Landing Page Optimization
How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
How Guinness Might Have Converted One Million
They say it’s better to be born lucky than rich. Guinness stout definitely has the rich part down (pun intended), but it seems they were a bit short on viral marketing luck this St. Patrick’s Day.
Guinness made a valiant attempt to make St. Patty’s a national U.S. holiday with their Petition 3-17 campaign. Their argument: Since there are nine times more Irish-Americans than there are people in all of Ireland, and since people of all ethnicities already miss work on March 17th in celebration of all things Irish, all citizens should be allowed to commemorate the day from the comfort of their favorite watering hole. With “a pint of Guinness stout or two,” of course.
To present it to Congress, Guinness needed 1 million signatures by the 16th. On March 17th, they had about 300,000 — a few parades-worth of revelers off their goal.
No worries. 300k signatures of loyal brand advocates is a huge achievement. And there’s always next year, right?
So, let’s take a look at how Guinness.com was feeding the campaign’s micro-site, Proposition317.com, and see what they might do to convert a million in 2009.
Guinness Means Business!
It’s evident that Guinness means business, as a Proposition 3-17 banner owns the Guinness.com homepage:
The banner is clean, simple, and straight to the point. Unfortunately, this falls slightly flat on this landing page:
Once here, visitors aren’t efficiently persuaded to follow through from the driving point (in this case, the homepage). The homepage was exciting and bold, but it didn’t say much about the campaign, which makes this landing page especially key. Since Guinness’s site exists to support its beloved brand, we can assume that most people who visit the site are already fans of the product.
They just need to keep visitors on track to sign the petition.
Testing is Good for You
If Guinness were a client, here are a few things we’d have them test:
• Tone — Rather than leading off with a “raise your pints!” attitude (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and party pictures, they may have benefited from speaking to personality temperaments other than Spontaneous (i.e., Humanistic, Methodical, and Competitive). Other parts of the site do speak to Humanistic visitors by explaining why it’s important to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday, but that sentiment isn’t clear on the landing page. Perhaps they could borrow a line or two from the other pages to make the why-you-should-sign argument stronger. (Is your site speaking to each temperament?)
• Better placement of content — Eyetracking studies also show that staring faces distract visitors. People immediately look to the center, then the flashing signature moves the eye to the right, then down to the quotes and pictures of other supporters. Meanwhile, the “Sign the petition” Call to Action is all the way on the opposite side of the page.
• Make the Call to Action eye-catching — The Call to Action needs to persuade and entice people to sign-up, but theirs is encased in a dark gray button and overpowered by the total signatures. Saying something less generic, like “Make it official,” might yield better results.
• Try counting down instead — This last one’s more of a hunch, so I’m curious to know whether any of you might find it more persuasive to sign the petition if they had it counting down from 1,000,000 (a pretty daunting number) rather than counting up. Example: “Only 650,048 signatures needed to make St. Patrick’s Day official. Don’t just sit there, tell your friends!”
Could Guinness have met their goal? I guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the meantime.
Proposition 3-17 may have missed the mark, but it wasn’t a failure. Anyone else fancy a pint?
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[Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with the so-called “luck of the Irish” knows that success requires hard work and dedication. Such is website optimization. You should test your luck.]
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Written by:Peter Lee
When a Banner Ad Becomes a One-Click Stand
Holidays are a great time to advertise. Because of the emotional context, marketers know people will be especially attracted to holiday-themed ads. Valentine’s Day is no exception: You can almost set your clock to the sudden rush of banners strewn with cheesy hearts, bears and candy kisses.
Banner ads, once clicked, usually evoke the confusion of Alice’s rabbit hole more than the come-what-may optimism of Forrest’s box of chocolates — either way, you don’t know what to expect.
Grabbing attention is tough, and most of us are jaded from past letdowns. So, to work, a banner campaign must direct traffic, showing visitors what they’ll get and why they’ll want it.
Who You Lookin’ At?
One way to get attention is by showing models. TracFone is an example of a company that puts on a human face (albeit a scowling one). Let’s take a look at one of their banners to see how they might improve conversion…
The Valentine’s Day motif grabs attention, as do the girls’ faces, which seem to be looking straight at you. But eye-tracking studies show that we’re drawn to models’ eyes. We end up mesmerized, ignoring the critical parts of the ad.
The folks at TracFone should read Bryan’s post, “How a Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away.”
Since our attention stays on the faces and eyes, TracFone’s benefits are lost in the background. The all-caps name “XOXOFONE” frames the faces, further keeping the eyes on the upper left-hand side. A simple change in the direction of the eyes to the lower-right side of the ad would direct visitors to the call to action and company logo. (Besides, it might make these girls look like they’re not going to yell at the first guy who invites them to Prom via TracFone.)
