How many visitors are you driving to your online channels each month? And how many of them have taken action or turned into customers?

If you don’t know the answer to this question, it’s time to better understand a conversion and why it matters to your business.

In this article:

• What is a conversion?
• Why is a conversion important?
• Examples of conversions
• How do you track and measure conversions?
• Conversions vs. conversion rate
• How do you optimize conversions?
• FAQ: What methods can be employed to monitor conversion rates so as to assess my marketing effectiveness?

What Is a Conversion?

Oxford defines conversion as “the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another.​​”

In the marketing world, a conversion is when a visitor of any of your online channels (for example, a website, social media, app, etc.) completes a desired action that brings them closer to a sale or an actual sale.

From a marketing perspective, a visitor’s status changes from one form to another as they take more and more steps along the purchasing journey. A conversion may not happen on the first visit, but over time and through various touchpoints, visitors may convert into customers.

To get a little more granular, it’s worth noting a couple of other conversion-type definitions you should know:

• A micro conversion is a small step in the journey to a larger conversion like a sale (think downloading an ebook in exchange for an email so that you can nurture that lead)
• A macro conversion creates revenue, like when someone purchases a product

For more, read:

• How SEO Supports the Customer Journey

Why Is a Conversion Important?

Conversions are important because they bring in revenue to businesses.

No matter what marketing tactics you are using, whether it’s advertising, search engine optimization, social media, video, or more, conversion is a key performance indicator (KPI).

A KPI is a measurable result of your marketing efforts. It helps you understand if your marketing is working (or not).

In the SEO world, the main goal is to drive traffic to a website. But, we always make sure that website publishers are aware of maximizing the value of that traffic, and that means making sure the website is set up to support conversions.

Examples of Conversions

Here are some examples of what a conversion might look like:

• A click on a link (micro conversion)
• Signing up for an email list (micro conversion)
• Downloading a content asset (micro conversion)
• Viewing a video (micro conversion)
• Requesting a service quote (macro conversion)
• Buying a service or product (macro conversion)
• Subscribing to a service (macro conversion)

How Do You Track and Measure Conversions?

There are many third-party analytics tools that can help you track and understand conversions that are happening on your online channels.

For example, Google Analytics is a popular and free tool that allows website publishers to understand the conversions that are happening on their website or app (See the Goals report help file for more).

With these third-party tools, you install tracking codes (for example, on your website) so that they can begin to measure and analyze key online activity.

With Google Analytics, for instance, you can measure the number of conversions, conversion rate and also see the steps or channels that contributed to the conversion.

Analytics tools can help you get granular and understand what is working or not working when it comes to conversions — whether it’s by page or by channel.

As you are tracking and measuring the value of conversions, you will need to look at how each conversion contributes to the bigger goal. For example, how does signing up for your email list ultimately contribute to the purchase of a product?

This will help you prioritize your efforts and understand the return on investment of your marketing activities.

Conversions vs. Conversion Rate

A conversion is an action that is taken by a visitor on one of your online channels. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that have completed the desired action out of the total number of visitors. This metric helps you get a big picture understanding of your marketing efforts.

To calculate a conversion rate, take the total number of conversions and divide it by the total number of visitors. If you have 100 visitors and 10 of them bought your product, you’d calculate the conversion rate as follows:

10 / 100 = 0.10 or 10% conversion rate

You can use different calculations to fit your needs. For example, it doesn’t have to be the visitors you are measuring; maybe it’s the total number of leads instead. Or you might look at the number of unique visitors instead of total visitors because it’s possible to get more than one conversion from a single visitor.

The formula would be the same regardless of which metric you are using.

How Do You Optimize Conversions?

Understanding your conversion rate is one thing — making it better is another. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is how you optimize your marketing efforts so that more people convert.

While you may be tempted to increase conversions by driving more traffic to an online channel, you can get smarter about how to maximize the potential of the traffic you already have.

One of the best ways to get started on this is to take the data you have, focus on areas where you need improvement and start testing.

For instance, you might find in your analytics data that visitors to your website tend to drop off on one particular page. That’s the page that you need to work on first.

You could start with your most important, highest trafficked webpages and review conversions there. How could those web pages better support conversions?

Or, you might find that the conversions from your email channel are quite low. What improvements can be made to ensure your audience takes the desired action?

Whichever path you choose, you will first need to set some performance benchmarks and track the data closely as you make changes to see if you are experiencing improvements. A/B testing and multivariate testing are both ways that marketers can test the efficacy of a webpage, for instance.

Closing Thoughts

In the SEO world, even though our main goal is to drive organic search traffic, we also care a lot about conversions. We want website publishers to be able to capture the value of their organic search traffic and turn it into profit.

And they do. I love pointing to this BrightEdge research because it shows that the organic search channel consistently is the largest contributor to revenue for many industries:

But this can only happen if website publishers invest in understanding their conversions and optimizing for them.

Time to convert your readers to buyers? Take your audience and maximize your bottom line with a complete SEO strategy. Get in touch. 

FAQ: What methods can be employed to monitor conversion rates so as to assess my marketing effectiveness?

Tracking conversions accurately in today’s digital environment is critical to businesses understanding the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. Conversions may take different forms – newsletter sign-ups, online purchases or form submissions are just a few – by tracking conversions accurately you can gain invaluable insight into your campaigns while making data-driven decisions to optimize strategies for success.

One of the easiest and most reliable ways to track conversions is with Google Analytics, an invaluable tool which enables users to monitor various metrics relating to conversions such as numbers, rates and sources of them. Integrate Google Analytics properly into your website’s framework to gain invaluable information regarding which marketing channels and campaigns are driving more conversions than others.

As soon as you’ve established your goals in Google Analytics, the first step toward setting conversion goals should be identifying them: Which actions would you like visitors to perform on your site? Once identified, Google Analytics allows you to set conversion goals that track these actions – this might include thank-you pages after purchases or form submission confirmation pages after form submission confirmation pages; destination pages could even include newsletter sign-up forms!

Add UTM parameters to your tracking capabilities for even greater tracking capability. UTM parameters are tags added to URLs that allow you to identify the source, medium, and campaign of all incoming traffic – providing valuable insight into which marketing channels are driving conversions allowing you to measure each one independently and determine its efficacy.

Call tracking can provide another effective means of monitoring conversions. If your business relies heavily on phone calls for conversions, implementing call tracking software could give invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and allow you to assign individual phone numbers across different marketing channels to determine which channels generate more conversions via phone call conversions.

And don’t forget to set up and monitor conversion funnels – the steps taken by visitors before converting can help identify areas for optimization or potential drop-offs in conversion processes that could ultimately increase overall conversion rates. By monitoring conversion funnels closely, it becomes easy to pinpoint potential areas of improvement or drop-off that could assist your website and marketing strategies and boost overall conversions rates.

