However, website traffic isn’t inherently valuable on its own. If your visitors never make a purchase, their clicks may boost your digital marketing metrics, but they won’t increase your bottom line. 

So, how can you convert more of those hard-earned website visitors into paying customers? The process of conversion rate optimization (CRO) can help. 

Below, we’ll define CRO marketing and break down the many benefits of a CRO campaign. 

The ABCs of CRO

Before we jump into the benefits of CRO efforts, let’s define the following terms: conversion, conversion rate, and conversion rate optimization.

What is a Conversion?

Put simply, a conversion is simply an action you want your site visitor to take. There are two main types of conversions:

• Macro-conversions – A macro-conversion is when a site visitor makes a purchase on your website, whether they buy your product or sign up for your service. Macro-conversions are the most valuable type of conversions, since they directly produce revenue for your business. 
• Micro-conversions – Micro-conversions are smaller actions website visitors take that occur before they make a purchase. Some examples of micro-conversions include:
• Filling out and submitting a form
• Contacting your company via phone or email
• Downloading an offer (such as an eBook, whitepaper, or free trial)
• Signing up for your newsletter
• Subscribing to your blog
• Adding an item to their cart
• Interacting with your online chatbot

Even though these actions don’t bring in money right away, they show that potential customers are taking meaningful steps on their customer journey to becoming paying customers in the near future. 

An uptick in either type of conversion is a good sign.

What is a Conversion Rate?

A conversion rate is simply the percentage of total website visitors who convert on your website. By increasing your conversion rate, you can maximize the value of the website traffic you’ve already earned through SEO and PPC. 

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate 

To calculate your conversion rate, all you have to do is divide the number of conversions you receive by your total number of website visitors for a given time frame. After that, multiply the resulting number by 100% to yield a percentage. 

Conversion Rate = (Conversions / Total Visitors) * 100%

As an example, let’s say your website receives an average of 1,000 visitors per month. Of those visitors, roughly 20 end up making a purchase. This would mean that your website has a conversion rate of 2%.

Luckily, you don’t need to calculate your conversion rate by hand each time. Many useful analytics platforms can do it for you automatically. For example, Google Analytics can help you track your conversion rate for:

• Your entire website
• Specific pages on your website
• Your PPC landing pages
• Certain keywords
• Website visitors from various traffic sources (organic search, paid ads, social media, etc.)

What is a “Good” Conversion Rate?

In an ideal world, 100% of your website visitors would convert right away. However, the average conversion rate across all industries is just above 2%.¹

A “good” conversion rate for your company will depend on your:

• Industry
• Products or services
• Website traffic quality
• Desired conversion (macro-conversions vs. micro-conversions)

Rather than comparing your current conversion rate to another company’s or the 2% average, simply aim to increase your conversion rate over time through website optimization.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

So, what is CRO? A CRO strategy is the ongoing process of optimizing your website to increase its conversion rate. In other words, it encompasses any steps you take to proactively transform more web browsers into buyers. 

Some popular CRO techniques include:

• Using heat mapping to see where your website visitors are clicking
• Finding out what your visitors think about your website via surveys and user testing
• Improving your website’s functionality and navigation
• Speeding up your website’s loading time
• Adjusting the copy of your headline, subheader, and a Call to Action that converts
• Shortening your forms
• Tweaking your website’s layout and design
• Establishing trust through testimonials, reviews, and money-back guarantees
• Using A/B testing to find out which changes are truly effective

The overarching goal of CRO is to identify and remove any obstacles that prevent your website visitors from converting, whether that’s a poorly designed web page, a lack of trust in your company, or poor messaging about your offerings. By using a combination of these CRO strategies, you’ll be able to accomplish this goal over time.

The Benefits of CRO 

After SEO and PPC, CRO is arguably the most powerful tool you can use to increase your online sales. Here are a few reasons why:

#1 CRO Maximizes Your Marketing ROI

When you invest in SEO and PPC, your website should see a gradual uptick in traffic. However, this traffic may plateau at some point. That’s because the audience for your product or service isn’t infinite, and for that matter, neither is your marketing budget. 

Fortunately, CRO has the potential to multiply your conversions without increasing your traffic. It empowers you to extract the most value from the traffic you already have. Better yet, CRO is often cheaper and easier than ramping up your website traffic, especially if you’ve already invested in SEO and PPC for a long time.

CRO is a lot like shopping from your own closet, rather than rushing out to the store to buy new things. There’s often a ton of untapped value in what you already have—you just need to find creative ways to harness it.

#2 CRO Yields Fast Results

While SEO often takes months to yield results, CRO can start working in a matter of weeks.

Since you already have a foundation of website traffic, any changes you make to enhance your CRO will be seen by your website visitors in real-time. Based on their reactions, you can find out how well your CRO efforts are working. 

As long as you move in the right direction and follow the data, your conversion rate should start increasing as soon as you implement the right changes.

#3 CRO Can Uncover Valuable Customer Insights

Effective marketing requires an understanding of your customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences. The CRO process allows you to develop a deeper understanding of your website visitors, including: 

• How they interact with your website 
• What type of information and promotional offers capture their attention
• What type of messaging they respond best to
• What type of content they find most engaging
• How they move through your sales funnel
• Which subsets of your website visitors are most likely to convert

These insights can help you improve conversion rate and all areas of your marketing campaign, even beyond the digital sphere. 

For example, you may discover that a certain demographic of website visitors never converts, no matter how much you optimize. This may lead you to conclude that this group doesn’t belong in your target audience anymore. Once you adjust your targeting accordingly, you’ll have more resources to funnel towards the audiences who actually convert.

#4 CRO Can Boost Your SEO

The process of SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to impress Google’s algorithms. 

Google’s primary goal is to offer its users search results that satisfy their search queries. As a result, Google rewards websites that successfully meet its users’ needs. 

A high conversion rate shows Google that you’re effectively delivering what your website visitors are searching for.² Thus, CRO can work in tandem with other SEO techniques to help you rank higher on Google’s search results pages. 

#5 CRO Makes the Buying Process Easier on Your Customers

Effective CRO aims to remove any obstacles that make it harder or less appealing for your potential customers to complete a conversion. In other words, it makes it easier and more convenient for your customers to do business with you. 

For example, you can set up PayPal in your mobile checkout process to save your customers the trouble of filling out their payment information manually on their phone. 

By employing conversion rate optimization tools like this, you can give your customers a more pleasant buying experience and increase your conversion rate, making it a win-win for both of you. 

#6 CRO Makes Your Sales Funnel More Efficient

Oftentimes, a potential customer will visit your website a few times before they make a purchase. Maybe they aren’t sure if your company is trustworthy. Or maybe they aren’t sold on your offerings’ benefits just yet.

You can expedite their journey through your sales funnel with the help of CRO. Since CRO techniques focus on building trust, clearly communicating your company’s value proposition, and encouraging action, it can reduce the number of interactions it takes to yield a sale. 

You’ll also avoid missing out on sales from people who were on the fence, but left your website, never to return. Don’t let these potential customers become the ones that got away. 

Capitalize On Your Current Website Traffic With CRO

CRO is a powerful process that can help you gain more customers and make the most of the website traffic you already have. 

Employing CRO doesn’t mean you should give up on increasing your website traffic. When used in combination, SEO, PPC, and CRO can do wonders for your bottom line. 

Now that you know what CRO is all about, you can start putting it to work in your marketing campaign. For more strategy, advice, guidance, and effective campaigns, reach out to us at any time. Here at Power Digital, we ensure your brand receives the traction it deserves.

Sources:

1. Business Insider. What You Need to Know About Ecommerce Conversion Rates.  https://www.businessinsider.com/understanding-which-website-conversion-rate-to-use-2010-8
2. Business Insider. How Google’s Algorithm Has Changed & The Top 25 SEO Companies That Can Adapt Your SEO Strategy In 2019. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/how-google-s-algorithm-has-changed-the-top-25-seo-companies-that-can-adapt-your-seo-strategy-in-2019-1027908182

The post What is Conversion Rate Optimization? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to increase conversion rate. These techniques make up a process known as conversion rate optimization (CRO). 

Below, we’ll review 11 powerful CRO marketing tactics that can move the needle on your website conversion rate.

How to Increase Conversion Rate: 11 Effective Techniques

What is conversion rate optimization? The process of CRO involves three main steps:

• Identifying why a site visitor isn’t converting
• Making changes on your website to address these conversion obstacles
• Testing these changes to find out if they’re actually working

To put these steps into action, simply try out these 11 tried-and-true CRO tactics and achieve customer satisfaction:

#1 Increase Your Page Speed

These days, online shoppers have high expectations. Notably, they expect websites to load quickly. Even a delay of a few seconds may send potential customers clicking the “back” button and giving your competitor their business instead. In fact, forty percent of people will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.² 

If you even want the chance to acquire more conversions, you need to keep website visitors on your page long enough for it to load. Thus, speeding up your website’s loading time is a simple way to improve your conversion rate. 

#2 Optimize For Mobile

Did you know that over 50% of online shopping experiences take place on a mobile device?³ If you want to win over this large swath of customers, you need to ensure your website renders properly on mobile.

You should also carefully review the steps involved in your mobile checkout process. Make checking out as simple as possible by letting guests pay with Paypal, GooglePay, or ApplePay—the fewer forms they need to fill out, the more likely they’ll be to complete their purchase. 

#3 Write a Compelling Headline

Roughly 80% of website visitors will read your web page’s headline, but only 20% will read anything else.⁴ Thus, getting the wording of your headline just right is essential for your conversion rate. 

Your headline should clearly communicate your value proposition. Every word of your headline matters, so test out a few different versions of it to see which one performs the best. 

It’s amazing how tweaking a few words within your headline can make a massive difference in your conversion rate.

#4 Include an Action-Inspiring CTA

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, your web page’s call-to-action (CTA) is another crucial component. Wondering how to write a call to action that converts?Effective CTAs are:

• Actionable – The purpose of a CTA is to inspire action, so you must use action-oriented language, like “Download Now” or “Yes, Give Me That Discount!” 
• Preceded by persuasive copy – To motivate website visitors to click on a CTA button, you need to explain the value of your product, service, or promotional offer. Explain how your offer (whether it’s a product or service, a downloadable piece of content, or a free trial) will benefit them.
  
  Use language that resonates with your target audience and addresses their pain points. If you get your messaging right, they’ll be much more likely to click on the call to action and convert. 
• Easy to find – If website visitors can’t find your CTA, they can’t click on it. In turn, your CTA must be easy to find. Make sure it’s positioned strategically on the web page in a location that draws the eye. You can use bright colors to help it stand out.
• One to a page – Even if you have multiple offers to share with your website visitors, limit your CTAs to one per web page. This way, you can tailor everything on the page to guide your website visitors towards this CTA. A single, focused CTA will convert much better than multiple, vague CTAs. 

#5 Remove Distractions From Your Landing Pages

Imagine that you’re shopping in a beautifully designed store. Every item is showcased exquisitely in perfect lighting. The sales associate is ready to answer all of your questions. 

Now think about shopping in a messy store where all of the items are scattered around haphazardly. You have to dig around to find each product and the sales clerk is nowhere to be found. You would probably leave this store without making a purchase simply because the shopping experience is too much trouble. 

These two experiences show that buying a product or service is easier when there are fewer distractions. Don’t make your website visitors dig to find the crucial information they need to convert. Instead, just show them the essentials of a high landing page conversion rate, which include: 

• A compelling headline and subheading
• An overview of the benefits and features of your product or service
• Social proof, including testimonials and a product review
• An attractive visual of your product or service
• A click-worthy CTA button

#6 Simplify Your Forms 

We’ve all been there—you go to fill out a form on a website and give up halfway because it was just too long. 

If a form asks for too much information, many people won’t complete it. They’ll perceive the form as being too invasive or tedious. 

As a result, removing unnecessary form fields is an effective way to increase your form fill conversion rate. 

#7 Gain Insights From Heat Mapping

If you’re not sure what’s essential and non-essential on your web pages, heat mapping can help you find out. 

Heat mapping shows you exactly where your website visitors click when they explore your web page. In turn, it helps you understand what content they find most engaging. Many heat mapping software also allow you to watch screen recordings of your website visitors’ sessions, enabling you to see:

• How far down the page they scroll
• Where they stop to read more
• How long they look at each section
• How much of a form they fill out

By analyzing this behavior, you can develop a much better understanding of your website’s user experience. Armed with this insight, you can make data-driven adjustments to encourage conversions, whether that’s placing your CTA higher up on the page or simplifying your forms. 