Oh, No They Di’int…
From the banner ad, visitors are sent to this busy landing page:
Tracfone presents big, bright red hearts as a marker to connect the visitor. Yet they fail to build persuasive momentum. At this critical stage, the visitor isn’t brought deeper into the buying process. Instead of continuing the scent trail [define] of information, TracFone introduces new information and visuals that create a disconnect with the banner ad it was designed to support.
If TracFone were a Future Now client, here are a few things we’d have them test:
1. Don’t Look at Me! — When using models, make sure the eyes aren’t the focal point. Use an image that directs the visitors’ eyes toward the call to action. Let the copy drive the click.
2. Buy When? — Don’t propose marriage on the first date. There’s almost never enough info on a banner ad to convince someone they should actually “buy now.” Try flirting instead.
3. Consistency is Key — Build on the information and images on the landing page. Help would-be customers make the connection. People will quickly lose momentum to move forward if you present different prices, copy and images than they saw in the ad.
[Editor’s Note: Tired of one-click stands? Sick of hiring gold-diggers who don’t return the investment? Bring home a conversion analysis your CFO would approve of.]
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Written by:Peter Lee
Is Something Wrong With Your Design?
I’m still settling in from my trip last week to the Internet Retailer Design conference. If you didn’t attend, you missed a great first-time show, so you’ll have to check it out next year.
Over 800 people showed up to hear the speakers and meet with consultants (like me) to evaluate their current websites — and some even discussed mock-ups and prototypes of new versions of their sites. My back-of-the-napkin calculation is that Internet Retailer gave away around $150,000 worth of consultations, but I’ll ask you the one common question I asked several of the companies I met with just for the price of spending a few minutes reading.
What makes you think the new design you’re working on is going to work any better than the one you have today?
I recall sitting with one of the most recognized brands on the Web and him pulling out his mock-ups. They felt that they had issues around how products were presented and how their navigation worked. They offered a complex menu with way too many options in their current navigation, and were hoping to improve it by using a top level menu with a javascript rollover.
“What research do you have that indicates that new navigation will work better than the current one?” I asked. He was honest and said, “None.”
So why don’t you test it?
Internet Retailer did a pre-conference survey and asked the top 500 retailers if they’re doing multivariate or A/B testing, and included the results in their Website Design & Usability Guide.
Amazingly, 76.7% of retailers surveyed don’t test!
Huh? Now that you can get A/B and Multivariate testing tools for free from Google, why aren’t you testing?
We’ve also found that it’s safer to roll out a redesign in stages, in order to avoid the initial drop in conversion that often results from a redesign. Why not roll this out as a series of tests?
If you need help, call us at 877-643-7244 (ext. 3316). We’d be happy to help you make more money before and after your redesign.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Can I Please Have the “Mac Guy” Back?
It was a bad moment. I felt like “PC Guy” from the “Get a Mac” commercial was trying to sell me an Apple product. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.
It all started when I checked my email and found an email from Apple with a subject line that said, “The new Mac Pro. Now with 8 cores standard.”
Like many email users, I don’t automatically enable HTML images. So, I have to click to allow the images to be shown. The result: The Apple email looks like a fancy design of gray and black with absolutely nothing there.
The subject line (”The new Mac Pro. Now with 8 cores standard.”) means nothing to me. How is that a benefit? It certainly doesn’t excite me enough to explore further, but since I’m an Apple fan, let’s say I decide to keep going.
When I did finally enable the image, I see the computer tower…
The call to action above the fold is “Configure now.” Wow, that’s really exciting!
I’m a Humanistic type (as opposed to Spontaneous, Competitive, or Methodical), so the word “configure” holds no scent for me — it sounds like something really technical you do with a graphing calculator. No thanks.
But for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m curious enough to continue and see this landing page:
Could they possibly use more techno-speak? There isn’t a word here of that wonderful, personal, easy-to-understand Apple language.
If this were designed for Methodical types, I’d give it high marks. Even if she didn’t have her images enabled, the Methodical customer might scroll down and see there was indeed some text in the email. She would probably like the word “configure” and appreciate all those wonderful technical specs, and a subject line like, “Now with 8 cores standard.”
But for the other types, this scenario bombs.
Spontaneous customers who don’t have images enabled on their email will likely not even open it with that subject line, and if they see nothing but a black and gray design with nothing in it, they’re gone.
Humanistics won’t often get past that subject line, either. Where’s the wonderful everyday language and engaging images? I’d like to see that nice guy from the TV commercials telling me why this new Mac Pro would be great for me. I bet he could do a good job of putting it into plain English and making me feel good about the product.