Tracking and measuring conversions is essential to measuring marketing effectiveness, whether through Google Analytics, conversion goals, UTM parameters, call tracking or conversion funnel monitoring. Doing this allows for data-driven decision making which ultimately optimizes efforts toward greater success.

Step-by-Step Procedure for Tracking Conversion Goals in Google Analytics:

1. Set conversion goals on your website.
2. Integrate Google Analytics with your site.
3. Establish a Google Analytics account.
4. Establish conversion goals in your GA account. Add goal tracking into analytics creating goals within GA to monitor specific activities.
5. Implement UTM parameters to track traffic sources, mediums and campaigns of incoming visitors.
6. Assign unique phone numbers to different marketing channels using call tracking software.
7. Analyze conversion funnels within Google Analytics in order to pinpoint areas for improvement.
8. Apply insights gleaned from conversion tracking to optimize both your website and marketing strategies.
9. Keep an eye on conversion rates regularly to monitor campaign effectiveness.
10. Use conversion tracking data to make informed decisions and optimize strategies for success.
11. Constantly test and refine conversion tracking techniques in order to guarantee their accuracy and efficacy.
12. Staying current on conversion tracking trends and advances is important to maximizing marketing efforts.
13. Seeking assistance from an agency or expert may ensure accurate conversion tracking results.
14. Analyze conversion data regularly to detect patterns, trends and opportunities for enhancement.
15. Utilize conversion tracking insights to adjust marketing strategies and allocate resources efficiently.
16. Conduct A/B testing on various marketing approaches in order to select the most successful ones and compare results against one another.
17. Communicate regularly with team members and stakeholders the results of your conversion tracking efforts.
18. Share knowledge gained through conversion tracking with all levels of management across your organization to inform decision making on all fronts.
19. Optimize website user experience to increase conversion rates.
20. Analyze conversion rates across various marketing channels to pinpoint those with the greatest effectiveness.
21. Repeat and refine! Conversion tracking should be an ongoing endeavor that includes constant analysis and refinement to enhance marketing effectiveness. Keep gathering data as you go along to optimize your strategies based on what it reveals about potential conversion points for more accurate tracking of conversion rates.

Bruce Clay Inc. owns all copies for 2023.

The post What Is Conversion? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

So, you’ve invested time and resources into SEO and got more targeted traffic. Without converting that traffic, what do you have to show for your hard work and investment?

You want to ensure your website is set up to maximize the value of your organic traffic. And that starts with optimizing for conversions.

In fact, SEO and conversion are two halves of a pie: SEO drives traffic to your site. Conversion optimization helps move those website visitors to action. Let’s look closer at why conversion optimization is an important part of your internet marketing program.

In this article:

• What is a conversion?
• What is conversion rate optimization and why does it matter to SEO?
• 3 steps to get started with conversion optimization
• FAQ: Why is conversion optimization important for maximizing the value of your organic traffic?

What Is a Conversion?

A conversion is when a website visitor completes a desired action that either brings them closer to a sale or to an actual sale. A conversion can be any action that moves a visitor further down the conversion funnel.

Some examples include:

• A phone call
• Filling out a form
• Clicking on a link
• Downloading a content asset
• Watching a video
• Buying a service or product
• Subscribing to a service

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization and Why Does It Matter to SEO?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a strategy to increase the percentage of website visitors that take a desired action. CRO does this by making variable changes to a webpage. The outcome? Make it perform better and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Conversion optimization is important for any website owner for at least these three reasons:

1. Potential customers are leaving you. The average website conversion is between 2% and 5% depending on the industry and device type. According to Statista, for instance, e-commerce websites in 2020 saw only 2.06% conversion rate. That means on average, about 98% of people who visit an e-commerce site leave without making a conversion.
2. You’re losing money. By optimizing and retesting the same webpage in iterations, you can improve performance. That means claiming more of the money that you lose every time a visitor bounces. Each time you make an improvement to a page, that improvement continues to perform even after the test is complete.
3. Your competitors are already testing. Top companies participate in some form of conversion testing. For instance, Google ran more than 600,000 tests to improve Search in 2020 alone. Chances are, you have already been a participant in one of these tests without knowing it.

CRO can be the critical next step in getting the most value from your SEO traffic.

Remember: The most important metric to measure SEO success is traffic. Conversions are typically out of the scope of an SEO program and in the hands of the website publisher.

Of course, website publishers can get expert advice on how to maximize conversions and then put in place those recommendations. But it is up to you to make those changes on your site.

3 Steps to Get Started with Conversion Optimization

Get Executive Buy-In

Getting executive buy-in can be a challenge – mostly in smaller businesses. In small businesses, it’s not uncommon for the president of the company to play a big role in the website.

This gives them a “parent” complex, where they view the site as their child, and directives are often subjective. This contrasts what the website should actually be treated as: a salesperson.

The best way to counterbalance the parent mentality is through evidence and facts. Be prepared when you meet with your boss. Go in armed with case studies and examples of real-world results. A single Google search can dig up countless case studies to support your cause for conversion optimization.

One approach is the attitude of “it’s only testing.” This shows your boss that the changes you’re proposing are only temporary unless they outperform what already exists.

Need help getting buy-in from your organization? Watch our on-demand webinar 6 Successful Ways To Get Company Buy-in for SEO.

Set Goals

Ultimately, you want every page on your site to funnel visitors toward conversion.

How do you do that? Set clear goals.

To set clear goals, you need to answer these questions:

Who is your audience? A good SEO program should have done the legwork of defining who your audience is if you don’t already know. You can look at things like demographics, keyword research, and customer interviews for more insights.

Creating personas based on audience research will help you to target your actual customers, rather than people you think are customers.

Related: 3 Steps to Define Your Audience for Your SEO Program

What are the goals for your audience(s)? What do you want this segment to do? Even without testing, if you orient website changes around your audience, it will typically show some improvements. And through testing, you can increase the success of those improvements.

What are the goals for any given webpage? Understand what goals you have for any given webpage and how visitors are expected to accomplish those goals. Keep your goals and audience in mind even when designing what may seem like minor elements like an “add to cart” button or hero banner call-to-action.

Test, and Then Test Some More

A room full of executives or marketing staff could sit around for weeks thinking up new designs, navigation, headlines, images, and more; but in the end, all they will have is an educated guess at best.

In fact, many times these folks are so out of touch with actual customers that calling it an “educated guess” isn’t even valid. Only through testing can you confirm those ideas and know for sure whether they are effective.

Many site owners shy away from conversion testing because of the potential negative impact it could have. However, there is value even if the testing produces fewer conversions on a webpage than it did prior. This way, you know what not to do.

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that educated testing seldom produces negative results. Even when negative results occur, you are not bound by those results.

(Typically a test can run anywhere from a few weeks to a month, so it’s a short-term period that likely won’t have a lasting negative impact on business.)

Also, the benefits of knowing what you should not do to your site based on negative test results can justify the value of having to run that test.

