Search engine algorithms are evolving at higher paces than ever before. The frequent updates to these algorithms – especially Google’s search algorithm updates – have made it harder to “game” the system using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This has forced companies to bring at least one SEO specialist on board in order to gain and keep high rankings for their websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
At the same time, advances in data-collection tools has made conversion rate optimization (CRO) one of the highest returns on the marketing investment (ROI). Ironically, CRO is one of the most underused activities in the marketing department.
This paradox becomes apparent once you consider that obtaining the click that brings someone to your website is only the first step toward converting the visitor into a paying customer. From this perspective, CRO carries the burden of managing the entire user interaction, as opposed to SEO, which arguably only brings the visitor to the “front door.”
SEO and CRO Are Meant to Work Hand-in-Hand
With SEO, the basic point of focus is the webpage. In conversion optimization, the central concept is a PPC ad and a matched landing page. Nevertheless, the principles of search engine and conversion rate optimization are undeniably compatible. In fact, here are a few fundamentals that apply to both SEO and CRO:
A conversion optimized page will prove user friendly and more likely to receive inbound links and referrals, thus improving SEO.
Having clear and relevant headlines, as opposed to excessively creative ones, will improve both SEO and CRO.
Using clear content hierarchy with proper heading tags will help with SEO and keep focus on the progression of the message, which will help with conversion.
A conversion optimized page should be using plenty of relevant keywords that match what visitors are searching for.
Replacing complex presentations with digestible pieces of content will improve your SEO and conversion rate.
Search engines will favor pages that are updated frequently. Keeping layouts and content fresh will prove beneficial for both SEO and CRO.
Pages that focus on a single topic or product achieve better search engine rankings and improve conversion rate.
SEO Factors Inform CRO Efforts
The SEO field has been revolving around the standards imposed by search engines, especially Google’s ranking factors. Some of these are documented by Google, some are relatively obvious, others are not confirmed, and some sit at the brink of speculation or wishful thinking.
Since SEO revolves around ranking factors, which basically dictate the actions and tools needed in this field, it’s only natural that the SEO insights most relevant to CRO are rooted in these ranking factors.
1. Focus on User Behavior
Conversion optimization is data-driven, much like SEO. Web analytics are your greatest asset, but you will need to do additional research into user behavior. Segmentation analysis becomes quite important. Ask yourself this: “How do different segments interact with your website, and how can you optimize their particular experiences?”
The user interaction factors most likely to be useful in CRO and impact on conversion optimization are:
Dwell time and click backs focus on how long people spend on your page before returning to the original SERP. Session duration is also important. It measures the amount of time people spend on your site and may be used as a quality signal by Google.
Average session duration in Google Analytics
If you’re having trouble differentiating dwell time, session duration, and bounce rate, read this article published by Neil Patel on Search Engine Journal. It will clarify the topic.
Bounce rate is used to calculate the percentage of users who navigate away from your site after viewing a single page. Bounce rate probably cannot be a ranking factor by itself. Metrics that can’t be applied broadly, with the objective of identifying relevant and quality content, usually are not Google algorithm factors. However, bounce rate will surely influence the way you strategize for conversion, especially in creating the A/B tests fundamental to CRO.
Direct and repeat traffic are powerful indicators of quality for Google. They use data collected through Chrome to determine how often users visit any particular site. Pages with a lot of direct traffic are favored in SERPs, because they are much more likely to contain quality and engaging content.
2. It’s Not Just the Landing Page, It’s Also the Website
Conversion optimization extends beyond single pages, creating what we call conversion paths throughout the website. SEO dictates that breaking up content into multiple steps is usually a bad idea. CRO specialists tell us that multiple-step landing pages can convert better, by engaging respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitating proper segmentation. For this reason, some form of consensus needs to be achieved in order to allow both SEO and CRO specialists to reach successful results.
Some of the site-level SEO factors most likely to influence CRO are:
Site Architecture and Sitemap improve your site’s relationship with Google, since they allow the engine to index your pages and more thoroughly organize your content. Make sure your website can accommodate conversion paths without messing up its logic.
Domain TrustRank is a very important ranking factor. TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in the famous paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank by researchers Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University, and Jan Pedersen of Yahoo!. SEO by the Sea tells us more about TrustRank.
Google indexes SSL certificates and uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. People are reluctant when offering credit card details and other personal data over the Internet. Obtaining an SSL certificate is crucial to offering assurance to customers and letting Google know that you are running a legitimate business.
Mobile friendly sites rank better with Google. Even before the April 2015 “Mobile Friendly” Google algorithm update, it was not unthinkable to assume that mobile friendly sites had an advantage in searches from mobile devices. Google actually displays “Mobile friendly” tags next to mobile search results.
Google’s mobile friendly tags
Also, keep in mind that Google has precise standards for evaluating what constitutes mobile friendly design. Google WebMaster Central offers details about mobile friendly requirements. To assess your website’s current mobile performance, check out this Mobile Friendly Test.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three
"*" indicates required fields
3. If Content Is King, the Webpage Is Its Kingdom
In both SEO and CRO, content is king. In SEO, this wins you links. In conversion optimization, it wins you customers. You should never allow technical aspects to eclipse what is truly important: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences.
