Table of Contents

• Why CRO Matters for Your Lead Generation
• The Problem with Guessing
• Formulating a CRO Hypothesis
• A/B Testing: Science, Not Supposition
• Elements to A/B Test for Conversion Rate Impact
• Reviewing A/B Test Results and Implementing CRO
• Conversion Rate Optimization Services
• Key Takeaways: How To Get More Website Leads Through CRO

Why CRO Matters for Your Lead Generation

It’s easy to think that to get more leads you just need to get more traffic. However, that’s like saying that a restaurant just needs more people coming through the door to be more profitable. 

Do those people in fact stay around and pay? Are you providing an experience they find worthy of tipping? Does poor service dissuade many people from returning? Is low food quality ruining your reputation?

The same goes for your website. You must provide an exceptional user experience to entice people to convert. 

Conversion rate optimization doesn’t focus on adding more people to the top of your sales funnel. CRO works to make the funnel itself more efficient, so you get more out of what’s already there. You’re tuning your site to move visitors from just browsing to actually taking action—signing up, reaching out, or making a purchase.

• Dive into the challenge of driving high-quality traffic that converts in our blog post CRO: Why More Traffic Doesn’t Equal More Sales.

The Problem with Guessing

Many businesses make changes to their websites to try to drive more sales based on assumptions about what will appeal to their visitors. Relying solely on gut feelings in this way can lead to wasted effort. 

Conducting formal A/B tests as part of a CRO strategy, on the other hand, replaces gut-level guesses with data. 

A/B testing (where you compare two versions of a page or element) is a powerful way to see how actual visitors respond to different options, allowing you to make data-driven changes that move the needle.

• Get expert insights from the DOM team about how to get more leads from your website in our Beginner’s Guide to CRO. 

Formulating a CRO Hypothesis

A hypothesis in CRO isn’t just a what-if-we-try-this question; it’s a thoughtful guess based on data and visitor behavior. 

Start by looking at heatmaps, session recordings, and analytics. Maybe visitors often leave from a certain page or ignore a call-to-action button. 

A solid hypothesis for that situation could be as simple as, “If we change the call-to-action color to something that contrasts more, we’ll likely see a lift in conversions.”

A/B Testing: Science, Not Supposition

A/B testing is a way of performing a scientific experiment on your website. You create two variations of a page (say, a landing page or product description) and split traffic evenly between them.  

The magic happens when you analyze which version converts better, meaning it gets visitors to take the action you’ve designed the page for, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

This data-driven approach minimizes guesswork and bias.

By laying out a hypothesis and collecting performance data on each arm of the experiment, you then have an objective view of which performed better. No more relying on gut feelings about red buttons catching more eyes than blue, for instance.   

Did that CTA in ALL CAPs outperform the CTA in Title Case? Did the longer product description with customer testimonials actually convert more visitors than the concise version? A/B testing provides concrete answers.

Elements to A/B Test for Conversion Rate Impact

You can run an A/B test on any element on your website that you can change. That being said, there are core elements that typically have a substantial impact on user experience that we at DOM recommend you consider testing first.  

Headlines
Most people skim webpages. They don’t read every word. That makes headlines important real estate on your website. Try phrasing them as to the features of your product vs. the benefits. Try using single words vs. phrases. 

Forms
The length of a form is highly correlated with the interest level of the people who fill it out. The longer the form, the more effort someone has to put in to complete it. This might mean that you will see only those with high buying intent complete your forms. On the other hand, too many fields to fill out may discourage would-be customers. The shorter the form, the less friction involved with completing it. Try both. 

Social Proof
Testimonials can be persuasive, but location matters. Test placing them near your call-to-action buttons vs. elsewhere on the page to see where they make the biggest impact.

Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
You may be able to reduce bounce rates with a compelling message that pops up when someone attempts to navigate away from a particular page. 

Calls to Action (CTAs)
CTAs are the last (and maybe most crucial) link in your chain of appeal to potential clients. The CTA can directly prompt someone to take the action you want. It may also more subtly sew the seeds of user action. Test CTA messaging and formats (like buttons vs. text anchor links) to see what generates more conversions. 

Images
The right image can make all the difference. You can try different media and content with your images. For instance, try photos vs. graphics. Try images that feature your product alone vs. people with your product. The human element is often appealing. Our glance tends to be caught more by images with people in them than those without. 

• Dig deeper in our blog post Where User Experience Meets Conversion Rate Magic.

Reviewing A/B Test Results and Implementing CRO

Once the test wraps, review the numbers. Conversions may be your ultimate concern; they shouldn’t be your only focus. There are many signals upstream of a conversion action that reveal the effect of an A/B test. 

Did the time-on-page decrease significantly? That could be a sign that visitor engagement suffered in one arm of the experiment.

How did the bounce rate of the page change? Does a heatmap reveal that people hovered their mouse over the element you changed? How far did users scroll down the page before and after the test? There are many such observations you can make that may inform your next A/B test iteration.  

When you do see a strong signal in your CRO test data, consider rolling it out sitewide. That way you can multiply the impact of what you learn from each test. 

If a test doesn’t give clear results, take it as an indicator to try a different variable or approach. Each test, whether the results are fuzzy or definitive, adds a layer of insight into what makes your visitors tick.

Conversion Rate Optimization Services

Feeling a bit overwhelmed with all that’s involved in performing A/B tests to increase conversion rates? DOM is here to help. 

Review Our Conversion Rate Optimization Services

Having a solid digital presence and giving people memorable experiences online is huge in how customers discover, evaluate, and eventually decide to buy from companies. 

As a digital marketing agency focused on boosting conversion rates, we’re all about making sure your brand looks its best on every screen—whether it’s on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. We design customer experiences that reflect the value they’ll get from working with you.

Whatever “conversion” means in your world—whether it’s more leads, sign-ups, or sales—we’re the conversion rate optimization agency here to lift those numbers.

Key Takeaways: How To Get More Website Leads Through CRO

• CRO goes beyond attracting traffic by focusing on improving the effectiveness of your website to drive conversions from existing visitors.
• Guessing about what works on a website can waste effort; A/B testing provides a data-driven way to learn what changes improve conversions.
• Formulating a CRO hypothesis involves using analytics to identify issues—such as low engagement or ignored calls-to-action—and testing possible solutions.
• Testing core site elements like headlines, forms, and calls-to-action can have a big impact on how visitors interact and convert.
• Reviewing A/B test results helps you implement winning changes sitewide and informs future testing, making each test a step towards better performance.

The post Stop Guessing, Start Testing — How To Get More Leads With Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Table of Contents

• User Experience in Digital Marketing
• Conversion Rate Optimization in Digital Marketing
• UX & CRO Work Together in Digital Marketing
• Core Elements of User Experience
• The Value of User Experience in Digital Marketing
• UX Best Practices for Digital Marketing
• Central Concepts of Conversion Rate Optimization
• Key Performance Indicators of CRO in Digital Marketing
• CRO Tactics in Digital Marketing
• The Intersection of UX and CRO in Digital Marketing
• Incorporating UX Principles into CRO Strategies Is Crucial for Digital Marketing Success
• Experience the DOM Difference
• Key Takeaways About UX and CRO for Digital Marketing

User Experience in Digital Marketing

User experience (UX) refers to the feeling someone has while interacting with something. In the world of digital marketing, we attend to the experience that users have on websites. Websites are where businesses display their wares online. A smooth, intuitive user experience is key to making your site an enjoyable place to be. There is an entire discipline of user experience design that focuses on the layout, navigability, usability, and accessibility of websites so as to create a pleasant experience.

