and a relatively strong online presence. Z Gallerie created the quiz “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?” to generate leads and to personalize their product line.
Z Gallerie’s strategy is to provide a personalized experience for every potential and current customer. This kind of an approach is heavily present in their personality quiz. After six visual questions, Z Gallerie collects our contact information through a lead capture form. Then they follow up in a personal way through marketing automation.
Not all questions have to look like a survey.
After completing the lead capture form, Z Gallerie’s quiz delivers your “Style Personality” with a link to learn more about it. Clicking the link directs you to a personalized page with product suggestions based intensively on the answers you chose on the quiz.
The quiz acts to build the Z Gallerie list.
A personalized approach not only keeps customers engaged, it also allows your brand to recommend products tailored specifically to an individual’s personal preferences based on your quiz. This lets your brand to create a connection with your customers on a level that would convert them into repeat buyers.
With the help of their personality quiz, Z Gallerie generates significantly increased lead acquisition.
Here’s how you can use this strategy for your brand: Create a quiz with personalized results for each individual customer so that you can offer product suggestions specific to that person. This can be done by either recommending one specific product or by assigning people a “personality” that relates to a group of products. Make sure you follow up with marketing automation to keep your customers coming back for more down the road.
Z Gallerie uses landing pages for each of the “Style Personalities” uncovered by their quiz.
How Birchbox Used A Personality Quiz to Differentiate Between Products
Birchbox specializes in monthly deliveries of personalized samples with original content and an exciting e-commerce shop. Similar to Z Gallerie’s reason for creating their quiz, Birchbox created the quiz, “Find Your Face Mask Soul Mate in One Minute” to give personalized suggestions on which facemask to purchase.
Where Birchbox’s strategy differs from Z Galleries lies in their execution. While Birchbox followed the same formula of creating a quiz that recommends products based on personalities, they mainly used it to differentiate similar products, most of which were different variations of facemasks.
BirchBox uses the quiz to offer a specific product, with no lead generation.
Birchbox didn’t use their quiz to generate leads, but instead used it to place an emphasis on the perfect face mask for their customers. The quiz established a very personal connection with their customers by offering products tailored specifically to them. Personalized experiences such as these help grow the relationship between customers and retailers.
Here’s how you can apply this method: Create a personality quiz with results based on your customer’s personal tastes. From there, you can recommend the single most suitable product which is awesome because personalized recommendations convert at 5.5 times better than general ones. Who would’ve known?
How BioLite Capitalized on Trends to Suggest Products Via Online Quizzes
BioLite develops and manufactures advanced energy products that make cooking with wood as clean, safe and easy as modern fuels while also providing electricity to charge cell phones and LED lights off-grid. Essentially, efficient low-energy-required products that you can use or recharge. BioLite created the quiz “What would you do with 10 watts?” to generate leads and to raise awareness on how ready people can be when the power goes out.
This lead generation form is optional.
BioLite’s strategy was incredibly simple. Taking into account the fact that BioLite relies on selling their 10 watt-only rechargeable products, they created a quiz in an effort to raise awareness on power outage readiness. After taking their quiz and getting your results, no matter how prepared you may be, BioLite can still recommend products that may be useful in similar situations.
BioLite offers a specific product based on the answers entered into the quiz.
Like most quizzes with a lead capture form, BioLite asked quiz-takers if they would like to submit their contact information to receive updates on environmental friendly products. The form brought in 4,852 leads.
Here’s what you can do to emulate this strategy: Create a quiz that makes people take into account various situations that questions how prepared they really are. This will encourage them to purchase your products in order to be better suited for such situations.
How The Elephant Pants Kickstarted Themselves Into Success Through Quizzes
Before The Elephant Pants – a clothing company supporting the African Wildlife Foundation – came to be as successful as they are today, their humble beginnings clung onto the support they received from a Kickstarter campaign. By creating the quiz “Which Pair of Elephant Pants Are You?” and linking it to their Kickstarter, they were able to generate enough leads to fund their launch.
Like the previous examples that we’ve seen so far, The Elephant Pants also used their quiz to distribute personalized results that recommended a specific kind of product to customers, in this case, a particular kind of Elephant Pants.
The Elephant Pants made sure to add a link at the end of their quiz in the results screen to help fund their Kickstarter. It also opted-in prospective customers to keep them interested and up-to-date with any new developments.
Low and behold, The Elephant Pants Kickstarter was a success, and through quizzes, helped raise over $8,500 which was enough to help the startup launch into a strong business today.
Here’s how to deploy this method yourself: Like several of the examples we’ve looked at prior to this one, create a quiz that recommends possible products that would encourage customers to fund your business so that you can have a lucrative launch. It also lets you develop a strong customer base from the start.