#8 Conduct Customer Surveys

Heat mapping shows what website visitors do on your website, but it doesn’t explain the “why” behind their behavior. 

You can uncover the motivations behind your visitors’ behavior by asking them. Simply administer a short survey with the following types of questions:

• Why did they visit your website?
• Did they find what they were looking for?
• Did they like your web design?
• Did they have any challenges navigating your website?
• Were they interested in your offer? 
• If they didn’t convert, what stopped them?

Based on this feedback, you can enhance your website’s user experience accordingly. 

#9 Establish Trust

Getting an internet user to convert on your website is much easier if you’ve established a foundation of trust. No one wants to share their credit card information with a shady website. Similarly, many people will be reluctant to buy something sight unseen without social proof. 

You can instantly bolster your credibility with the help of:

• Customer testimonials and reviews – Over 90% of consumers are hesitant to make a purchase without referencing reviews first.⁵ By placing testimonials and reviews directly on your website or landing page, you can offer these customers the social proof they need to feel secure in their purchase. 
• Logos – If you’ve worked with any well-known companies or brands in the past, add a banner of their logos on your home page or landing page. Many website visitors will immediately recognize these companies and view yours as more reputable as a result. Your association with established, trusted brands is a testament to your credibility. 
• Money-back guarantees – Providing a money-back guarantee is another effective way to instill trust with website visitors. If they know they can get their hard-earned money back, they’ll be much more willing to convert, as there’s considerably less risk involved.
• Updated web design – Nothing scares away a potential customer like an unattractive website with spammy links, outdated content, and poor functionality. By updating and upgrading your website, visitors will have a much easier time trusting your brand.

#10 Add a Chatbot

Even if potential customers trust your company, they may still have some specific questions about your products or services. If these questions go unanswered, they’ll be less likely to convert. 

Fortunately, a live chat like a Chatbot can answer their questions right away directly on your website. Chatbots interpret text inquiries and generate automated responses that mimic a real person.

Once your inquisitive website visitors get their questions answered, they’ll feel more comfortable proceeding with a purchase. 

#11 Use A/B Testing

If you employ any of the ten tactics we’ve discussed so far, that’s great! You should see an uptick in your conversions in no time. However, CRO is all about tracking your progress and making adjustments according to the data. 

That’s where A/B testing comes into play. 

With A/B testing, you create two versions of a web page: web page A and web page B. These web pages should differ slightly. For example, one web page may feature slightly different:

• Headline, subheader, or CTA copy
• Web design elements
• Colors
• Layouts
• Pop-ups

Once these two pages are created, show web page A to half of your website visitors and web page B to the other half. After some time has passed, see which page receives a higher conversion rate. You can then use this better-performing page as your official web page. 

CRO: Analyze, Hypothesize, and Optimize!

As you can see, CRO is sort of like a science experiment. You examine what’s preventing conversions, hypothesize potential solutions, and test them until your web pages are perfectly optimized. 

By using the 11 tactics we discussed, you should see an increase in your overall conversion rate in no time. 

For more information about the CRO process and other conversion rate optimization tools, check out our marketing blog—or reach out today to see how we can help.

Sources:

1. Business Insider. What You Need to Know About Ecommerce Conversion Rates.  https://www.businessinsider.com/understanding-which-website-conversion-rate-to-use-2010-8
2. Entrepreneur. Vrooom! Why Website Speed Matters. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/281986
3. Forbes. Mobile Commerce To Grow 68% By 2022 As More People Shop On Their Phones. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2020/02/09/mobile-commerce-to-grow-68-by-2022-as-more-people-shop-on-their-phones/
4. Copyblogger. How to Write Magnetic Headlines.  https://copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/
5. Medium. Why Are Customer Reviews So Important? https://medium.com/revain/why-are-customer-reviews-so-important-185b915d4e5d

The post How to Improve Conversion Rate appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

But including a hasty “Buy now!” is not always the most effective approach toward meeting your marketing objectives.

Being mindful of your target market’s needs, wants, and concerns can help to bring more nuance to an otherwise bland call-to-action. 

In this blog, we’ll go over everything you need to know about taking your calls-to-action to the next level. 

Here’s an overview of what’s to come:

• How to Write a Call-to-Action: Define and Align
• Calls-to-Action that Convert: What to Include 
• How to Evaluate the Efficacy of Your CTA button

How to Write a Call-to-Action: Define and Align

The very first step in writing a high-quality call-to-action is defining your marketing campaign objectives. 

Are you trying to increase ticket sales for an event? Would you like to encourage satisfied clients to leave a positive rating on your Etsy shop? Perhaps you’re simply hoping to boost the number of profile visits to your company’s social media page. 

If you’re not sure where your campaign vehicle is headed, it’s challenging to draw a precise map that will get it there. First, set your direction. Then, build a compelling CTA in a way that supports it. 

Consider framing your campaign objectives around:

• Awareness – Getting more eyeballs on your brand and building familiarity. A call for awareness could ask your audience to follow your brand on social media, subscribe to your mailing list, or view your new line of products.
• Consideration – Fostering deeper engagement and creating trust. A call for consideration could invite a potential customer to comment, fill out a survey, or schedule a call.
• Conversion – Increasing your revenue with sales. A call for a CRO service could inspire lead generation to take advantage of a promotion or finish checking out.

Once you’ve defined your goals, proceed by aligning your call-to-action with them.  

Calls-to-Action that Convert: What to Include 

After you’ve properly outlined your campaign goals, the process of designing the perfect call-to-action begins. 

Here’s a brief look at what to include:

• Active language
• Subtle urgency
• Emphasis on value
• Risk-free rewards
• Precise formatting
• Eye-catching design

Ready to break these down a bit further? Keep reading!

Active Language 

It says it right in the name: call-to-action. Not call-to-passivity or call-to-inertia. A successful CTA should always inspire some sort of movement in the digital marketing space: clicking on a subscription box, transferring a product into an online shopping cart, or signing up for a monthly newsletter.

Whatever specific action you are trying to incite should be reflected in equally dynamic language.¹ 

Imagine how confusing the game of Simon Says would be if active language were entirely absent. Simon says: pencil! nose! stapler! Blank stares and puzzled head scratches would surely follow, right? 

Instead, stick to strong verbs like these to ensure clarity and drive engagement:

• Explore
• Join
• Learn
• Start
• Create
• Discover

Subtle Urgency

Now that your leads are clear on what you’d like them to do, consider adding a time-sensitive nudge to your call-to-action to let them know when the action should be completed. Whether or not the clock is actually ticking on your intended conversion, your target audience may need to feel like it is in order to act.

Using words like ‘now,’ ‘soon,’ or ‘expires’ can decrease bounce rates and incentivize users to act as soon as possible. 

Remember: There is a fine line between a nudge and a push. You don’t want to set off anyone’s manipulation radars, so be mindful of the words you choose. 

Here are a few suggestions to help you strike the right balance:

• Time – 3-day sale, now, today only, offer expires in 24 hours
• Scarcity – save your seat, one day only, while supplies last
• Speed – instant, act fast, don’t hesitate

Emphasis on Value

What? Check. When? Check. 

Now it’s time for the why. 

Aside from improving the conversion rate, why should your target audience accept your invitation to act? In other words, what’s in it for them?

Including the value propositions of your product or service within the call-to-action makes it clear to the consumer how, exactly, you plan to address their pain points, answer their questions, or satisfy their wants. 

Take a look at this CTA example from prAna:  

Not sure which size is right? Find your True Fit in just 60 seconds.  

Why is this an effective CTA?

• It addresses consumer concerns (purchasing shoes online without trying them on)
• It proposes an immediate, effective solution
• It includes a specific time frame within which the consumer’s problem will be solved 

Consider this next CTA example from Elementor:

Join 5,000,000+ Professionals Who Build Better Sites With Elementor

Why is it effective?

• It clearly states its value: building better websites
• It highlights trust by offering a specific number of current users 

Start by determining what the top value propositions are for your product or service and build an irresistible call-to-action from there. 

Risk-Free Rewards 

Another element of crafting the perfect call-to-action is using language that puts your audience at ease. This is particularly important for new leads who may be unfamiliar with your brand. 

What if they aren’t satisfied with their purchase? How will they know if your service is right for them? 

Using a clear CTA that builds trust and lowers the buyer’s risk is more likely to result in a conversion. Be sure to include language that addresses consumer concerns and eliminates uncertainty. 

Here are a few call to action examples from brands that have mastered this technique: 

• Millions of songs and podcasts. No credit card needed. Get Spotify free. (Spotify)
• $14.99/month. Cancel anytime. Sign up now. (HBOMAX)
• $5/month. Try us risk-free for thirty days. (Thrive Market) 

Precise Formatting

So far, we’ve talked in depth about what should be included in a conversion-boosting call-to-action: 

• Action-packed words
• Language that encourages a timely response
• Top product takeaways that will garner your audience’s interest 

That’s a pretty tall order for something that also needs to be kept short and sweet. More often than not, your window for capturing the user’s attention is quite small. Packing a strong CTA with all the necessary information while also keeping it brief is often what makes writing it so challenging. 

If possible, keep your call-to-action under ten words in length. Eliminate the extraneous to hold your audience’s attention, and to ensure that your primary objective is not lost underneath a mountain of clutter. 

Be mindful of specific character limits for CTAs in the following formats:

• Email subject lines – 90 characters maximum 

• Instagram captions – 125 characters before the “read more” link
• Twitter ads – 280 characters maximum

You’ll need even shorter captions to optimize for mobile devices. If you tend to see more conversions on mobile, keep email subjects under 30 characters long.

Eye-Catching Design

After spending valuable time stringing together the perfect combination of words for your CTA text, how tragic would it be if it went completely unnoticed? 

Precise wordsmithing is not the only way to craft compelling calls-to-action. Marrying the language with the design can also go a long way in making sure your CTA is ultra click-worthy. 

If your call-to-action will take the form of an action button, consider the Von Restorff effect which suggests that oddball items within a group are likely to be the most memorable.²

So, if you’re stuck on how to customize your CTA button, choose a color that contrasts with its surroundings.³ 

Don’t forget about the font! Save the curly, hard-to-read serif fonts for your signature—not the CTA. 

How to Evaluate the Efficacy of Your CTA 

You’ve sculpted a near-perfect call-to-action and paired it with a design that can’t be missed…or so you think. 

Is your CTA being seen, clicked, or completely passed over? 

To know, you’ll need to set up a system of key performance indicators (KPIs) and keep track of the ones that are most relevant to your marketing campaign.

Whether you’re monitoring website traffic, profile visits, or number of sales, make sure your CTA is doing its job. 

Here are a few conversion rate optimization tools you can use to measure a successful CTA rate:

• Google Analytics
• Instagram Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• HubSpot 

If you’re finding that your CTA is not delivering the results you had hoped for your marketing strategy, it might be time to take it back to the drawing board. 

A Call-to-Ambition with Power Digital Marketing 

A well-designed call-to-action can often be the deciding factor between a successful campaign and one that misses the mark. Investing time into finding the right language, defining the value propositions of your product or service, and enhancing your CTA with a complementary design, are sure to provide your brand with a high return. 

Calls-to-action aren’t the only essential pieces in the content marketing puzzle. Supporting them with the proper marketing strategy, refining your target market, and re-evaluating your brand objectives are just a few more steps that will help propel you forward. 

We at Power Digital Marketing present you with a call-to-ambition: Get a proposal and step into your full marketing potential today. 

Sources: 

1. Forbes. Why Your Call to Action Needs To Be Clear And Compelling. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/12/26/why-your-call-to-action-needs-to-be-clear-and-compelling/
2. Coglode. Von Restorff Effect. https://www.coglode.com/research/von-restorff-effect
3. Protocol 80. 2021 Inbound Marketing Stats on the Power of Call-to-Action Buttons. https://www.protocol80.com/blog/2019-cta-statistics

The post How to Write a Call to Action That Converts appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

In this blog post, we will cover:

• What A/B holiday testing is and why it’s so important
• Data-backed reasons why NOW is the time to start A/B testing elements on your website
• A list of things you should A/B test ahead of the holiday season
• Important dates to keep in mind this holiday season

What is A/B Testing? And Why Is it So Important? 

A/B testing, also commonly referred to as split testing, is the process of comparing two different versions of a web product  page, app, email, ad campaign, etc. And by measuring the difference in performance between the two versions, we are able to get better insight into what resonates with our customers/users.

