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Getting Started With Conversion Rate Optimization: Our Way
Many Grok readers have been curious about our online marketing optimization services and what kind of process to expect when working with us. I’ll use some work we’ve done with a client to show you some basic things you should be looking at when optimizing and testing your site. A client of ours, Universal Accounting, offers successful bookkeeping courses to those who are looking to start their own accounting and bookkeeping businesses.
We started by looking at this client’s traffic sources and separating them into early, middle and late stage buyers. None of this client’s traffic is truly “late stage” because very little traffic actually uses their brand or specific course names in their search to get to their site.
Their traffic is mostly in the early, middle and middle/late stage buckets. Their middle/late stage visitors come to their site from search terms such as “starting a bookkeeping business” and “how to start a bookkeeping business.” The homepage is the top landing page these types of visitors land on.
We start our continuous improvement process by making recommendations to convert more of their late stage traffic. This is where the fun begins because we get to think and act like these types of visitors in order to understand what their motivations and needs are. With this, we assess whether the site does a good job of moving the visitors through the information towards giving them the answers to their questions and persuading them to take macro-conversion action.
If you were searching “how to start a bookkeeping business,” what content would speak to this need if you landed on the homepage? Their original homepage offered no call to action in the active window to speak directly to this visitor. They had some strong headlines and a small link, “start here,” that blended in to the headline bar.
This is the recommendation (click screenshot to enlarge) we gave them through our software.
After some interaction with this client, they came up with two variations of buttons to test against the original (click screenshots to enlarge). The conversion point of this very simple test was to move more visitors to the next page in the scent trail–in other words, to move them forward in their buying process.
It was found that both variations with buttons performed better than the original. The version that calls out “Start your own accounting business now” had less success than the “Learn how to start your accounting business.” This is because the majority of traffic coming to this page is not yet ready to just get started, they first want to “learn how” before they start their business.
What can you take from this example? Start by determining who your late stage traffic is. Look at their keywords: what are they searching for and what are they looking to accomplish when they arrive at your site? Are you featuring a strong call to action (mapped to a buying stage) that will help this visitor move forward in their buying process? Treat each click independently and help your visitor move through one revolving door to the next.
Have you tested anything similar recently? We would love to hear about your experiences.
About the author
Melissa is a Senior Persuasion Analyst at FutureNow.
More articles from Melissa Burdon
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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March 2nd, 2010
5:38 pm
Thanks Melissa. It’s nice to read such a valuable article on bookkeeping. It will help a lot. Looking forward to see some great article from you.
March 2nd, 2010
9:55 pm
Thanks for sharing these great tips. It’s really helpful. It is really important to know what your customers want and then build from there. Keep up the good work!
March 3rd, 2010
12:34 am
The insights on optimizing and testing a site is a great one. We should submit to what the people needs as to answer their demands.
March 3rd, 2010
2:10 am
Thanks for the thorough disection of the components of conversion marketing and traffic source stages…very informative
March 3rd, 2010
5:45 am
with google becoming more and more personalized the era of Rankings is gone, we will have to rely heavily on SMO and ROI and eyeball conversions will become the key
March 3rd, 2010
12:48 pm
i would agree with what vicky said about the PR era gone, we would greatly rely on ROI and SMO
March 3rd, 2010
1:18 pm
I use clicktail, it helps me know what is happening on my site and its heatmaps and videos show me i can increase my conversions
March 3rd, 2010
4:23 pm
Keep my customers moving through my site. Good advice, and I will recheck my site to make sure I’m doing that.
Thank you!
March 3rd, 2010
4:29 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I just met with a client (sells software) about how to increase conversions. Do you ever use Crazy Egg?
March 3rd, 2010
4:30 pm
Crazy Egg shows visitor heatmaps – makes it really easy to refine the design of a landing page – conversion page. Thanks for writing!
March 3rd, 2010
4:35 pm
Many offline business have started to focus on increasing their conversion rates with visitors and clients so it makes perfectly good sense here.
I think those who test, persist, and adjust accordingly will do well. I now have more to think about.
March 3rd, 2010
7:12 pm
thanks for the tips, I’ll keep them in mind.
and I agree, Some websites out there miss out “the call to action” they don’t realize how improtant it is in terms of conversion.
March 3rd, 2010
7:12 pm
Interesting how many folks are mentioning “visual” analytics tools like CrazyEgg and ClickTale. We’ll have to blog on this topic soon!