Ready to increase your conversion rate on your site? Our SEO Training course will help you take website visitors and turn them into customers.

FAQ: Why is conversion optimization important for maximizing the value of your organic traffic?

Conversion optimization is an invaluable strategy for businesses seeking to maximize organic traffic. By increasing the conversion rate on the website, conversion optimization can increase visitor value from organic search. Conversion optimization plays a pivotal role in strengthening an organization’s online presence.

Organic traffic is invaluable as it comes from users actively searching for your products or services. But to be successful, conversion optimization involves more than simply visitors. To be truly effective, it involves leading users toward desired actions such as making purchases, filling out forms, or subscribing to your newsletters.

By optimizing your site for conversions, organic traffic won’t go to waste. Visitors will be empowered and encouraged to interact with your content instead of passively browsing — this results in higher conversion rates, sales increases and overall an improved return on investment from organic traffic.

Conversion optimization involves improving the user’s experience on your website. You can do this by observing user behaviors, conducting A/B tests and adding user-friendly design elements that ensure an enjoyable, seamless journey for visitors. This will ultimately cause them to stay longer, view additional pages and convert into customers.

Conversion optimization provides another great opportunity to identify potential friction points or barriers in the user’s journey and eliminate them. By analyzing data and gathering feedback from users, conversion optimization enables you to identify obstacles preventing visitors from converting and take proactive steps to address them, improving not only conversion rates but also user satisfaction and loyalty.

Businesses cannot ignore the significance of optimizing for conversions in today’s highly competitive online environment. By investing time and resources to optimize your website for conversions, businesses can maximize the value of organic traffic while simultaneously increasing revenue growth and business success. A well-optimized site not only draws visitors, but also encourages them to take desired actions that lead to greater revenues for increased business success.

Conversion optimization is essential to unlocking the full value of organic traffic. Your website can become an effective business development tool by improving conversion rates, improving user experience and eliminating barriers that inhibit conversions.

The post SEO and Conversions: Two Halves of a Pie appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

SEO without CRO is like running a race but never crossing the finish line. Sure, you have traffic, but are they converting into leads and revenue?

The ultimate goal of a successful digital marketing program is sales. It starts with driving traffic through many digital channels, like organic search, and ends with more revenue. If you’re a CMO interested in conversion rate optimization, keep reading.

In this post:

• What is a conversion
• What’s a conversion rate
• What is CRO and its impact on SEO
• Getting started with CRO
• FAQ: How can I enhance my digital marketing sales using SEO and CRO?

What Is a Conversion?

A conversion is when a visitor to a website completes a desired action that either brings them closer to a sale or to an actual sale. Micro conversions include small steps, like downloading an ebook, while macro conversions create revenue, like purchasing a product.

Examples of a micro conversion:

• Sign up for an email list
• Download a content asset
• View a video

Examples of a macro conversion:

• Request a service quote
• Buy a service or product
• Subscribe to a service

In the SEO world, we want to know what conversions happened as a result of the organic search channel. This could be newsletter sign-ups, revenue from sales, or others. Whatever the desired action, SEOs need to quantify how much the organic search channel contributed.

By the way, according to BrightEdge research, the average share of revenue from the organic channel is now more than 50% for B2Bs and tech companies and 36% to 41% for others.

No matter how much companies invest in building websites, no matter how many engineers they hire, no matter how much money they invest in driving visitors to the website … if visitors do not convert, none of that matters.

–Khalid Saleh, CEO of Invesp and Bruce Clay Inc. CRO partner

What Is a Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that have completed the desired action out of the total number of visitors.

To calculate a conversion rate, take the total number of conversions divided by total website visitors. So, say you had 100 visitors, and 10 of them bought a pair of jeans. You’d calculate the conversion rate as 10 / 100 = 0.10, or 10%.

A good conversion rate varies based on the type of marketing channel and industry. My sources at Invesp shared data that shows the following conversion rates on average per marketing channel for enterprise ecommerce sites:

• Paid ads, branded: 7%
• Email: 6%
• Organic: 3.8%
• Paid ads, generic: 1.5%
• Social: 0.8%

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization & How Does CRO Relate to SEO?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the practice of optimizing websites so that more visitors convert.

SEO and CRO have a symbiotic and cyclical relationship. Conversion optimization can help SEOs:

• Maximize the opportunity for traffic
• Get insights about how webpages are performing from search
• Create trust among an audience, a key criterion in Google’s E-E-A-T
• Improve rankings

Wait, did I just say CRO can actually improve search rankings? Let me explain. When you drive organic traffic to a webpage that does not offer a good user experience, your chances of converting those visitors are slim to none. What you do have is a good chance of their leaving your site rather quickly.

This high bounce rate, in turn, may cause search rankings to suffer, thanks in part to Google’s RankBrain. RankBrain applies machine learning to determine the best search results based on a variety of factors.

And clicks to a webpage along with engagement on that page, could, over time, impact rankings. The question Google is trying to solve is: If no one is clicking on a result or not many people are staying on the site, is it a good search result worthy of top rankings?

So SEOs are concerned with driving clicks and keeping people on a webpage, too. That’s where having a whole-SERP SEO strategy to get more visibility in the results (more chances for clicks) or optimizing meta tags for a better click-through rate can help.

How to Get Started with CRO

A good place to get started with CRO is by looking at your most important or high-performing pages. Which pages drive the most traffic? Which pages are key to conversions?

Then you’re going to dive into a four-step process that you can read more about in our conversion rate optimization tutorial.

Like this post? Please share it! We also invite you to subscribe to the Bruce Clay Blog.

FAQ: How can I enhance my digital marketing sales using SEO and CRO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) work in tandem to improve digital marketing sales.

The SEO Foundation

To enhance your digital marketing sales, starting with a strong SEO foundation is essential. SEO ensures that your website ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic. This means optimizing your website’s content metatags, ensuring mobile-friendliness, improving visibility, and attracting a more targeted audience.

The CRO Edge

Once you’ve laid the SEO groundwork, it’s time to leverage Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO optimizes your website’s design and user experience to convert that organic traffic into paying customers. A/B testing, compelling CTAs, and intuitive navigation are just a few CRO techniques that can significantly boost your conversion rates.

The Synergy Unleashed

The real magic happens when you combine SEO and CRO strategies. You can maximize your conversion potential by driving more relevant traffic to your site through SEO and then fine-tuning the user experience with CRO. For instance, understanding the keywords that lead to high conversion rates allows you to tailor your content and design accordingly.

Measuring Success

To continuously enhance your digital marketing sales, you need to monitor and analyze the results of your efforts. Tools like Google Analytics help track traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. Regularly review these metrics and adjust your strategies to ensure you’re staying on the path to success.

Staying Ahead

Staying updated with the latest SEO and CRO trends is crucial. SEO algorithms change, and user preferences shift, so a proactive approach to adapting your strategies is key to long-term success.