In essence, A/B holiday testing is an experiment. Based on a statistical analysis of this experiment you are able to determine which version performs better for a given conversion goal, and in turn build your website accordingly. These data-informed decisions allow us to make UX changes grounded in results rather than “hunches,” essentially removing risky decisions and saving you time AND money.

Clearly, taking out the guesswork can be a huge boost to anyone’s business, so let’s cover some of the most important reasons why you might want to consider setting a split test for your business.

Lower Bounce Rates  

As soon as users end up on your site’s landing page, they are seeing a site that has been perfected through data-driven tests in our case a split test. Therefore, they are more likely to have a positive experience and to convert.

Reduced Cart Abandonment 

There are many reasons for cart abandonment, but tweaking when and where costs are displayed, check-out page messaging and even color scheme may help you find a winning variation that helps reduce cart abandonment and encourage more of your target audience to complete the checkout process.

Personalized Targeting 

You may also learn that one version of a page is working better for one demographic, and a second version works better for a separate demographic. This would also allow you to use personalization to show users the version that is proven to convert better for their demographic.

Increase Revenue/Leads 

The most important benefit this powerful CRO marketing tool can provide for your business is clearly increased sales. Fewer bounce rates, better customer engagement, a higher customer conversion rate, and other aforementioned benefits all lead to increased sales/lead volume for your business, which in turn has the added benefit of increasing your ROAS for your paid marketing campaigns.

Solve Internal Disputes 

Yes, this isn’t a typo. The benefits of split  testing are not just limited to your website’s KPIs. From our experience, there are times where there will be a division in opinion on the client’s internal team about how to approach the design or structure of the website. When that occurs, it sometimes feels like a lose-lose situation since siding with one side will upset the other. Additionally, you’ll never be sure if you picked the right side… well that is if you didn’t run multiple tests of A/B. Running an A/B test eliminates having to pick a side and instead puts both sides against each other head-to-head (if the control isn’t one of them) and lets the test result determine the winner. This way there are no hurt feelings, unless, of course, the control beats out both of them in the test data.

Why NOW is the Time to Start A/B Testing

Now that you know the benefits of testing, let’s discuss why it’s important to start A/B testing now (End of August & Early September).

End of November Code Freeze (Black Friday) 

The reason we are focusing on that final week of November is because Black Friday this year (for the US) takes place on November 27th, and all tests on a website will want to go on a code freeze the week of Black Friday to ensure that no unexpected glitches or poor UX hurt what is projected to be the biggest Black Friday for online retail ever. In other words, you want your website to be buttoned up prior to Black Friday. 

Note: We suggest against testing during Black Friday because we believe that the shopping user behavior of your target audience that occurs during this time is not normal and people will persist through bad UX if it means getting a good deal (people are willing to camp in front of stores and deal with shopping stampedes at brick and mortar stores – the online shopper is not much different during BF&CM). This means there is an outside variable affecting your test result, putting the integrity of the data into question. That said, we are not 100% against testing during the holiday season, but we suggest running tests that are isolated to the week of (11/22 – 12/1) Black Friday & Cyber Monday. During that time, you should also have someone live monitoring tests, ready to pull the plug on one if a test variant is performing incredibly poorly to ensure you are not hurting your site during the biggest sale of the year. If you were able to test like this during BF&CM, then you would gain valuable insight into how to optimize your site for big sale events for the future, but you should be wary of letting these results inform the optimization of your site year round.

A/B Tests Take Time 

The rule of thumb for A/B testing is that a test will take a minimum of 2 weeks to run to completion. Working under this best case scenario, that leaves you around 12 weeks to run tests, or effectively 6 rounds of tests before you hit the final week of November. That, again, is the best case scenario. Most tests will not hit statistical significance in 14 days, therefore, you’ll be running a test 3-5 weeks before you can launch the next test in the same testing track (tests that aim to improve the same goal on the site, hence, why they can’t be run simultaneously). The reason why most tests don’t reach statistical significance in this 14 day window is because there is either not enough traffic spike to the page where the test is taking place or that the test is further up the funnel (i.e. a navigation menu test) where engagement goals typically take longer to hit statistical significance. From our experience, the average site will likely get through 3-4 rounds of testing (2-4 tests per round) prior to Black Friday & Cyber Monday if they start testing at the beginning of September, which is just enough time to make some considerable optimizations to your site prior to Black Friday.

Things you Should A/B Test

Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner, you want to ensure that you test things in the correct order and also test things on your site that will have the greatest impact on your site. 

Navigation Tests

Navigation tests are very important because they can help users find products and information on your site more efficiently, plus bring greater visibility to your entire product catalog. That said, these tests are going to typically take a long time to hit statistical significance since the measurable impact will usually be small (unless the current navigation is very poor). 

These tests will usually take 4-6 weeks to hit statistical significance. Make sure you start them no later than 10/16.

PDP Tests 

The PDP is going to be one of the most important page templates to test on your site prior to the holiday season since they live further down the shopping funnel. The main goal while testing your PDPs is to increase your Add To Cart (ATC) rate, which typically will result in an increase in the website’s revenue and CVR. 

PDP tests generally will hit statistical significance in 2-4 weeks. If you have healthy traffic, you should have no problem squeezing in a PDP test at the start of November.

Cart & Checkout Tests 

These tests, with healthy holiday traffic, can reach statistical significance in 2-4 weeks. Websites that don’t get a lot of  holiday traffic reaching the cart page should likely focus higher up the funnel; otherwise, they run the risk of a test running for 6+ weeks without hitting statistical significance. So while you can see huge improvements from optimizing the cart & checkout (we just recently increased a client’s revenue by an estimated $248k a year from a simple mobile cart test), it is something you should only focus on if enough of your site’s traffic is making it to that stage of the shopping funnel.

Important E-Commerce Holiday Dates to Keep in Mind

The holidays’ are a time in which your buyers’ moods and shopping user behavior likely to change drastically from the norm. They may have a higher sense of urgency to purchase, or they may be more concerned with factors like delivery time than with savings. So it would be a good idea to look for Ecommerce holidays worth A/B testing for your business goals.

Here are some common ones we would suggest:

• Wednesday, January 1 – New Year’s Day
• Thursday, November 26 – Thanksgiving Day

• Friday, December 25 – Christmas Day

• Black Friday

• Cyber Monday

• Halloween

Wrapping Up

The holidays are a make-it or break-it time for many businesses. By following the steps above and planning ahead, we are confident you’ll land in the “make it” category. Happy testing! 

The post Why You Should Be A/B Testing Your Website Ahead of the Holidays appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

One of the most effective ways to convert visitors into paying customers and keep those customers coming back for more is by creating a seamless, efficient, and memorable shopping experience on your website. And while you can do weeks of testing to ensure the length of your checkout form is just right or that the color of your “Add to Cart” button is as clickable as possible, you will only be scratching the surface of what is possible. 

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about personalization and how brands can use this tactic to deliver unforgettable shopping experiences and increase online conversions. Let’s dive in!

What is Personalization?  

Personalization is exactly what it sounds like – it’s the process of creating customized, or personalized, experiences for visitors on a website. Instead of providing a single experience for every website visitor, personalization allows brands to present website visitors with unique content tailored to their interests, needs, and goals. 

Personalization vs. A/B Testing: What’s the Difference?

A/B testing and personalization are both massive CVR and revenue boosters, but they have different methods of accomplishing this. 

A/B testing, as you may know, shows which versions of a page, product, image, etc. are performing better or worse by evenly splitting traffic between version A and version B. This allows companies to maximize their success by putting the top converting page in front of the user. 

Personalization accomplishes it’s CVR-boosting goal slightly differently. Have you ever Googled a product you are looking for, and suddenly began to see ads for this product on Facebook or any other site you use? Well that is exactly what personalization does for you – it puts your product specifically in front of users who are looking for the same type of product, which obviously leads to some pretty serious CVR increases. The power of personalization lies in its ability to immediately show the user exactly which of your products they are most likely to buy.

Why Personalization is So Powerful

Now let’s dive a little deeper into what kind benefits and results you can expect to see when utilizing personalization.

1. Optimized landing pages put what your customers want right in front of them. Oftentimes your customers already know what they are looking for when they come to your site – personalization makes it so your site also knows what your customer is looking for as soon as they arrive. So a personalized approach avoids the need for a lengthy search.
2. Speeds up the sales cycle. Customers rarely purchase on their first visit to an e-commerce website. Personalization speeds up this process by providing a better user experience on their first visit.
3. Introduces trust to the customer-vendor relationship. Customers are no longer just looking for products. They want to find and connect with quality brands. Personalizing your site content builds this trust by showing them that we understand them and know what they are looking for.
4. Personalization is becoming the new expectation. 86% of customers said that personalization impacted their purchase decisions. In response, nearly 70% of businesses have started to prioritize personalized experiences.

What sorts of things can you personalize? 

Ok, so you’re probably thinking right about now “Personalization sounds great, but what exactly can I personalize on my own site?”. The answer: practically everything! Don’t worry, we’re not going to leave you hanging with such a vague answer. Here are some popular use case examples of how you can use personalization on your own website. 

Personalizing your website content based on audience segmentation & campaign source

One of the big pitfalls for a growing business is when they try to extend their brand’s reach to a new audience. To do this, you not only need to increase your acquisition strategy, but typically you also need to adjust your site’s content to appeal to this new audience. This becomes an issue when the attempt to appeal to a new audience alienates your existing core audience. The German giant, Chal-tec, faced this exact problem when they evolved from a hyper focused single online store (Electronic Star) that specialized solely in DJ equipment into a multi-category online mall to compete with the likes of Amazon. While the expansion did result in an increase in online revenue and conversions, it left their core audience that frequented their site when they were purely a DJ equipment store confused about where to find all things Audio/Visual.

Chal-tec solved this by targeting a DJ enthusiast audience segment and creating a personalized experience that hid every element of the original site and replaced it with content that was geared towards DJ audio and video equipment. 

This can be easily replicated on your site by creating audience segments based on specific paid campaigns (using UTMs) you’re running or by leveraging the profile information (age, gender, region, etc.) associated with the user visiting your site.  

Product Recommendations

It’s fairly intuitive that product recommendations are important. According to Invesp, “56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a website that recommends products”(Forbes). In today’s current e-commerce climate, however, having product recommendations alone is not enough. Findings have shown that “47% of consumers check Amazon if the brand they’re shopping with doesn’t provide product suggestions that are relevant – SmarterHQ” (Forbes). So your website not only needs to have product recommendations, but the recommendations also need to be relevant to the user. Most recommendation apps and widgets will allow you to show product recommendations based on what is most popular, related products to the currently viewed PDP, or what the user has recently viewed. While this will work fine for a portion of your site’s visitors, for the rest the recommendations will be like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

To avoid having an ineffective recommendation strategy for a large portion of your site’s visitors, tools like Dynamic Yield allow websites to recommend products using more personalized strategies like user affinity, collaborative filtering, and bought with last/recent purchase (ideal for increasing LTV of returning customers).

An effective example of this in action comes from Dynamic Yield’s case study of Sephora. According to the report:

“To help users seamlessly find the most relevant products, Sephora focused on optimizing PDPs across eight markets in Asia. In each country, users were shown recommendations based on three distinct strategies: similar items, bought together and automatic.

Since the most successful recommendation approach varied by market and KPI, Dynamic Yield’s adaptive recommendations crunched the data and deployed the highest performing strategy in each market, based on users adding items to cart and completing a purchase.

Dynamic Yield’s recommendation engine powered a CTR of more than 4%, ultimately returning direct revenue in excess of $6.50 for every $1 spent with Dynamic Yield. As a result of the massive revenue uplift and development time saved, Sephora now serves recommendations powered by Dynamic Yield to 100% of website traffic”. (Source)

Navigation Menu Personalization

The makeup brand, e.l.f., ran into a problem a lot of websites with extensive product catalogs face, lack of room in their navigation menu. How e.l.f. got around this was by using the browsing history of the user to personalize the navigation menu. New users would be shown what they determined the best high-level category menu, but returning users would be shown the subcategories of the main category they previously visited. This resulted in a 17.6% increase in CTR and exposed users to products deeper in their catalog. 

Leveraging first party data to create new detailed experiences.

The great part about tools such as Dynamic Yield is that it allows businesses to leverage their historical first party data. So if your business has detailed audience segmentation already stored in another analytics platform, DY can import those segments so your team can immediately start creating custom experiences for them (Source).