How Aaron Brothers (Michael’s) Artistically Uses Quizzes to Generate Leads
Aaron Brothers (Michael’s) takes pride in their merchandise by offering custom framing, art supplies and picture frames. Aaron Brothers also brings the latest fashion designs in framing and home decor. With their artistic sense of style, they created the quiz “What’s Your Color?” for the sole purpose of lead generation.
With an emphasis on art, Aaron Brothers created a longer quiz to determine someone’s color. It was an entertaining piece of shareable content whose sole purpose is to generate leads for the brand. Personality quizzes that categorize quiz-takers into personalities are highly favored on social media, so they get shares on a frequent rotation.
The quiz ended up generating 515 leads and has been Aaron Brothers’ most successful part of their recent color-centered marketing campaign.
Here’s how you can draw out the same tactic: You might be tired of seeing this now, but this quiz is pretty much an exact replica of the quizzes that are so popular all over the internet. That’s the strategy.
Reproduce the idea of a popular quiz and use it as a means of generating leads.Let’s Recap And See What We’ve Learned
As retailers begin to take note of the wild growth of online sales, they’re beginning to set their eyes on the most effective and innovative ways to join the bandwagon. So what’s stopping us from figuring out the best possible way of driving e-commerce sales?
You’ve seen how popular quizzes are; how they’ve swept the nation’s social media feeds with simple yet entertaining micro-interactions with shareable results. They aren’t just a form of enjoyment, they’re a super secret marketing mega weapon!
Once you’ve set your scope on your target audience, you can use quizzes in a personalized manner as a way of recommending individually-tailored products to customers. Using quizzes to deliver personalized results can help grow a customer base that not only encourages purchases and return buyers, but as a means of generating leads as well!
In the end, quizzes did exactly what these companies set out to do, and that was to drive e-commerce sales in a continually growing industry.
A Call to End CRO Forever
Conversion OptimizationThe optimization industry is plagued most by a poor acronym: CRO. Here is my reasoning for changing this damaging moniker.
The Importance of Acronyms
The three letter acronym (TLA) that defines an industry or organization is crucial to its success.
We all know of organizations who’ve been carried by their TLA. IBM comes immediately to mind. Here is a company that is universally recognized by its TLA. More recently, the search engine optimization industry has enjoyed significant success with the SEO TLA.
Industries with poor TLAs have fared much worse. Remember the WOM industry? Neither do we. In fact the entire social media industry has fallen on hard times due in part to the lack of a compelling TLA. SMM? Please! It’s basically a mumble.
Several industries have even consolidated their TLAs in an effort to get traction. Social media teamed up with local search and mobile to create Social Local Mobile, or SLM. When this didn’t work, they tried to slip a few more letters in. Hey, SoLoMo people, lower-case letters are still letters! This is really an acronym haiku.
Today, the TLA for the conversion optimization industry is CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization. This is a sad moniker for a set of disciplines that offers so much promise. The conversion rate is the number of transactions or leads generated divided by the traffic for a given period of time. It is a metric of optimization, not the thing we are optimizing. Anyone can easily increase the conversion rate of any ecommerce site by cutting all prices in half. This would bankrupt almost any business, however.
Why Conversion Rate? It’s like naming our industry Bounce Rate Optimization (BRO) or Revenue Per Visit Optimization (RPVO). No, we don’t optimize conversion rates alone, so CRO is fundamentally flawed.
CRO Alternatives
Despite the cool allusion to a black carrion bird, it cannot stand. We can say we optimize for conversion, and could call the industry “CO”, but a quick letter count reveals that this is a two-letter acronym (TA). We spend most of our time optimizing websites, so website optimization, or WSO would work. But we have to come clean and admit that “website” is just one word, and “WO” is a TA. Furthermore, WSO is owned by the World Safety Organization.
We can upgrade our TAs to TLAs by adding ancillary words. Online Conversion Optimization gives us OCO. Since we’re really optimizing for revenue, we might embrace Online Revenue Optimization, or ORO. We could use the SoLoMo approach and call it OReO, but the makers of a certain sandwich cookie may take issue with this.
Join the Cross-out Protest
In addition, I recommend that you write CRO with the “R” crossed out anytime you use it on the web. This is our visible protest. Here is the HTML:
C<strike>R</strike>O
or
C<span style=”text-decoration:line-through;”>R</span>O
Use this in your blog posts, marketing or anywhere you want people to know that YOU DO NOT OPTIMIZE CONVERSION RATE ALONE.