March 3rd, 2010
8:44 pm
Very good article Melissa.
I wanted to get ideas from you and others as to what kind of criteria do you use to determine whether it’s early stage, mid-stage or late-stage traffic.
What are your thoughts, ideas as to how you determine that?
Thanks,
-Deven
March 3rd, 2010
9:27 pm
Thank you for breaking things down in the purchasing cycle – I’ve been trying to explain this to a client and I’ll be using your article the example I’ve been trying to come up with.
Thank you.
March 3rd, 2010
10:07 pm
I got a ton out of this article. Never thought about the early, middle and late stages of buyers. Splitting your keywords into these categories and then optimizing your site for each of the categories…
Now its time to stop reading marketing blogs and get going.
Thanks alot for the article and the screens definately helped.
March 4th, 2010
12:33 am
Your article shows how careful choice of words, copyrighting can make a big impact to the conversion. Thanks!
March 4th, 2010
12:39 am
Smart to separate buyers into different stages. Late stage buyers are about conversion. Early stage buyers are more about educating them to like the product or service enough to convert.
March 4th, 2010
2:23 am
Some great tips in here. I’d love to know more about your processes. i.e. what criteria do you use to distinguish middle/late stage keywords from early stage keywords?
March 4th, 2010
3:01 am
I think making the call to action larger should just be common sense, but it is usually the simple things that we miss. Thanks for sharing your experience!
March 4th, 2010
4:11 am
Thanks for those great tips. I am new to the world of optimization, But I found numerous nice tips here in your blog as a beginner. Worth reading one.
Nice sharing and keep posting more like this.
March 4th, 2010
6:58 am
I am SEO writer By profession and very well understand the value of Creative wrting.
I agree with all points.
March 4th, 2010
9:16 am
We are currently redesigning our website so your post is really timely. There seems to be a very difficult balance between optimization and usability. We also don’t want to have too much of a marketing tone.
Thanks for writing.
March 4th, 2010
7:32 pm
Thank for sharing it. I am starting from zero to build a website and I will implemented your experienced. at this time I only put related post session to expand my visitors.
March 4th, 2010
7:34 pm
great post. thanks.
March 4th, 2010
7:37 pm
Very nice article. Would love to up my conversion rates.
March 4th, 2010
9:45 pm
Thanks for the insights on using certain words on the front page of the site to target certain type of people visiting your site.
Crazyegg does sound useful in finding out the best places to place adverts etc. Thanks for the advice (:
March 4th, 2010
10:13 pm
Great article Melissa, thanks for the tips on improving website traffic.
I am a big fan of Crazyegg, and have used it for all of my websites. I would strongly suggest others to check it out!
March 4th, 2010
11:17 pm
Great article Melissa, thanks for the tips on improving website traffic.
March 4th, 2010
11:18 pm
Thanks for this usefull article
March 5th, 2010
12:49 am
Your tips if useful for me,I will try the method to improve my site traffic.
March 5th, 2010
5:39 am
The tips provided in the article are great – no-doubt, wishing that grokdotcom suggests marketing tips for mobile sites too.
March 5th, 2010
6:11 am
A good point
, so will be dificcult to help).
I will give it a try at my website because at the moment my conversation rate moved down. It is the lowest conversation rate from the bigging of my website. After that will come back and let you now. Also you can have a look at my website (it is in greek
March 5th, 2010
6:29 am
Great example, it’s a very popular mistake in the UIs.
March 5th, 2010
11:48 am
optimization is good, just a note read this blog post and you are bolding too many sentences
March 5th, 2010
12:30 pm
I found your example very interesting… how changing the call to action to “learn how” rather than “start now” … you immediately discovered something about the visitors.
Thanks!
March 5th, 2010
2:13 pm
this is a really interesting article especially for for clarifying the importance of a landing page. definitely something that is overlooked by the majority.
March 5th, 2010
3:03 pm
this is a great article. We have since massive results by changing just a few things on a page.
March 5th, 2010
3:32 pm
thanks for sharing this great article.conversion rate is a problem for me.i hope i will make it better
March 6th, 2010
1:13 pm
It is so easy to change things if you know what to change. Thank you for your great Case study
March 6th, 2010
11:54 pm
Hi,
Thanks so much for this article, it’s really going to help me on my current projects!