Conversion Rate Optimization in Digital Marketing

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a core concept in website design that overlaps with and complements user experience. Changing the text, colors, buttons, or navigation scheme of a website are all changes that might be made in trying to get people to take a specific action, to convert. Conversion rate optimization is the practice of studying user behavior and then adjusting elements of a website to influence that behavior.

UX & CRO Work Together in Digital Marketing

UX and CRO intersect in their shared goal of enhancing user interactions to achieve business objectives. Good UX design provides an intuitive and pleasant website experience, which keeps people engaged. CRO builds on this foundation by analyzing user behavior to identify and implement changes that encourage users to take specific actions. When UX design is informed by CRO insights, the result is a user-friendly website that also effectively drives conversions. When UX and CRO form a productive, symbiotic relationship, customer satisfaction improves and so does the return on investment for marketing efforts, leading to sustainable online success.

Core Elements of User Experience

As we’ve been saying, UX is shorthand for the overall impression that a person has when interacting with a website. There are numerous elements that influence how people feel about and interact with a online interface:

Navigability — This element of user experience encompasses how fluidly people can find their way around a website. Can people quickly find the information they seek or take the action they desire? If so, then the website is very navigable.

Accessibility — Setting up a website so that any user, even those who are differently abled, can interact with the site is a principle of good accessibility. This means including alt text for images that can be interpreted by a screen reader and read aloud to someone who is vision-impaired, for instance.

Design — The aesthetic appeal of a website is discussed under the umbrella of design. Typography, color palette, visual hierarchy—these are design considerations that can cement brand identity while also contributing to an enjoyable user experience.

The Value of User Experience in Digital Marketing

Creating a good user experience is often essential to achieving business goals.

People who have a pleasant, smooth experience on your website are more likely to impute those same feelings to your product or service. Opportunities to provide customer satisfaction present themselves long before someone actually has your product in their hands. The initial landing page by which a user enters your site is your first chance to make a strong impression. Make it a good impression, an impression informed by quality user experience design.

Customer retention flows directly from customer satisfaction. Creating a website that people like to visit will help with first-time sales, and further that positive user experience can foster loyalty to your brand. Repeat customers often generate substantially higher customer lifetime value than one-time customers, so pay attention to what keeps people coming back to your site time after time.

An intelligently designed, user-friendly site tends to keep visitors engaged, which typically leads to reduced bounce rates. On a website with poor user experience design, people enter a page and can’t find what they’re looking for, so they bounce. They leave the site and move on to the next. A reduction in your sites’ bounce rate is a good indicator that you’ve improved the user experience on your site. Plus, lower bounce rates are often correlated with higher conversion rates.

When your business isn’t the only player in the market, a superior user experience can be the competitive advantage that sets you apart. Suppose you have to click through four levels of menus to even find the children’s shoes on a website, and then it’s another two sub-menus down before you find the section for soccer cleats (which Alex needs for Sunday’s game). While on a competitor’s site, the same cleats (at same price) are navigated to in two clicks. It’s clear that a poor user experience may put off a customer from returning to your site in the future.

UX Best Practices for Digital Marketing

Here are actionable insights to improve the potency of your digital marketing through quality user experience design:

• Clear Navigation: A site with clear, logical navigation helps users find information quickly and easily. Use well-labeled menus and a consistent structure.
• Responsive Design: Build your website with a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. Then test your site on a variety of devices, like smartphones (both Android and iOS) and tablets, to check whether everything looks okay across the many screen sizes and device configurations.
• Fast Load Times: Speed is crucial. Users expect pages to load quickly. Optimize images (by reducing them to less than 100kB), leverage browser caching, and use a content delivery network to improve load times. Read more about how to improve website performance with faster loading times for a better user experience.
• Intuitive Forms: Simplify forms by minimizing the number of fields and providing clear instructions. Use inline validation to help users correct errors in real-time. You want to minimize friction as much as possible at this crucial stage. You’ve compelled a user to consider giving you their information—don’t let poor UX foil a potential sale.
• Consistent Visual Design: Maintain consistency in fonts, colors, and button styles throughout your site. This consistency helps users understand and predict how to interact with your site.
• Feedback Mechanisms: Provide feedback to users once they’ve taken an action, such as when they’ve submitted a form or clicked a button. This can be in the form of confirmation messages, loading indicators, or error notifications. Small touches like these can help people understand what’s going on and feel like the website is catering to their needs.

Central Concepts of Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO is about getting people to convert, to do something you’d like them to do. It encompasses activities like studying user behavior on a website, surfacing actionable insights, and implementing changes to try to influence what action people take (or don’t take) on the site. For example, CRO is often conducted to get more sales, newsletter signups, or form fills. In digital marketing, the goal is to nudge users—through compelling text, outstanding colors, fluid navigation, etc—to do more than simply browse a website, but to take an action of significant business value.

See how we helped drive a 107% conversion rate increase for a machinery component reseller.

Key Performance Indicators of CRO in Digital Marketing

As you begin to make changes to your website’s user experience in an attempt to improve your sites’ conversion rate, it’s important to track your efforts. Here are KPIs that digital marketers use to quantify the efficacy of CRO efforts.

Let’s start with bounce rate. When a user enters a site, doesn’t navigate to any other page, and then leaves, he is said (in CRO parlance) to have “bounced.” That is, the user went to the site, but bounced off without digging in beyond that initial page. This kind of behavior is often a sign that your website is not good at driving user action. Bounce rate is usually calculated by taking the number of bounces (sessions where the user visited only 1 page) and dividing it by the total number of sessions during a given period. So if your website registered 8 sessions on Thursday and 3 of those sessions were bounces, then Thursday’s bounce rate would be 37.5% ([3/8=0.375]x100=37.5%).

Average session duration is a metric about the amount of time that a person spends on your website. Generally a longer session duration suggests that users are finding value in your content. They are perusing your website for many minutes, rather than just scanning a page for a few seconds and leaving (bouncing). If you find that your average session duration is less than a minute, it may be time to invest in building out your products and services page with robust copy. Craft compelling descriptions of why customers should choose you over the competition.

Alongside how long people spend on a website, how many pages they visit is another metric that digital marketers monitor: pages per session. A high number of pages per session can indicate a site that is intuitively structured and entices people to explore.

It is also useful to know what pages are those from which users leave the site. A page with a high exit rate means that a particular page is the last page that people view before navigating away from the site. Pages with a high exit rate present opportunities for optimization. Such pages can probably benefit from internal linking (which provides related content for people to read) or a clearer call to action (like an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter).

Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of what percentage of visitors to a page click a link on said paid, thus clicking-through to other content. A strong CTR signals that the page drives people to read more content or take action.

The time has now come for the bottom-line metric of CRO, which is conversion rate itself. Bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session, exit rate, and CTR are all micro indicators of the macro metric that matters most. Digital marketers pay close attention to all of these stats, and make changes to try to improve them, but at the end of the day getting more conversions is what matters. Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors to a site or page.

A cybersecurity company came to us wanting to drive more free trial registrations. See how we helped drive a 2,800% increase in registrations.

CRO Tactics in Digital Marketing

Consider the following actionable tactics that you can try in order to improve the CRO of your website.

