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- 7 Ways to make web analytics work better in companies
- Measuring social media, influence, debate, buzz monitoring
- Web analytics winners and losers? It’s the people that make the difference.
- Simple segmentation for your website and better web analytics understanding
- Web Analytics Wednesday in London – the future of web analytics
- Digital cream: revealing debating at econsultancy’s marketing event
- Google Analytics Tip: Ecommerce tracking set up, screenshots and why it’s useful
- Reliving my customer’s experience and some nice screenshots
- Internal site search part 2
- The best charts ever and food for thought for us web analysts
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My Blogger Friends
8 conversion rate tactics below to help increase conversion rates on your website.
1. People Click On What They Want
People navigate the web by “scent”, Byran Eisenberg, conversion guru and persuasion architect, tells us. Scent was first described by Xerox PARC to describe the parallels between a human’s information-gathering techniques on the Web and an animal’s food-gathering techniques in the wild. People seek information through the “scent” given off by their trigger words.
According to research performed by usability guru Jared Spool, when visitors found their trigger words on a landing page, they were successful at completing their task 72% of the time; if the trigger word wasn’t on the page, they were only successful 6% of the time. The scent of the keywords kept them on the right path; lacking that scent, they stopped searching that particular “trail”. One tip to make sure you have your visitors’ trigger words covered is to make sure each major button or link:
completes this sentence: “I want to _____”.
includes trigger words / strong scent
2. Start Using Persuasive Call To Action Words
Impotent call to action hyperlinks like “read more” and “submit” sometimes make me feel embarrassed for website owners. They should know better.
Persuasive call to action hyperlinks should include an imperative verb and a benefit. For example, which hyperlink is more persuasive: A or B?
George found an investment secret that changed his life. Read More
George found an investment secret that changed his life. See how George doubled his income in one year.
You can see from this comparison why the second example is more likely to induce action.
3. Better Product Images Are Worth A Thousand Calls to Action
Having better-looking product images than other sellers will do wonders. If research is any indication, product images are a major factor in converting visitors. In fact, 83 percent of eBay shoppers skip listings without images, while sites with galleries get 15% more activity and those with so-called super-size photos show a 24 percent spike in sales. The better photo wins every time. Many people skimp on the quality of their product images and use manufacturer-supplied images which is a mistake.
4. B2B Products or Services Need Merchandising, Too
The same holds true if you are in B2B: Better product images are worth a thousand calls to action. Many B2B sites offer downloads of whitepapers or demos in exchange for completing a form, but fail to make the most basic of efforts to persuade visitors to do so. Don’t just tell them about your whitepaper… merchandise it. Show a cover, show them how easy it is to read with all your pretty charts. Test to see which pieces matter the most.
5. Headlines Must be Made to Stick
Most headlines (and copy for that matter) suffer from what Chip and Dan Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick as a curse of knowledge: Once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The headline on your page is the one thing that about 80% of your visitors will read. But while headlines are often crafted for their persuasive abilities, they often assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Make sure that everybody understands what your headline is about, even if they have no reference to understand it. Then invest as much time as possible testing your headline’s abilities to both (1) gather attention and (2) entice visitors to invest the next 30 seconds on your page by explaining what’s in it for them — in language they can understand!
6. Always be Testing
Doing A/B or multivariate testing used to require some in-house programming expertise or expensive third-party software. Thankfully, Google has provided us with a free alternative in the form of Google Website Optimizer. While it may not offer every feature some of the other solutions provide, it is quite an elegant solution and getting better all the time. I actually prefer that people don’t spend their money on a tool, but focus those resources on better copy and imagery instead. There are no more excuses for not testing regularly. Remember what Claude Hopkins wisely said in 1923: “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.”
7. Should we be testing hundreds of thousands of variations?
This question illustrates the market’s misunderstanding of testing. For the vast majority of businesses, this is more like random testing. You can test thousands of combinations in a multivariate test, but being able to doesn’t mean you should. Let’s focus on this example. I’ve kept the numbers simple for clarity’s sake, but let’s assume:
Example I (not recommended):
1,000 = Test combinations (the number of page sections and variations in the test)
10,000 = Page views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment (we’ll run the experiment with all our traffic)
2.4% = Current conversion rate (average conversion rate)
20% = Expected improvement
The duration for this test: 34.9 days. (More than a month!)
Example II (recommended):
20 = Test combinations (focused on key drivers)
10,000 = Page Views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment
2.4% = Current conversion rate
20% = Expected improvement (focus on key drivers in the hierarchy of optimization rather than just random elements, and your expectations should be higher)
The duration for this test: 0.698 days. (Under a day!)
Under the guise of being “scientific”, the companies that originally offered these tools charged on a monthly basis. While they had plenty of experience in managing their software, they had little experience in identifying valuable tests. Plus, they had zero incentive to get quick results while customers paid a monthly fee.
Multivariate testing for the sake of conversion rate optimization should be scientific. However, testing is about improving your business results, not scientific experimentation. Unless you’re running a lab, you’re testing for profit. (No offense, non-profits… yes, you should be testing too.) Testing only what matters is how to recover opportunity cost. Time is money. Don’t waste it by testing which variables matter; rather, invest your time in improving those variables and your understanding of them. Fix the things that hurt your conversions as fast as possible, and make more money today.