One of the ways e.l.f. took advantage of this feature was by importing their existing audience segments from customer-analytics software, Custora.

Wrapping Up

And there you have it – a brand new marketing tactic that takes advantage of the traffic you are already getting to your site to turn more website visitors into paying customers, and more first time customers into repeat buyers. Never underestimate the power of a personal touch! 

The post Personalization: The CRO Tactic You Didn’t Know You Needed (Or Could Even Do!) appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Because everyone is highly knowledgeable in their respective fields, I find myself constantly learning new things about digital marketing day in and day out, whether through meetings, articles, or even conversations around the water cooler. This not only helps me develop into a better UI/UX designer, but also as a cross-channel digital marketer in my own right, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree.

As much as my digital marketing acumen has expanded during my time here at PDM, if I’m being completely honest, I’d chalk up PPC as being one of the few channels I’ve had the least amount of experience and understanding of. When you think about all of the fundamental elements of digital marketing, PPC and web development would probably be on the opposite sides of the spectrum. At Power Digital, PPC (or pay-per-click advertising), which is led by our Paid Media department, entails marketers running ad campaigns to get users to visit a particular landing page on their website.

This essentially means they are paying for site visits to strategically gain a return on their investment, or ROI. On the other hand, web development, in the realm of digital marketing, offers more of a supporting role for the other digital marketing channels. Implementation of tracking codes, website optimizations, creation of landing pages, and even full website builds and redesigns are just a few of the ways our web development department helps support the rest of the team for success. But when looking at the two channels, how do they interact with each other?

Discovery & Overview

Finding an Opportunity

“How do they interact with each other?” This was the underlying question that got the ball rolling on the 3-month long Power Pairs Mentorship Program, which I sought to answer with the guidance of my program mentor and PPC extraordinaire, Hans Tveten. Early on in the program we were able to identify that the bridge that connected both the PPC and web development departments was CRO (conversion rate optimization), a rather niche category within the web development department.

Although CRO falls within web dev duties, if I’m being completely honest once more, it’s an aspect of my department that I wasn’t well-versed in. Since PPC was a digital marketing channel I’ve had yet to dive into, and CRO was an unfamiliar aspect of the department I’m in, we thought it’d be best to merge the two to set up the groundwork for what would be our main objective for the Mentorship Program.

Related: CRO Meaning in Digital Marketing

Establishing Goals

As Hans and I huddled up, we thought it’d be best to build a curriculum and a set of learning objectives around the idea of bridging the gap between PPC insights and CRO strategy. The goals we established for myself consist of:

1. Better understanding of the CRO process from A-Z
2. Fundamental understanding of Google Ads
3. Understanding quality score for testing

Related: 3 Reasons Why Investing in CRO Can Improve Your PPC Performance

Learning & Growth

The CRO Process A-Z

Before diving into our crash course in Google Ads Fundamentals, Hans and I reached out for some outside help to learn more about CRO. And there was no better person to reach out to than PDM’s Director of Web Development and CRO guru, John Saunders. John was able to run us through the essentials of CRO to give us a strong foundational understanding of the subject, as well as the current process we have in place.

CRO Tools:

Source: Lucky Orange, VWO

There are two main tools that we use for CRO here at PDM: Lucky Orange and VWO. Lucky Orange is what we use primarily for analytics and comes with an array of valuable tools within the platform, such as heatmaps, scroll maps, and visitor recordings (which we’ll get into later). VWO is a tool we use as a result of the analytical data we find in Lucky Orange — it’s what we use to implement A/B tests based on our findings in Lucky Orange, giving us the flexibility to manipulate different variations of a landing page or website if we need to.

Applicable Data:

Although there is a wide array of metrics we can utilize when optimizing for conversions, the main points of focus we like to dive into when analyzing CRO include the following:

• Heatmaps: Lucky Orange’s Dynamic Heatmap functionality allows us to get a better understanding of how users are interacting with our landing pages and websites in regards to clicks. It’s able to show us precise areas of where users are clicking, providing us with a pattern or trend to go off. People tend to click above the fold? Let’s capitalize on that by promoting a popular product in that area on the webpage. Not a lot of users are clicking on a “Contact Us” button buried near the bottom of the page? Let’s try moving that to the top to increase visibility, and altogether more clicks.

Source: Lucky Orange

• Scrollmaps: These help us understand where users generally tend to drop off on a landing page. It provides us with a visual on the hot and cold areas of a page in relation to what users are seeing as they scroll, and what they’re not seeing because of where they drop off. In analyzing this, we’re able to determine what to try and prioritize on any given landing page, such as page length or ensuring users are seeing what you want them to see in order to garner conversions. If we see that users are trending towards dropping off just before a product slider in the lower half of a page, one A/B test you can implement right off that bat would be to move that product slider up towards the “hotter” area of the page to increase its visibility.

Source: Carmelon

• Visitor Recordings: Lucky Orange’s video recording feature is another valuable tool we gravitate towards when analyzing user behavior on our landing pages and sites. The ability to actually see how users are interacting with a site, rather than making educated guests with heatmaps and scrollmaps, is extremely valuable. If your site performs better on desktop mode as opposed to mobile, using a visitor recording of a mobile user would be an ideal method to diagnose reasons as to why mobile isn’t converting as well.

Google Ads Crash Course

After getting some baseline knowledge about the ins and outs of CRO, Hans ran me through a crash course on the fundamentals of Google Ads. What Google Ads essentially does is connect customers to businesses through varying ad placements within their search and display networks. However, as digital marketers, what we want to focus on is how these ads get served to customers in the first place. Here are some elements of Google Ads that we focused on to get a good foundational understanding, while still maintaining relevance to CRO:

Google Ads Account Structure:

Each Google Ad account is organized by a hierarchical framework called the Account Structure. The Google Ads Account Structure is demonstrated by the diagram below, with the “AdWords Account” being the umbrella that holds all of the underlying categorizations of Google Ads:

Source: WordStream

• Campaigns: A set of ad groups that share commonalities, such as budget, location, and targetings.
• Ad Groups: A compilation of one or more ads that target a shared set of keywords, and can be organized via a common theme.
• Keywords: Words or phrases that are entered by users into search queries.

Campaign Types:

Google Ads has a few different campaign types that determine where customers will be able to see your client’s ads. These campaign types include the following:

• Search Network: Ads that appear in Google’s search results
• Display Network: Ads that appear throughout Google’s Display Network by matching your client’s ads to relevant websites or apps.
• Search and Display Opt-in: Ads that appear in both Google’s search results, with an option to display on relevant websites or apps via GDN.
• Shopping: Ads that appear in Google Shopping.

Although each type is beneficial in attracting site visits, high-potential customers, and building brand awareness, Search Network is the campaign type that consistently provides the best results.

Campaign Settings and Targeting:

Knowing that a Search Network campaign is the best ad campaign type that provides the best results, we now need to know how we can serve these ads to the right customers and get the best-suited ads served in front of the best-suited pair of eyes. That’s where targeting comes into play. It’s an advertiser’s goal to attract the most qualified customers or leads as possible through your ads, and the way to do that is by customizing your campaign’s targeting through a variety of ways:

• Audience Targeting: Allows marketers to precisely target audiences based on certain categories pertaining to their demographic or interests. Some notable examples of audience targeting include demographic, remarketing, or in-market.
  • Demographic Targeting: Pinpointing ads to be served to users based on their location, age, gender, or device type.
  • Remarketing: Targeting users who’ve previously visited your site.
  • In-market Targeting: Targeting users who have been searching for products and services similar to the ones you’re running ads for.

Keyword Match Type:

Understanding keyword match types is vital to the success of a campaign, as they give advertisers the control and flexibility to serve ads based on how relevant a search term is to a campaign’s targeted keyword. For every keyword added to a campaign, the keyword can be assigned any of the following match types:

• Broad: These give you the widest reach, but has the potential to provide you with the least relevant keyword match.
• Broad Match Modifier: These are signified by adding a ‘+’ in front of all the words in your keyword. This tells Google to match a search term that has any, or a close variant of, one of the words in your keyword with a ‘+’ in front of it.
• Phrase: This match type is signified with quotation marks around the keyword, and matches up with search terms that have the keyword included.
• Exact: These match up to precise keywords being searched, and provide you with the least amount of reach, but the most relevance.

We use Broad Match Modifier and Exact Match types the most as these tend to work the best in attracting the most qualified and relevant customers and leads.

Source: Cardinal Path

Related: Breaking Down the Different Google Ads Match Types

Remarketing:

Remarketing is a method digital marketers use to connect (or re-connect) with previous website visitors who’ve interacted with your site or app. This provides you with the opportunity to serve ads to those users who are browsing other websites or apps, keeping your brand top-of-mind for the customer even though they’re somewhere else on the internet. There are a number of key benefits to remarketing with Google Ads, including:

• Well-timed ads being served: You’re able to show ads to those users who’ve recently interacted with your website or app.
• Focused advertising: You can create remarketing lists that advertise for specific instances, such as abandoned cart shoppers being reminded of what they’ve left in their cart.
• Large-scale reach: You’re able to remarket across all devices.
• Easy ad creation: Your ads can consist of text, image, and video for free by using Ad gallery.
• Campaign stats: You’re able to pull stats and reports of how your campaigns are performing.

Understanding Quality Score for Testing

One key aspect of PPC that has a direct correlation with web development and what we do in the realm of CRO is Quality Score. Quality Score is a proprietary metric Google utilizes to determine the overall quality of your ads, as well as the landing page users will be directed to if your ad is clicked on. It’s based on a 1-10 scale (10 being the highest), with Google deeming three main factors that affect an ad’s quality score. These include:

• Expected click-through rate: A metric that determines how likely an ad will get clicked on when it’s shown for a particular keyword. There’s a variety of factors Google takes into consideration when calculating this, such as past keyword performance based on your ad’s placement.
• Ad relevance: A measurement of how relevant a keyword is to an ad. Google takes not only your ad’s copy into consideration, but also the copy on the correlating landing page.
• Landing page experience: This refers to the overall user experience when someone lands on the intended page directed by your ad. A few factors go into determining this, such as relevance of the page copy to the ad copy, website load time, and page or website organization.

With these three factors in mind, if your Quality Score ranks fairly high, then Google deems your ad to be useful for users searching for particular keywords. It’s also important to note that Quality Scores are based on performance over time. So, for fresh ads, typically there’s no Quality Score designated towards them since Google needs some time to aggregate all of the data.

The reason why Quality Score is a pivotal metric, for both Google Ads and CRO purposes, is because a good Quality Score can result in the following:

• Higher click-through rates
• Lower costs-per-conversion
• Improves the return on your investment

Source: WordStream

Quality Score is also a key metric for CRO purposes. Since it’s a metric that gauges the usefulness of a website and landing page, if a Quality Score shows up as being relatively low for a particular campaign, then the PPC and CRO departments can collaborate on how to best optimize the ad copy and landing page experience for optimal results.

Refinement & Opportunities

Incorporation of New Methods

By no means do we think our current CRO process is broken. In fact, we think it works very well for us and our clients. But nothing is perfect, which is why we think it would be extremely useful to integrate PPC analytics and data into our workflow whenever applicable. When it comes to conversion rate optimization, although we test solutions based on relevant data and diagrams we pull from Lucky Orange, these changes are based on intuition — changing the placement of a call-to-action button from the bottom to the top of a page doesn’t necessarily guarantee increased visibility and conversion for that particular element. But with the addition of a valuable metric like Quality Score comes into play for example, the potential for page visits and conversion goes up, because it’s a metric that Google initiates as being highly relevant for users.

With the addition of the Quality Score metric into our CRO process, we went ahead and included a tracking column for it in our CRO deliverable document we use in-house. This allows us to track conversion changes over time as we continue to test and optimize.

Reflection on the Power Pairs Mentorship Program

The 2018 Power Pairs Mentorship Program provided me with the opportunity to broaden my arsenal as a digital marketer in my own right. After Hans ran me through the curriculum he put together on Google Ads, I had the urge to keep learning and dive a bit deeper into the world of Google Ads. Without pressuring me to do it, he suggested that I could take the Google Ads Fundamental Exam… and so, I did.

I passed with an 89% and am now Google Ads Fundamentals Certified!