Call to Action (CTA)
Be explicit about the action you want people to take. Make it clear how they can take that action. For instance, create a button that says, “Get My Free Proposal.” This lets people know exactly what they will get (the free proposal) and how to get it (by clicking). Phrasing CTAs from the perspective of the user can be effective, so you can also try statements like, “I’d Like an Obligation-Free Consultation.” Using “My” or “I” subtly draws the reader into understanding that they have the power to take action.

Streamlined Checkout Process
Make checking out as simple as you can. That means eliminating any step that isn’t absolutely necessary to the transaction. Think about it—would you rather answer a dozen questions across several checkout pages, or enter a few essential pieces of info on a single page to complete your order. If your checkout process is long and meandering, people are likely dropping off along the way. That’s revenue you’re losing out on due to poor CRO, not due to the quality of your offering.

Trust Signals
Add signs of your experience and integrity in the industry. These elements are peripheral to your direct marketing efforts, yet they often have a tremendous effect on CRO. Make sure your website includes testimonials from satisfied clients, reviews from customers, or any rankings you’ve achieved in business publications. Star-ratings are a good visual. Google, for instance, provides their customer reviews in the form of a star-rating and any message that the customer cares to provide. You should also consider linking to review platforms like G2 where prospective customers can review other people’s experiences with your business.

Personalization
Adjust the user experience to appeal to a particular visitor’s behavior on your site. Provide personalized recommendations, dynamic content, and customized offers based on what pages they’ve visited and what actions they’ve taken on your site.

Mobile Optimization
Ensure that your website is built with responsive design. More and more people go online from their phone rather than sitting down in front of a computer. So it’s important that your site is set up to look good and load quickly on mobile devices.

Retargeting Campaigns
Re-engage with people who have shown some interest in your site. Retargeting refers to advertising efforts that reach people with specific messaging or offers based on how they have interacted with your business in the past. One common way that companies retarget is to send ads to people who have abandoned a shopping cart. Try offering a 5% discount for them to complete their order within a week. Or show them items that people also buy based off of what’s been left in the cart. You can also retarget people based on certain pages of your site that they’ve visited, like sending more information about your baseball gloves when they’ve visited that section of your sporting goods site. Retargeting gives advertisers the opportunity to present targeted messaging to engaged visitors.

Ask for User Feedback
Provide ways for users to tell you what they think about using your site. This is sometimes done with a survey that is presented to visitors after they complete a CTA or as they are attempting to navigate away from your site. You may not often get responses, but the insight you do get from vocal visitors can be invaluable. You truly get an outsider’s perspective, which can reveal rough points in the user experience that are harming conversion rates. Chatbots are becoming more and more popular to collect user feedback, too.

A/B Testing
Run tests to compare the impact of changes you make to your website. A/B testing is an overarching idea that pervades all elements of CRO. When you try any of the actionable tactics here to improve your CRO, you need to compare performance between pages or between time periods to quantify their impact. With this kind of A/B testing, you can begin to surface insights into customer behavior. For example, do more people click on a button that says “Get Our CRO Guide” or “Show me how to drive people to take action”? Do people respond to images? Does a larger font size get more people to convert? Offering a deal for just a limited time might drive more engagement than an open-ended one. Testing opportunities abound in CRO.

There are many ways to optimize your website for conversion rate. We’ve presented the major CRO tactics that have helped our clients succeed at Direct Online Marketing. It all comes down to reducing friction. How can you make the customer experience as smooth and intuitive as possible? You want to seamlessly guide visitors to take the action you want—whether that’s providing their email in exchange for a whitepaper or providing their dollars in exchange for your products and services.

The Intersection of UX and CRO in Digital Marketing

UX and CRO are closely linked, both working to enhance the user journey and prompt specific actions. UX aims to create an intuitive, enjoyable experience for users, while CRO focuses on turning that positive experience into measurable actions.

When a site is user-friendly, visitors can easily find what they need, reducing friction and frustration. This seamless experience sets the stage for CRO to fine-tune elements like CTAs, form designs, and product descriptions—all contributing to driving higher conversion rates.

Incorporating UX Principles into CRO Strategies Is Crucial for Digital Marketing Success

Designing a site with user-friendly principles boosts satisfaction, making users more likely to convert. Satisfied users are more engaged and tend to trust the brand more. The synergy between UX and CRO enhances user satisfaction.

Reduced friction is a major priority in digital marketing. Improvements in UX, such as intuitive navigation and fast load times, remove barriers that might hinder conversions. Less friction means a smoother path to completing desired actions and therefore better conversion rates.

Good UX builds trust by presenting a professional and reliable online presence. Trust signals, like clear privacy policies and customer testimonials, make users more comfortable converting. So demonstrating trust and credibility can go a long way toward improving CRO.

Combining UX research with CRO analytics provides a deep understanding of user behavior. This comprehensive view allows for more precise optimizations that address both usability and conversion challenges. Monitoring the effects of various changes you make to your site is your path to surfacing data-driven insights. This is what A/B testing is all about: incrementally revealing improvements that bring compounding benefits to your conversion rates.

Sustainable growth is a valuable result of investing in your site’s UX and CRO. Focusing on how people behave on your site ensures that optimizations are user-centric and sustainable, rather than short-term fixes. This approach leads to long-term growth and higher retention rates.

By integrating these principles, businesses can create a seamless and effective user journey that not only delights visitors but also drives conversions, ensuring sustained success.

Experience the DOM Difference

Pretend you’ve never heard of your business. Now go to your website. Is it clear both what you do and what action you’d like a visitor to take from just a moment’s glance at your homepage?

The user experience and conversion rate optimization experts at Direct Online Marketing can help. Our digital marketing agency has learned from thousands of websites. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Drop us a line if you’d like a free consultation of UX and CRO opportunities on your site.

Key Takeaways About UX and CRO for Digital Marketing

• User experience in digital marketing focuses on creating an intuitive, enjoyable interaction for users on websites, improving satisfaction and retention.
• Conversion rate optimization aims to influence user behavior by adjusting website elements like text, colors, and navigation to drive specific actions.
• UX and CRO intersect by enhancing user interactions to achieve business objectives, with good UX design providing a foundation for CRO strategies.
• Integrating UX principles into CRO strategies increases user satisfaction, reduces friction, builds trust, and provides data-driven insights for precise optimizations.
• A symbiotic relationship between UX and CRO leads to improved customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and sustainable online success.

The post Where User Experience Meets Conversion Rate Magic appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Tracking form submissions in Google Analytics can be tricky. We’ve seen multiple guides out there, yet many people are still confused regarding exact troubleshooting methods that apply across the board and are guaranteed to work.

Using the steps outlined below, we have yet to encounter a form that we couldn’t track in under 5 minutes.

To get this done efficiently, we have skipped over explaining the “why” for each method. All you have to do is follow along: Answer the following questions in order and follow the proceeding directions.