Cognitive Biases, Data Scientists, Great Landing Pages [For Further Study]
Landing Page OptimizationWhat’s on the Conversion Scientist’s reading list these days?
Business Insider: 20 Cognitive Biases that Screw Up Your Decisions
If I was to rename this article, it would be, “20 Kinds of Best Practices and Why They Won’t Work”.
It is bad news to rely on best practices that are unsupported by data or testing. This article gives you 20 reasons why.
This article is so interesting that it’s no surprise I decided to cover this topic on my most recent column for MarketingLand.
Read more.
LiftPoint Consulting: Data Scientists’ Critical Role in Marketing Today
The conclusion of this article says it best by stating “The days of Marketing as a ‘Creatives Only’ fraternity are over”.
Data Scientists are the left-brained necessity to every marketing department, but since that realization is so new, you might not be able to recognize a good one. They’re a rare breed, after all. There are four skill-sets they have that you need.
Read more.
Econsultancy: Is Booking.com the Most Persuasive Website in the World?
This case study examining Booking.com reminded me a lot of my presentation on the Chemistry of the Landing Page where I talk about the different elements that make a landing page a success and also our post on impulse buying where we talk about how to reduce risk so that customers will feel comfortable spending money on your website.
Booking.com’s website is a great inspiration for formulating hypotheses that you can test.
Read more.
What are your suggestions for articles we should read For Further Study?
How to Approach Bloggers about Guest Posting: Dos and Don’ts
Conversion Marketing StrategyWhen I first met Brian Massey, I had just attended a presentation he gave about his success with The Conversion Scientist Blog. I learned a lot during the presentation and was impressed by the analytics he shared about the blog’s readership and subscribers.
Conversion Scientist email subscribers have steadily increased in 2015
Pageviews on guest post “12 Rules for Maximizing Conversions from AdWords“
Pageviews on guest post “Can Live Chat Increase Conversions?”
Pageviews on guest post “7 Best Practices Using Exit Intent Popovers, Popups“. Guest posts can have a lasting impact on growth of traffic to your blog.
I knew as soon as the presentation was over: I wanted to write a guest post for this guy. Luckily, I got a chance to chat with Brian afterwards and I offered to send him a post for his blog. Sure enough, about a week later, I got an email from Brian asking if I’d like to send him the article we had discussed.
If only this was the way guest blogging always worked.
Far too often, I associate the term “guest blogging” with spammy emails and crappy content. This is despite the fact that Google has been penalizing sites that use guest blogging solely for SEO for over a year now. I also tend to associate guest blogging with the infuriating assumption that good content can be acquired for free. Let me be clear: good content is not free. It may not cost you money per se, but you had better be prepared to offer something of value in exchange for good work.
As both a writer and a manager of several different blogs, I’ve had experience on both sides of the guest blogging scenario: contributing guest posts and seeking out guest contributors. Here are some Dos and Don’ts I’ve discovered about finding guest contributors for your blog.
Don’t: Be vague or beat around the bush.
I can’t tell you how irritating it is to get an email that basically says, “Hey! Are you interested in an opportunity to do free work? You’re a total stranger but I thought you’d like to do me a favor for no reason!” What’s worse is when you write back to politely find out what’s in it for you and you get a canned response that:
On the flip side, I once received a vague email from someone requesting to contribute a guest post to a site that I manage. When I asked for details, they responded that if I didn’t like their content, could I please just hide a backlink in my site for them? Um, no.
Do: Be clear and direct about what you want and what you are willing to give in return.
If all you’re offering is attribution and space for a short author bio, that’s fine. In several cases, that has been a good enough reason for me to contribute a guest post to a site. It all depends on the author’s goals and priorities. Just don’t expect it to work with everyone.
Do: Be willing to offer original content in exchange.
If you’re contacting a blogger, chances are they have a responsibility to create content for their own site on a regular basis. If that’s the case, they probably don’t have much time to write a shiny new post for your blog, no matter how much they want 30 minutes of your audience’s precious, undivided attention. That might not be an issue if you offer to provide content in exchange. Guest posting on each other’s sites is a great, symbiotic way to expand your audience and add variety and a new perspective to each other’s blogs.
Do: Tell them about your readership.
Before I sent my first guest post to Brian, I already knew that his blog had a significant number of readers and subscribers. Nobody had to convince me that guest posting on the Conversion Scientist Blog was a good idea. I was excited for the opportunity because it was a way to get my name in front of people, and by doing so, start building readership for the blog I had just launched.
Just remember that everyone can get their work “out there” online. When you’re convincing a writer to contribute content, give them the data that will make it worth their time. If you’re still building a following, tell them about your target audience. Some up-and-coming bloggers may actually care more about your niche than your current numbers anyway.
