One of the best things you can do to wring more ROI out of your website is to optimize for desired business results like sales leads.  Few clients are doing this yet.  Why?  Not in their habit path, no one understands it, or sometimes even worse — they are making faith based assumptions (“I think this is going to work”) and gambling their web results on guesswork.  WebFadds provides testing services, and to help you understand more about them and how to be successful with them — here are some strategies and tactics with visuals to help:

• Measurable Desired Business Outcome(s):  What is the desired, and measurable result that your MarCom team  wants?  For B2B, this is often leads generated via a lead form, and to track conversion rates, we need a unique “thank you” page that a prospect sees only after filling out the form.  Sometimes it’s “engagement.” Sometimes a download of an important White Paper.  We can’t improve results unless they are well defined and trackable.
• General Factors that Improve Results:
  • The clarity and strength of your value proposition:  Often, clients are unclear on the question of why choose this company and its product or service.  Another mistake is to believe that visitors will choose to surf the site and figure out their value –not true and dangerous for two reasons:  they may not take the time to do this, and even if they do they may take the time, they may form a very different concept of value about your company,  its services and products.   State the value clearly on the testing page.  You have the opportunity to help them visualize and “feel” good about your company — take it.
  • Reduce “friction”:  Anything that feels too hard or takes too long = friction.  Longer forms do not convert as well as shorter forms.
  • Reduce “anxiety”:  People worry about the credibility of a company, and what they will do with email and other personal information.
  • Increase motivation:  Promise them something like a free white paper, etc.

Types of Tests

• VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization: In VBO, we are interested in the “Why” of visitor behavior, beyond the “What” we get from Analytics. Sometimes “Where” too. One popular method here is to get a heat map of where people click on particular pages, then ask they questions that get to the “why” for the behavior.  This is good to test a design before you even implement it, because the visitors are just reacting to a JPG of the page.  Another type of VBO test you can take is an exit survey to help you answer the “Why” of visitor behavior.  Analytics answers “what” your site visitors do and don’t do, but not why — so the best thing to do is simply ask visitors questions that help you understand more about their behavior relating to your desired business outcomes.
  
  Above are some results of one kind of VBO test we did for Content Marketing Institute , and  for International Performance Group (Click to Enlarge).  It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left), and also what they remembered and believed the site to be about.
  
• LPO Landing Page Optimization:  This is probably what I will recommend for this client based on your comments.  Here we focus on improving desired business results on only one page.
  • We work with either Google Website Optimizer, or another good option Visual Website Optimizer.  Each offer certain strengths — VWO offers a WordPress CMS plugin, for example.
  • A/B Test: Here you are testing two separate page designs.  This requires a complete separate design for each page, and approximately 1000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    
  • Multivariate Test: Here you only need one page, but you test different combination of persuasive elements on that page to optimize for desired business outcomes.  One popular set to test is:  Two Headlines, Two Persuasive Images, and Two Calls to action.  You would then be showing six different page element combinations to visitors, so you would need 3000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization: This one is similar to the nature of LPO in that you are interested in increasing the number of desired business outcomes, called “conversions” in analytics (when a visitor completes a lead form they “convert” from a visitor to a prospect). The main difference here is that you usually will take a series of pages into consideration — the sales “funnel” leading from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page, for example.
  Above (click to enlarge) is a “funnel visualization” (series of pages leading to a goal) for a client that would like to have more visitors download their whitepaper.  CRO often involves looking at which pages are not functioning well to get visitors to complete a desired business outcome, and here one problem is the homepage.  They have no call to action on their home page to funnel visitors to this goal.
• Number of Visitors to get a Valid LPO Test: Think 1000 for an A/B test (500 interact with each page), and 3000 for a 3 element Multivariate Test (500 visitors interact with each of six page element combinations).  Google adwords is an excellent way to gather visitors for a test (figure .50 cents average per click, or $500 for 1000 visitors plus management fee).  CRO tests may require move visitors.  We can give you a quote on managing your PPC ad campaign.

Two Final Pieces of Optimization Test Advice:

• Always be testing — drive this tactic into your marketing culture, and you will definitely see an increase in ROI.
• Avoid the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), because at best when a C-Level Manager says “I think this will work”, you are gambling on faith instead of asking your prospects and customers directly via VBO, LPO, and CRO testing.

Read more here:  WebFadds VBO-Max Services |  Contact us today for a quote.