1. Have you tried GTM’s generic form tracker?
   1. Yes – Proceed to step #2 below if it didn’t work
   2. No – Proceed to the “Implement GTM Generic Form Tracker” section
2. When the form is submitted, does the URL redirect?
   1. Yes – Proceed to the “Track URL redirect upon form submission” section
   2. No – Proceed to step #3 below
3. Does a thank you message or unique html element appear upon form submission?
   1. Yes – Proceed to “Track appearance of unique confirmation text” section
   2. No – Proceed to step #4 below
4. Have you tried tracking Form Submission Button Clicks?
   1. Yes – Your blog post may be embedded in an iFrame
   2. No – Proceed to the “Track the form submit button click” section below

NOTE: You will need Google Tag Manager for each of the solutions below. If you haven’t already, head over to tagmanager.google.com and sign up for an account. You will need google tag manager for all of these solutions. For each solution below, we have created a preconfigured GTM container with the necessary code and settings already in place. All you need to do is import the container into your Tag Manager account (and update according to the specific instructions). If you are unsure how to import a container into GTM, please head over to our Google Tag Manager Recipe article and read the directions under the “How to Import a Container” section.

How to Test if Form Tracking is Working Correctly

1. In the same Google Chrome browser, navigate to the following in separate tabs:
   1. Your website property in Google Analytics
   2. Your Google Tag Manager workspace
   3. The page on your website that contains the form you would like to track
2. Click preview in the upper right hand corner of your GTM workspace
3. Navigate to the browser tab that contains the form you are trying to track. We recommend clearing your page cookies by pressing Ctrl+Shift+r (reloads the window). Fill out the form you want to track and submit it.
4. Switch to the tab containing your Google Analytics property
   1. Navigate to Real-Time > Events.
   2. You should see a window that looks similar to the image below:
5. If you implemented form tracking successfully, the submit event will show up in the table (see image below). Be patient, sometimes it takes a few moments for the event to populate.
   

Implement GTM Generic Form Tracker

The very first method you should use to track a form is the one that relies on GTM’s standard form submission trigger. This doesn’t work for every form, but we always give it a try because it does work well in most cases. To implement, follow these steps:

1. Download and import our pre-configured container: Form Tracker: Generic
2. Update your GA Settings Variable in your GTM workspace by navigating to Variables > GA Settings Variable > Variable Configuration > Edit Variable Configuration >
   1. Change the Tracking ID from UA-00000-00 to match your GA tracking ID. If you don’t know how to get your GA tracking ID, follow the instructions here.
3. This form trigger should now fire on all forms on your website. Test if form tracking is working correctly
   1. If that didn’t work for you, proceed to #2 in the table of contents above. If you do see the event appear in your Google Analytics, congratulations, you have successfully tracked submissions to your form (don’t forget to publish your GTM container). This solution will track forms on all pages of your website. If you would like the generic form tracker to only fire on specific forms, follow the directions in step #4 below.
4. If you only want to track forms on a specific page, try the following (Optional):
   1. Navigate to Triggers > Form Submission > Trigger Configuration > This trigger fires on > Enable this trigger when all of these conditions are true
      1. Change (.*) to the page path that contains the form you would like to track.

Track URL redirect upon form submission

If your form redirects to a new URL upon submission, try the following:

1. Import our preconfigured GTM container: Form Tracker – URL Redirect
2. In your GTM workspace, navigate to Triggers > Form Submission > Trigger Configuration > This trigger fires on
   1. Change “your-thank-you-page” to the page path that contains the form you would like to track.
3. Update your GA Settings Variable in your GTM workspace by navigating to Variables > GA Settings Variable > Variable Configuration > Edit Variable Configuration >
   1. Change the Tracking ID from UA-00000-00 to match your GA tracking ID. If you don’t know how to get your GA tracking ID, follow the instructions here.

Track appearance of unique confirmation text

If a unique thank you message or html element appears upon form submission, try the following:

1. Note: Sometimes you can track when a form is submitted based on an element that appears on the screen. If you see a thank you message or something of the sort, follow the steps below. Here is an example of a thank you message that appears on a form that we use this method to track:
   
2. Install the Get Unique CSS Selector plugin for Google Chrome. It will help you find a unique CSS selector for the element.
3. Fill out the form and click submit.
4. With the “Get Unique CSS selector” plugin turned on, hover over the thank you message. You should see something like the screenshot below:
   
5. Right click on the thank you message and select “Copy Unique Selector to Clipboard”
   
6. Download and import our preconfigured GTM container – Form Tracker – Unique Element Visibility
7. Navigate to Triggers > Form Submission > Trigger Configuration > Element Selector
   1. Replace “.copy-your-unique-selector-here” with the unique selector that you just copied to your clipboard.
8. Update your GA Settings Variable in your GTM workspace by navigating to Variables > GA Settings Variable > Variable Configuration > Edit Variable Configuration >
   1. Change the Tracking ID from UA-00000-00 to match your GA tracking ID. If you don’t know how to get your GA tracking ID, follow the instructions here.

Track the form submit button click

Note: This technically doesn’t track form submissions, just clicks on the button to submit the form. Depending on your needs, that may or may not be an issue. The number of times that a submit button is clicked often does not exactly match up with the number of times a form is successfully submitted; this is because users often click submit after entering data in the wrong format or missing required fields. To make the data as reliable as possible, we set the form submit trigger to only fire once per page per user. To track form submit button clicks, follow these instructions:

1. Install the Get Unique CSS Selector plugin for Google Chrome. It will help you find a unique CSS selector for the submit button.
2. With the “Get Unique CSS selector” plugin turned on, hover over the submit button. You should see something like the screenshot below:
   
3. Right click on the highlighted submit button and select “Copy Unique Selector to Clipboard”
   
4. Download and import our preconfigured GTM container: Form Tracker – Submit Button Click
5. Navigate to Triggers > All Page-views > Edit Trigger Configuration > This trigger fires on > Fire this trigger when an Event occurs and all of these conditions are true
   1. Change “.your-unique-css-selector-here” to the unique CSS selector that you copied to your clipboard above.
6. Update your GA Settings Variable in your GTM workspace by navigating to Variables > GA Settings Variable > Variable Configuration > Edit Variable Configuration
   1. Change the Tracking ID from UA-00000-00 to match your GA tracking ID. If you don’t know how to get your GA tracking ID, follow the instructions here.

The above methods for implementing form tracking in Google Analytics cover almost every single form you will come across. The rare exceptions to this are forms that are embedded in an iframe.

The post Track ANY Form in Google Analytics in Under 5 Minutes (Updated August 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

This article isn’t about how to optimize your page for conversions — see the list at the end for links to our guides. This post aims to answer the question you might ask before you even get started: why is conversion rate optimization so important?

A conversion is simply an action that you want a visitor to do. This often means a sale, but not always. Sometimes, you want sign-ups for your webinars. Maybe you have a newsletter and you want visitors to subscribe. No matter what kind of conversion you’re looking for, the goal is the same: to make your visitors more likely to take the action you want.

There are two ways you can increase the number of conversions generated by your website. The first, and simplest way, is by offering something valuable. As in the video, below, if you promised a truck full of gold bars in exchange for an email address, you would have more conversions than you would know what to do with.

Since you aren’t going to be offering to make someone an overnight multimillionaire by clicking your sign-up link, you have to look at the other main way to generate conversions: making it as easy as possible for your users to take that action you want them to take. We call that “reducing friction.” Here are three reasons why it’s so important:

A little goes a long way

The best argument in favor of CRO is how little changes can lead to big results. Even if the improvement you make is minor, you can still see huge benefits. For instance, if making a small alteration to your page makes for one more conversion a week, that’s 52 more conversions a year than you had before. Chances are, your efforts will be rewarded with even more than that.