Page-level SEO factors that will prove crucial for conversion
Using keywords correctly throughout webpages is critical when trying to improve your search engine ranking and your conversion rates as part of your online marketing strategy. Keywords must be used in:
URLs.
Title tags. Place top-performing keywords in descending order and make sure that the title tag reflects the most important keywords used on that particular page. Here are 9 best practices for optimized < title > tags (Search Engine Land).
Description tags. This MOZ article states, “While not important to search engine rankings, [Meta Description Tags] are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs.”
Heading tags. The heading tag is useful in outlining whole sections of content. It impacts both the SEO and usability of websites. For information on how to use these tags, consult this article from Woorank.com.
The body text. Fairly distributing the keywords throughout the content is crucial. You may want your keywords to be the most frequently used elements on the page. However, do not overstuff content with keywords. Use them intelligently and always favor usability. A link or review from an established source – thanks to the quality of your content – will weigh much more than keyword density. On the other hand, keyword prominence might be an important relevancy signal. Make sure to include your keywords in snippets and in the first 100 words of your content.
A great page layout influences rankings and conversion, if not directly as a quality signal, at least by scoring in the “user friendly category.” This keeps readers coming back for more. The page layout on highest quality pages makes the main content immediately visible. Content length. While life on- and off-line speeds up and our attention span keeps narrowing, you would expect content to get shorter in order to efficiently catch the attention of users. On the contrary, long articles rank and convert better than short ones. Review the results of an A/B testing experiment conducted by Neil Patel, demonstrating the superior efficiency of long copy.
4. Build Links, Build Trust, Build Rapport
One of the driving goals of SEO is link building. Conversion optimization deals with links mostly in terms of conversion paths. Landing pages usually do not contain links themselves other than for the call to action (CTA). However, many SEO factors concerning link building can apply to CRO in crucial ways. Here are some examples:
The quality and word-count of the linking content make a big difference in link value. For example, receiving a link from a 2,000+ word well-written article weighs in much more than a link from a short comment or a poorly written blog post.
“Poisonous” anchor text pointed toward your site may be a sign of spam or a hacked site. Either way, it can hurt your ranking and your conversion rates, particularly when the anchor texts in question are stuffed with pharmaceutical keywords.
If there are low-quality links pointing to your landing pages, or you receive unnatural links warnings from Webmaster Tools, you can always use the Disavow Tool. It will not remove the harmful links themselves, but at least it will eliminate them from Google’s assessment of your site.
You have the option to disavow links
Contextual links – links placed within the content of pages – are more valuable than links found in sidebars, footers, or anywhere else on the page. So on top of the PPC ads, try getting your landing pages mentioned in relevant content on relevant websites.
5. Your Brand Needs a Social Identity to Attract and Convert
In terms of the decision to purchase, user behavior has been shifting toward a multi-source, multiple stage process over the last few years. Regardless of how persuasive your landing pages are and how well they bring customers to the realization that you have the answer to their specific needs, your brand needs to back up its claims with a healthy social media presence and an SEO effort that encompasses social factors. Here are a few of the factors that can inform CRO specialists on what needs to be done:
Google officially favors real brands and real businesses, with real offices and real people, so it only makes sense they would verify businesses and brands by their website and social media location data. MOZ goes even further and suggests that Google looks at whether a website is associated with a tax-paying business.
Brands have Facebook pages with many likes and Twitter profiles with many followers. Moreover, serious businesses have proper company Linkedin pages. Interestingly, Rand Fishkin, co-founder of MOZ, states that having many Linkedin profiles that list working for your company will improve your rankings and might actually constitute a brand signal.
Social media account authority weighs considerably in SERPs, especially since social media has become a major influencer of consumer behavior. An infographic published by Social Media Today shows how social media influences consumers, the types of content that deliver the most impact, and more.
A link shared on multiple accounts will be more valuable than the same link shared multiple times on one account.
Wrapping It Up
Looking ahead, experts predict a major detachment from traditional ranking factors to a much deeper analysis of perceived site value, authority, structured data, and social signals. Automation is transforming digital marketing, turning SEO and CRO into much more precise and effective fields in the process. Ideally, within this decade Google’s services and search algorithm will evolve to a level that will allow us to fully customize our proposals according to our customers’ buying cycles.
You want to improve your conversions but no money to fund this effort. We’ll walk you through 4 sure-fire ways to get a CRO budget for next year.
If you ever went to the government and asked them what your fair share of taxes should be, they would first ask you how much you made last year.
And that would likely be the answer.
Likewise, a conversion optimizer would probably be the last person to ask how much to budget for conversion optimization. “How much budget do you have?”
Nonetheless, I’m going to give you the tools to add conversion optimization to your budget next year. Then, when you call us next year, you’ll be ready.
Where to Get Your CRO Budget
One key question you need to ask is, where will I get my CRO budget? I have some suggestions.