Sure, I probably won’t be going into Google Ads on a daily basis or run ad campaigns anytime soon. But to have the opportunity to not only learn and understand the basics of Google Ads under a seasoned veteran like Hans, and to also gain some valuable intangible skills from him that I can apply to my own professional skill set is invaluable. Although I feel like I’m far from the account manager he is, I feel as if his business acumen, attention to detail, and overall professionalism has definitely rubbed off on me throughout our time together. With added skill set I’ve gained, I’m now able to speak to the basics of Google Ads and integrate what I know now with what we do in regards to CRO.

The post Bridging the Gap Through CRO appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

When it comes to online marketing campaigns focused around performance aka generating a lead for your sales team, an ecommerce sale, or acquiring a new customer, there are many components that go into generating a positive ROI and provide an opportunity for mass scaling and volume of customer acquisition.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed as a marketer, a CEO, or businessperson on what parts of your campaign to optimize, what components are working already, and what components are not.

Often times marketers and business owners are really focused on bringing more traffic, higher quality traffic, getting that traffic at a lower cost, marketing to your current customers, and getting those current customers to repeat purchase.

We agree that all of these things should be in focus but the success of all of these things comes down to one core metric that is often times overlooked and not given nearly enough energy when it comes to improving… conversion rate.

So, what do we mean by this? Conversion rate is the percentage of individuals who convert to your goal. To give you more context, we’ll give you a few examples for your business.

• For an Ecommerce Business: the conversion rate represents the percentage of people who make a purchase on your site. Typically for ecommerce, a 2% or higher conversion rate is really good. That means for every 100 visitors, 2 people are making a purchase.
• For a Lead Gen Business: conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that book or becomes a lead for your sales team. Typically for lead gen, 5% or more would be a good conversion rate as a baseline.
• For a Subscription or SaS Business: conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that create an account or become a member. For SaS, the conversion rate benchmark can vary a little, but typically 5-15% is a good conversion rate with this type of business.

Now that we’ve defined what conversion rate is and what industry benchmarks are in each type of business, let’s dive into why this metric is so critical to your business and oftentimes overlooked.

Conversion rate is so critical because when you have thousands or more visitors coming to your site, minor improvements in conversion rate will net huge returns, whereas slight improvements to volume of users or slight decreases in the cost of getting those users to your site will have an impact, but not the same vast impact as improving your conversion rate.  

For some reason, way too many business people ignore conversion rate or look at it too robotically. We’re going to give you five actionable steps you can take today to improve your conversion rate and increase profits.

Tip #1: Look at Analytics

Go into your analytics account and filter by conversion pages (Behavior Reports → Site Content → Landing Pages) that are getting the most traffic and pick your 2-3 pages that have the most traffic and are below the average conversion rates we shared above. Simply identifying the biggest opportunity pages is step one here and making them a focus for your team will net you better results and is first key to success.

Tip #2: Look at These Pages Like a Human

The next step is to evaluate these pages both on desktop and mobile and judge them from your own perspective. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is the offer or CTA being positioned on this page compelling?
• Is the offer clear and concise; can you wrap your head around it and would you convert?
• Is the action the customer is supposed to make clear or is it confusing to know what to do next?
• How many fields or pages does a user have to visit to complete their goal and are there ways to make this process faster/easier for them?
• Does the page load fast enough when you navigate? If you had a poor internet connection, would you hit back or navigate through the page? Check out our resources on site speed optimization.
• How is the design? Is the page impressive and are there visuals that help tell the story and compel the visitor to convert?
• Does the page have any social proof or third party validation? This can be customer reviews, user-generated content, influencer photos, association logos etc.
• What is the experience above the fold? Are you wasting space above the fold or are you hitting people with messaging above the fold, meaning you see it without having to scroll down. This shows what we mean by “above the fold” for the brand Lululemon.

Once you make a list of these seemingly obvious tweaks you can make, take this list and prioritize it for potential fixes. Based on how mature your business and your marketing is, we would recommend your next step be one of these two things.

A Business That has Done Limited Testing and Marketing vs. Business Far Along in Marketing

Limited Testing and Marketing: For a new business that has done little to implement changes to its website or conversion rate, you should immediately implement some of the above common sense improvements, moving quickly to improve your conversion rate. We recommend moving quickly because the downside is low, you may already have a bad conversion rate, the user experience is not ideal, so there’s no need to waste time or create hurdles for yourself. The key is to implement quickly, measure performance, and iterate further on the changes.

Business Far Along in Marketing: If your business is mature and you have done marketing and potentially updated some things for conversion rate, take these hypotheses above and leverage a tool like VWO or Optimizely and begin to aggregate data on how visitors are interacting with the page. Once you aggregate significant data (for an established business this could be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors) review the data trends against your hypothesis. Select the number one test that the data and your hypothesis suggests to be the most impactful and begin to A/B test your current variation versus this improvement until you have substantial data and a clear winner. When you have a clear winner implement that change and move onto your next test.

No matter what phase of your business and marketing you’re in, you can benefit from improving these pages, but one of the big mistakes we see brands make is analysis paralysis. Be careful how many hurdles you put in front of yourself because every day you go without improving your conversion rate is many dollars lost. The key is to take action quickly and have a person accountable for this and work at consistently.

Tip #3: Analyze Your Traffic Sources and Look at The Intent of The Visitor

Now that you have begun to improve and test your pages and how to improve them, the next step is to get the right prospect to the page and make sure you’re driving quality traffic while also understanding where they are in the buyer process and what their intent is to assure your conversion point and messaging really aligns with them.

To give you an example from offline, let’s look at me as an agency owner networking at a conference with two different approaches.

Approach A) I meet you at a conference and immediately ask you for $20k for Power Digital to run a marketing campaign without you knowing much about me or our services. You would probably walk away because you don’t know me or trust me and are not ready to be sold to.

Approach B) Now pretend I met you at a conference and we started a conversation, talked marketing, and shared some experiences relevant to each other.

Which of these two approaches would petition me in a better place to at some point earn your business?

The answer is clearly approach B! Way too often you will find that your traffic wants to be spoken to like approach B and you’re hitting it with approach A. Make sure your conversion points and offers align with where the prospect is in the buying cycle and how you can cater to them.

Tip #4: Hire Someone to Do This for You…

Obviously it’s funny coming from us that we think you should hire someone to optimize your conversion rate, but we do this all the time, and moreover, it’s really difficult when running a business or have lots of marketing initiatives to put the focus on conversion rate and it requires a few different types of people: 1) a data person 2) a great copywriter and 3) a designer. If you have the team, follow the process above and win big. If you don’t, consider hiring someone specifically to help you improve conversion rate. It’s very, very measurable, the goal is very clear, and it can be done very efficiently. Sometimes as business owners and marketers we get so close to our own business that it helps to get some outside perspective.

Conclusion

Whether you run an Ecommerce, Lead Gen, or Subscription based business, conversion rate is one of the most important components of your bottom line. Small adjustments in conversion rates results in huge gains for your business. Therefore, improving conversion rate is imperative to increase your profits. However, business owners often go about this the wrong way. Follow the actionable steps listed above to make sure that your business is performing at its absolute peak ability.

The post How to Improve Your Conversion Rate appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Where to Start?

Not everything is a game of throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. It’s important to start any CRO testing plan with analytics. You need to know your customers and how they behave before you can begin to test them. You can do this by installing a software like VWO, or even just Google Analytics to track trends in behavior to begin to establish a foundation for what is wrong, and what must be tested or changed.

Related: What Does CRO Mean and Stand For?

Once you’ve gathered some ideas around how users interact with your site, it’s time to establish your hypothesis for experimenting. This means gathering viable ideas you believe will help users reach the end destination you have set out for them in the easiest way possible. A hypothesis should be based on an observation and should reflect the trends gathered in your planning phase. Once you have gathered the hypotheses you want, it’s time to test.

Related: A Guide to Ecommerce CRO

Now that we have that covered, let’s begin to look at the best strategies we’ve seen work this year.

Social Proof

What speaks more to your products or your business than the customers themselves? NOTHING. Social proof, or testimonials, have been found to be the number one item users look for when shopping or researching a service. IF there is no social proof, there is no purchase.

Our movement in 2018 has been to focus on moving social proof sections to the forefront. This content should be front and center as an accessory to your CTA, add to cart button, or checkout process. We like to boil pages down to the bare bone necessities. That means the desired goal, brief information, and social proof. That tactic has shown time and time again to work, and we highly recommend shifting your focus on gathering and implementing your crowds as soldiers in your war for a higher conversion rate.

Make Your Product or Service a “Must Have”

Obviously, you’re already trying to make your business an essential part of people’s lives. You strive to reflect your chops as something everyone wants and everyone can have. But what if I told you that was all wrong?

The key to making your product feel exclusive is to make it seem like it’s rare, or limited, or only for those who qualify. Human nature proves time and time again that people want what they can’t have… Or at least what they can’t have.

How do you do this? It’s time to test different messaging, implying that your product is one of a kind, or is only available at limited quantities. Other tactics include using timers (see below, this means a time to buy or you’re out!), or offer an email capture to “see if you’re qualified”, or even just telling users they’re flat out, missing out.

Move it On Up

This one is going to sound incredibly simple. Move your CTAs up. That simple. Let me explain.

User attention spans are dropping. Site speed is beginning to play a very large part in how users deem a website experience worthy, so the ability to get goals across early and in a simple way is essential in 2018.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to CRO

Let me give you an example: For the longest time, web designers and developers have made pages where information leads the charge for a scroll size 4000px and higher. At the end of the journey, they say “Okay, now you know, so BUY.” This works for big brands and trusted businesses with returning customers. But if you’re a shotgun business with a new idea, it’s important to use an elevator pitch of sorts that drives users to convert within the fold of the page (the fold is the section of the page you see when you load the URL).

Take your CTA, or your valuable content, and move it towards the top of the page however possible, in a logical manner. Don’t sacrifice your messaging or vital info, but implement the conversion point in a place where a user an easily reach it before bouncing.

Wrapping Up

The above strategies are some we have seen work again and again this year. It’s important to expand on these ideas with your brand and product. Take them with a broad view and refine using the analytical data we spoke of in the beginning of this article. And remember:

If your test fails, test again.

The post The Top CRO Strategies to Focus on in 2018 appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

An effective homepage is one that makes your company stand out from your competitors, while also presenting the most important details about the product(s) and/or services you provide to your customers. If the ultimate goal is to get people on the web to spend their time, money, and/or effort with whatever it is your company has to provide, then your homepage serves as the best place to communicate why they should.

In order to have your homepage truly speak to users and effectively communicate the benefits you can provide to them, ensure that your homepage design includes the following:

Addresses What Your Company Is And Does

Seems like a no-brainer, right? If you’re a company with a ton of brand awareness (the Apples and Nikes of the world), then there’s probably no need to do this. But startups and small to medium sized companies still need to answer questions like “Who are you?” and “What do you do?” Make it easy for your users and potential customers, especially new ones, by answering these questions on your homepage.

Ideally, you’d want users to think, “Oh, ____ is a _____ company and they do _____… Cool!” in a matter of seconds. You don’t want any friction throughout the time a user arrives to your site and starts to explore, or else they’ll bounce right out. Try and utilize bold, straightforward headlines and relevant imagery and/or videos to make it as clear as day for your users.

Places The Most Important Information Above The Fold

Think of this aspect as being directly related to the previous one. The area above the fold, which is everything that is shown immediately after a webpage loads within your browser window, is very valuable real estate for your website. If the homepage itself is the “first impression,” then what you decide to place above the fold will be the difference maker.

Think of it like if you were to wear a sweatshirt and jeans versus a suit and tie for a job interview at law firm. That may not be the best example to make, but my point is that people’s attention can be lost quickly. And like I mentioned earlier, if there’s any friction between the time they click on a link and when they get to your site, it’s more likely that they’ll bounce right off your site.

Demonstrates Why Users Should Do Business With You

Okay, so you’ve got them to land on your homepage. Nice!  Now they’ve gotten an understanding of who you are and what you do, and were drawn in to the content above the fold. Awesome! But, how will you get them to stay? How will you get them to fully engage with your homepage and explore through the rest of your website? To do that, provide them with the value your company provides. You can do that in a variety of ways.

One way is through a value proposition, which lets users know why they should do business with your company over your competitors. Try not to confuse a value prop with a slogan or catchphrase. A great value proposition is one that expresses the benefits of your company through a compelling headline + sub-headline or small paragraph + some type of visual. People are highly visual, so we tend to gravitate towards intriguing visuals over text.

Because of this, a photo or video that complements a good head and sub goes a long way. Another great way to demonstrate value is through trust indicators. These consist of customer testimonials, case studies, social media posts, or trust seals. These are excellent ways of proving to your potential customers that your product/service is tried and true.