Don’t: Expect guest posts from established writers.
There’s a reason successful writers have become successful. It’s not just because they’re good at what they do. It’s also because at some point, they started asking to get paid for their work. If it’s in your budget to pay a freelance writer, then start reaching out to people. If it’s not, then those emails you’ve been sending out may just seem random and irritating. Which leads to my next point…
Do: Nurture relationships with bloggers and experts in your field.
This is a golden rule of guest blogging (and of any sort of influencer outreach). As you work on building content and readership for your blog, reach out in person or online to people whose work you admire. A common way to do this is by commenting on their posts. Don’t just do this as a spammy ploy to get backlinks to your site (bots are doing that enough as it is). Leave thoughtful comments that show interest and engagement and continue a dialogue. Once it seems appropriate, invite them to check out your site and go from there.
In building your network, you may have established a relationship with a subject matter expert who doesn’t have time to contribute a guest post. If this is the case, ask them if they’d be willing to do a phone or email interview. It could mean the difference between 15 minutes of their time and several hours.
Do: Let people help on their own terms.
Many writers have a strict editorial calendar to follow. Don’t add to the burden. Instead, offer them as much flexibility as you can. That being said, if you have certain guidelines and requirements for the content on your site, don’t be shy about sharing that. It’s not worth compromising the quality of your site just to for the sake of featuring guest content.
Don’t: Expect free content to be good.
There are a handful of guest blogger networks such as My Blog Guest, which have survived the scourge of Google Panda. In a few rare cases, I have connected with some talented writers on these networks. But, like I said, this is very rare. The vast majority of the time, I receive guest post submissions from these sites that at best, are off topic, and at worst, not even written by a human.
Unrelated to these networks, I also receive frequent emails and comments on the blogs that I manage in which people are offering to send me a guest post. I could be getting these emails for one of several reasons:
Just as the reasons for wanting to guest blog are all across the board, so is the quality of the content you will receive. Moral of the story: don’t rely too heavily on guest content, particularly if it is acquired from guest blogging networks and out-of-the-blue emails.
Wrapping it Up
While Google has been trying its darndest to squelch the practice of guest blogging “just for SEO,” the practice still tends to dwell in some shady territory.
Cut through the noise and the spammy emails by building relationships with bloggers whose content you love. Remember to be choosy about the content you post, no matter the source. (If you use your blog for brand building or lead generation, nothing destroys your credibility more than a high volume of bad content.) If you play your cards right, guest posts can be a great component of a high quality, high value blog.About the Author
Colleen Ahern is a copyrighter at Page Agency, an independent marketing and advertising agency in Dallas, Texas. You can read more of her thoughts on the Page Agency Blog. Follow her on twitter @ColleenAhern.
We Want to Give You $10K This Year for a Referral
News & EventsWe just sent a sizable check to someone. They didn’t do any work for us. They didn’t deliver any software, designs or furniture. They didn’t install a hot tub or trim the trees outside our office. They didn’t threaten us.
All they did was trust us to help one of their clients. The relationship has gone well past the original engagement, and we love working with this company. By all accounts, they love working with us, too.
We’d like to do the same for you.
We love it when we get referrals. Referred clients are some of our best. For some reason, referred clients are more successful and stay with us longer. This means we can reward you handsomely for introducing us to your clients and colleagues.
http://conversionsciences.wistia.com/medias/usm94t9svl?embedType=seo&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=501
Over the next twelve months, we want to give away $100,000 in referral fees. That’s ten referral clients and up the $10,000 in referral rewards per client.
Yes, that’s a lot, but we intend to make it up over the course of a long relationship with them, beneficial to both of us.
What We Do For Them
We are a turnkey website optimization company. We don’t drive traffic. We don’t do SEO. We don’t manage paid search accounts. What we do is make all of these programs more profitable.
We offer a 180-day Conversion Catalyst™ program. In 180 days, we will have setup a mature conversion optimization program for almost any company and will have found enough additional revenue to cover the cost of the program and a lot more.
The Conversion Catalyst works with a wide variety of companies, established companies with 300 leads or transactions per month.
We know our stuff. Last year, 97% of our Conversion Catalyst clients continued working with us after the 180 days.
If you think one of your clients or colleagues is ready for website optimization, please complete a short form, or reach out to us by email. It could mean $10,000 in your pocket with no additional work.
How the Referral Program Works
It’s always been a simple program. We have a formal referral agreement, but otherwise, things are very collaborative.
Step 1
Do you know a business with a leaky website?