1. From IT
The basis of any conversion optimization effort is a sound analytics and measurement foundation. This consists of tools that slide under your website and are bolted in place. This is IT stuff.
Our research has shown that most businesses’ websites have some level of implementation of analytics. You don’t want to be left behind. This is a crucial behavioral database that will be invaluable as you begin to vet ideas for testing.
2. From the Things You Should be Testing Anyway
It is a golden age of marketing. We have more tools, data sources and shiny objects to drive our online businesses than any marketers have ever had. We can mobile gamify our ratings and review process using direct visitor feedback to drive personalization throughout our content funnels.
In other words, we’re overwhelmed, and the first sign of a marketing department that is overwhelmed is the decision to redesign.
Your website probably doesn’t need a redesign. It probably needs to be optimized.
Put the redesign money into an optimization program and see immediate results.
There is a good way to get your head around all of the things you could be doing to your site. You could test the ideas. Instead of blindly pouring money into exit-intent popovers, live chat, or personalized recommendations, you should test them. We have seen these work and we have seen them fail.
Your conversion optimization team will know how to use data to make good decisions on where to spend your money. Budget for optimization first.
3. From Your Ad Spend to Get a CRO Budget
Paid search is a great way to generate qualified traffic. However, our success in search causes our fundamentals to “regress”. It becomes harder to increase traffic, and the new traffic often is less qualified, less profitable.
When you spend more, get less traffic and make less money, it’s time to try optimization.
When your traffic is flat, ad spend is rising and profit is dropping, you know you should be putting some of that into optimization.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but there is a period of sweat and anxious hand-wringing.
You see, conversion optimization takes time. There is a very real dip in performance. When you reduce spending on ads you reduce your traffic and your revenue. For a period of time, your revenue drops until your optimization efforts get traction.
It might look something like the graph below. This assumes a modest 5% increase in revenue per visit (RPV) each month for one year, and that 8.9% of ad spend, or $8900, is invested in optimization each month. In this example, we began with a conversion rate of 1.7%.
If you can make it through a short valley of death, borrowing from your ad spend can be very profitable.
Monthly revenue dips due to the reduction in PPC traffic. Revenue returns to baseline levels in month four. Revenue is positive in month six compared to investing in PPC only.
The Return on CRO (green line) turns sharply north, even though we are still investing 8.9% of ad spend each month.
This is what powers conversion optimization. You have a compounding effect working in your favor, but you have to invest on the front end.
Depending on your traffic, these can be had for a few hundred dollars each month up to several thousand dollars each month.
The Team
None of these tools matter if you don’t have someone to pull the levers, turn the knobs and read the graphs. The main functions found on a conversion optimization team are:
A researcher to collect qualitative data.
A statistically-responsible person to collect and evaluate quantitative data.
A developer to create the changes in each test.
A designer to implement design changes.
A patient QA person to be sure nothing is broken by a test.
A project manager to keep the momentum going.
It is possible to have one super-amazing person who can do all of this. It is the death-knell of your conversion optimization program to ask someone to do all of this in addition to another job. Your PPC person is not going to be able to do all of this and their job too.
These are fairly expensive employees. Consider hiring an outside agency, like us, to get started. As of this writing, Conversion Sciences can provide these functions for less than ten-thousand dollars a month.
The Opportunity Costs
There is a cost to testing that is not seen in reports. It’s the cost of losing treatments. In any list of “good” ideas for increasing your conversion rate and revenue per visit, fully half will actually do more harm than good. We don’t know which of our ideas are “losers” until we test them. When we test, some percentage of your visitors will see these losers, be turned off, and won’t buy.
This is lost revenue. With proper management, this downside can be minimized, but it is the cost of doing business. It’s the price of admission, the overhead, the burn, that funny smell in the kitchen.
It’s hard to budget for this particular line item, but it should be part of your discussion.
Be Clear About Your Upside
If I haven’t scared you off, there is good news. We call it the upside, the green bling, statistical bignificance, and sometimes we just dance.
You should understand what your statistical significance is. You must know the answer to the question, “What happens if my conversion rate goes up a little?” We call this a Basic Unit of Upside.
Click for a Conversion Optimization Upside Report that does the math for you.
We offer our Conversion Optimization Upside Report to help you understand your upside. It calculates what your yearly increase in revenue would be if you only added 0.1 to your conversion rate or revenue per visit. Plug in a few numbers and you’ll see what small changes mean for your bottom line.
A Little More Motivation to Get a CRO Budget
For most businesses, conversion optimization is a ten-thousand-dollar a month investment or more. Many businesses are spending a whole lot more than that.
If conversion optimization is on your “maybe next year” list, consider what might happen if you give your competitors a year’s head start on you.
The business with the highest conversion rate has the lowest acquisition cost and can profitably boost bids on their paid advertising. Plus, Google favors high-converting landing pages when assigning ad placement.
With a realistic understanding of the costs of conversion optimization and a real appreciation for the potential upside, you should be able to make the case for adding it to your shopping list this year.