Optimization makes your website better

When we say you need to optimize, that’s what we mean: we want you to make your site more useful to your customers. Not only will conversion rate optimization make your site more usable, but it will also focus your audience exactly where you want them to go. It might help to think of every conversion as a transaction, no matter what is being exchanged — money can be exchanged for goods and services but it can also be as simple as submitting an email address or filling out a form. By optimizing your pages for conversion, you are also optimizing them for usability.

Time isn’t money, but it sure is valuable

When your kitchen knife gets dull, you sharpen it; you don’t throw it out and buy a new knife. This is a good way to look at CRO — improving what you already have and maximizing resources you can use today.

Here’s something you can do right now

One big obstacle that we see often is found in the forms we ask our users to fill out. One thing you can do right now to make your users more likely to convert is to reduce the friction they encounter when they fill out your form. How much information do you absolutely need from your user? Simply reducing the number of questions you ask in a form will give you an immediate bump. Try it now!

Speaking of forms, fill ours out to get a free, no-obligation consultation with the experts at DOM.

More about this subject:

• CRO: Why More Traffic Doesn’t Equal More Sales
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• Beginner’s Guide to CRO

The post Why Conversion Rate Optimization Should Be Your Number One Priority appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Conversion rate optimization is the use of analytics and user feedback to improve your website. CRO can be used to improve any element on your website that’s significant to your business. These are often called key performance indicators (KPIs). Conversion is just another way of saying “a sale,” if you’re selling something, or a consultation if you’re offering a visitor one — a conversion is a customer doing what you want them to do.

To put it another way, it helps to increase the percentage of website visitors who become customers. In this quick beginner’s guide, I will offer you some tips to help you get testing! 

Avoid Blind Testing

When first starting out with CRO it can be quite a daunting task to figure out what exactly you should test. While you might be able to guess at certain aspects of the site that could use improvements and you might be right occasionally it’s best to use tools that help you address these issues.

One such tool is a heat map. This allows you to record user sessions on your site and see the areas that are “hot” (receive clicks/activity) and the areas that are not and could use some improvements.

With the data from these tools, you can start coming up with various ways in which to improve your website and correct the issues that are present. For instance, if you are trying to drive traffic to your request-a-quote page and that area of your site is cold, then you know you need to reposition the link in a more active area of the site.

Recording software, another useful type of tool, allows you to record all of the mouse movements that are made on a website and to play them back in video format. These are powerful tools that can show you exactly how a user interacts with your site and their process from page to page. This gives you the ability to see where users may be having navigation issues, ultimately helping you improve the layout of your site and make it more intuitive to the user.

A QUICK GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of what those optimization tests mean, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same things.

• CRO: Conversion rate optimization is the subject of this post and a great way to maximize your content
• A/B Test: a method of web development where half of your audience sees one version of a page and the other half a different version, usually with only one element changed. The goal is to find out which one performs better
• A/A Test: a test between two identical pages
• Multivariate test: a test between two pages that feature multiple differences instead of just one
• Margin of error: the threshold of statistically insignificant difference. A percentage difference greater than the margin of error is the only kind you should use
• Statistical significance: if the results of your test are too small to be conclusive, or are within the margin of error, you should not rely on them

TRY AN A/A TEST FIRST

We’re about to get into A/B testing, but CRO best practices have evolved to include a brief A/A test first. An A/A test is when you deploy identical versions of the same page and then analyze the metrics. If you see a massive difference between results (more than a small statistical variance), then you know there’s something amiss with your reporting software.

Test for Significance

Once you have created a solid hypothesis it’s time to put it to the test. After setting up an A/B or multivariate test it’s important to let it run long enough to generate enough traffic to determine a clear result of statistical significance.

If you run a test for only a short period of time your results may not actually reflect the true impact of the changes. For example, if you made changes to a site and the next week you get conversions, while it’s likely that the changes caused the conversions there is still the possibility of that just being a good week for sales regardless of the changes made. When the test is allowed to run for a longer period it becomes much less likely that the results are due simply to chance.

The usual benchmark for statistical significance in CRO is 90%. This means that there is a 90% chance that the effects of our experiment would be less extreme if the control and experimental groups were the same. Another way to think about it is that there is a 10% chance that we would get the same result if the control and experimental groups were identical.

WHAT DO I TEST?

With so many elements that make up a web page, you might look at what you already have and wonder what, if anything, you can change. The goal is to try something that you might think will lead to more conversions, after all, so don’t be afraid to make a big change, like the main image or headline. You might even try changing a product description or service explanation. Another good test to make is how buttons are arranged and where your calls to action are located. This is your opportunity to see what will actually move the needle on your business’s online efforts. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Main or “hero” image
• Headline
• Product description
• Service explanation
• Supplemental images
• Button labels and placement
• A video instead of an image
• An image instead of text
• A sidebar (or removing the sidebar)
• A call to action

Test Big

While A/B tests are very useful for changing one element at a time, it can take time to complete multiple changes when one A/B test can take 4 weeks or more to complete.

Multi-variate testing allows you to make adjustments to various aspects of the webpage and test them all at once. This is useful when changing multiple elements with the same end goal and can eliminate the need for multiple A/B tests. When multi-variate testing with a program such as Optimizely, the program will take the various element changes and test them to find the best combination for improving the page for a given goal.

Before running a multivariate test it’s important to find the sample size that you will need for each variation to reach a statistically significant result. You will need a decent amount of traffic as the test will be splitting traffic between the various elements you made changes to. If traffic to the page you would like to test is low, consider using an A/B test instead of a multivariate test.

Constantly Test New Changes & Final Thoughts

Once you have run a test on your site it’s important to keep going. Just because one test was successful and provided an increase to your conversion rate does not mean that the page is now perfect.

There is almost always room for improvement on a webpage; continual testing is the best way to ensure that you are constantly using the most effective page that you can. Test as many variations of different page elements as you can to find the best page layout for your audience.

If you have any questions, or if you would like to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation, get in touch.

The post Beginner’s Guide to CRO (Updated May 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Many marketers see improving traffic volume as the first step in improving ROI. The relationship between traffic and sales can feel directly correlated. With more eyeballs should come more sales, they say.

The problem is, “they” aren’t always right. Worse still, accepting such an approach as a mathematical certainty often leads to wasted efforts.

Why?

Because the driving factor in website sales remains conversion rate optimization. While traffic volume certainly plays a critical role in your website’s conversion rate optimization strategy, it often receives too much weight. Website owners labor over increasing the number of visitors to their site, rather than focusing on the quality of those users.

So let’s discuss some more potent conversion rate optimization factors. But first, let’s examine why trying to drive a lot of traffic could negate conversion rate optimization efforts.

The Downside of High-Volume Website Traffic

If you have the traffic, you probably feel you are in a position to make money. That’s typically true, but it is also important to understand that mo’ traffic equals mo’ problems, also.

• High-volume website traffic increases server costs
• Increased traffic may necessitate a content delivery network (CDN)
• Heavy website traffic can strain load times and cause high-converting users to back out
• High-volume website traffic limits landing page design opportunities
• High-volume website traffic also means more chances for hackers to harm your site, particularly with Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks

The Basic Flaw with High-Volume Traffic and Conversions

If high-volume traffic equated to increased sales directly, ad buyers would purchase advertising in volume. But they don’t; they filter traffic down to geos, gender, age, job title, and a slew of other demographics as a way to make money. Otherwise, they’d lose money on huge volumes of traffic hitting their landing page that doesn’t want to buy.