Ensure That The User Experience Is Up To Par, If Not Better Than Your Competitors

You may draw your users in with excellent visuals, great copy, and an aesthetically-pleasing interface. But if your users can’t navigate through the homepage, then they probably won’t engage with the rest of your site. User experience is kind of like the cloud the hovers over your entire homepage, it covers every piece of your homepage from the content to the functionality. Again, the goal is try and eliminate as much friction for your users as possible.

The Design Is Optimized For Multiple Devices

This is really a no-brainer. The web is being viewed more and more on mobile devices over traditional desktop computers and laptops as time progresses, so ensuring that your homepage is as effective on mobile as it is on desktop is vital. If your homepage is fairly simple and straightforward and doesn’t have too much going on functionality-wise, you should definitely consider making your mobile homepage AMP-compliant. Integrating AMP to your homepage will drastically improve the speed of your homepage, altogether making the user experience on mobile devices that much more enjoyable and efficient for your potential customers.

A Few Examples Of Effective Homepages

Grammarly

Right off the bat, Grammarly’s homepage immediately demonstrates the benefits their company provides by A) providing a straightforward headline and subheadline that brings the user in, and B) includes a complementary visual (in this case it’s the charismatic typing gif) that clearly demonstrates how it their product functions.

It gets that much better as you scroll down. Grammarly does an excellent job of doing the most with less – keeping their homepage and user experience simple and straightforward so that the content is digestible and users know where to go and what to click on.

Sun Basket

The use of “organic” and “sustainable” seals and certifications, along with notable publications they’ve been featured in, are nice touches in pushing the idea that they only provide the best ingredients for their customers.

Invision

Wrapping Up

Remember to keep in mind that your homepage is what will make a lasting impression on your users, especially new ones. Ensure that the user experience is always top-of-mind when it’s being designed and built out, but still try to find ways to make your product or service stand out from the crowd.

The post Components of an Effective Homepage appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

So how does CRO help the performance of your PPC campaigns? We all know that the first step to capture users online is to have enticing ad copy that will catch their attention and get them to click on the ad. By following ad copy best practices, advertisers can reach the right users at the right time. The second step is to drive them to a conversion-rate-optimized landing page after they click on the ad. This is so that once a user clicks through, there is a clear conversion path on the landing page to guide people to convert.

While having enticing ad copy can help improve your click-through-rate, having a conversion-rate-optimized landing page can help improve your overall conversion rate.

Related: Increase the Success of Your Paid Search Campaigns With These Landing Page Best Practices

You can write the most compelling ad copy and draw users to click on your ad, but what good does your ad do if you’re driving users to a bad landing page and people don’t convert? If your landing page isn’t optimized, there’s a high chance people will drop off during the conversion funnel and not even make it to the final step to convert. Considering the ultimate goal of running PPC advertising is to drive people to convert, it’s important to start investing in CRO to ensure your landing page is optimized for conversions.

Although there are some websites that need CRO more than others, almost all websites can benefit from CRO testing. How do you know if your website needs CRO? A big tell-tale sign is when your ads are yielding a high click-through-rate (above 2% according to PPC Hero) but the conversion rate is low (below 2.70% according to Search Engine Watch). Seeing this trend in your metrics will typically indicate that your ads are appealing to the users and people are clicking through to the landing page, but for some reason once they are on the site, they are not converting. This is when CRO can be helpful in identifying where and why people are dropping off so you can modify your landing pages accordingly.

Related: Is Your Site Optimized for Conversion?

In order to setup CRO testing, we utilize VWO, an all-in-one CRO software. By implementing a tracking pixel, VWO can track every user behavior on your site. You can capture data insights such as heatmaps, click maps, area stats, etc. and understand how people are interacting with your page. There are numerous elements on your page that can be tested, by looking at your user’s’ behavior data will help you make data-driven decisions on which elements to test.

Let’s say your ads are yielding a high click-through-rate and a high conversions rate, why would you still want to invest in CRO? Here are 3 reasons why:

Drive More Conversions And Increase Overall Online Revenue

Even if your campaigns are already performing well, there is always room for improvement. “The perfect website or landing page does not exist – but you can get close to perfect if you are continuously testing and optimizing using the proper CRO tools”, says our Director of Web Development.

Related: Advanced Tips & Tactics for Conversion Rate Optimization

VWO can run analysis on your product pages or lead gen forms, and provide insights on the checkout or form completion process to help you make the user experience as seamless as possible. CRO is a continual process of optimization as how people interact with your site can change week over week depending on who’s visiting your site. This is why it’s important to make sure that your site is catering to your most current users. Ongoing CRO testing can ensure your site is always optimized and drive more conversions for your business.

People Often Interchange Between Devices While Searching And Browsing

Considering most people own multiple devices nowadays, they could be searching on one or all of their devices at any given time. Cross-device browsing has made CRO even more crucial in online marketing as people tend to interact with each device differently. What works on desktop won’t necessary work on mobile and vice versa, this is why it’s important to approach each device with its own strategy.

Considering there’s been an uptick in mobile-first users in the recent years, it’s important to keep mobile-first testing in mind if majority of your users are on mobile. I can’t stress enough how crucial it is to implement separate testing strategies dedicated to each device in order to optimize accordingly.

Ability To Use Dynamic Text Replacement On Your Landing Page

Unbounce offers advertisers the option to show the exact text in your ad copy on your landing page with Dynamic Text Replacement. This is similar to AdWords’ Dynamic Keyword Insertion which dynamically updates your ad to include a keyword that matches the user’s search query. Having the ability to customize your landing page to your ad and then customize that ad to the user’s search query, you can now serve extremely relevant ads to people with a landing page that reflects the same ad copy. This relevancy tactic can be used to help improve your ad’s quality score and ultimately help you drive more conversions.

The bottom line is CRO can help you create landing pages that are optimized for conversions. By continually testing, you can make sure that your page is always conversion driven. As the PPC advertising landscape continues to get more competitive, it’s important to always be looking for new opportunities to improve your website or landing page that you’re driving your users to. CRO can help both e-commerce and lead gen businesses as well as companies with more engagement-focused objectives to better improve the overall site user experience. If you are still not convinced, here are 9 CRO Facts That Will Convince You To Use It. Time for you to start investing in CRO!

The post 3 Reasons Why Investing in CRO Can Improve Your PPC Performance appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The post What Is Responsive Design? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

There’s only one answer to this roadblock…

TEST, TEST, TEST SOME MORE.

CRO testing can help you determine things the human eye can’t see in real time. It takes the past, present, and future into account and can help you make the small changes that make a BIG difference.

Related: 9 CRO Facts That Will Convince You to Use It

Let’s look at someone like Nike. You see their site (and maybe they do too) and it’s difficult to notice items that can be tested. To you, you may identify one or two things to improve or experiment with:

But in our eyes, e-commerce sites have endless things to test and reiterate. Here’s what we see:

Everything outlined in red, we see a test for. Before I lose you with this, let me explain:

E-commerce sites attract users, all of which are unique in the way they like to shop. Therefore, the more experiences you can tailor for, the better. Once you target a certain layout that appeals to the most amount of users, you’ve found what ultimately benefit you the most.

In addition to this idea, this year alone shows how much room for improvement there is among e-commerce websites. The Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly released a December 2017 report on conversion segmented by devices and media for large e-commerce brands, showing how there is always room to hit a 5% mark, even if the average lies around 2-3% (especially for mobile devices, I can’t stress enough how important mobile optimization is in 2018):

Why is it Important to Be Above the Average?

Convertize puts this into perspective in I think the best way:

“…the main takeaway that you should have after getting acquainted with “the slight edge phenomena” (another name for the winner takes all phenomena)… is simply to say that one should focus on relative, not on an absolute performance! Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook claim that in some settings, absolute performance does not yield the reward; what matters, in the end, is simply being better than your competitors… when you play tennis, you don’t have to be the best in the world to win in some match; you just have to be better than your opponent in the moment.”

It’s important to be better than the average because in most cases that makes you the best.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to CRO

So How Do We Get To Be THE BEST?

We test. In order to get a higher e-commerce conversion rate (or to meet averages in your respective industry), you must experiment and follow best practices and user data.

Here are some of the main items to look at when brainstorming ideas to test on your e-commerce website:

• Website copy (categories, info, FAQs, product descriptions)
• Social proof (testimonials, product reviews, social, media)
• CTA placement (add to cart buttons, request info, checkout)
• Exit-intent pop-ups (if the user leaves the browsing window, offer a discount)
• Product pages (price size and color, description placement, ratings, images)
• Checkout experience (how many shipping fields are there, where are people abandoning the cart)
• Navigation (are pages clear for users?)
• Reducing choices (instead of leaving too many options as a distraction, TELL the user what they need)
• Reviews (make the placement and specific ratings strategic)

(Props to Shopify, PPC Hero, and Wise Pops on some of these)

Wrapping Up

In summary, keep an open mind when assessing the psychological effects of your e-commerce store. There are things waiting for you to toy with. 100% of the time you are either finding an improvement or validating the work you have done. It’s a win-win situation that leaves you with more money and knowledge in the end.

The post A Guide to Ecommerce CRO appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

A landing page is a standalone web page designed specifically to convert visitors into leads. The operation is simple: if we offer something that intrigues the user, he will be more willing to type his information into the form. This page helps us convert the users into final clients. For this reason is why it is very important to create a Landing page that really converts.

How Does a Landing Page Work?

For example, the user accesses a written post on our blog or website on how to make a good content marketing strategy. He decides that he wants to know more about it so he decides to click on a call-to-action button of an eBook about “the perfect content marketing strategy”. This button will direct the user directly to our custom landing page.

Finally, this page will ask the user to send us their contact information in order to download our content. After that, they will be redirected to a thank you page with the download link, converting to a valuable lead.

The number of downloads we register translates into the collection of personal information of potential customers. This is how we obtain the perfect opportunity to contact them directly and in a personalized way, in order to influence on their purchase decision.

Related: Breaking Down the Best Landing Pages

How to Create an Effective Landing Page?

Title

The title has to clearly identify what the message and purpose of the page is. Basically, it has to fulfill the promise that attracted the client to the page in the first place.

Benefits

What benefits will the user get when he provides us with his contact information? Whether it is a downloadable, content access exclusives, additional information that we only share with our subscribers, or what have you, it has to be attractive to the user in order for him to give us the data we need.

Attractive Image

An Image is worth a thousand words. Providing a clear image of what you are offering makes the user have a tangible perception of what they will receive.

 Form Above the Fold

When the user lands on the landing page, a form will be the first thing they will see without the necessity to scroll down. Statistic data assures that forms that are situated on this first section are a lot more effective.

Few Fields in the Form

A very common error when creating a landing page is asking for too much information from potential subscribers. When a user is in front of a form that asks for a lot of data, the user might opt out from engaging with the landing page altogether. That been said, we now know that less is more. Keep your forms short and sweet and the rest will be cake!

Include Bullet Points

Writing quick, precise bullet points explaining the benefits the user will get from the downloadable is the best way to go. Avoid overloading the landing page with dense paragraphs and lengthy descriptions. Keep your bullet points to the point (see what we did there) and this will simplify the information, making the text more visual and easy to read.

Use of CTA Buttons

It is very important to use the right CTA button. CTA buttons like “register me, download now, etc..” have a higher percentage of success than the typical “Send” button. It has to be an authentic weapon of mass attraction, something that draws attention and prompts the click. In addition, it has to be clearly visible, and in a prominent place.

Eliminate Distractions

As you already know, the purpose of a landing page is to gather users information. That being said, it is very important to get rid of unnecessary distractions, irrelevant information, excess of imagery, links that make users leave the page, and so on. You have one goal and you want the user to focus on that goal.
Related: Is Your Landing Page Having an Existential Crisis?

Wrapping Up

Nowadays, there are many different tools that allow you to create a landing page without needing the help of a developer. The majority of these tools are “Drag and drop”, meaning that with only one click you can move elements and place them wherever you want them to be. Some examples of different tools for creating landing pages are:

• Instapge
• Unbounce
• LeadPages or Clickfunnels
• Launchrock

When it comes to creating a successful landing page, keep it short, easy to digest, and high level. Don’t over-complicate the process, just keep things simple. Good luck!