Will CRO agencies adopt SEM, or will SEM agencies integrate CRO?
The perfect storm of online business, the peanut butter and jelly, the gin and tonic, the Abbot and Costello will be SEM and CRO. The reason is that the conversion rate of any business is calculated by dividing transactions (leads, sales or calls) by the number of visitors overall. Those businesses with the highest conversion rates enjoy both targeted, qualified visitors and optimized websites.
High converting sites optimize both sides of the equation.
There is no better source of qualified traffic than that brought through search engine marketing (SEM).
Both organic and paid search traffic represents visitors who have expressed a certain intent. If you can deliver an on-site experience to match that intent, you will gain customers at a lower and lower acquisition cost.
What kind of agency is going to deliver this one-two punch? Will a CRO agency adopt the search marketing services and bring them to market or will a search agency adopt full-stack website optimization practices?
Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences and Jim McKinley of 360Partners will debate this question in their free Webinar on September 17thThe CRO + SEM Agency: Challenges and Opportunities.
The conversation will begin with violent agreement on the importance of bringing these two practices together. We will examine the trends in search marketing and website optimization.
Then things will get interesting. These two industry veterans will tackle some of the harder questions.
Do these need to be under one roof, or can agencies partner to deliver a complete package? Why or why not?
How would search agencies have to change their business models? How would a CRO company have to change?
Why do so few agencies claim to do both?
For those agencies that offer both, are they really providing the double-digit conversion rates that the combination promises?
Here’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.
The closer your conversions are to zero, the closer your conversion optimization efforts will be to guessing.
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.
43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three
"*" 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.
Bounce rate on landing pages
Click-through-rate on key internal pages
Add-to-cart for ecommerce sites
Form completion percent
Abandonment rate (basically the opposite of the last two)
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.
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:
Headline
Call-to-action button text
Pictures. If you can’t write a meaningful caption for an image, change it.
Add sub-headlines
Add bulleted lists
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:
You can also split testing with less than 100 conversions. You just need really big wins. If you have a treatment with 20 conversions and another with 40 conversions, a 100% difference is something you can probably bank on, even with such small numbers. However, if one treatment got 20 conversions and the other got 30, that 50% increase is too close to the margin of error and shouldn’t be considered an improvement (even though it feels like a win).
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 Compfightcc and adapted for this post.
Last 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.
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.
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:
Relevant
Specific
Not cliche, i.e. Unexpected
Often, being relevant and specific is surprising enough to meet the last requirement: unexpected.
“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 likeadaptive 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.
Today’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.
Step One: Look for Evidence
Step Two: Rate the Traffic
Step Three: How Hard is it to Test?
Step Four: What does experience tell you?
Step Five: Bucket the Winners
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.
User Experience: For hypotheses that would alter the layout, design, or other user interface and user experience issues.
Credibility and Authority: For hypotheses that address trust and credibility issues of the business and the site.
Social Proof: For hypotheses that build trust by showing others’ experiences.
Value Proposition: For hypotheses that address the overall messaging and value proposition. Quality, availability, pricing, shipping, business experience, etc.
Risk Reversal: For hypotheses that involving warranties, guarantees and other assurances of safety.
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.
We 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.
Buy more traffic.
Increase the revenue earned per visitor.
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:
Click-tracking tools (also called heat map tools) that track where a prospects are clicking and how far they are scrolling. This reveals functional problems on specific pages.
Screen Recording tools will record visitor sessions for analysis.
Split testing, or A/B testing tools allow marketers to try different content and design elements to see which generate more inquiries.
Site Performance tools help companies increase the speed with which a website loads. Page speed correlates with conversion performance.
Social Analytics track the performance of social interactions relating to the site, such as likes, shares, and social form fills.
User Feedback tools provide feedback directly from visitors on the quality of the site and content.
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.
As 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.
This is a key piece of knowledge for any business ready to test – know your base 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:
Where are visitors coming from?
Which pages are they landing on?
Which pages get the highest traffic?
What are the key pages in the funnel?
Are there pages with high exit or bounce rates?
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.
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43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three
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Even though OkCupid won’t let me install Crazy Egg or Hotjar, I’m still going to treat my dating landing page like I would a client’s website when I start the optimization process. I make a list of hypotheses I think could improve the conversion rate and come up with a plan of action about how to test each one.
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.
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 plaid and your landing pages polka dots? That is, are your PPC ads and landing pages in alignment? Check out these great tips and maximize conversions.
Pay-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
If you’re not matching terminology on your landing page to your PPC ads, you’re wasting money and losing clients.
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:
Impressions dropped 6%
Click-through-rate (CTR) increased by 55%
Conversions increased by an incredible 228%
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.
5 SEO Insights Pivotal to Optimizing Your Website for Conversion
Conversion OptimizationSearch engine algorithms are evolving at higher paces than ever before. The frequent updates to these algorithms – especially Google’s search algorithm updates – have made it harder to “game” the system using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This has forced companies to bring at least one SEO specialist on board in order to gain and keep high rankings for their websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
At the same time, advances in data-collection tools has made conversion rate optimization (CRO) one of the highest returns on the marketing investment (ROI). Ironically, CRO is one of the most underused activities in the marketing department.