If you indiscriminately buy traffic, you’ll likely lose your ad spend. You must qualify your leads. Even if you happen to encounter large referral traffic volume, if you can’t cash in on the leads, you’ll eat away at your margins.

So what does all of this mean? This means that you should seek to improve lead quality rather than website traffic. It also means you should study conversion rate optimization until you can’t hold your eyes open. If your site is properly optimized for conversions and you focus on traffic quality, you’ll dramatically increase revenue.

How to Improve Conversion Rates

So now you’ve decided to focus less on increasing website traffic and more on improving conversions with the current traffic. That’s gold. But fear not, following this section, we’ll certainly tackle increasing the quality of inbound leads.

Make sure CTA is above the fold: Whatever product you’re selling, make sure the website visitor can see it. This CRO tip might change if we are talking about blog posts, where a CTA might be found towards the end. All the same, it is always a good idea to make sure landing pages host CTAs above the fold.

Make headlines succinct: Headlines should tell the visitor exactly what they are in for, clearly and precisely.

Leverage urgency: Timing is everything, particularly when time is running out. Visitors who feel that your offer is an urgent, time-restricted one may be more motivated to convert.

Create a value proposition: Do you have a value proposition? If not, you’re messaging to potential buyers probably reeks of inconsistency. Create a value proposition for website visitors. What value does the consumer receive in exchange for buying or signing up for your offer? Craft sales messages according to this. Test/optimize those value propositions.

Provide testimonials: People trust products with great reviews; they turn their noses up at those with none. Leverage a few notable happy consumer reviews on your landing page to help validate the quality of your offer.

Keep images on point: If you’re using the same old stock images as everyone else, you’ll seem inauthentic. Showing real people using your product, or real employees in your real offices creates trust between yourself and the website visitor.

Decrease form field requirements (beware, this can lower lead quality – see next section for details): More form fields mean more hurdles. Asking a website visitor to do too much can turn them off. You might get more leads using fewer forms.

Provide value: In the end, some visited your website looking for value. If they landed on a blog article, the value is found in your article’s guidance and solutions. If you offer poor content, why would anyone sign up for your newsletter or purchase a recommended product?

Match offers with content: Don’t just throw crap at a wall and hope something sticks. Create content that solves problems with your product/service solutions.

How to Increase Inbound Lead Quality

Notice, our subheader doesn’t read “how to increase traffic.” Instead, we want to focus on increasing the quality of inbound leads.

Filter all ad buys as much as possible: As stated prior, no competent ad buyer buys purely on volume. You must filter your traffic as precisely as you can. Otherwise, you’re wasting ad spend and server bandwidth.

Increase form field requirements: Remember in the prior section when I said you could increase conversions by lowering form field requirements? You can. But you can also harm lead quality when you use fewer form fields. Why? Because form fields help qualify traffic. For example, if you are an analytics service provider that needs to sign $20k-per-month contracts to stay solvent, then you would benefit from having a form field that asks “How large is your company?” with an annual revenue dropdown.

Stay SEO-keyword focused: Again, don’t throw crap at the wall with your SEO efforts. Use SEO software such as SEMRush to extract profitable keywords and build blog posts and landing pages around them.

More blogs, more traffic: Some may deem this hearsay, but the fact is, the more blog posts you create, the more traffic you’ll get.

Collect emails: Email marketing creates sales as well as any other medium out there. Add a newsletter signup form to your site and send out helpful content on a weekly basis.

Encourage content sharing: If someone enjoys your content and offers, they likely know other people who will share their sentiments. Make sure your content is shareable.

Retarget: The best inbound traffic you can receive is from those familiar with your brand. If someone’s already engaged with your content but failed to accept your offer, you want to make sure your offer finds them again. Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and Google Ads all offer the ability to leverage pixels for this exact purpose. Retargeting increases traffic, but that traffic is highly qualified as a potential buyer.

If You Experience High Volume, Implement Conversion Rate Optimization on the Fly

You should always be optimizing your website for the sake of earning more revenue. But what happens if your blog article gets shared on a major Sub-Reddit, or by a huge website, and your traffic explodes?

Just because high-volume traffic doesn’t always equate to increased revenue doesn’t mean it never does.

You should look to optimize the landing page that’s experiencing the heavy traffic load. Here’re some CRO factors to consider:

Improve/Test CTAs. Your calls to action are vital for lead collection and sales. If a huge influx of traffic is coming in, you might be able to optimize the landing page that’s taking on the traffic. This can allow you to improve your chances of increased revenue.

Check page load times. You can check that specific page’s load times as well as your site load times using Google Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix. If the page experiencing high volume traffic becomes sluggish, expect people to back out of your page. If load times are getting out of control, try leveraging a CDN such as Cloudflare. They offer free plans that can bail your site out of load time catastrophe.

Conclusion

High traffic does not equate to increased revenue. Instead, focus on conversion rate optimization for your current traffic. As well, work on increasing quality inbound leads to your website. Doing so can help drive revenue.

The post CRO: Why More Traffic Doesn’t Equal More Sales appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Consider Your USP (Unique Selling Point)

To create an effective landing page, you have to consider your USP. What makes what you have to offer unique and different? Conveying your USP includes everything from your use of media and messaging and your call-to-action, to how you develop a relationship that is rooted in trust with your potential or existing customer.

Engage Your Audience

The instant someone looks at your landing page; they need to immediately understand what sets you apart from the rest of the competition. You should have a bold presence, while at the same time featuring content that is engaging, easy-to-understand, and quick to read—and that drives the visitor to a greater action.

Your content flow should include:

• A quick and punchy main headline – “Our company is awesome.”
• A short supporting headline – “Here’s some clarification on why we’re awesome.”
• A reinforcement statement further down the page – “Just reminding you that we’re awesome.”
• A call to action – “Click here to experience our awesomeness.”

Make Use of Appealing Media

Impactful visuals attract attention, so it helps to have compelling media in the form of images or a video on your landing page. Try to avoid stock photography if possible and instead use imagery or videos that are authentic to your brand and business. It’s not always easy to obtain those unique visuals, but the payoff is well worth it. When showing your actual product or service in action, bounce rates reduce and time spent on your landing page increases considerably.

Have a Clear Call-to-Action?

Your visitor has to understand what you want them to do after they come to your landing page. You need a call-to-action that is clearly communicated and easy to execute. Also consider the amount of information on your landing page; it may be worth featuring several calls-to-action at strategic intervals.

Build Trust?

Consumers need to know your brand is trustworthy before they commit to making a purchase or using your service. This means you need to fulfil several trust indicators if you want to win them over and win their business.

• Social Proof – Genuine customer testimonials with names and photos are beneficial.

• Industry Accreditations – If your industry is regulated and/or requires certifications, display the appropriate badges or certificate numbers on your landing page.
• Third-Party Badges – Using trusted third parties (PayPal, for example) can significantly increase consumer trust.
• Privacy Policy – Feature a clearly communicated policy on how you’re tracking and managing consumer data.

Getting your brand’s website or landing page on point isn’t always easy on your own. At C-leveled, we have a team of experts waiting to help you authentically convey who you are so visitors are compelled to buy-in to what you’re selling. Give us a shout!

The post The Must-Have Elements of an Effective Landing Page appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

For example, a site owner may prioritize creating new content, hoping to increase the site’s relevance and to increase user engagement. Time spent creating new content is time not spent optimizing landing pages. If your site has inbound traffic from search, you need to pay attention to the optimization health of your landing pages.