You think of a business that is losing revenue to their inefficient website or landing pages.
Step 2
Introduce us to them using our online form.
Contact us via email or through our online form. We’ll follow up with a call and determine appropriate next steps.
Step 3
If there’s a good fit, we’ll work with them to make things better.
If they are qualified, we’ll prepare a presentation and proposal. Conversion Sciences has a strong value proposition and great reputation.
Step 4
We’ll reward you with up to $10K.
If we work with them, you collect $1000 for each month they are under contract, up to ten months.
Get Started Now
We’re only taking ten referrals this year under the program, so secure a place in the program. Complete the form on our site and schedule a conversation with Conversion Sciences.
Why PPC and CRO are So Sweet Together
Conversion OptimizationWe just finished a webinar on PPC and CRO that was, for me, one of the most fascinating I’ve participated in.
The reason is that Jim McKinley of 360Partners brought in some very interesting data on the relationship between PPC and CRO. You know how data gets me excited.
We also got some good questions that I’ll answer in this post. But first, the data.
The “Market Clearing” PPC Bid Range
This is the graph that got me excited.
The “S” graph of paid search CPC vs. Clicks
If you took a keyword set, slowly changed the maximum bid and recorded the volume of clicks you were getting, you’d likely get a curve like this. The gray area indicates the part of the curve in which small changes in cost per click (CPC) deliver large changes in the traffic volume.
This is the price range at which more of your ads win, at which you get more traffic for your money. Traffic “clears” at these market prices.
Jim showed us an example from real life.
Many PPC campaigns have bid-ranges in “no-mans land.”
Here, you can see that “Client X” is in a marketplace in which the “Market Clearing CPC” is between $1.00 and $2.00 for a group of brand keywords. Yet, this client can’t be profitable at that level. They only make money on clicks prices between $0.30 and $0.60.
What are their choices? They can invest in other advertising strategies, or they can increase the number of clients they get from these clicks, making each click more profitable.
Jim’s team recommended that they NOT invest in paid search until they took some time to optimize their website.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can move your bid range into the sweet spot by reducing acquisition cost.
This is the effect that conversion rate optimization has on paid search. It allows advertisers to bid at those high-return rates, the “market-clearing” rates.
If this doesn’t get you excited about the possibilities of combining PPC and CRO, you should have someone check your pulse.
Conversion + Search is a Natural Match
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. The conversion rate is a function of both the traffic quality and the website effectiveness.
Paid search traffic is high-intent traffic. With the right ad this traffic can be phenomenal. Add to that an amazing landing page that keeps the promise of the ad and you have a powerful revenue-generating engine.
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing action (conversions) by visits (searches).
It’s Hard to do in One Agency
We talked at some length about the pros and cons of doing everything under one agency roof. It’s not easy.
You can’t optimize a site for a percentage of spend. Jim’s team did the numbers, comparing the hours worked on projects to the percentage of spend coming from them. There was no more room for the kind of optimization that will make a difference.The bulk of PPC services is billed on a “percentage of spend” model. Search traffic is bought like broadcast media, TV and Radio. Agencies have typically done their work and taken a percentage of the advertising fees paid to the TV or Radio networks. And now they take a percentage of fees paid to Google and Bing.
One thing we were clear on is this:
Why do search agencies claim to do conversion optimization?
Three Types of Conversion Optimization
There are several levels of conversion optimization. The first is “better than nothing” optimization in which someone with experience applied conversion best practices. We stopped doing this at Conversion Sciences because it just doesn’t work, unless you get lucky.
The second is data-driven optimization, in which you make changes to a site based on data from analytics, mouse-tracking heat maps, session recordings, and surveys. In essence, you’re deducing best practices for a site.
The third is test-driven optimization. Those ideas you want to try that don’t have the support of data should be tested. We see split tests as the Supreme Court of data. This tells us exactly what will increase conversion and revenue, and by how much.
The fourth type of conversion optimization require a small team. A data scientist, a developer and a designer. This assumes the data scientist knows how to setup and QA a test. This doesn’t come cheap.
CRO Tools are New-ish
A PPC agency is going to have team members familiar with the collection and exercise of data. A design and development team is also common in such an agency.
However, the tools that make test-driven optimization affordable are relatively new, coming to maturity in the last four years. They are powerful and easy to misuse. Experience is the key.
The marketplace has a supply of experienced search experts. Conversion optimization experts are currently harder to find.
Conclusions
If I were to sum up our conversation, it would probably be that you must invest in both search marketing and conversion optimization to be competitive in the marketplace. The value proposition is just too strong.