This paradox becomes apparent once you consider that obtaining the click that brings someone to your website is only the first step toward converting the visitor into a paying customer. From this perspective, CRO carries the burden of managing the entire user interaction, as opposed to SEO, which arguably only brings the visitor to the “front door.”
SEO and CRO Are Meant to Work Hand-in-Hand
With SEO, the basic point of focus is the webpage. In conversion optimization, the central concept is a PPC ad and a matched landing page. Nevertheless, the principles of search engine and conversion rate optimization are undeniably compatible. In fact, here are a few fundamentals that apply to both SEO and CRO:
SEO Factors Inform CRO Efforts
The SEO field has been revolving around the standards imposed by search engines, especially Google’s ranking factors. Some of these are documented by Google, some are relatively obvious, others are not confirmed, and some sit at the brink of speculation or wishful thinking.
Since SEO revolves around ranking factors, which basically dictate the actions and tools needed in this field, it’s only natural that the SEO insights most relevant to CRO are rooted in these ranking factors.
1. Focus on User Behavior
Conversion optimization is data-driven, much like SEO. Web analytics are your greatest asset, but you will need to do additional research into user behavior. Segmentation analysis becomes quite important. Ask yourself this: “How do different segments interact with your website, and how can you optimize their particular experiences?”
The user interaction factors most likely to be useful in CRO and impact on conversion optimization are:
Average session duration in Google Analytics
If you’re having trouble differentiating dwell time, session duration, and bounce rate, read this article published by Neil Patel on Search Engine Journal. It will clarify the topic.
2. It’s Not Just the Landing Page, It’s Also the Website
Conversion optimization extends beyond single pages, creating what we call conversion paths throughout the website. SEO dictates that breaking up content into multiple steps is usually a bad idea. CRO specialists tell us that multiple-step landing pages can convert better, by engaging respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitating proper segmentation. For this reason, some form of consensus needs to be achieved in order to allow both SEO and CRO specialists to reach successful results.
Some of the site-level SEO factors most likely to influence CRO are:
Google’s mobile friendly tags
Also, keep in mind that Google has precise standards for evaluating what constitutes mobile friendly design. Google WebMaster Central offers details about mobile friendly requirements. To assess your website’s current mobile performance, check out this Mobile Friendly Test.
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Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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3. If Content Is King, the Webpage Is Its Kingdom
In both SEO and CRO, content is king. In SEO, this wins you links. In conversion optimization, it wins you customers. You should never allow technical aspects to eclipse what is truly important: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences.
Page-level SEO factors that will prove crucial for conversion
Using keywords correctly throughout webpages is critical when trying to improve your search engine ranking and your conversion rates as part of your online marketing strategy. Keywords must be used in:
A great page layout influences rankings and conversion, if not directly as a quality signal, at least by scoring in the “user friendly category.” This keeps readers coming back for more. The page layout on highest quality pages makes the main content immediately visible.
Content length. While life on- and off-line speeds up and our attention span keeps narrowing, you would expect content to get shorter in order to efficiently catch the attention of users. On the contrary, long articles rank and convert better than short ones. Review the results of an A/B testing experiment conducted by Neil Patel, demonstrating the superior efficiency of long copy.
4. Build Links, Build Trust, Build Rapport
One of the driving goals of SEO is link building. Conversion optimization deals with links mostly in terms of conversion paths. Landing pages usually do not contain links themselves other than for the call to action (CTA). However, many SEO factors concerning link building can apply to CRO in crucial ways. Here are some examples:
You have the option to disavow links
5. Your Brand Needs a Social Identity to Attract and Convert
In terms of the decision to purchase, user behavior has been shifting toward a multi-source, multiple stage process over the last few years. Regardless of how persuasive your landing pages are and how well they bring customers to the realization that you have the answer to their specific needs, your brand needs to back up its claims with a healthy social media presence and an SEO effort that encompasses social factors. Here are a few of the factors that can inform CRO specialists on what needs to be done:
A link shared on multiple accounts will be more valuable than the same link shared multiple times on one account.
Wrapping It Up
Looking ahead, experts predict a major detachment from traditional ranking factors to a much deeper analysis of perceived site value, authority, structured data, and social signals. Automation is transforming digital marketing, turning SEO and CRO into much more precise and effective fields in the process. Ideally, within this decade Google’s services and search algorithm will evolve to a level that will allow us to fully customize our proposals according to our customers’ buying cycles.
Feature image licensed by Bgubitz through Creative Commons and adapted for this post.
4 Ways to Get a CRO Budget for Next Year
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationIf you ever went to the government and asked them what your fair share of taxes should be, they would first ask you how much you made last year.
And that would likely be the answer.
Likewise, a conversion optimizer would probably be the last person to ask how much to budget for conversion optimization. “How much budget do you have?”
Nonetheless, I’m going to give you the tools to add conversion optimization to your budget next year. Then, when you call us next year, you’ll be ready.