Competitives might like the subject line, but they want benefits, not features. How will this help them do more, be better, have a superior computer to what they have today? They also will bail if they don’t have images enabled. They are almost as impatient as the Spontaneous folks. Here’s the sad thing: There’s actually great copy for Competitives like, “Once reserved for the top of the line, 8-core processing power is now at the heart of the Mac Pro.” Same feature, but delivered in a benefit-oriented fashion Competitives would love — yet it’s below the fold where, unlike the Methodical customer, they may not scroll to see it (they’re much too fast-paced).
Bottom line: The whole scenario feels like it was designed by that “PC guy.” I want my Mac guy back.
[Editor’s Note: Do your landing pages speak to customers in their own language? If you’d like to optimize your landing pages and improve customer focus, we can help.]
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
A Simple A/B Test Suggestion for Puma.com
While searching for new sneakers, I decided on a pair of Pumas. I love their style and color options, and they always have the newest selections. The same goes for their website. It’s chock full of flash — literally. I normally don’t mind the extra attention to design — in fact I appreciate a beautifully designed website — but Puma.com has made it difficult to find any products.
Landing on the homepage, I was hypnotized by the Flash and interactive design, which must have taken months to program. It showed. (I was on slow connection and had to endure an excruciating load time.) Finally, I was shown one measly, dull-gray shoe. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and clicked on the shoe, expecting to be presented with more colors and styles to choose from. Instead, a new window popped up with no sneaker or link to the online store in sight. They’d sent me to Mongolian Shoe BBQ; a micro-site for a campaign I was unaware of. And although I noticed a trace of copy next to the gray show (after going back to the homepage to figure out what happened), it still felt like the e-tail equivalent of Outer Mongolia.
I started to wonder about Puma’s online business strategy. (Did they even want me to purchase anything? Where the heck are the sneakers or online store? Where am I supposed to go now?) What did they want visitors to get out of their website? As a retail company, the obvious goal of the site would be both branding and e-commerce. In other words, to get visitors excited about their products and brand and, eventually, make a sale. I was ready to purchase, but there were too many usability issues that forced me to browse aimlessly.
A major roadblock for Puma.com com is that it’s top-heavy with (beautiful) design. It’s very image and Flash-oriented and, despite the demand of would-be customers in search of Puma’s sneaker-line, the visitors’ eyes are immediately drawn to the center Flash animation, then to the bottom icons. The small red bag representing the online store is lost amid all the colors and commotion, and the link to the online store in the left navigation is effectively hidden because it’s surrounded by colorful banners. The small, light-gray text — although cool-looking — makes it difficult for visitors to shop.
Current Homepage:
So, what can Puma.com do to be a more effective e-commerce site? They need to provide a clearer driving point (define) to their online store. A simple A/B test on the homepage will have a big impact. How simple? Well, Google makes it free for all and the only thing you’ll lose is time spent learning a valuable advantage over competitors and opportunity cost of course. To be most effective when making changes to a website, proper A/B testing on Google Website Optimizer is recommended.
My Test Page Suggestion:
Which page do you think would convert better?
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Written by:Peter Lee
Dell Loses its Marketing Scents
What if you knew exactly what visitors were looking for when they came to your site. Say they’ve even told you the exact model they’re looking for. All they want is to get some details about this product and possibly make a purchase.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads allow you to know the directions visitors are heading, and can help you plan and optimize the experience in order to guide them along their buying process. PPC gives you a great advantage by allowing you to bring the visitor directly the thing they’re looking for, bypassing obstacles that may prevent them from even finding a product directly from your homepage . The more you know about your customers’ needs, the easier it is to fulfill them. Although most e-commerce shops run PPC campaigns to some degree, most get hung up on the search and keyword element of it, and forget that this is really about eliminating steps for the customer. As a result, they end up losing out on a lot of revenue.
Being #1 is not enough…
If you think this isn’t just as much a problem for big-time e-tailers, with huge marketing budgets, think again. The paths that customers follow are called “scent trails,” and precious few online shops seem to know much about them. For instance, check out this search results page for the term “Bestbuy Sony dsc w80″.
Dell has cleverly bought a PPC ad for this term in hopes of intercepting a few sales from the competition. But take a look at where they bring you when you click the link (and, remember, they’re paying for this to be at the top of the page). The product that was searched for is nowhere to be found. They already know exactly which product the visitor is looking for. All they have to do is bring this person to the product page for the item — or at the very least, show the customer that they do in fact have this item by placing it clearly within the active window.
The landing page disconnect…
If you’re paying for PPC ads, you need to get your money’s worth by bringing the visitor as far as you can, given what you already know about their needs. With the right keywords, you already have some information about what they’re looking for; you might as well make it as easy as possible for them.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
How A Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away
It’s no surprise that marketers use faces to draw people into their websites. They know that, from birth, humans are naturally attracted to, and engaged by, faces. In fact, one of our studies showed that people perceived websites as more “professional” when they had images of people on the site.