By integrating SEO and CRO effectively, you can enhance your digital marketing sales and establish a strong online presence that resonates with your target audience, ultimately leading to sustainable growth.

Step-by-Step Procedure: Enhancing Digital Marketing Sales with SEO and CRO

1. Begin with a comprehensive SEO audit of your website to identify areas for improvement.
2. Research and select relevant keywords that align with your business goals and audience.
3. Optimize your website’s on-page elements, including meta titles, descriptions, headers, and image alt text.
4. Ensure your website is mobile-responsive for an improved user experience.
5. Create high-quality, engaging content that incorporates your chosen keywords naturally.
6. Utilize social media, email marketing, and other online channels to spread your content.
7. Google Analytics and Search Console can help you monitor your website’s performance.
8. Implement A/B testing to identify and refine key elements of your website that impact conversion rates.
9. Focus on creating compelling calls to action (CTAs) that guide users toward desired actions.
10. Simplify website navigation to enhance user experience and reduce bounce rates.
11. Use heatmaps and user behavior analysis tools to gain insights into how visitors interact with your website.
12. Continuously test and refine your website design and content to improve conversion rates.
13. Combine SEO data with CRO insights to optimize content and design for higher conversions.
14. Regularly track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
15. Analyze user feedback and adjust your strategies accordingly.
16. Stay up-to-date with SEO algorithm changes and industry best practices.
17. Adapt your SEO and CRO strategies to reflect evolving user preferences and trends.
18. Keep refining your content and design based on ongoing data analysis.
19. Collaborate with digital marketing experts or agencies for additional guidance and support.
20. Stay committed to a continuous improvement mindset for sustained digital marketing success.

By following these steps, you can effectively enhance your digital marketing sales using the synergy of SEO and CRO.

The post A CMO’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in 5 Minutes or Less appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Newsletter thank-you pages, however, receive a lot less attention. There aren’t many how-to articles devoted to them. And web designers don’t give them much notice.

But how about the person who signs up for your newsletter email list? That thank-you page is an opportunity to leave a new subscriber with a positive feeling — or a missed opportunity.

Don’t let your thank-you-for-signing-up page be just an afterthought. Here we’ll look at seven great examples of companies thanking new subscribers.

Consumer Reports Weekly Newsletter Thank You Page

What Consumer Reports does right:

1. Welcome the subscriber by name.

The reader feels welcomed with an informal “You’re all set!” and a thank you that calls them out by name. This reinforces the person’s budding relationship with the brand.

2. Use eye-catching and relevant images to reinforce reader’s newsletter choice.

In addition to personalizing by name, Consumer Reports confirms the reader’s choices using bold images with captions. This lets the reader know, at a glance, that they’ve subscribed to content that will be interesting to them.

Here’s an idea: Review your image assets. Can you pick some that match your topics to enhance your thank-you message?

3. Link to current, directly related content.

“Preview” links let the reader get immediate access to what they’re looking for. In this case, they can view last week’s newsletter for their selected topics.

Don’t worry about an algorithm showing a three-year-old “related” article to your new subscriber. Link to the most recent publication and you’ll always show the latest content. The reader can be assured it meets their needs — and engage more with your site, too.

4. Indirectly collect demographic information.

Did the subscriber click to see the previous money newsletter but not the previous car newsletter? Getting an idea of a subscriber’s relative interest in those two topics can help you segment your email list.

Think about it: Track the links on this page. Then you’ll see how much traffic the thank you page drives to your on-site content.

If your thank you page is not on your own website, you can add UTM codes to the links for tracking. (Here’s where you can learn how to build tracking code into your links.)

Car and Driver Newsletter Thank You Page

What Car and Driver does right:

5. Show a clear summary of what the reader selected.

Car and Driver shows the subscriber an image of the newsletter with some eye-catching images. The “Read More” link encourages the reader to stay on the site and consume content they might be interested in.

6. Have great timing for offering related content.

Where else can a business get a new subscriber with a single click? Even better, one who is already in a funnel? On the thank-you page, of course!

The site has all the person’s information already loaded. So adding another newsletter subscription here is easy. If the reader does click to subscribe to one of the other newsletters presented, another subscription offer is shown (signing up for special offers or perks, for example).

Barbecue Bible’s Up In Smoke Newsletter Thank You Page

What Barbecue Bible does right:

7. Offer the subscriber a surprise.

The signup form was for the “Up In Smoke Newsletter.” It didn’t promise a bonus offer in exchange for an email address. So the special offer comes as a surprise — a meaty 85-page ebook of recipes and tips in the reader’s choice of formats. There is even a link to FAQs in case the reader isn’t sure how to get the bonus.

8. Make navigation options and items for sale visible.

Barbecue Bible doesn’t let the subscriber preview the newsletter. However, they offer related products (in a variety of price ranges) to buy. The full site navigation is also present so that the user can find other interesting content on the site.

It’s a missed opportunity making your thank you page look like an isolated landing page.

Give the subscriber a way to continue engaging with you! The Car and Driver example above does this with selective options. But just leaving your navigation menus in place gives someone a chance to do more on your website.

Note: For the sake of space, the surrounding site navigation has been cropped from the following examples.

Dogster.com Newsletter Thank You Page

What Dogster does right:

9. Emphasize conversion optimization best practices.

This page could be in a textbook on conversion optimization.

There is an attractive image looking toward the text the subscriber should read. A low-commitment “Give Dogster Magazine a Try” button offers an upsell. And the styling of this page matches the design of their print magazine (see below).

You’ve probably done your research and know what appeals to your customers. You should get the most use of that research. Use it consistently on as many pieces of the site as you can.

King and Prince Resort Email Thank You Page

What King and Prince Resort does right:

10. Suggest tagging photos on Instagram.

Some newsletter confirmation pages suggest that the reader visit the site’s social media accounts after signing up.

This resort’s page also encourages the reader to use an Instagram hashtag for a chance to be featured on their account.

Business Insider Email Newsletter Thank You Page

What Business Insider does right:

11. Give prominent user feedback.

Right at the top, the page confirms the newsletter subscription went through. This simple feedback is an obvious but essential part of a thank you page.

12. Match the Website’s Style.

Additional products are offered for the highly motivated subscriber. But there are no flashy cars or credit cards here, which matches the site’s tone. The images instead show a variety of devices.

Business Insider recognizes that their readers want to consume information when they’re on the go, on assorted devices.

HTC Newsletter Thank You Page

What HTC (cable/internet provider) does right:

13. Combine friendly and professional.

The envelope image offers a smile and helps convey to the reader a non-stuffy attitude. Yet it doesn’t go overboard on the humor. The welcome and message let the visitor know what to expect in their email.

14. Include strategic persona building.

HTC asks for a small amount of information to get you to sign up. Then on the confirmation page, it offers options to tailor your newsletter subscription with the incentive of a surprise on your birthday. It’s a gentle way to get more information while making sure the new subscriber is getting relevant information (and not too many emails).