Regards
Dan
March 7th, 2010
3:56 pm
Its these microchanges when tested in a scientific manner (A/B tests) which make the difference between successful and non-successful landing pages. You can have the best graphics but if you’re not testing the micro elements you may as well have not bothered with the design.
March 7th, 2010
5:05 pm
Great example, it’s a very popular mistake in the UIs.
March 7th, 2010
11:53 pm
There is a lot of opportunity to improve the conversion and tweaking on just the home page alone. We had one case study with a company where USP was free delivery of the products (as claimed by the company and they highlighted it primarily on the home page). 1. The Unique Selling Proposietion (USP) of Free Delivery was too weak both in visual design to be noticeable and value. Free Delivery has become standard on the web. You’ll need to establish what your value proposition is and communicate it clearly. 2. The images of the Top Selling Products did not look clickable. It was not clear what they wanted the visitor to do from home page. 3. The images were weak and did not portray the products in the best of light.
4. There was no eye flow to the page. The Top selling product images were drawing the eyes in skipping past any and all messaging.
The visitors were not yet ready to buy from the home page. So we made the home page to help them make a choice to buy and removed too many distractions on the page. A better approach would be to use images of product categories to get them to a product quicker. Rather than than top selling products we tried top product categories. This just scratches the surface, there is much more that can be implemented with A/B testing.
March 8th, 2010
2:17 am
Never really heard the buying stage philosophy before, very intersting.
March 8th, 2010
4:24 am
Thank for sharing it. I am starting from zero to build a website and I will implemented your experienced. at this time I only put related post session to expand my visitors.
March 8th, 2010
2:10 pm
Really appreciated the detail explanation of how you worked with your client on conversion and optimization for their bookkeeping business.
March 9th, 2010
2:18 am
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so. Really nice post!
March 9th, 2010
2:34 pm
Thanks for sharing this study. Your post is very effective with the images.
We did some homepage A/B testing that not only resulted in higher conversions, but also resulted in a lower rate of shopping cart abondonment.
March 10th, 2010
2:52 am
Hi Melissa, could you give us an idea how much will such kind of of project costs us? thanks
March 11th, 2010
2:33 am
Hmm that’s very interessting but actually i have a hard time understanding it… wonder what others have to say..
March 11th, 2010
6:31 pm
I think the essence of this blogpost lies in the very few sentences: Get to know your visitors and learn how they feel so you can understand them and react.
If the FEEL UNDERSTOOD, they will convert. I’ve tried and this works.
March 12th, 2010
2:54 am
@ Expresso
Yes it is all about relationships! Understand your visitor and you understand how to convert them, lead them, and close them.
March 17th, 2010
3:25 am
Subsequent to some contact with this client, they came out of bed with two variations of buttons to test next to the original click screenshots to make bigger.
March 17th, 2010
8:35 pm
Smart article! It is so fantastic that such information are revealed because it is for our own good. Thanks for sharing one.:)
March 17th, 2010
10:45 pm
Thanks for the great tips. You really don’t know what works until you test. I remember seeing a software that actually records user mouse movement and shows with heat map about what portion of the page user is mostly interested in. That’s another great tool to help design a better site.
March 17th, 2010
11:21 pm
Well said. I never thought I would agree with this opinion, but I’m starting to view things from a different view. I have to research more on this as it seems very interesting. One thing I don’t understand though is how everything is related together.
March 19th, 2010
2:31 am
@ Stupidly Simply
That sounds a lot like a Google Heat map to me. They are pretty common on the web today, and most people agree that the upper left corner is the “hottest” area. You can just do a search for “heat map” anywhere and find it.
March 20th, 2010
3:32 am
you know, as i read your post i
wrote my clients asking for a list
of the last 50 clients that closed a deal and am going
to try to suit each website to that type of client
so.. thanks a lot
Cheers, Sagive
March 20th, 2010
8:07 am
Its great post. I have learned a lot specially about Late Stage visitors. It was really helpful in my SEO Study.
March 20th, 2010
1:27 pm
Free Delivery has become standard on the web. You’ll need to establish what your value proposition is and communicate it clearly.
March 21st, 2010
1:00 pm
nice article thanks…
March 27th, 2010
8:57 am
What tool do you use to trace all the traffic came from and from what search term they use. That one get my attention.
April 3rd, 2010
10:30 pm
Thanks for great post
regards,
April 4th, 2010
12:16 pm
Making recommendations is huge, people want to be steered into a certain direction they just don’t know where. If you are nice with what you ask of them, and direct them to something you know they already want. That is amazing!