8. Read the Reviews on Conversion
Reviews have been all the buzz the past couple of years. If you recently purchased something online, has a review influenced your purchase decision?
New research further illustrates the value of reviews:
77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
Most people don’t seem to focus on all the factors involved in implementing reviews to enhance conversion. It’s important that you test and optimize for conversion and persuasion by focusing on the following areas:
Placement for Visibility
Above the fold
Size
Stars or other graphic
Near point of attention or action
Review Interaction
Ease of reading
Sorting
Rating Distribution
Use across the site
Single Dimension versus Multi-Dimension Reviews
What are the key attributes across different categories
Can review content influence purchase decision
Credibility Factors
Negative and positive reviews
Review approval policy
Reviewer characteristics
What Does a Review Mean
Number of reviews
What questions are you asking
Qualitative versus quantitative
Reviews are just one example of the market trend demanding more authenticity and transparency, and they are key factors in getting your visitors to take action. Any time you have a choice between opening up more or less, always opt for giving your customers more.
What do you think? Do you have any ideas on how to make your website perform better?
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recent posts
- 7 Ways to make web analytics work better in companies
- Measuring social media, influence, debate, buzz monitoring
- Web analytics winners and losers? It’s the people that make the difference.
- Simple segmentation for your website and better web analytics understanding
- Web Analytics Wednesday in London – the future of web analytics
- Digital cream: revealing debating at econsultancy’s marketing event
- Google Analytics Tip: Ecommerce tracking set up, screenshots and why it’s useful
- Reliving my customer’s experience and some nice screenshots
- Internal site search part 2
- The best charts ever and food for thought for us web analysts
recent comments
- Perry Williams: Hello Dear, I am strongly agree with your point that the web analytics is associated with the social...
- Philip Sheldrake: Nice overview Marianina. I wanted to post a link to an article in Business Week from June about the...
- Luisa Woods: Hi Marianina, I think you make a very good point about the importance of segmentation. I like to carry...
- Eric T. Peterson: Marianina, Nice to have seen you Monday in London! I just got this post so perhaps something odd is...
- Marianina Manning: Hi Luisa, Thanks for your thought-provoking comment! I agree that new ways of looking at web...
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Web Analytics Princess by Marianina Chaplin
January 7 2008
Overall I agree with a lot of the things you said but want to point out a few things. I think the scent trails tip is just about making sure you use the proper messaging to reach your audience. Find the right messaging and apply that to all aspects of your page in images, design and text.
About testing, it’s not advisable at all to test in under a week time span, no matter how small your test is. I bet the traffic on Monday to your blog is way different than the traffic on Saturday and that’s the way it is with almost any website. You’ll have a lot of different types of traffic arriving all week, so you should test your page at least for 1 week. Also if your expecting certain traffic because of an event (increasing PPC, sending an e-mail campaign, seasonal activity, etc.) then your traffic will change also and that traffic probably should be segmented into a different test from your normal traffic.
Lastly, while I can’t comment on other multivariate testing companies, we at Widemile focus a lot on testing methodology and not testing just to test. I often have to persuade my clients to not test certain things that most likely have very low influence.
Thanks for sharing your experience with testing though. It’s helpful for me to know what others are going through.
January 8 2008
Billy, Thanks for your comment. About messaging 100% agreed – tailoring different scenarios by persona can help those scent trails too.
Re testing, I think it depends how much traffic your site has – if you have 10 or 15 million page views a day then testing for a short period of time can provide meaningful results, even if there are cyclical fluctuations as a result of natural visitor activity or marketing activity.
Marianina
January 8 2008
Hi Marianina,
The biggest difference Widemile has against Offermatica or Google Optimizer is that we are a full service firm. Meaning we provide everything including in-house creative. So our creative team is experienced in creating conversion focused pages. In addition, our staff is all very marketing oriented. We don’t test just to test. We believe that while we have very strong technology that more important is the methodology behind testing.
Another important difference is that we have a new platform. Since our company is newer, we benefit from having a faster and more scalable platform than Offermatica. In terms of Google Optimizer, the general consensus is that Google Optimizer is like Google Analytics, in that it is a great way to get started and a powerful tool in itself but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of solving specific problems and customization needed by enterprise level companies. There are more specifics, but that is a good overview.
In response to your last sentence, I believe its true that you can get meaningful results quickly with a lot of traffic, however we tend to play it more conservatively. In my experience, there is a lot of danger in running a test short, although in no way do I want a test to be long just to be long! Widemile’s chief scientist always goes over these extreme situations and we have not found a situation where the amount of traffic automatically meant quick stabilization of results, meaning statistical validity has not been reached.
We actually have had experience with a client that got a high page view count and wanted us to cut the test short against our advice. It ended up bringing a temporary but unsustainable conversion lift. Obviously this may not happen every time but when you’re dealing with statistics it all depends on how you want to roll the dice. If you’re willing to risk your results working only 80% of the time (or less) rather than 95% of the time, then you can shorten the test. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you
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