Be careful! Simply picking a “pretty” picture isn’t enough. Too often marketers will take people pictures and show them to a focus group to see which ones they relate to best. As marketers, we worry about the gender, style and overall quality of the picture relating to our message. There’s another crucial factor for marketers to consider: The direction in which the model’s eyes are facing.
Generally, it’s best when the model faces the content you want visitors to engage with first.
Take a look at the landing page below (I’ve blurred the text to protect the guilty innocent):
What happens is that you are naturally drawn to the image of the attractive model and our eyes tend to meet. Since her eyes are focused back at you, they stop you in your tracks — and researchers can prove it by studying your eyetracking gaze.
Take a look at the following ads that our friends at Bunnyfoot analyzed in eyetracking studies:
Now take a look at the Heatmap of the ads:
Next time you choose a face to appear on the web or in an ad, consider where it draws the beholder’s eyes. Ask yourself whether the image draws attention away from your persuasive message.
P.S. This is for my friends who like to test everything. I have a couple of questions: When testing pictures, do you currently break down the variables in the image? If so, were you aware of using the directional focus of a model’s eyes as a variable?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Netflix Reads Grok, Blockbuster Misses Opportunity
To follow up on my last post about Netflix — and its probable loss of conversion on its homepage — we’d like to congratulate them on taking action on our advice. It seems they’ve implemented my first recommendation. Well, almost. Instead of changing the “coupon box” to a search box, they removed it entirely. I’m not sure if they’re testing, getting rid of coupon codes, or if they plan on putting in a search box in a follow-up test. Regardless, it’s a step in the right direction.
Capitalizing on Competitors’ Conversion Challenges
Meanwhile, Blockbuster missed a huge opportunity. Netflix’s coupon box mess was a huge opportunity for Blockbuster — if they were sharp enough to notice this competitive advantage — to woo customers, and likely keep them for years.
One possibility for Blockbuster would’ve been to use its “employee discount” leek as mentioned at HackingNetflix.com. To capitalize on its competitor’s conversion problems, they only needed to purchase PPC ads for “Netflix coupon,” where they could’ve offered Netflix customers a Blockbuster coupon on a customized landing page. As of today, only five ads currently appear on Google for that search term.
Moral of the story: Follow your competitors. Look for their conversion mishaps, and capitalize on them.
Reading Future Now’s GrokDotCom won’t hurt, either 
Before:
After:
P.S. — Blockbuster (BBI), are you paying attention?
P.P.S. — Got a coupon code for me, Netflix?
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
Confessions of a Screenshot Addict
If you’ve ever seen any of my screencasts, or seen one of my presentation, you may have noticed I collect screenshots of just about anything I consider relevant.
Where does this obsession come from?
The other day, one of our newer staff members asked me why I’m such a screenshot addict. What’s the benefit to collecting all these images, many of which I may never use?
It was only when I opened my Yahoo! page yesterday that it hit me. The banner was right there, where it’s been for awhile. Even though I never clicked, there is a value in those impressions. What triggered my memory was that little stick drawing guy in the SnagIt banner.
I can remember, as early as 1996, taking screenshots for marketing purposes. Back then, I was working with a telecom company that was selling voice-over-Internet products, and I was helping to manage the banners we bought on Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista, landing pages, and so on. The top-performing banner — no matter what we offered or how creative we were — was this little stick figure smiley-face guy with a simple offer. (By the way, I’m still shocked today at how good this company was at measuring stuff back then. It probably helped fuel my passion for web analytics. I could tell you by the keyword on any of the engines, for any date range, for a particular version of a banner we ran, how many minutes people used our product to call Argentina.)
But I digress. What did I do with the screenshots?
I used to take screenshots of every page where I could find our banners. Then I would save them to compare with the following week’s/month’s metrics. I’d analyze them to see if any other elements on the page were enhancing or detracting from the ability of the banner to get the click-though. Sometimes it was a search result that influenced the conversion. I’ve been collecting screenshots ever since.
For as long as I can recall, I’ve been a fan of TechSmith’s SnagIt (and later, Camtasia for video) for Windows. Now that we’ve switched the company to Mac, we’re using SnapZ Pro X, as well as TechSmith’s newly released Jing Project. (Thanks, guys. Please keep those Mac products coming!)
What can you do with screenshots?
1. Chronicle all of your online advertising efforts and use the screenshots to analyze any interactions with your success metrics.
2. Keep a running history of changes to your content, or a competitor’s (i.e., see what changes/tests have been performed).
3. Use them in presentations when reporting on web analytics for a particular ad creative or page.
4. Use them to figure out what to test next in your landing page optimization efforts
5. Impress your friends with your collection that contains an original Amazon screenshot.
Are you a fellow screenshot addict? Want to be? If so, come join my FaceBook group.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