So let’s break down some concepts:

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page is any page on your website that aims to convert a lead. (This feels remedial, I know.)

A landing page is a page where a consumer “lands” following a click. The page typically offers a product or lead opportunity. Often, a landing page is simple and to the point, so as not to risk distracting the reader from your prime objective. Most landing pages aim to get the reader to convert; this is what we will focus on.

A blog post used for lead generation, for example, which collects emails and phone numbers, can serve as a landing page. I make this distinction because sometimes blog posts are themselves landing pages, when those blog posts attempt to generate some sort of conversion. These days, many blog posts feature such lead generation forms.

What we want to understand is how to optimize a landing page to drive more conversions.

That is, how do we craft landing pages that increase leads, sales, or phone calls. With landing page optimization, we harness data-driven decision-making as a foundation for discovery.

The Basics Of Optimizing Landing Pages

You don’t know anything.

While that might be difficult to digest, the end result is that you understand your landing page optimization process begins as a blank slate. You seek to increase customers and sales; that process begins with your knowledge of your space. Your awareness and instincts are on your side; they will serve you well in the early stages of landing page optimization.

So let’s begin there.

Use Your Instincts to Design Your Landing Page

You begin by creating a landing page that reflects what you think will convert. But in doing so, you don’t become a slave to your ego. Many of you have already completed part of this step. Many site owners develop a landing page based purely on instincts. But others build a landing page based on what the competition creates. In the second case, the belief is that if another site is spending advertising dollars on a landing page, it probably works.

Either scenario is a starting point you’ve potentially breached already.

Here’s the thing—in the case where you build a landing page based on someone else’s design, you save time. But you also, therefore, gamble that someone else truly tested and optimized their landing page. What might shock you to learn is that oftentimes, landing page optimization takes a backseat to other initiatives. Few site owners spend money on a page that loses money (at least not for long), but many run landing pages that aren’t optimal.

In the second case, you fly by the seat of your creative pants. The risk, of course, is that you badly miss the mark. But, you don’t risk your landing page becoming another replication in a long line of untested landers.

So, which scenario is the basis of your current landing page? Understanding how you got to where you are impacts decisions through the landing page optimization journey.

Divide Your Landing Page Into Optimization Components

What elements of your landing page can be altered, changed, or manipulated to encourage a change in consumer behavior?

Let’s define and organize those.

Here are the primary elements of landing pages that influence consumer behavior:

• Design
• Copy
• Headlines (I separate this from copy)
• Calls to Action (CTA)
• Page Commotion
• Functionality, Load Times
• Images

All of these components interact with one another. But possessing this list allows us to classify our testing strategy. Because what would landing page optimization be without A/B testing?

Your landing page most likely comprises all of the above components. You either invented them or copied them. In either case, you know you want the ultimate result to be a more impactful funnel. So you’ll need to make small changes to each component and log the changes and compare those results.

So now let’s create a plan for each.

The Process For Optimizing Landing Pages

To begin, shall we review our current process?

The worst landing page optimization strategy is the one that’s most commonly deployed. Here it is:

“Ugh, my landing page isn’t converting.”

“Maybe it’s the blue background? Or maybe the call to action on the button sucks? Or maybe I should just go without any images at all?”

“I’m gonna do them all. Let’s shake things up.”

It’s easy to not want to act as a bystander while sales and leads are down. Stress encourages us to become reactive. When it comes to landing page optimization, being reactive and impatient is the enemy of improvement.

In the above example, too many items are manipulated to understand which value changes influence better or worse results.

The takeaway…

A solid landing page optimization process tests variables within each property against themselves. For example, if we suspect the red color background is too aggressive, we change it to a softer blue. But we change no CTAs or any other portion of the page. Then, we either A/B test, or we allow the soft blue to run full-time and compare it against previous results. So long as the traffic source remains the same, we should learn whether the background color causes any change in behavior. If we discover that the variable change results in different effects, we test colors until we find the highest converting landing page color.

After that, we move on to another landing page element.

In this way, we build on knowledge and understanding regarding what page elements move the needle.

Now, let’s explore landing page optimization elements more deeply. For simplicity’s sake, we will only refer to split-testing. But just know, you can multi-variant test these elements. It’s just a more complicated undertaking.

Create Landing Page Design For UX

Design matters. Particularly for user experience. In the modern web, less is more. While every page element is worth testing, it’s unlikely that extravagant design will win the day. Look no further than Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, and Apple.com, for examples of content displayed in intelligent UX.

Creating a pleasant user experience impacts lead generation more than pretty designs. When you design to design, you lose. When you design to convert, you win. Design with the customer in mind, not your tastes.

Be Simple

Your landing page has one goal—convert leads/sales. Wherever your design strays from this path, it heads toward landing page dystopia. All elements of your landing page design should harness the funnel strategy. Anything else is just waste.

Monitor Length of Landing Page

A simple landing page might be a page so small and to the point that no one needs to scroll. But it could be so informational that it allows for lengthy scrolling. Depending on your product or service, either might be appropriate. A medical site might need to provide information on doctors, studies, and consumer reviews as part of the sales funnel. While a company that’s promoting the opening of a new restaurant might only need a brief amount of copy.

No matter the nature of your service or product, you can test length against itself. Maybe your landing page length distracts people and they never end up converting. Maybe your landing page length feels uninformative, so you need to offer more meat. You can test these elements against one another.

Landing Page Colors

Website colors matter. Readability matters. If the color of your landing page makes it difficult to read the text, you might lose leads. Who wants to strain their eyes to read about sofas? Likewise, colors influence emotion.

A neuroscientist by the name of Antonio Damasio carried out studies in the 1990s that proved human brains respond emotionally different depending on the color. You can read more about his work here. Damasio explored what’s known as color psychology. It’s a complex concept and one that’s often misunderstood.

What color psychology isn’t?

Your taste. What you like. What’s pretty to you. What your happy hour friend thinks “looks sharp.”

We don’t live in the 1990s anymore. We sit on an arsenal of testable elements. If it’s on the web, it can be tested. For that reason, let’s not talk best landing page colors. The data determines which colors perform the best on a given landing page.

Kyle Deming, founder of WojoDesign, believes no landing page design should go untested.

“When designing landing pages, there are certainly a number of design principles you should try to follow. Keep it visually interesting, use concise & direct language, etc. However, the only way to know for sure what design, layout, and content is effective is to test. That’s why we recommend using a tool like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to conduct A/B testing on landing page projects whenever possible.” Deming told us.

“Landing pages are perfect opportunities for A/B testing. All good landing pages will have one or more measurable goals you are tracking. Plus, in most cases you are driving a consistent flow of traffic directly to each landing page. These factors make it very easy to setup valid A/B test experiments that help you learn what visitors respond to.

By all means, you should keep design principles in mind when creating your landing pages. But don’t forget to test these critical pages to make sure you are getting the best return on investment.” He continued.

Landing Page Headlines

Readers will interact with landing page headlines before almost anything else. People skim headlines hoping to find the section most relevant to them. The landing page copy, which follows this section, typically complements the headline.

Let’s think of the reader’s process as such:

1. View page
2. See visual headlines
3. Find headline that pertains to pain point
4. Read supporting copy
5. Interact with CTA button or link or form

Did you read this entire article, or did you scroll to the headline that felt relevant to your need?