Today investing in SEM and CRO will usually mean hiring two different agencies to do the work, or one agency charging a flat rate or time-and-materials for the combined service.
Agencies that staff for conversion optimization as a service offering will find it much more profitable than their search services, and this will be true for some time.
Questions from the Webinar
Bobby asked, “Once the in-house talent / resource gap is tighter where do you see CRO going next?”
The industry has been enabled by tools. I think the tools will get better and smarter, including using machine learning for real-time personalization. The role of the data scientist won’t go away, though. The machines can’t come up with hypotheses to test nor creative to try.
Rachelle noted that, “You are identifying the challenges between CRO and SEM services, however, many clients are looking for a packaged solution. What do you see as the offering around those type of requests? Are the clients going to need to continue to look for separate agencies to handle both segments?”
We think it will be separate agencies for now, but the value proposition of the combined service, and the profitability of conversion optimization in particular make integration a strong candidate.
PJ said, “I’m involving the sales team and using a CRM to take CRO to revenue.”
It is crucial to drive search and conversion down to the bottom line. For long-sales cycle offerings, the CRM is a requirement. You can pump more and more leads into the system, but if they are closing at a lower rate, you’re just spinning your wheels.
The Cognitive Biases that Infest Your Website Redesign
Conversion-Centered DesignI state that, “A redesign is a big ball of bias-driven assumptions” in my September Marketing Land column The Biases that Drive Crazy Decisions. A large part of the column is dedicated to the biases found in website redesigns. These include Pro-innovation Bias, Stereotyping, Overconfidence and Blind-spot Bias.
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In the 1990s, we had GIF animations, blinking and scrolling text, and any number of fonts appearing on pages.
Sometimes, you just need to start over on your design.
These were implemented for no other reason than because we could.
When carousels, or sliders were added to Web templates, they began to appear everywhere, despite the fact that they tend to hurt conversion. We’re still getting rid of them one site at a time.
Rotating banner from Zumba.com
We’ve recently survived a short bout with parallax scrolling sites. Fortunately, this trend seems to be waning on business sites.
Parallax animations are distracting and don’t help conversions.
These techniques seem to be built to serve the designer’s ego at the expense of the potential buyer.
Parallax animations are distracting and don’t help conversions.
More recently, we’re seeing a pro-innovation bias with the proliferation of “flat” design template. These designs result in long, banded pages. I recently reviewed 47 WordPress templates. All but two were in this flat style.
You may find this post difficult to read. It is. It is a collection of design choices made under the influence of the pro-innovation bias. This is only one of twenty I researched.
My Marketing Land column uncovers several more biases that may be infecting your website.
Feature image by ethanhickerson via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.
9 Website Optimization Mistakes Even Smart Agencies Make
Conversion OptimizationMarketers have always relied on testing.
But let’s be honest. It’s probably only in the last few years that they’ve begun discussing conversion rates rather than golf scores over a beer.
The Austin #CRO community is a dedicated bunch:
@peeplaja @jtrondeau @mercertweets @bmassey
The level of measurement and testing that we now have wasn’t even possible in the “old” days. Now that it is, CRO (conversion
rateoptimization) is clearly a “thing”.And yes, I’ve got the data to back that up!
According to Econsultancy, in the last five years, the number of companies using A/B testing has more than doubled. Two-thirds (67%) of the companies surveyed use A/B testing, making it the top optimization method used today. Compare that to five years ago, when only a third of businesses were testing.
Cool thought, I know. And it sounds like it should benefit businesses across the board. But that’s not what we’re seeing.
Whenever any tactic becomes a “thing,” it gets adopted by newbies and wanna-bes as well as the pros. So beware! You could be paying good money for “website optimization” services from an agency who just learned last month how to run a test.
The Truth About Testing and Website Optimization
The truth is, CRO is hard. You can’t learn it in a month, and you won’t be an expert until you’ve done it for years.
Let me say that again: It takes YEARS to become a pro.
What does that mean? It means lots of agencies are making mistakes without even knowing it because they’re so new to the game. Here are some of the mistakes we see most often.
1. “Best practices” landing pages
Best practice is NOT the same thing as conversion rate optimization. PPC agencies, SEO agencies, UX and UI people—they’re all claiming to do CRO.
But calling it CRO doesn’t make it so. Here’s what Brian Massey told me the other day:
“Here at Conversion Sciences, we’ve stopped doing best practices consulting because it’s so unreliable. Even if someone asks for it, we won’t sell it to them.
Every audience is different. You have to test to know what’s working. Period. End of story.”
As an example, best practice says videos are good and sliders, or carousels, are bad. It says that sliders distract visitors, are hard to read, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. Not so, according to a DeviceMagic case study, published by VWO.