The post How to Create a Great Landing Page appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

At the end of the day, slow websites will have a low number of conversions, a high bounce rate, and a low number of pages per visit. Essentially, a slow site means people will bail because no one has the patience to wait for a web page to load. This is even more important for businesses when there is a long conversion funnel on the website. There is always drop-off when a conversion funnel has multiple steps and pages, but when you also have a slow website and users are trying to get through a more complex conversion funnel, that drop-off is amplified.

Let’s break down just how much of an impact site speed has across multiple digital channels.  

Site Speed’s Impact on SEO

Site speed is a ranking factor and an even larger ranking factor for a mobile device. Google is rolling out a Mobile First index moving forward, which will officially take effect in July 2018, meaning now is the time to optimize for mobile site speed so you’re not on the losing team when it officially rolls out. With that being said, we have already seen the direct impact that site speed has on our clients’ websites’ SEO rankings and organic traffic.

The reason why site speed is a ranking factor is that it is, first and foremost, a sign of quality user experience. A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. A user is typically staying on a site longer if the site speed is faster and they also convert better and bounce less. For those reasons, Google has made it a ranking factor.

Related: Improve Website Speed with these 5 Quick Tips

We view three to four seconds or less as a good page load time. This varies slightly based on the type of site and industry but typically if your web pages load in under three to four seconds, you’re doing well. Once you exceed that load time, we start to see less optimal rankings as well as a poorer user experience. Conversely, if we brought this page speed down to sub-three to four seconds we would likely see better rankings.

We have seen the effects of this first-hand with a client. We implemented site speed optimizations on a client’s website and the client’s developer accidentally removed the work we had done. The website with the site speed optimizations went from a four-second load time to a 12-second load time after the optimizations were removed, which caused rankings to plummet. We went back in and updated the site with the proper site speed optimizations again and got the website back to a four-second load time and rankings went back up.

This illustrated in real-time that site speed has a direct link to your SEO marketing strategy and keyword rankings. This is rare, as almost nothing happens in real-time for SEO, it’s a slow and steady wins the race scenario, but we saw the ranking impact in just a few days when site speed optimizations were stripped and then re-implemented. It was a great experiment because we already knew site speed made an impact on SEO, but this really showed the emphasis Google is placing on it for mobile and desktop from a search perspective.

The benefits of site speed on user experience impact other digital channels as well, like paid search.

Site Speed’s Impact on Paid Search

With PPC and site speed, it comes down to paying the most affordable and cost-effective rate for your keyword bidding, which is determined by your quality score. For paid media, quality score is basically how relevant Google finds your website’s landing page to a search term, which takes a look at the user experience based on that person being driven to your page from that specific keyword. Ultimately, slow site speed will appear to Google as a poor user experience and will, in turn, bring down your quality score.

Quality score determines how much you pay (cost per click or CPC) and your average position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). If you have a low site speed/quality score it’s really hard to show up in the top two positions on the SERP and depending on how competitive the keywords are, you might not show up in the top spots. If you have a low enough quality score, your ads won’t show up at all. As you can see, quality score makes a huge impact on PPC.

Additionally, like any other channel driving traffic to your site, with a low site load time, conversion rate will be lower and bounce rate will be higher – two things you don’t want when trying to drive sales or leads.

Quality score is the number one metric you want to look at for PPC to ensure your ads are performing at their best. With a better quality score, you’ll see a better and higher ad position and a lower cost per click. With faster site speed, you can assume your quality score will be higher, you’ll pay less, and rank higher.

Site Speed’s Impact on Social Ads

Much like paid ads on Google, Facebook also favors higher site speed when it comes to ads. Facebook, much like Google, wants to show you the best results for what you are interested in.

Facebook had an algorithmic change in August 2017 that prioritized user experience, where site speed came into play. As we’ve discussed, the better the site speed, the better the user experience and overall site’s performance. Facebook announced that this site speed and user experience will cause your ads to either be prioritized or not. While there are many factors that come into play for Facebook’s algorithm with social ads, a fast load speed does influence a higher priority on the newsfeed, while slow load time influences a lower priority on the newsfeed.

Site Speed’s Impact on User Experience and Conversion

As we’ve discussed, site speed has an impact on a number of digital marketing channels, but what it really comes down to is user experience and conversion. User experience affects SEO, Paid Search, and Paid Social, which is why site speed is so important as it plays a direct role in user experience.

Site speed is a huge reason why people bounce off of sites. When we refer to a bounce, we mean someone who is not viewing more than one page on the site before leaving the site. This rate of people coming to your site and those that bounce is called a bounce rate. If a site has a slow load time, people will not stick around and they will bounce. That is why slow sites typically have a very high bounce rate, while faster sites tend to have a lower bounce rate. One thing to keep in mind is that bounce rate is also a ranking factor for SEO relevance, so it should be a priority of yours to have a lower bounce rate.

Related: Developing Websites with Marketing in Mind

When it comes to conversions, site speed also plays a large role. Ultimately, if people are bouncing due to a slow load time, they’re not converting. This is especially true if your website has a longer checkout or conversion process. As we mentioned, with each page that needs to load to make a conversion, there is more chance for drop-off.

Additionally, if your site is fast it gets people to the information they want faster, unfortunately, if it takes longer to load it gives them more time to change their mind. It’s better to catch people during their purchase decision with a fast and easy-to-navigate site in order to better lead them on their path to conversion.

What This Means for Your Website

Now that you know how important site speed is to your website and overall business, from impacting digital channels, to impacting your bottom line, here is a comprehensive guide on how to benchmark and improve it.

Benchmarking Your Site Speed

The first step in this process is to see how your website’s site speed is currently performing. We use a number of tools to run this analysis, which shows how your site stacks up. The great thing about these tools is that they are free and you can run as many reports as you want. Our primary tools for this are the Google site speed tool PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and Pingdom. The process is very simple and includes running an automated analysis of your website URL. You will then get a report that breaks down the pagespeed insight and areas for improvement.

You can use this report as your baseline before making any optimizations and then run the analysis again once you have made updates to track your progress. Typical updates include resizing images and videos and disabling inactive plugins.

Assess Overall Website User Experience

In addition to optimizing your website for site speed, there are also a few other user experience metrics that complement site speed you should look at before and after implementing site speed optimizations. Ask yourself these questions:

• Did the navigation start successfully? Has the server responded?
• Has enough content rendered that users can engage with?
• Can users interact with the page, or is it still busy loading?
• Are the interactions smooth, natural, and free of lag?

Once you ask yourself these questions, you’ll have a better sense from the end-user perspective how your site stacks up and what updates you can make to improve overall user experience right off the bat. A combination of site speed and design elements will help your website excel and drive traffic and conversions.

How to Improve Your Site Speed

To dive more into how to improve your website’s site speed, it comes down to eliminating unnecessary elements that could be bogging down your page load time. Here is a quick overview of ways you can optimize your website for the best and most efficient site speed:

• Minimize landing page redirects, plugins, and link shorteners
• Compress files to decrease mobile rendering time
• Improve server response time by utilizing multi-region hosting
• Remove render-blocking javascript
• Use a high-quality content delivery network to reach your audience quickly
• Remove redundant data that does not impact how the page is processed by the browser
• Optimize images to reduce file size without diminishing visual quality
• Reduce the size of above the fold content to prioritize visual content
• Use asynchronous scripts to streamline page render time
• Dynamically adjust the content for slower connections/devices

So, how can you efficiently and effectively resolve all of the above issues to make your site lightning fast? Let’s take a deep dive into our process at Power Digital.

Our Process

Our site speed optimizations can take between a few weeks to two months, depending on how many pages the website has and how many issues are hindering site speed. This process has proven to get amazing results for our clients, where their page load time has decreased by over 50% in most cases, and our web development department has a skilled team that runs the process from A-Z. This means our process is very efficient and very cost-effective.

The fastest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design, which is why it’s the first step in our site speed optimizations. This means streamlining the number of elements on your page, using CSS instead of images whenever possible, combining multiple style sheets into one, and reducing scripts and putting them at the bottom of the page. The goal here is to create a lean and efficient site design.

Next, we jump into reducing your server response time, as this is a key update that can significantly reduce load time. Your target is a server response time of less than 200 milliseconds. Google recommends using a web application monitoring solution and checking for bottlenecks in performance.

After optimizing for design and server response time, two low-hanging fruit opportunities, we work on enabling compression. Large pages, which we find when clients are creating high-quality content (high-quality content is the goal!), are often 100kb or more, which means they are bulky and slow to load. You may be creating amazing long-form content, but it runs the risk of slowing your load time if not properly optimized. The best way to speed up the load time of these large pages is to zip them, otherwise known as compression. Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response and reducing page load time. We use a tool called Gzip to run this process.

After we enable compression, we move on to enabling browser caching. When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, otherwise known as temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site your browser can load the full page without even having to send an HTTP request to the server. This saves time for the page to communicate with the server to load, because it’s already stored like a memory. A surprising 40-60 percent of a websites’ daily visitors come in with an empty cache, which means there is a huge opportunity for subsequent visits to load faster. Yes, you should have a fast site speed on the visitor’s first visit, but the following visits can load even faster if you enable caching.

The next step in this process is to minify your resources, meaning deleting unnecessary pieces of code like spaces, line breaks, or indentations that you don’t need. This helps make the page leaner and easier to load.

Images are another big piece of the site speed puzzle. We go in and optimize images for size, format, and src attribution, making sure we avoid empty image src codes. We also optimize CSS delivery, which holds the style requirements for a web page. We recommend an external style sheet because it reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications.

The last few changes include prioritizing above-the-fold content, meaning ensuring that the content at the top of your website pages leads the fastest, as that is where users end up first. We also reduce the number of plugins on your site and eliminate any old or unused plugins. Finally, we reduce redirects.
This full process can be honed into a well-oiled machine with a skilled dev team and has such a vast impact on user experience and digital channels that is 100 percent worth your while to invest in.

Related: Site Speed Tips & Tricks

Other Brands Weigh In

Don’t just take our word for it, check out some other marketing leaders weighing in on why they have put an emphasis on site speed and what results it’s gotten them.

Meri Chobanyan

Content Producer and PR manager at SEMrush – a major all-in-one SEO and digital marketing suite that we use at Power Digital

“Throughout the entire previous year (2017), Google was gradually getting everyone used to the fact that page speed is of high significance. So, Google’s recent confirmation about page speed officially becoming a ranking factor – so far, for mobile search –  in July 2018 should not strike us as an unexpected update. As a business owner, the “Speed Update” will affect your slow pages’ performance. Yet, Google really underlines and makes it clear that speed won’t be the utmost ranking factor for mobile search results, and slow pages that showcase quality and relevant content will still get a chance to rank for Google’s top positions.”

Jordan Harling

Chief Digital Strategist for Wooden Blinds Direct, one of the leading window furnishing companies that operate entirely online

“People are impatient nowadays. There’s so much competing for our attention all the time – social media, smartphones, Netflix – that we can access instantly. So waiting even a few seconds for a website to load seems like an eternity, it can cause people to flip out. This little delay in load time affects more than just people’s moods and their perception of your company though, it also affects your SEO. With the continuing trend towards users viewing the web on mobile devices and Google’s growing insistence on fast websites for its search rankings, quick-loading websites have become a necessity. If people have to sit and wait for your site to load, most likely they’ll grow tired and move onto your competitors. This isn’t even only an issue for SEO, it also affects conversion rates. A two-second delay is all it takes to increase checkout abandons to 87%. That’s just two seconds, less time than it takes to read this sentence.”

Michelle Kubot

Marketing Director at Ambrosia Treatment Center

“Starting July 2018, Google is upping the ante on site speed by (finally) including it as a ranking factor on mobile. It’s already been a ranking factor in desktop for years. So, if you want your brand’s website to rank in Google, you should be looking at site speed.

Every second counts for users too. The longer your page takes to load, the more likely the user will abandon your site. (And, you might have paid for that click). Even if they stay this time, providing a good user experience is critical for repeat business and customer satisfaction.

We are always looking for ways to keep our site speed down. I personally check Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool every month to see how we’re tracking and what we can do to get better.” 

Andrew Sumitani

Director of Marketing at TINYpulse, the leading employee engagement platform.

“Site speed is important to our brand as it is inseparable from a delightful customer experience. The difference between a fast site and a slow one may be mere seconds for one visitor. But over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of visitors, those seconds add up to a lot of waiting before a blank screen.

On TINYpulse.com, we’ve recently taken extra measures to make sure that our most highly-trafficked pages, namely our blog, are mobile-responsive and equipped with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This protocol strips away a lot of behind-the-scenes processes and extra code designed to benefit the publisher — all for the sake of creating a snappy visitor experience.