Where to Get Your CRO Budget
One key question you need to ask is, where will I get my CRO budget? I have some suggestions.
1. From IT
The basis of any conversion optimization effort is a sound analytics and measurement foundation. This consists of tools that slide under your website and are bolted in place. This is IT stuff.
Our research has shown that most businesses’ websites have some level of implementation of analytics. You don’t want to be left behind. This is a crucial behavioral database that will be invaluable as you begin to vet ideas for testing.
2. From the Things You Should be Testing Anyway
It is a golden age of marketing. We have more tools, data sources and shiny objects to drive our online businesses than any marketers have ever had. We can mobile gamify our ratings and review process using direct visitor feedback to drive personalization throughout our content funnels.
In other words, we’re overwhelmed, and the first sign of a marketing department that is overwhelmed is the decision to redesign.
Put the redesign money into an optimization program and see immediate results.
There is a good way to get your head around all of the things you could be doing to your site. You could test the ideas. Instead of blindly pouring money into exit-intent popovers, live chat, or personalized recommendations, you should test them. We have seen these work and we have seen them fail.
Your conversion optimization team will know how to use data to make good decisions on where to spend your money. Budget for optimization first.
3. From Your Ad Spend to Get a CRO Budget
Paid search is a great way to generate qualified traffic. However, our success in search causes our fundamentals to “regress”. It becomes harder to increase traffic, and the new traffic often is less qualified, less profitable.
When you spend more, get less traffic and make less money, it’s time to try optimization.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but there is a period of sweat and anxious hand-wringing.
You see, conversion optimization takes time. There is a very real dip in performance. When you reduce spending on ads you reduce your traffic and your revenue. For a period of time, your revenue drops until your optimization efforts get traction.
It might look something like the graph below. This assumes a modest 5% increase in revenue per visit (RPV) each month for one year, and that 8.9% of ad spend, or $8900, is invested in optimization each month. In this example, we began with a conversion rate of 1.7%.
If you can make it through a short valley of death, borrowing from your ad spend can be very profitable.
Monthly revenue dips due to the reduction in PPC traffic. Revenue returns to baseline levels in month four. Revenue is positive in month six compared to investing in PPC only.
The Return on CRO (green line) turns sharply north, even though we are still investing 8.9% of ad spend each month.
This is what powers conversion optimization. You have a compounding effect working in your favor, but you have to invest on the front end.
Send me an email if you want to see all my assumptions.
It’s this four-to-six month dip that marketers and managers fear. How do you sell a drop in revenue to your boss?
4. Pony Up
The other option is to reach into your own profits and slap down some cash on your conversion optimization team.
I’m not going to sugar coat this. There are three costs you must deal with when investing in optimization.
The Components of a Conversion Optimization or CRO Budget
The Software
The first cost is the least bothersome. Conversion optimization requires a certain amount of data to succeed.
The competition in the marketplace is pretty brutal. Each year, we get more functionality from cheaper and cheaper tools. At a minimum, you’ll want a good click-tracking tool, a good session recording tool, a strong analytics database and a split-testing tool.
Depending on your traffic, these can be had for a few hundred dollars each month up to several thousand dollars each month.
The Team
None of these tools matter if you don’t have someone to pull the levers, turn the knobs and read the graphs. The main functions found on a conversion optimization team are:
It is possible to have one super-amazing person who can do all of this. It is the death-knell of your conversion optimization program to ask someone to do all of this in addition to another job. Your PPC person is not going to be able to do all of this and their job too.
The Opportunity Costs
There is a cost to testing that is not seen in reports. It’s the cost of losing treatments. In any list of “good” ideas for increasing your conversion rate and revenue per visit, fully half will actually do more harm than good. We don’t know which of our ideas are “losers” until we test them. When we test, some percentage of your visitors will see these losers, be turned off, and won’t buy.
This is lost revenue. With proper management, this downside can be minimized, but it is the cost of doing business. It’s the price of admission, the overhead, the burn, that funny smell in the kitchen.
It’s hard to budget for this particular line item, but it should be part of your discussion.
Be Clear About Your Upside
If I haven’t scared you off, there is good news. We call it the upside, the green bling, statistical bignificance, and sometimes we just dance.
You should understand what your statistical significance is. You must know the answer to the question, “What happens if my conversion rate goes up a little?” We call this a Basic Unit of Upside.
Click for a Conversion Optimization Upside Report that does the math for you.
We offer our Conversion Optimization Upside Report to help you understand your upside. It calculates what your yearly increase in revenue would be if you only added 0.1 to your conversion rate or revenue per visit. Plug in a few numbers and you’ll see what small changes mean for your bottom line.
A Little More Motivation to Get a CRO Budget
For most businesses, conversion optimization is a ten-thousand-dollar a month investment or more. Many businesses are spending a whole lot more than that.
If conversion optimization is on your “maybe next year” list, consider what might happen if you give your competitors a year’s head start on you.
The business with the highest conversion rate has the lowest acquisition cost and can profitably boost bids on their paid advertising. Plus, Google favors high-converting landing pages when assigning ad placement.