This test pitted a slider against a video to see which would work better on the home page.
DeviceMagic was pretty sure the sliders were a better fit for their purposes, but they knew better than to make the change without testing. Interestingly, the video seemed to be an early winner. But after reaching statistical significance, the slider was the clear winner.
Another example comes from one of my own projects. I had been commissioned to rewrite a collection of landing pages and, sadly, discovered that we were using best practice as our guide. The results? We nailed SEO, but conversions dropped to half of what they were before the rewrite.
Agencies fall into the same trap. They hear that something is working on another website, and they adopt it, no questions asked.
If it does, it was just dumb luck!
2. Testing the Wrong Things
When you rely on hearsay rather than data, it’s easy to make another mistake as well—testing the wrong things.
Experienced Conversion Scientists™ know which data gives them the insights they need. And they know which tools will give it to them.
Some agencies try to shave expenses by cutting out the data-collection tools—things like click testing, heatmaps and user-session recording tools. As a result, they don’t have the data to make smart decisions about what to test. These agencies pick something out of the blue to test instead of using analytics to figure it out.
In other words, they’re testing for the sake of testing.
Science should be based on hypotheses, not guesses or busy work. So you gotta ask, if your tests aren’t based on data, what’s the point?
Honestly, that’s the case for a lot of tests. Alex Turnbull, Groove’s founder, gives a great example of this. He lists some tests that are often considered “easy wins.” But for Groove, he says, they were pointless.
Typically, these tests are the first tests newbies try to run, not because they’re relevant to the website or the audience, but because they seem like easy wins. Remember: trust the data, not someone else’s results.
3. Reliance on Self-Reported Data
Data is important. But you can’t depend on just any data.
Self-reported data—such as responses from focus groups, user testing, surveys, and forum feedback—is gathered from people’s stories, not their behavior.
The problem is people lie.
They may not mean to, but they do. If you ask them how they spend their money, they give a best-case scenario or what they wish to be true. Not the absolute truth.
Compare their answers to your analytics and you get another story. The real story.
That’s why Conversion Scientists don’t put much stock into self-reported data. Qualitative data (self-reported) is great for generating hypotheses, but it needs to be validated with testing.
Here’s where you need to be careful: A lot of agencies (especially UX and UI) redesign a site using only self-reported data. A true Conversion Scientist uses analytics and split testing to verify assumptions before deciding they’re true.
The Marks & Spencer 2014 redesign proves the point: Costing £150 million (about $230 million), this redesign took two years and led to an 8% decrease in online sales.
Based on the fact that this project took two years, I’m guessing that most decisions were made from self-reported data plus the design team’s own opinions.
It’s unlikely A/B testing was involved because testing delivers incremental changes rather than one massive change. And it allows you to mitigate technical errors, because you know for certain whether the changes you’re making are helping.
DigitalTonic says it well in their analysis of the redesign:
“Drastic changes can never be monitored meaningfully and you won’t be able to separate the variables that are causing the positive or negative impact on conversions. With testing on your current site prior to redesign, you will hit a local maxima meaning that you have optimised the site as best as you can in its current incarnation. It’s at this stage that you would take the learnings and move towards the global maxima with the redesign process.”
The issue here is really about behavioral versus attitudinal data. Look at this chart, which illustrates the landscape of 20 popular research methods, and you can see why this is such a common mistake. Self-reported data looks like a scientific approach.
Behavioral versus attitudinal testing
Surveys and focus groups give useful information, but since the data is both attitudinal and qualitative, it should never be the foundation for testing.
Use it to help you develop smart hypotheses. Use it to understand your users better. But alone, it’s not valid. Behavioral (or quantitative) data is your most reliable source of information.
As Christian Rohrer states, “While many user-experience research methods have their roots in scientific practice, their aims are not purely scientific and still need to be adjusted to meet stakeholder needs.”
4. Not Understanding the Scientific Process
Agencies are time and materials companies. They bill by the hour. Understandably, they want every hour of their employees’ time to be accounted for and assigned to a winning project.
The problem is, this focus on the bottom line can actually dampen results.
Scientists need time to be curious, follow their hunches and understand the reason things are happening. A successful A/B testing agency needs to give them that time, even if some of those hunches turn out to be pointless.
In the long run, it’s cheaper to eliminate hypotheses early, before testing. If experienced Conversion Scientists are given time to “play,” they can usually do that with analysis alone, saving time and money.
In other words, a few hours of analysis beats 2 weeks of testing every time.
True inspiration requires time. Time to follow dead ends. Time to dive into the data. Time to think and ask questions. If your agency doesn’t allow that, be aware, you’re probably not getting the best results.