More Best Practices

15. Use a double opt-in signup.

Savvy companies use a double opt-in to ensure that they’re growing their email list with real people who want what they offer.

You can tell your reader that they will receive an email, and that they’ll need to confirm their subscription.

16. Noindex the confirmation page.

Make sure people aren’t leaking into your conversion funnel at the wrong stage.

You don’t want someone to find your thank-you page from a search engine. This is a problem if you have your thank-you page set as a conversion goal in analytics since you don’t want someone visiting it without having converted. More importantly, it’s a bad user experience to go straight to “Thank you for subscribing!” when the visitor hasn’t.

You can keep the page out of the index with a meta robots “noindex” directive.

17. Don’t ask for a new signup again on the thank-you page.

Many sites have a pop-up encouraging the visitor to sign up for their newsletter. By default, this form pops up from every page — even right after the visitor just signed up for the newsletter!

To avoid this, note the URLs of your thank-you pages. Then configure your pop-ups to not launch on those pages.

18. Make it clear the visitor successfully subscribed.

Many sites redirect the visitor to the homepage. Or they display a single, easily overlooked line of text that says they have subscribed. Instead, welcome the visitor and let them know they did complete what they wanted to do.

19. Proofread.

Even though these pages do not have 2,000 words of text, they still need review. Make sure there are no spelling, grammar or style errors.

Applying these newsletter thank-you page best practices can help your business build a great relationship with your customers. A little extra care can keep the positive feeling going between the reader and your brand.

Go ahead and share this article with your content team and others!

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• Chris Mercer runs an interactive agency SeriouslySimpleMarketing
• Krista Seiden works in-house at Google
• Alex Harris is a CRO consultant

What are the skills a CRO needs to work with you or be you?

Alex: Being a CRO consultant requires thick skin to get clients, getting results and keeping cash flow. You learn a lot. The ability to manage projects, manage PNL, and to find contractors to accomplish that. What’s specific to CRO consultant? To streamline your time to get the best results possible. Thinking about the clients and customers to get the best results possible. Much higher pressure on results.

What do you look at in a CRO as an employee?

Chris: It comes down to a UI systems person. There are CROs that are backend and CROs that are client facing. The back end CROs are very process focused, and comfortable with a system managing you. The front-end is a data-driven sales person, like a sales engineer. You have to constantly sell clients on waiting to call the test, and other coddling. A sales person who is data driven is pretty rare. It’s equivalent of finding a developer who understands marketing. If you’re that person, write your own ticket.

Krista: Someone who’s really going to dive into the analytics and find golden nuggets.

What’s the most effective way to become a contributor as an entry-level CRO?

Alex: Make mistakes early. Have mentors around you that can help you learn. Be in an organization that has some risk tolerance.

Chris: They hire people as marketing manager assistants and give a foundation for how to explain starting from the data. It’s important to soak in the data at first and then coming up that will be ingrained.

Krista: If you’re just starting out in CRO because it’s becoming part of your job, there’s a good chance that your organization doesn’t have a full-time dedicated CRO person. When she started a new job, she had to be the enthusiastic advocate for doing CRO.

Tim: If you’re not passionate about it, if you don’t really want to help visitors to your website have a less painful experience, you shouldn’t be in CRO.

How do you manage CROs?

Krista: Teams that she’s worked with can struggle to find the meaningful tests. Things she challenges CROs to do is dive into the data and ask the hard questions.

Chris: It’s about building a system that manages them and they have a hand in that so the management gets buy in. Testing velocity is a metric that can be objectively tested and gives the CRO a system to manage themselves.

Krista: An initiative to have 100 tests in the quarter caused a lot of poor quality tests going out.

Tim: What gets measured gets done. People will adjust to the penalty-reward system you put in front of them. An award to the highest test velocity doesn’t account for business outcomes. The focus should be on the quality and not the quantity of the test. More experienced manager will focus on managing systems and processes, not people.

Alex: He’s turned designers into CROs, analysts into CROs, and he challenges them to take a decision to its next step — owning the test, presenting to the client, and getting mentorship and guidance from Alex along the way. Young talent tends to play it safe and he pushes people to try new things. Encourage risk-taking as a manger.

What’s the biggest challenge you face if you’re a full-time CRO?

Alex: Time management. Start with where you’re going to make the most money and then work back from there. It’s about prioritization.

Chris: It’s hard to grow the agency. As we grow the company, some structure has to be left behind so someone can come in and take their place as others move up. Asking questions like how do you know what you know? It’s frameworks, checklists – extracting their knowledge and formulating it.

Where should CRO ideally live in a company, or to whom does it report?

Alex: An early startup he was in didn’t know where CRO went in the organization. Ultimately they built an acquisition team that held CRO.

Tim: You could put it under analytics, under product development, under IT … these are difficult.

Krista: She’s seen it under product, under research. In large companies, she’s seen it best effective aligned with analytics under marketing.

Chris: The Make More Money department.

Tim: At SiteTuners they make organizations more mature on CRO. Customer experience, measurement, tools and technology, process and culture, and skills and structure. At the advanced model, it’s reporting to the very top of marketing, the CMO. Not part of the team that touches the web experience. The most dynamic companies have a team reporting to the CMO, and every other part of the company ask them to break, re-break, fix and then give it back. Not part of the team that touches the web experience.

Krista: She thinks that Tim’s point about not having CRO as part of the team that touches the web experience keeps the team from being invested.

Tim: The problem at the website experience level is that you’re invested in incremental tinkering improvements rather than at the strategic level.

Advice for pricing your services?

Alex: Move to a retainer model. Get the customer the best results possible in a month time. Start small and then every client you get, raise your price.

Chris: If you want to grow and add to your staff, you need to charge more than you think you need to. Add some skin in the game clause – as I increase your revenue, dear client, then I can earn from that as bonus based on performance. This is good for small businesses where you’re dealing with the principles.

Tim: This doesn’t work for big businesses because the contract negotiations get caught up on that clause and you lose time when you could be getting more work.

Alex: You can also start with packages of tests, like one to three tests to get started.

Tim: Goes into retainer after some consultation analysis. Then they have two packages, the high gas package and the minimum required for results.

Effective CRO for Particular Roles

Tim is going to name off job roles and the panel will share their biggest challenge to being an effective CRO.

Copywriter

Alex: Be persuasive using data – be direct response focused.

Krista: Not being too tied to a perfect message crafted in your head but tie back to what the data tells you.

Chris: There are more research-driven copywriters.

User Experience Engineer

Krista: mindset for beautiful design will be their biggest hurdle

Chris: understanding purpose-driven design will be their biggest hurdle

Psychologist

Chris: Over-complicating will be the weakness. It goes back to Mona Patel’s BS excuse persona of the Scaffolder. (Read the liveblog coverage of Patel’s keynote).