So… what is a “Conversion”: I get this question a lot.  Remember when everyone worried about “hits?”  Well, “conversions” are the new hits. You see, it’s not really that good to get a lot of hits, if your visitors simply bounce away without doing anything that brings them closer to a business goal.

You want to think very carefully about how you intend to “convert” visitors, into prospects (they might download a whitepaper, for example); into leads, where they usually fill out a contact form which may be given to your sales team; and into customers — when they make a purchase at your site.

The good news? You can use Google Analytics to track with precision your site visitor behavior leading to conversions.  The bad news?   Well, when you consider that most conversion optimization work yields improvements in the 20% – 75% range… it’s really all good news for your R.O.I. (Return On Investment).  If there is any bad news, it’s simply that your work isn’t done after the first design and formatting pass.  You need to always be testing, reviewing, and tweaking to increase conversion rates.

Is there a formula? Yes, in a general sense, but forget about “best practices” here.  Why?  Because every site, niche, and business model is different, and in particular your product or service’s value proposition is different — even from your closest competitor.  So… the right combination of Headline, Graphics, and Calls to Action yielding the highest conversion rates will vary.  But… sound the trumpets — Google rides to the rescue again with the “Google Optimizer” program which rotates these key elements and reports on the best combination.

Above, we can see a Google Analytics report showing that traffic referred from a Business Blog (for a WebFadds client — International Sportsmen’s Expositions) converts 31% higher than average per visit, and 255% higher for the specific “Goal 2″ — a purchase of eTickets for a show in Salt Lake City.

It works. Using analytics for a current client we are able to determine that visitors originating from their Business Blog show a higher ecommerce conversion rate (they purchased 255% more eTickets) than those originating at the parent site.  And using our favorite landing page optimization formula… we were able to increase exhibitor information form fill-outs by 50%, year over year,  for a 3-month period – a $9200 increase in R.O.I. just in 3 months so far. Not too bad.

Give me a call, or contact me and we’ll explore ways to increase conversions and R.O.I.  for your company.

Contact Us · (360) 566-2451 · Email | Twitter: WebFadds

Hello -

What is your Video Strategy? Video Strategy? Yes… get ready for it. I too held off, but WebFadds just received a new client as a result of my first video posted on YouTube in January.  I mentioned this WordPress 2.7 with conversion tip video in an earlier edition, but some of you said the video was not permitted in your email — so here’s a direct link: WordPress 2.7 Introduction – Using WordPress as Your CMS.

Whether you’re a service provider, or selling products… video is becoming a key component of good content. But, will sales result from any video you place on your site? Jon Quarto-vonTivadar, writes how that is NOT the case in his article: “Video Views Up, When Will Sales Follow?” Take a look — he has good advice.  And here’s a series of articles about producing videos.

The Most Important C’s of Successful Online Marketing: A while back, I wrote an article on the five C’s that contribute to your success online: Content, Community, Conversation, Connection, and Conversions. Note that at the original writing the final word was Convergence, though I am updating this strategy to change that to Conversions, for the best focus, from a business perspective. Which of the “C’s” are most important?

Content. Everything else is secondary.
Conversions. Everything else — except Content — is secondary.

Get Content… and you'll Get Customers.

What about the other three C’s? They’re important too, because even in these times of new technology… people will still buy from those they know. But they’re not primary.   Because you can chat people up and plant links here and there back to your site, doesn’t mean you’ll be successful… even if your Google pagerank increases. Unless you have persuasive content, and continually focus on improving your conversion rates, all else is just busy work with no pay off.

And yet, I often see many requests for SEO work, or social network linking projects with little consideration toward first making your Content compelling, on target, and persuasive — a discipline my colleagues Newt Barrett and Joe Pulizzi write about in a new book about, “Content Marketing.” You should get their book – Get Content, Get Customers.

I see even fewer marketing project proposals written with an eye toward Conversions. Why?

I’ll close with some interesting results from our LinkedIn poll on “How well does your website convert visitors to leads or customers?“  which point to the answer to that question:

Results by Job Function…

This result shows that some creatives actually focus on conversions — those are the ones you want to hire, because they begin with the end in mind (your strategic business goals).  Marketing types, so far in this poll, seem focused on sales (yellow), but not completely clear on the concept of conversions — they do not understand how “optimizing” (blue) landing pages (adding your value proposition, for example), can increase your conversions .

So… how well is your site converting? Stop by at LinkedIn and take the poll… and if you’d like to focus on, and increase your conversions — give me a call.