5. Offering a Completely Done-For-You Model
This one sounds more like a premium service than a mistake. But when it comes to CRO, it reads more like a mistake.
Some agencies believe they have more “job security” if they make the client completely dependent on them. So they do it all: collect the data, make the hypotheses and, supposedly, deliver results.
Alone.
There’s no collaboration with clients. Which means they’re only using half the information they should be using to create hypotheses.
Here’s the thing: The best results come when the agency and client work together. The agency has the expertise to collect the data, but the client has the intimate knowledge of the customer. It takes both.
Seriously. If your agency is doing everything for you, they may be creating issues rather than solving them.
Does your agency see you as a money tree? Collaboration, rather than DFY services get the best results.
6. Not Bothering to Influence the Client Culture
Similarly, some agencies appear to collaborate with the client, but they draw the line before influencing client culture.
In reality, there’s a huge advantage to having an agency work so closely with you that they actually change the way you do things.
True collaboration involves getting together on a frequent basis and discussing ideas. Over time, you begin to see the thought process that goes into each website optimization effort. You begin to understand how to make decisions based on data and to value the insight numbers can give you.
When that happens, whether you consider yourself a numbers person or not, you’re hooked.
That’s the point at which you stop making random marketing decisions. Instead, you call your agency and ask what data needs collecting and when you can start testing. (Congratulations! You’re a conversion geek!)
As we talked about before, a done-for-you or non-collaborative service may not be giving you the best results—and they may be charging premium rates to do so.
Always remember, you’re the resource for testing. Not many agencies actually try to influence your company’s culture. Make sure yours does.
7. Not Staffing for CRO
This is a biggie. An agency that doesn’t staff for CRO shouldn’t offer CRO. You see, the best Conversion Scientists are skilled in two areas. They’re good with numbers and they’re excellent communicators.
Good with numbers. Getting high marks in high-school math isn’t enough. Conversion Scientists are masters of data and statistics.
They know when numbers are reliable and when they’re not. So they know how long to run a test and when the results are statistically valid. They know when the math is bad, which means you can be sure you’re getting positive results.
But being good with numbers isn’t everything. Great Conversion Scientists are also…
Excellent communicators. All too often, Web developers are recruited to do analytics, and sure they understand the numbers—but not much else.
At Conversion Sciences, the team spends much of their time going through the numbers to tease out the stories. If there’s a hole in the plot, they design a test to figure out what’s missing. The goal is to find the story in the data—and tell that story well.
Conversion optimizers are fortune tellers
If you think about it, conversion optimizers are really fortune tellers. They predict the future based on the data your site gives them. Is your agency converting analytics to customer stories? If not, you may be dealing with Web developers rather than conversion optimizers.
8. Failing to Test Before Going Live
Pros test and validate everything before going live. That avoids costly mistakes like Finish Line’s 2012 Web redesign, which cost the chain around $3.5 million in sales and a huge hit to its reputation.
Four days before Black Friday, Finish Line launched a freshly redesigned website, supposedly planning to “reinvent the shopping experience.” Instead, customers complained about lost orders and other technology glitches, and Finish Line had to revert back to the old design just prior to the Christmas shopping season.
Granted, that level of mistake isn’t likely for smaller brands, but bad usability can still impact reputation and profitability.
My guess is a brand agency was responsible for that redesign. It would have been smarter to work with conversion optimizers, who understand how to use data to decide on incremental changes, validating each one before moving on to the next.
9. Making Rookie Mistakes
Since CRO is now a “thing,” everyone and their office cat now offer website optimization services. Most don’t know the difference between conversions and sales, which means they’re making a lot of mistakes.
Now don’t get me wrong. We all make our fair share of junior mistakes when we’re starting out—things like delivering results without statistical validity, not analyzing traffic enough, and the like.
But this is the “golden age” of conversion optimization. Don’t you want pro results?
Again, not everyone who claims to be a conversion optimizer is. Unless your team is experienced and has a structured approach for improving conversions, they’re likely making some mistakes that could be easily avoided—if they were more experienced.
Pro CROs use a structured approach to improving conversions.
Download a free copy of our eBook Four Rookie CRO Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs.
Website Optimization Mistakes Bottom Line
As you can see, mistakes are more common than not. That’s because website optimization is hard work.
If you want to get the big results CRO promises, you need an agency that has the experience and know-how to do it right. Period. (BTW, I recommend talking with Conversion Sciences about whether they can help.)
What CRO fails have you seen? And what are you doing to keep from making bonehead testing mistakes? Share in the comments below.