Alex: When you’re defining the user journey you focus on understanding the psych for user personas, but may overlook the design aspect.

Mathematician or Statistician

Alex: You may look at the numbers but how do you understand it holistically, melding the qualitative and quantitative. And they may not have the business knowledge to understand how an optimization will affect the business.

Krista: She sat on the core team for the Optimize 360 product. A statistician on the team was very vocal about how the test reports would look and the data provided to the user. But she doesn’t think the user needs to see too many details. They wanted to pair it down to the key reports.

Tim: Sometimes the numbers lie. Running a test where environmental factors can skew the data. What’s missing is the context of the numbers — the business context.

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You’re tuned in to Conversion Conference 2016 and a presentation by Michael Aagaard of Unbounce. He loves that quote by Einstein because it relates to CRO. The story he’s going to tell today is about how we can change our mindset to just straight testing and broadening it to understanding the problem.

He starts us off viewing a landing page with lead capture form. Being a conversion optimizer, he wanted to optimize the page. He removed three of the fields on what he’d call a monster form. The result was 14% lower conversions. Ouch! So next he went looking at where the drop off occurs on the form. He found which form fields had low interaction and high drop-off and addressed them by rearranging the order of the fields (putting ones that were a low commitment higher up) and tweaked label copy.

This time they got 19% increase in conversions.

The question: why didn’t he do the research right away and why did who jump to best practices?

It’s very difficult to understand a problem that you don’t understand. Vice versa, it’s easy to solve a problem when you understand it.

He asked other conversion optimizers what keeps them from doing conversion research:

• Time
• Client/Company Buy-in
• Budget
• Not knowing where to start

Split testing is not an excuse to skip your homework.

6 Things You Can Do Right Away

… to conduct better research, better hypotheses, get better results.

1. Manual step-drop analysis with Google Analytics.

Same with ecommerce.

There’s a custom report in GA that he wrote and we might be able to get it later.

2. Run feedback polls on critical pages.

There’s a conflict in CROs.

1. Get more data
2. Don’t bother users

For everyday ninja analysis, feedback polls are cool, unobtrusive, and you just ask one questions. But you can do them wrong. A question like “did you find what you were looking for today” and then a scale of 1 to 10 is bad. Start with the question “what were you looking for” and then “did you find it.” What does it mean if 50% of people choose 4? That data is useless.

His tip is to lower the perceived time investment of filling out the poll with clever formatting.

The person will click on “yes” or “no” and then the form will change to let them type in the reason why.

3. Conduct interviews with sales and support.

These are the questions to ask them:

• What are the top three questions from potential customers?
• How do you answer when you get these questions?
• Are there any particular aspects of ______ that people don’t understand?
• What aspects of ______ do people like the most/least?
• Did I miss anything important? Got something to add?

4. Perform 5-second tests.

Here’s the tool: http://fivesecondtest.com/. You give a user a screenshot to view for five seconds and then ask, “What do you think this page was about?” He showed users an Unbounce page with an employee of theirs on the page. Yes, we think people on pages is good for conversions. But when they showed that page to five-second testers, no one knew what the page was about, and some even said they were distracted by the image.

5. Calculate your sample size and test duration.

Before you can call a test trustworthy, you need statistical significance. There’s a very fascinating set of calculations he does. Look for a simple size and test duration calculator. Unbounce.com has one A/B Test Duration & Sample Size Calculator.

6. Formulate a data-driven test hypothesis.

You need to know some things before you can make a hypothesis:

• Why do we think we need to make a change?
• What is it that we want to change?
• What impact do we expect to see?
• How will we measure this impact?
• When do we expect to see results?

Here’s a mad-libs style hypothesis exercise you can fill out for your hypothesis:

Because ________, we expect that ________ will cause ________. We’ll measure this using ________. We expect to see reliable results in ________.

It’s all about seeing through the eyes of your users. Data driven empathy is what it’s about. He gives credit to Andy Crestodina, sitting behind me, for that phrase.

The reasons that you have to do conversion research:

1. Time
2. Client/company buy-in
3. Budget
4. Don’t know where to start

Final Thought

Be like Einstein: prioritize understanding the problem before you start your testing. Always be aware of bias and be critical of data (you can make it say whatever you want if you torture it enough). Also, split testing is only a tool.

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The post How to Conduct Solid, Data-Driven Conversion Research #ConvCon appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Here’s her agenda:

• How Analysis Drives CRO
• 5 Tips for Accelerating CRO via Analytics
• Bonus Tip: Rapid Optimization Plan
• The Future of Testing, Adapting and Personalizing

How Analysis Drives Optimization

What is optimization? Conversion rate optimization is the ongoing, data-driven process of continually discovering what works for your consumer.

#CRO is the ongoing, data-driven process of discovering what works for your consumer. @KristaSeiden
Click To Tweet

Testing or analysis? Whether testing or analysis is appropriate depends on the question you’re asking or the hypothesis you have. You can use analytics to justify the test you want to run.

Why don’t people convert? There are many factors that can contribute to low conversion rate:

1. User experience
2. Site content and personalization
3. Actionable web analytics
4. Development resources

Next, she’ll give five tips for accelerating CRO via analytics.

Tip #1: Implement Ways to Track CRO

Email testing: Use campaign tagging to distinguish variations. Use campaign tracking to tag calls to action (CTAs) on buttons and links from email to test different headlines or email copy.

Ad testing: Use the utm_content slot to denote the ad variation. She usually describes the special offer — it’ll add a lot of light to your analysis later on.

Social media testing: Tag each post with unique campaign parameters to ensure you can track back to find out which individual post and channel are driving the highest conversions.

Use the dataLayer to collect test IDs. If you’re using a tag management system, you’ll have a data layer.

Tip #2: Set Up Analytics Goals to Track CRO Success

In analytics, you can set goals and create a funnel for that goal.

In this slide, we see that it’s a three-page sign-up flow. She actually has set goals for each of those steps (micro conversions) leading to the user completing the final goal, signing up (macro conversion).

Tip #3: Your Site Can Tell You What’s Important

Site Search will tell you what topics people are looking for on your site. Take that information and use it to determine your roadmap for different posts you’re going to write.

Heat maps can pinpoint areas to optimize. The Crazyegg confetti report of where and when people click even lets you sort by time to click. How long does it take a visitor to click what you want? Are they clicking on what you want, or are they distracted by something else on the page?

Tip #4: Use Key Google Analytics Reports

The Devices report (in Google Analytics) lets you look at where conversions came from. Do you need to spend more time optimizing the mobile experience?

Browser reports and the Browser Version report tell you if your performance varies based on browser types and versions.

The Site Search report lets you create a custom report and see when people search for something and also convert. Then you can create more content about that topic.

Fallout Funnel is her favorite report. You can zoom in on the flow and see where the drop offs are happening in the funnel.