With a realistic understanding of the costs of conversion optimization and a real appreciation for the potential upside, you should be able to make the case for adding it to your shopping list this year.
Feature image by frankieleon via Compfight cc and adapted for this post.
The CRO + SEM Agency: Challenges and Opportunities
Conversion Marketing StrategyWill CRO agencies adopt SEM, or will SEM agencies integrate CRO?
The perfect storm of online business, the peanut butter and jelly, the gin and tonic, the Abbot and Costello will be SEM and CRO. The reason is that the conversion rate of any business is calculated by dividing transactions (leads, sales or calls) by the number of visitors overall. Those businesses with the highest conversion rates enjoy both targeted, qualified visitors and optimized websites.
High converting sites optimize both sides of the equation.
Both organic and paid search traffic represents visitors who have expressed a certain intent. If you can deliver an on-site experience to match that intent, you will gain customers at a lower and lower acquisition cost.
What kind of agency is going to deliver this one-two punch? Will a CRO agency adopt the search marketing services and bring them to market or will a search agency adopt full-stack website optimization practices?
Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences and Jim McKinley of 360Partners will debate this question in their free Webinar on September 17th The CRO + SEM Agency: Challenges and Opportunities.
The conversation will begin with violent agreement on the importance of bringing these two practices together. We will examine the trends in search marketing and website optimization.
Then things will get interesting. These two industry veterans will tackle some of the harder questions.
Watch the webinar on-demand.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Normally the resources I can install on a client’s website inform the hypothesis list and the recommendations I come up with, so I have to be creative by relying on my own experience and on an expert’s opinion, namely Brian Massey.
Here are a few hypotheses from his analysis.
I create a list of hypotheses to test when I begin optimizing
Brian’s critique gave me some great ideas on what to test. I know that my copy needs a bit of work, as does my landing page’s scannability. This is the first hypothesis I’m testing:
Hypothesis: If I change the copy to be about the visitor, instead of myself and improve scannability with bold text and paragraph breaks I can improve conversions.
I carefully changed all of the “I” statements and made them about the visitor. I also added more paragraph breaks and highlighted key words in my text allowing a visitor to more easily scan my profile.
My revised profile
When testing, it’s important to isolate as many variables as possible, so for now the copy is the only thing I changed. I could have swapped out my headshot for a party shot, but if I see an increase in conversion rate, I won’t know if it’s the photo or the copy that’s improving my numbers.
For our testing purposes, my primary goal will be to beat my qualified lead conversion rate of 3.84%, but I will be tracking my overall conversion rate and visitor count as well.
I’m going to want to test more than one hypothesis to get this profile just right. For my next test, I’ll focus on images. Choosing the right images are vital to the success of a landing page, maybe even more so on this particular type of landing page. Since my next test will focus on the images. I did some research, scouring the internet for articles from online dating experts and determined the best profile photos were a smiling woman looking at the camera, showing some skin but not too much skin.
I had a small selection of photos I thought would fit the bill so I decided to take an informal poll of men that fit the type I was looking for: I asked a bunch of my guys friends to help me choose a photo. The photo of me in a black sleeveless dress smiling warmly at the camera was the clear winner. I filled out the rest of my profile photos with a variety of activities and a few shots of me dressed up a bit to show that while I may wear a lab coat to work, I do clean up okay for a night on the town.
This first test isn’t about the images, but after Brian’s critique, I knew that my images might not be saying what I wanted them to say. For this initial pre/post test, I left the photo winners from my poll as they were but added captions to clarify what I wanted the viewer to get from each image.
I’ve shared what I was doing when this photo was taken and also indicated that it’s a fairly recent photo.
With my changes made and my visitor count ticking up, there’s nothing to do but wait and see. We’ll check back in a week (and I’ll look every day in between) to see how my text changes have fared. With any luck (or in my case, with science), I’ll have upped that 3.8% conversion rate.
Are Your PPC Ads and Landing Pages in Alignment?
Advertising CRO, Landing Page OptimizationPay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a highly effective way to get your products in front of new prospective customers and drive sales, but only when campaigns are set up with the right touch. Depending on what keywords you want to target with your bids, search ads are generally not prohibitively expensive, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of blowing through your budget on PPC without justifying your media spend with enough sales.
The PPC management mistakes that most commonly ruin advertisers’ chances of respectable ROI involve text mismatches. All too often, an ad’s keyword settings do not match the language used in the ad’s creative, or the landing page content does not match the language used in the ad’s creative.
Search marketing spending in the US from 2014 to 2019.
Why Matching Terminology Matters
Successful PPC marketing hinges on continuity across all touch points. Web searchers enter search terms into Google based on a need they are trying to fulfill. By the time users have formulated their queries as lines of text, they have already been forced to think about what they’re looking for as being specific to certain terminology. Thus, if your message is going to resonate with them, it has to use the very same terminology.