Google is unwavering on its goal of delighting users, so they reward publishers that align with this goal and invest in steps like this. The result? Our year-over-year search traffic is double what it was last year.”

Amanda Austin

Founder of Little Shop of Miniatures, an ecommerce store specializing in dollhouse miniatures

“I see site speed as a very important component in reducing bounce rates. Research shows that even a four-second page load increases the bounce rate by 25%. Research also shows that customers expect a page to load in two seconds or less. If you are paying for advertising, you are practically throwing money down the drain if your page load times are not acceptable.

Knowing this, we regularly test our page load speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insight. We have always tested well, but if we didn’t, we would compress the images on our site, compact HTML, and follow all the other best practices for page load speed.”

Jonathan Holloway

Director of Digital Strategy at NoExam.com

“I’ve been working in digital marketing for 10 years. In the last five years especially, I have seen site speed become more and more important as mobile users increase. Lately, we have been working to improve our site speed by combining CSS and javascript, optimizing images, and moving javascript below the main page content. The result has been faster load times and increased conversion rates for mobile users. This has led to increased revenue without having to increase spend on advertising channels. It’s important for our brand to have fast site speed since we spend a lot of money on paid traffic, and the increased conversion rates allow us to compete with larger competitors.”

Brett Helling

CEO of Ridester

“Three factors that make site speed a top priority for Ridester are: a fast loading website helps put a great first impression of our brand on the visitors; humans attention span is lesser than that of a goldfish as per research, and with each passing year visitors desire for instant gratification is increasing; if your site isn’t loading soon enough the potential visitors will leave it and never return again; today, site speed is an SEO ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search results of Google.

Changes that we have made which improved our site’s speed include implementing a CDN (we use WPengine), cleaning up our database, removing any plugins/themes etc. that we don’t use, optimizing our images, and tweaking our CSS and javascript, and running site speed diagnosis via multiple tools such as Google Site Speed, Pingdom, and GTmetrix to instantly know if there are any issues and make changes to fix them right away.

As a result, we have seen improvements in our site speed, and also in our SEO rankings.”

Get Started

Luckily for you, Power Digital’s expert web development team has developed a proven, fast, and cost-effective process for doing site speed optimizations for brands all over the world. We’re able to see 50 percent or more improvement on site speed and the cost range for us to handle from A-Z is anywhere between $1,500-$12,000 for this type of project, depending on the size of your site. Please contact us for a quote and help us help you take your business to the next level, starting with one of the most impactful updates you can make in 2018.

The post The Importance of Site Speed in 2018 appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

If you are expecting to get lots of traffic to your site, you should be aware of your site’ speed. 1 second latency could drop your visitors by a high percentage. Tools such as GTMetrix, Google Insight Speed, and Pingdom could help you figure out what is wrong with your site and make it load much faster.If you are not experienced in doing site speed optimization, this could be a real headache. Additionally, it could cost you your site if you are messing around with it.

Here are a few tips that I normally use in order to achieve a great speed score.

Image Compression

I believe this is the number 1 issue on site’s speed scores. When building a website, people often times just upload the images regardless of the size. The impact of an image is huge. I have seen cases where the images weigh more than the actual site.

So, be sure to…

• Resize your images to the actual size that are going to be displayed on the site.
• Use JPEG rather than any other format.
• Use image optimization tools such as Optimizilla (online), Smush it (WordPress), andImageOptim(Mac).

Don’t Overload Your Site With Plugins

Plugins can be super helpful sometimes. You can have a plugin for almost anything you would want. The issue is when you have a plugin for every single functionality. This will definitely cost you some speed. Most of the plugins use third-party scripts which slow your site because it makes your site request multiple links from different sites. The same thing happens when you add some JS, images, CSS, or any type of files from other servers.

In order to solve this, keep your site simple without overloading it with unnecessary plugins, and if you are getting files from other servers, just host them all in your server to reduce the number of requests.

Minify Your Resources

CSS files, as well as JavaScript and HTML, use many lines of spaces that could take up a significant amount of space depending on the number of lines that these files have. In order to reduce their weight and make them load faster, you could minify these files by taking all the unnecessary spaces off the files. Tools such as Minifier and Refresh SF could help you accomplish this.

Optimize CSS Delivery

Organization goes along with optimization. When setting up all the styling of your website it is important to have everything thoughtfully laid out and organized. A good way to layout this would be:

• Adding ALL your CSS rules into ONE external file (hosted in your server)
• Link them within the <head>.
•  Avoiding inline CSS

Prioritize Above-The-Fold

Above the fold means whatever the users see first when they go on a site. It is important to prioritize that the site loads above the fold  first so the user does not experience any delay while the rest of the site loads later. To do this, it is important to structure your HTML accordingly to load everything you  want showing immediately, first. Inline CSS would normally load before external CSS, so use inline CSS for Above the Fold sections, while the rest of the external CSS can load after.

Deferring JavaScript to load after the actual content loads could help you reduce the amount of loading time for Above the fold.

Reduce Redirects

Redirects are methods to automatically take visitors to other locations. Every time you redirect a user, you are hurting your page speed score. So, it is important to get rid of as much redirection as possible. It is okay to keep the ones are necessary if there is no other solution, but try to keep your site clean of those.

Enable A CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web server which is used to deliver content more efficiently to users. Through a CDN, content is more likely to be received by the user faster, reducing the slow time on your website. W3 Total Cache is a very popular plugin used in WordPress to store cache.

The post Site Speed Tips & Tricks appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Not all websites are made equal. Some websites are simple, logical, and easy to use. Others are a messy hodgepodge of pages and links.

Bad navigation is an especially common problem area. We’ve all struggled to find things on disorganized websites without any logical structure. It feels hopeless, like being lost in a maze with no map.

Just because a website looks awesome doesn’t mean that it is easy to navigate. You can have a beautifully designed website, but if it is impossible to use, what’s the point? No one is going to sign up for a newsletter or buy any products. Search engines will be confused, too.

Designing and developing good navigation is the most important part of building your website. If a website is like a house, navigation is the foundation. Just like the structural foundation of a house, you must start by building the structural foundation of your site navigation first.

It can be hard to design user-friendly navigation, especially on huge websites. Just remember that simplicity is always the best approach. Also, before your website gets too big, think about how you want users to navigate around it — or things will quickly get disorganized.

Here are a few tips on how to create good website navigation, turning a negative user experience into an awesome one.

Tip #1: Make Sure The Navigation Is Clear And Legible

In most cases, stay away from narrow fonts and scripts. They’re just too hard to read, especially on a small scale. Here are two examples:

• Dancing Script
• Pragati Narrow

The minimum text size on your site’s navigation should be 12 pixels. Anything smaller and your users will be squinting, and search engines might flag it as suspicious. It’s always a good idea to test your website for legibility on mobile devices. Be sure the navigation is easy to read.

Navigation should also be divided into clear categories, with only the most important links on your main menu. If your website has a lot of pages, use second-level or third-level dropdown menus.

Use accurate navigation titles. There’s nothing more frustrating than digging around on a website and getting lost because the titles on the navigation links were confusing, vague, or too similar to other titles.

Use actual text instead of icons for menu items. It’s good for SEO and easier for your users. Search engines can read text to figure out the most important parts of your website, which helps visitors find you, but search engines can’t read icons. Too many icons will also slow down your page speed, which is bad for SEO. Visitors might not be able to load the images quickly either. Text is always the best way to go.

Be sure that there’s a clear contrast with the colors used for your navigation menu. You can use dark text on a light background, or light text on a dark background, but never dark-on-dark or light-on-light.

You may also want to try different colors on your navigation links to see what users respond to. Here’s a good example why: In 2014, Google earned an extra $200 million per year by switching to a new shade of blue on advertising links that people clicked on more often.

Tip #2: Understand Human Behavior, Especially When It Comes To Interacting With Different Devices

People naturally look for patterns and gravitate toward what is comfortable for them. If they can’t find the menu easily, or figure out how to navigate between pages on your website, they won’t stay long.

In this day and age, people are used to interacting with websites in a certain way. Try not to make things difficult for them. The good news is that basic navigation patterns haven’t changed much over the years.

Related: Empathy: The Key to Great Design

For example, desktop users expect to see a prominent, clearly-labeled menu on the top or the side of the page. Mobile device users expect the menu to be integrated in the app, or the responsive page design.

As more people switch from desktops to mobile devices, more websites are switching to a navigation menu that is far less obvious.

On mobile devices, there has been a wide adoption of the “hamburger menu,” a three-lined icon that users click on to expand the menu.

Hiding your navigation menu behind a hamburger button can be hard to find, which is why some apps and websites opt instead for side bars, dropdown menus, or a tab bar at the bottom of the app screen.

Tip #3: Integrate Search Functionality With Your Site

When all else fails, the search bar is the saving grace of navigation. Search functionality is also a great idea for websites where users will be looking for something specific instead of clicking through links.

Taking steps to improve your website’s search functionality can help improve conversion rates. It can lead to happier shoppers who come back again and again. Even so, the search bar is often neglected.

There are a few things you can do to make it stand out. Put text inside the box, such as “Search Here,” or an icon of a magnifying glass, to help your visitors figure out that it is a search bar instead of a newsletter sign-up form. You can also draw attention to your search bar by offsetting it in a different color from your site’s color scheme.

The functionality of the search results page is also extremely important. Users expect their product searches to be filterable. It is no longer enough to have minimal options like size, color, and style. Users also want to be able to search for new items, sale or clearance, and more — and filter out categories they don’t want to see.

Tip #4: Breadcrumbs Make It Easier For Users To Understand How Your Site Is Organized

Breadcrumb trails are like a map. They are text links, usually at the top of a page, that might look like this: “Home > Books > Fiction > To Kill a Mockingbird.” They’ve been used in web navigation since the 1990s.

Breadcrumb trails are popular for a few reasons. They’re user-friendly, take up very little space, help users keep track of their location, and enable one-click access to other important parts of your website.

Breadcrumb trails are also beneficial for SEO. They are an excellent way to get keywords onto a page. These keywords tell search engines which pages on your website are most important, which makes it easier for the search engine to understand the structure of a website.

Tip #5: Include A Sitemap On Your Website

A sitemap is like a directory of your website. It is a page with text links to the most important parts of your website. Sitemaps help your users navigate your website, but they are just as important for SEO. They give search engine crawlers an easy way to find pages on your site.

Related: Developing Websites with Marketing in Mind

There are two types of sitemaps: HTML and XML, and you may want both. An HTML sitemap helps a person navigate your website, with links to the most important parts of your website. An XML sitemap helps a search engine navigate your website, with links to all of the pages and information about how frequently the content is updated.

Tip #6: Prove It Works

Before you go live with any changes, prove your navigation works. Get other people to test out your website for Quality Assurance (QA) and give feedback. This helps avoid costly mistakes and unhappy users.

After you go live, you’ll want to closely monitor how many of your users are doing what you want, such as buying a product or signing up for a newsletter. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a popular approach to converting more visitors into subscribers and customers.

CRO typically involves A/B testing different menu formats by randomly offering users two different versions of your navigation and picking the most effective one. You’ll probably want to play with the order of your links to determine which pages on your website bring in the most customers. These are the pages you’ll want to focus on improving.

If you are not sure why your users are dropping off from your site in their journey — or where they are getting lost — you can try recording how they are using your website. This is also called “behavior tracking” or “funnel analysis.” It offers a wealth of data about how people are interacting with your website, helping you determine where customers are getting confused so you can fix conversion problems.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is an ideal platform to bring together your conversion optimization strategy. It’s an all-in-one solution for A/B testing, visitor recordings, tracking goals, funnels, cross-device and cross-browser testing, user research, and more. VWO mines your data looking for insights that have the maximum impact on business objectives — be it sales, sign-ups, or page views — which helps business leaders make data-driven decisions that expedite growth.

The post How to Make Your Website Easy to Navigate appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

A-B comparison. Split testing.

• 5 different colors for the “Add to Cart” button
• The order of the images, each one can be tested in first position
• Video play button icons can be added to test against the control
• The top header (in yellow) can employ 5 different CTA messages

To visualize multivariate check out this diagram:

*Graphic by Optimizely*

 
Wrapping Up
Don’t think of these two types of CRO tests as opposites or two different methods to do the same thing. They both have great benefits to them that should be employed for any website/company currently exercising CRO.

The post Multivariate vs. A/B Testing appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.