A few other report ideas:

• Look for high traffic, high bounce rate landing pages and segment these to find out if performance varies by demographic, browser, device or other factors (such as location).
• Use custom funnels to identify user drop off through your path to conversion.

Tip #5: Qualitative Surveys as CRO Tie-breakers

Add to quantitative testing and analysis with qualitative feedback. The combination is powerful. You can ask how satisfied they are with multiple choices of satisfaction levels and ask what the main reason they visited today was. You can also ask who they are, and that gives you another lens to analyze the data against.

Bonus Tip: Analytics to the Rescue with a Rapid Optimization Plan

She explains that over two years, they ran a lot of tests before launching a site redesign: 453 unique variations, 159 unique tests, 25 locales and 4 different product lines. The result was 50+ key learnings.

What they tested:

• CTAs
• Headlines (see variants in slide below)
• Images
• Grids for pricing
• Demos

“If we see a 5 percent increase in sign-ups, then we’ll launch the new site,” she says. They didn’t reach the 5 percent mark; the sign-ups were flat. So she dove into analytics. She saw that they might want to change the button color to the old style. They changed the color of the icons. They also found a video that was a blank part of the page if the user scrolled too quickly. They addressed these three items and tested again, and this time they did see the 5 percent increase they were looking for — test validated.

Read Krista’s article for more details: Rapid Optimization Plan Blog Post

The Future of Analytics, CRO and Testing

It’s easier to have an engaging conversation in the offline world. Online it’s more difficult, but we have analytics to slice and dice our traffic. Even still, we serve people the same web experience even though we know they are different and have preferences.

Google Optimize 360 customizes your site by customer.

Personalization is the big bonus of Optimize 360. You can use the audience segments built in GA to target experiences to different customers on the web. If you’re a travel brand, you can segment your customers by different levels of spend. You can target people on the site and give them a different experience.

Next, she explains how Google Optimize 360 makes enterprise-level testing and personalization simple. It’s because they designed it to integrate (“best-in-class”) with the Google Analytics 360 Suite and other Google products:

• Simple to use from start to finish
• With powerful testing and personalization capabilities that support sophisticated needs
• Enabling users to act on all their data seamlessly.

Because this is the scenario we all want to get to:

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How can we tell a computer program is going to convert? A user experience engineer thinks about conversion in the model of a mouse and a piece of cheese. Between the two is an electrical grid. The levers you pull are: you can increase the size of the cheese and decrease the shock of the electricity. If you’re giving away free Jaguars, your emails can suck.

We have tools to let us see where the eye moves on a page to maximize the visual links, or visual access. People scan complex areas, saturated colors, and dark areas. Having a person in an ad looking at the product or text makes the viewer look at that text or product.

Removing the complexity from forms is one way to reduce shock. But what else can we do?

Engineering Performance and Persuasion

Think about PET. PET = persuasion, emotion, and trust. In other words, PET is persuasion engineering.

When do we have hope?

The power of relatively is something a PET engineer uses to reduce shock and increase usability.

Compare these two slides. It might look like shipping costs a lot so the user abandons. Add another big number (money saved) and that shipping cost isn’t a detractor. We’re suckers for the scarcity principle.

Look at the most persuasive sites. Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube. They aren’t “pretty,” but they have value and persuade in other ways.

PET Flow Strategy

We want to get direction through evidence-based design. We need user data. We do surveys using scales to get feedback. Unfortunately, this is unreliable.

Scarcity and divestiture influence people. Divestiture version is the difference between what we say we’d pay for something we didn’t get versus what we’d sell a ticket for that we believe is rare. In a research study, our typical response to “did you like it” isn’t useful.

Galvanic skin response can test and find when a person is tense, but you can’t tell why they’re tense. In eye-tracking studies, you can tell where people are looking and when pupils dilate, but you can’t tell why their pupils dilate. You can study facial expression and even when parts of the brain light up – but you can’t tell why. This is not useful for design.

A/B testing and big data will tell us which version is working. There is some information you can never get to. So there’s a psychology methodology of doing deep interviews to understand the emotional motivations behind decision making.

Fear, sex, survival, and progeny — these are our basic, underlying motivators. We can research users and decompose these drives, blocks, and feelings. Schaffer mentions there was a study on youth that found young customers like having money. Why run that study?! Anyone could have told you that! But take a look at the findings:

You can test ads against the prediction model. You can see before you go to market how the ad will be received. This is the core of omnichannel strategy — the biggest design challenge UX companies have today. The challenge we have to overcome is getting everyone and everything to fit together — because when you silo departments, they come out with strange ideas.

Unintended Consequences of Giving Away Things for Free

Giving away stuff isn’t a great strategy. It has unintended consequences. Here’s a story. There’s an old man who lives in a neighborhood that’s getting run down and kids are making noise by his home. He goes to the kids and asks them to make noise by his house and he’ll give them a dollar. They do and he does. The next day is the same. Then the next day the kids come to his house and say we’re ready to make noise! And he says he can only afford to give them $.10 and they say they’re never going to make noise by his house again.

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But Patel wonders if we ever take that lens and point it inward. She wants to enable businesses so that employees feel optimized and fulfilled. Why? Employees are a big part of customer service. The way employees interact with your customers are going to affect your customer experience.

In 2009 she started her own company of one. She had clients and then she got pregnant. She decided to hire people to take care of her clients while she was on maternity leave. She wanted to design a hiring process that would match the customer experience she wanted. Patel started thinking about how to create a platform where she took talented people and made sure they were optimized to bring their best work to the marketplace.

This brought her to thinking about EX – employee experience. Where would you rank how optimized you feel at work? If you’re an entrepreneur or company of one, where would someone you hire rank their optimization of employee experience? Where would you rank your work experience? If you’re not a 10, write down the reasons your work is not optimized – areas where you could see improving.

If you wrote some things down, there’s good news. These are probably excuses. We can fix excuses. She’ll cover the excuses here. The fixes are in her book.

The BS Excuse Personas

She tells a story of a visit she made to a CEO. When she arrived she was pointed to the fourth floor. Turns out that was the gym and she actually is made to take a physical test before she could see the CEO. Does a test like this work? Who knows! Is there any data to support it?

Persona #1: The Brat

A brat is a person who judges an idea before they have data. They don’t listen to the data or the facts. They already know. We see this come up as “this is never going to work.” It comes up in design and in the workplace. This is one of the most common excuse personas we see in the design world.

Persona #2: The Bullied

A bullied persona is the one who thinks they’re a victim. They aren’t going to do anything because someone’s holding them down.

Persona #3: The Bottlenecker

The bottlenecker requires that all ideas go through them before they’re implemented. He or she will stick themselves into a process where they don’t need to be. A bottlenecker likes to be busy, but because they’re so busy, they don’t take action on plans to improve.

Persona #4: The Scaffolder

The scaffolder is the persona who builds up an idea so big that they make an excuse that something can’t be done. A larger topic — baby boomers or the economy — might be the excuse for something in the way of actually making changes.