Google users naturally gravitate towards organic search results. To catch people’s eyes, your ad needs to convey that it addresses the exact issue that the searcher is trying to solve. What’s more, search terms that appear within ad copy appear in bold letters, adding to their visibility and click-throughs.
When people click on the ad, they are expecting to find a matching solution on the other end. You know that dirty feeling you get when you click on a content headline that over-promises and the article ultimately under-delivers? That’s a similar feeling to what happens when there’s a disconnect between search ad copy and landing page copy.
When you get that feeling, you’re unlikely to do business with whoever gave it to you. And that’s why it’s so important that the landing page refer to the exact need at hand and offer an appropriate solution, all using the same terminology. This is one of those landing page best practices that tends to be right every single time.
PPC Ads and Landing Pages in Alignment: The Power of Maximized Continuity
Lack of continuity will result in customers leaving your conversion funnel before opting in to your lead capture offer or purchasing your products.
If a customer searches for “cyan polo shirt summer sale” and you show him an ad for “men’s clothing,” he is not likely to click on it, even though your online store might very well offer cyan polo shirts in the men’s section. Even ad creative touting a “blue polo shirt” product won’t perform as well as the phrase “cyan polo shirt” would – the closer to an exact match you can get, the more effective your ads will be.
Use the word “cyan” to describe the color of this shirt, not just “blue”.
The same principle applies to matching ad copy with landing page copy. If your ad promises a “cyan polo shirt summer sale” but you send people to your homepage, where there are 25 different apparel products being showcased and no trace of any type of sale, the visitor is likely to bounce out extremely quickly.
Customized Ecommerce Text Variations
Using standardized language across your website is necessary to maintain an atmosphere of professional polish and so that your internal search engine will work well. On the other hand, when you set up your search ad campaigns, you should be performing some extensive keyword research to reveal all of the alternate wording that people use for the same thing.
Going back to the same example, you may learn that people often search for polo shirts that are “sapphire,” “teal,” or “turquoise,” which are all reasonably close matches to the “cyan” that appears on your product pages. It totally makes sense to bid on ads to appear on search results for “sapphire polo shirt,” but in cases like these, you may want to create alternate versions of your product pages that only visitors referred by this specific ad will see.
Just make sure to keep these variations out of sight of the search engines, so you won’t get penalized for duplicate content – and out of sight in the website navigation, so visitors do not get confused. Apply a meta “No Index” tag to the head of the landing page to make sure that variations don’t get indexed. Better yet, make sure all your PPC ad campaign landing pages are noindex, follow. Until you have chosen the one you would like to drive organic traffic to.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion
A helpful tool in this process is a Google Adwords feature called Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This tool will adjust your ad text to reflect keywords in the user’s search, potentially accomplishing the same goals we just discussed.
Wordstream ran a case study testing the effectiveness of DKI with a client, and found that using this strategy had the following results:
DKI more than tripled conversions.
The results speak for themselves.
In the context of continuity, the key is to have a very small number of keywords in your ad groups. For top performers, you may even want to use Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS).
Customized Lead Capture Page Variations
If your offer is for a service, a B2B product or something otherwise relatively expensive, then you don’t need to send visitors to ecommerce-integrated product pages at all. In these cases, a sparser landing page is likely to perform better, and it’s easy and inexpensive to create new versions of your landing pages for each keyword combination that you bid for.
Landing pages like these are generally aimed at capturing leads rather than driving sales, since major purchases require more pre-sale relationship building to establish trust and to educate prospects. Many of the better marketing platforms available in the open market offer modules for both landing page creation and autoresponder marketing emails.
If lead capture is your goal, focus your Adwords strategy on your prospects’ pain points rather than your offer’s specifications. For instance, a financial consulting firm could run PPC ads for the search term “family budgeting help” or “debt advice.” These ads could lead to landing page variations for each search term, with each one offering visitors the option to download an eBook that provides practical tips on family budgeting and saving money on household bills.
A campaign of this type takes into account that the prospect is having trouble balancing his or her household budget, and it offers a quick and easy solution that also positions the advertiser as a trustworthy expert in the field of family finance. This paves the way for follow-up messaging.
Another benefit of this type of hyper-specific targeting is that it allows marketers to segment the entire customer journey and serve up nurturing emails that match the subscriber’s specific interests. A post-campaign analysis of the relevant conversion data can reveal which segments represent the advertiser’s most valuable customers, thereby informing subsequent marketing strategies.
Doesn’t Have to Be a Bottomless Pit
You do need a landing page for every important ad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should set up hundreds of landing pages. Instead, focus your campaign on a select number of lead nurture audience personas (three or four) and create an ad that’s optimized to speak to each one of them. Create a unique landing page for each of these ads and set up an autoresponder to send follow-up emails with relevant content to each persona.
If you’re marketing an ecommerce property with a diverse product line and a shopping cart system, start by trying these tactics for just a few products. If it serves you well, then you can focus on making your work flow scalable down the road.
PPC campaigns that are set up for maximum terminology variations are likely to enjoy boosted conversion rates and revenues, so that ad dollars are less likely to go to waste.
Graph image by Statista (via Skitch)