April 4th, 2010
8:19 pm
thanks for article. great post. thanks for share
April 6th, 2010
8:38 am
I remember seeing a software that actually records user mouse movement and shows with heat map about what portion of the page user is mostly interested in.
April 8th, 2010
5:45 am
We had one case study with a company where USP was free delivery of the products (as claimed by the company and they highlighted it primarily on the home page).
April 17th, 2010
4:29 am
You need to be really smart in converting your leads into customers and later on into revenue generating Business.
You must know your customers, from where they are coming? And most important what are their needs?
May 6th, 2010
3:49 pm
Online marketing and online conversion has to be one of the toughest things to do. Everyone is competing for the same data and positioning. I envy anyone in this business who is successful.
May 10th, 2010
10:58 am
I think conversion rate optimisation is best achieved with targetted calls to action to late stage traffic
May 12th, 2010
4:43 am
Marketing SEO is legitimate service in order for your online marketing plan to reach the targeted organization. Search Engine Optimization is in fact one of the fast growing business options for the IT industry and writers. The purpose, as described above, is to maintain a good page ranking and linking. Furthermore it may include web development services, hence the importance of a coordinated involvement with your marketing and sales team.
May 14th, 2010
12:54 pm
Great post, very informative stuff.
Side note: I just noticed that all of the female authors on this website are sexy little things.
May 16th, 2010
2:49 pm
In online shopping ,for being optimized it is great information.
so from your suggestion i am also use optimized content for getting more visitors.
May 17th, 2010
3:49 pm
Subsequent to some contact with this client, they came out of bed with two variations of buttons to test next to the original click screenshots to make bigger.
May 20th, 2010
6:56 am
I’m very curious about how yahoo answers attracted so much traffic? Especially in the initial stage. If I am going to start something like yahoo answers but niche area, any bright marketing ideas how I can attract a large amount of traffic?
May 22nd, 2010
11:53 pm
It’s a useful for me.
May 23rd, 2010
11:05 am
[...] View full post on Conversion Rate Optimization & Marketing Blog | FutureNow, Inc [...]
May 27th, 2010
10:43 pm
online shop owners used to use the devices ‘traccking’ to record the activities of visitors to the web. There are available reports can be reviewed to improve our online store to be better and have a higher conversion rate. Error in laying down the ‘buy’ even fatal to discouraged buyers to click on the button. So do not be surprised if a lot of shop owners who complain their sales at least monthly
May 30th, 2010
5:43 am
Helal olsun valla ne güzel yazmış yaaa tebrikler
10.Sınıf Coğrafya Kitabı Cevapları
10.Sınıf Coğrafya Kitabı Cevapları
May 30th, 2010
8:48 am
Great ideas in this article. I will definitely try to start optimizing my conversion rates by looking at my traffic for early, middle and late stage buckets and try to offer them someting that suits their needs!
June 6th, 2010
1:55 pm
Thanks a lot for this post.
June 8th, 2010
12:51 pm
Solid Post. Funny how sometimes the smallest changes can make the biggest difference. Find that low hanging fruit.
June 11th, 2010
8:36 am
This is great post. Thanks for taking the time to write as I am interested in the subject
June 12th, 2010
5:33 pm
Single page checkouts and the use of Ajax andjqeury baskets to speed up and limit the checkout process, Great article …
June 28th, 2010
5:30 pm
If I get what you are saying about early/middle/late stage buyers, it’s smart to build a site that not only appeals to impulse buyers but also provides enough content to bring back buyers who might be on the fence or still need some time to think before they commit.
July 5th, 2010
7:00 pm
It would be great if there was some way to know what the user have done before coming to your site. For example, if they visited 5 other similar sites already, they may be already a late stage buyer vs an early stage. Without that information, we can only rely on our own navigation cookies to determine what stage they are in.
July 20th, 2010
3:34 am
@greg yup agreed i am also looking for the same solution.
More on i would say PR is nothing.I rely on ROI & SMO.
July 22nd, 2010
11:02 pm
good SEO without high convertion rate is unuseful
July 30th, 2010
4:14 am
For example, if they visited 5 other similar sites already, they may be already a late stage buyer vs an early stage. Without that information, we can only rely on our own navigation cookies to determine what stage they are in.
August 8th, 2010
2:42 pm
Single page checkouts and the use of Ajax andjqeury baskets to speed up and limit the checkout process, Great article …