Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman

Speakers:
Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners.com
Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NYTimes Bestselling Author, bryaneisenberg.com

Oh good. Bryan’s given me fair warning that his presentation will be next to impossible to liveblog. Something like 125 tools and 60 slides. Eep!

Tim’s presenting first. He’ll be telling us about 5 tools today. CrazyEgg, ClickTale, UserTesting, CrossBrowserTesting and AttentionWizard.

All these tools will help you identify problems with your site. He asks everyone to raise their hand and say “my baby is ugly.” Your landing page has fundamental problems. These tools will help you find them.

CrazyEgg

Type: in-page analytics

Key features:
Mouse heatmaps
Click confetti
Link click overlay

Conversion applications:
Clicking on non-clickable images
Behavior changes based on screen size and traffic source

They aggregate people’s mouse movement on the page which generates a heat map and that lets you know where people are focusing.

He compares two pages with a similar layout and you can see that on one the search button and nav get attention, whereas they don’t on the other. What’s the difference? Window size. So consider moving elements up even a little to fit into a smaller window size and it can make a big difference.

Pricing:
30-day money back guarantee
Different levels

ClickTale

Type: In-page Web analytics and user monitoring

Key features:
User session recording and playback with downloading
Click heatmaps with adjustable display
Advanced link analytics

Conversion applications:
How far do people scroll
Do they reach the bottom of the page
What form fields are commonly left blank
Which form fields cause most delay confusion
Which links are hovered over but not clicked
User session playback based on business rules

Conversion report: A conversion funnel that is very granular, inside the page, shows percentage and number of visitors travelling through the path.

A time report shows you the average length of visitor interactions in each field.

Blank field report: Only ask for info in forms that’s absolutely necessary to complete a task. These tools will help you identify how many people are wrestling with certain fields.

Pricing:
Different price levels

UserTesting.com

We often live in hermetically sealed boxes. We don’t ever talk to people, users. This gets you in touch with people actually using your site. It’s a way for you to have someone go through a process you define. There are also first impression tests, or have them do a common task. Because they’re uninterested visitors, that’s more representative of real users than you. If you run it on your competitor’s site, even one a nugget of info might reveal an “ah ha!” moment.

Type: online usability testing

Key features:
Online test setup specify task to perform on your site
Pre-screened subjects (taught to speak out loud)
Very quick results (start getting feedback within 1 hour
Get audio video recording and text transcript

Conversion applications:
Observe actual problems that uninterested visitors have
Run tests against your benchmark competitor’s sites
Get unexpected ideas for problems/testing

Pricing:
$29/participant
5-pack recommended as minimum
100% guarantee

CrossBrowserTesting

Type: cross-browser testing

Key features:
Test different OS, browser, application combinations
Pay by the minute for screenshots or live testing

Conversion applications:
Identify usability issues with different configurations
Find broken or suboptimal site operation
Find distorted spatial relationships

Pricing:
Basic is $19.99 a month

AttentionWizard

Type: simulated visual attention tool

Key features:
Creates “attention heatmaps” of web pages
Works with live and mocked-up designs
No actual page visitors required
Instant results – just upload an image

Conversion applications:
Identify visual elements that distract from goals
Determine exact amount of emphasis for key elements
Improve a landing page design before you publish it

A designer may want to include a design element like a drop shadow. But as a general rule, embellishments are distractions that hurt conversion rates. How do you prove that? With a tool like AttentionWizard, that predicts where a visitor’s attention will go on the page. You can fine tune things before they go live, making sure the focus on what you want them to focus on.

Bryan’s next. Buckle up! At least he’s not just making my life crazy. He just apologized to the video guy because he’ll be walking all around the room. He’s going to cover all the tools from this session in his next ClickZ column.

When he thinks of CRO, he thinks of 3 parts:

1. Tools: insights, creating pages, testing, personalization, campaign and automation
2. People: insight, management, creative execution, test setup implementation, outsource
3. Process: planning and creating new ads and content, optimizing old ads and content

$56.8 billion will be spent this year on generating website traffic, but only 2%-3% of visitors will actually convert. There’s more tools, more knowledge, people are more comfortable putting their credit card online. So why haven’t conversion rates gone up at all in 10 years?

Companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site. Only $1 of them convert.

Don’t do slice and dice optimization. The problem is:

• You need resources to create all these variations
• You need the traffic to test them
• If you don’t have these, this kind of optimization strategy won’t work.

Responses of a survey of the effectiveness of using dedicated landing pages:

• Somewhat effective 49%
• Very effective 43%
• Not effective 8%

Where is the landing page opportunity?

Every keyword is a unique campaign and should approach the visitor differently. With slice-and-dice optimization you’re putting lipstick on a pig. You still have a pig. You’re not getting very far. You should understand why people are buying.

76% don’t have a structured approach to CRO. 48% say they have limited time and resources. 61% do less than 5 tests per month.

Customer behavior in the last 5 years has changed so radically (mobile, social). You should be doing at least 20 tests per month. Amazon does 200 tests per month. They get 30% of every dollar spent online.

Tools time!

• Omniture and Google Analytics
• Form analytics like ClickTale
• Voice of customers like 4Q and Kiss Insights
• Call tracking like ifbyphone and mongoosemetrics
• Speed check like websiteoptimization.com and Loadsin (every second delay in load time is 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page vies and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction)
• Image optimization like smush.it and Dynamic Drive
• Tag acceleration like Tag Man and Site Apps
• UserTesting.com for PPC keywords
• Wirify.com creates wireframes of your site
• Mockflow can help you mock out a page before you give it to your designer
• BO.LT lets you take your landing page, upload it, and let you make changes to it
• Get Premise is a landing page generator for WordPress (check out their landing page for one of the best landing pages on the Web)
• 5 Second Test lets you get initial feedback
• Behavioral targeting like BTBuckets. You can see segments of visitors, geographic, devices, browser, seasonality, and a lot more.
• Site testing like with Google Website Optimizer (follows his rule: get good at free, then pay)

What are some of the first things you should be testing:

1. Headline copy
2. Content of images
3. Body copy
4. Format of layout

• Message consistency: average conversion improvement range 5%-20% (as high as 100%)
• Badging: Conversion impact as high as 55%. Overlaying a badge on top of a product image lets viewers focus in
• International: conversion improvement as high as 100% (don’t need a whole site, just a message that you can ship there, for example)
• Tax free
• Email acquisition: acquisition improvement as high as 1000%.

AdWords Performance Grader for Google AdWords campaign. Don’t write an ad your landing page can’t cash.

TagCrowd will show you what your page is about. If your keyword doesn’t show up, smack yourself.

BoostCTR.com crowd sources new ads for your product and you only pay if their ads perform better. Focus on conversion per ad impression.

Now you have the info and the tools. So now you have to speed up. A lead looses effectiveness by 6x within the first hour. Efficiencies of speed is what optimization is all about.

Finally, it’s not the tool, it’s how you use it. Check out http://mo.am/21secrets for how.

For related information regarding conversion tools, see our Conversion Ninja Toolbox post.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.