Persona #5: The Square

The square loves the lines in the box to explain why they can’t come up with better ideas and can’t make changes. In design work we might hear that the technology doesn’t support it or there are regulations. Their excuses are actual facts that might exist but which really shouldn’t have anything to do with making changes. Look at your business from a design lens; that forces you to start from a blank slate and create.

Persona #6: The Sheep

The sheep has a herd mentality. This person has to do what everyone else is doing. They think things like, “I’m not happy at my job but no one else is either, and it won’t be better anywhere else.” If you feel like this, you might be right — but you’re not going to feel like a 10 on your satisfaction rating scale. You need to stop worrying about being right.

Persona #7: The Blamer

The blamer is going to say “It’s not me. It’s you.” It’s always something else. The blaming prevents you from having to solve the problem.

Persona #8: The Blamer

The slacker is the passenger in the car. They’re definitely not driving. And you may want to ask yourself if it’s preventing you from being happy.

Stop the Excuses

Do you relate to any of these personas? Do you work with anyone who manifests some of these traits? Stop the excuses. What’s holding you back?

Think about what you need to do to move your numbers up and get to the ten on the job satisfaction scale. Don’t let the BS excuses keep you down. If you start thinking “yeah but” then think about it – you’re bringing up excuses again.

Touché, Mona.

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Alex Harris’ CRO Tools He’d Take with Him on a Desert Island

Alex has been doing CRO since 2000.

Testing:

Optimizely is the testing tool he uses daily. Working with the dev team to set up tests and use these tests for long-term improvements. You can do A/B testing and multi-variate testing. You can set up goals. You can figure out how long it takes to run your tests.

Tim adds that Optimizely has been doing a big push for personalization. So the Optimizely platform isn’t just for testing; it’s going to real-time automate and personalize your content.

Usability tools:

UserTesting – it’s great to watch people go through your site, your competitor sites and Google search queries to find your site. Be careful to ensure you use the right people into your tests. For example, it might take a while to find the right users to test your site on IE. He recommends making sure your script it tailored to find these people. You don’t want to persuade people through the script you use.

Moderated user testing will get real feedback and observe reactions from ideal customers. It’s easy to do this with Skype or Screen Flow recording program. He recruits people for this kind of testing on Craigslist.

Live chat tools:

Olark is one of the easiest live chat tools. You should be talking to your customers, obviously, but for CRO, go through the transcripts in your live chat logs to understand the voice of your customer and top FAQs. In ecommerce you might see patterns of users looking for how long to ship and the return policy. You want to identify what is missing to persuade people to convert.

Intercom is a live chat tool, but also marketing automation, customer feedback and support. If someone does something on your website you can change the message based on what is going on.

Landing page and funnel tools:

Unbounce is great for landing pages and PPC campaigns and lead generation. It’s easy to customize. You can change the landing page headline to automatically match the ad headline the user clicked on.

LeadPages is very helpful to increase email opt-ins and lead generation. Aside from creating custom landing pages, you can also create lead digits – create a marketing funnel or response based on text messages. It’s easy to implement; you don’t need a development team.

Click Funnels is a new tool that just came out of beta. It’s easy-to-use funnel creation and landing page creation software.

Angie Schottmuller’s CRO Tools She Loves as Much as Star Wars

Her tools jump around to mobile, SEO and CRO.

She’d add a moderated user testing tool is GoTo Meeting. If you’re already using it for your video calls, you can add moderated user testing to its ROI. You can use it to record these calls so you can review later.

Unbounce updated their platform last Fall so that you can automatically publish to WordPress. Unbounce pages will publish in an Unbounce subdirectory and not a subdomain which is important for SEO. http://try.unbounce.com/angie/ will get you 3 months free.

Web pages are fatter and slower than they will a year ago. Please plan a way to prioritize page load time with your management and have them have performance goals. WebPageTest.org is the only tool she’s aware of that actually measures first view load time.

Social conversion/click-through tools:

Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards and WebCodeTools.com. The latter has a Twitter Card and Open Graph generator. There are WordPress plugins as well that will let you customize the image and description. The call to action or goal you’re featuring socially may also be a little different for different social sites.

Video lead gen tool:

Wistia Video Platform – She’s never met a Wistia user who wasn’t a huge fan. If you’re wondering YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo or Wistia – Wistia is the best option for conversion. (That doesn’t mean don’t also put it on YouTube.) On Wistia you get the most control. You can generate leads from Wistia, similar to SlideShare’s lead capture slide.

Tim adds to include the email ask deeper into the video so they know that it was worth it.

Visual testing tool:

Hero Shot Scorecard – We use visuals in all of our content. How are you grading your images? Not all images are hero shots.

There has to be a better way to test images if it’s not to the testing stage. She wants an image score of 7 or higher. This is going to be great for helping other people and other teams select visuals too. (Learn more about her Hero Score Card).

Bonus tip: PSDcovers.com will going to give you a 3D version of your screenshots in different devices and shapes and items!

Optimizing for phone calls:

Click-to-Call is a tactic-slash-tool. If calls are your conversion goal, optimize for it. You need a href=tel: and class=”clicktocall”. Always display hours because there’s nothing more frustrating for a user to call and find they’re calling in after hours.

Justin Rondeau’s CRO Tools He’d Be Bummed to Live Without

Qualitative tools:

Hotjar and Lucky Orange – qualitative tools that reports session recordings. You can see what people are doing. There’s a lot of time that goes into watching these recordings. Start looking for patterns. That’s how they redesigned pages, like if they found a user scrolled a long way down in order to see a product shot. Alex adds that you can view the user funnel and see where people drop off your site using Hotjar.

Know that mobile heat maps can be wonky because you’re going to be seeing lots of scrolling clicks. The survey functionality is limited. Qualitative data is essential. It’s the why. It’s giving the Tin Man a heart.

Tim adds that the advantage of looking through recordings – tracking people in the wild – is invaluable. As soon as you ask people to talk about what they’re doing as they’re doing it (like they know they’re being watched) it ruins everything.

On-site retargeting:

Optimonk and Banana Splash – I think these are pop-up tools but he describes them thusly: bootstrapped personalization with backend conditional logic rules of how to set things up. Say a user is reading a blog posts and came from Facebook. There’s some auto-event reporting. Banana Splash is what he uses for mobile. You can segment by operating system and use different designs that matches that OS. Gleam.io is what he’s used to run contests.

Tool manager:

Google Tag Manager: When you don’t have access to the code, you can start avoiding your development team and create highly-customized events. It is a steep learning curve. And it can make your site bloated.

Testing tool:

VWO is the powerful testing tool he uses. It’s easy to get personalization. He says personalization is a must. You can’t put VWO or Optimizely in Google Tag Manager.

Tim closes the session by asking the audience to share the CRO tools they use by tweeting them with the hasthags #convcon and #tools. Happy tool treasure hunting!

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