Headlines should be to the point and on point. Healthy headlines help improve the odds that someone will continue reading your landing page. Headlines should clearly state what the offer is about. Because the text has a larger presence, less is more. Every word should be meaningful.

You should test headline vs. headline.

Landing Page Copy Creates Value

Your landing page copy may be crushing your lead potential. It happens all the time.

First, let it be known, our use of the word “copy” should be understood as all words outside of headlines and CTA. Sure, those landing page elements are indeed, copy, but for landing page optimization testing purposes, we prefer such distinction be made.

Think of copy as the non-header font. Typically, this is the meat of your offer. Why should someone put in their credit card, email, or phone number?

Create a Value Proposition

Your copy needs to create a value proposition. If someone clicked on your landing page, read the headlines and viewed the images, they are ripe to convert. But that means the copy needs to be on point. That copy must convey a reason to convert to a customer. This means the copy entices lead generation and sales through value proposition.

Value proposition conveys a promise to the consumer.

The value proposition can and should be tested. Your product or service might feature a slew of value propositions. Maybe you need to include all the value props, such as money savings and life improvements. Or maybe a single value proposition wins leads. You can test one value proposition vs another value proposition. You can test how you pitch the same value proposition.

Improve Landing Page CTA’s

A powerful call to action remains the lifeblood of all offers. It doesn’t matter what the offer is, without a call to action that wins, the offer likely fails.

A landing page call to action displays as links, on buttons, or surrounding forms. Wherever you need an action to take place, a CTA should exist.

Here are some examples of calls to action:

• Download today
• Join now
• Time is running out, sign up today
• Be happy starting today
• I’m ready!
• Be better
• Lose weight

The list of CTA potential is endless. Therefore, landing page optimization involving CTA remains the most expansive.

To test landing page CTA, begin by creating a massive list of potential CTAs. By crafting 30 CTAs, you enable yourself to deploy split-testing or multi-variant testing over time. The landing page CTA serves to influence lead conversions as much as anything. That probably feels a bit odd considering CTAs often amount to few characters. But if you can’t provoke an action, your landing page fails.

Avoid Landing Page Distractions

Your landing page serves a single purpose—convert a lead. So why would you want to distract the potential lead from converting?

It happens more than you think. Distracting potential leads is one of the worst landing page optimization infractions around.

How does this happen?

The most common distraction is site navigation. On modern websites, header navigation deploys on each page. Such uniformity inspires a consistent site journey for the reader. But it can distract from a landing page’s mission to convert a sale.

Landing pages primarily used in advertising should remove the navigation, but keep recognizable logos.

Other distractions include:

Information overload: Don’t talk past the sale. Don’t give the reader more copy than they need or is useful.

Don’t spread information thin: Be precise in what you want the reader to do, don’t distract them with lots of options. They are on a single journey to convert as a customer for your site, not explore everything you can think of to offer.

Don’t overdesign: Their eyes need to be drawn to calls to action, not dancing gifs.

In terms of testing landing page distractions, that’s a tough one. Your page should innately be distraction-free. So you shouldn’t be testing the addition of distractions.

Landing Page Load Times, Functionality

Slow loading landing pages lose leads. These days, people don’t wait for web pages to build out and load. This isn’t a landing page element we test because in no case would a slower-loading landing page win.

So let’s just talk load time optimization tips:

Avoid Landing Page Image Duds

You should never litter a landing page with useless images. Even images should serve purposes in the funnel. Some landing pages use text on images to encourage an action. Others use images for product or brand recognition purposes.

The web and images go together like peas and carrots. If your landing page design is on point, make sure to test your images. You can test image vs image, or image vs no image, or even image copy vs image copy.

Analytics Solutions For Optimizing Your Landing Pages

Now that we understand how the landing page optimization process should flow and what variables we should cross-test, let’s look at analytics software that helps us.

Clearly, Google Analytics remains a top optimization tool for a website. However, there are other tools that assist optimization efforts. Mike Criswell, Direct Online Marketing’s CRO expert, recommends a product called Hotjar. Here’s what he had to say.

“One tool you can utilize to generate solid test ideas is HotJar. This is a user feedback and behavior analytics tool that allows you to better understand the behavior of your website visitors through heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys.

Heatmaps allow you to visualize the activity of users to specific pages of your site. You are able to see where users clicked, how far they scrolled, and where their mouse has moved. With this data, you are able to determine which elements on your page are working and which ones could use some work. Heatmaps also allow you to track the combined scroll depth of users. This can give you insights on whether your page is too long or if certain elements need to be moved higher up the page.

Recordings might be my favorite aspect of HotJar. These allow you to watch user sessions across your site and see exactly where users get frustrated and abandon the site. Using these recording to find common pain points in your site and eliminating them can help you create a very user-friendly site and boost your conversion rate.

Surveys are another great tool. HotJar surveys are sent out asynchronously to users, and they are able to complete them on their own time. These work best when paired with an action such as a purchase, where you can ask questions such as “How would you rate your experience?” or “What almost stopped you from making a purchase?” You can also create on-page polls, which are similar to surveys, except that they will pop-up on the page after a user completes an action or attempts to exit the page.

Whether you use HotJar or another similar tool, I highly suggest utilizing heatmaps, session recording, and surveys to generate a well-thought-out testing hypothesis.”

Conclusion

Landing page optimization increases lead generation. Understanding the best optimization process along with influential landing page elements creates an ecosystem of continual learning and growth. There are tools to support your optimization efforts, including free analytics tools.

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the optimization of your site? Contact us for an audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• How To Crush Your Unminified JS And CSS Issues
• Readability Analysis: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

The post These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Effective ad copy not only promotes your brand, it also helps to build a bridge between your audiences and your business. You have to do more than just tell people what your product or service is and what it does, because your ad is in constant competition, not only with other ads, but with limited attention spans, digital overload, and life in general. This is about crafting compelling copy that creates connections with your target audiences and compels them to act in a meaningful way.

Here’s how you can take your advertising copy to the next level.

Create a Compelling Message

Effective advertising copy starts with developing a compelling message. Here are four things to consider when creating your advertising message.

• Know your audience  – If you enter a room full of people and you want to get one person’s attention, you would probably call out their name. In advertising, you want to get as close to this level of intimacy as you can. You have to know your audience and target your advertising to your ideal customer. Using the right combination of words and tone will make them feel like you’re talking directly to them about something they need, want, and will ultimately love.
  • Hook them and hang on to their interest – If you know and understand your target audience, you’ll be able to tailor a message that grabs their attention—but you have to keep it. That’s where your ‘hook’ comes in. This is a short phrase, maybe a tagline or a jingle, that entices your audience to continue engaging with your advertising content. You want to avoid gimmicks here—you need a hook that aligns with your brand and creates a lasting connection with your customers.

• Engage emotional triggers – The best ads create an emotional connection and impact. Advertising copy that pulls on the heartstrings or triggers emotions tend to be more memorable and are more likely to lead your audience to action.

• Consider your advertising medium – Customize your ad copy to suit your advertising medium. Some mediums, such as mobile or social media advertising, will require short, snappy copy that gets right to the point. Others, like magazines or advertisements on a podcast, for example, might give you some room to expand on your message.

Components of Advertising Copy

Create more effective advertising copy by following a formula that includes these four elements.

• Headline – This is usually the first thing that your audience will see when looking at an ad. Make it count. Consider pulling on heartstrings or using surprise and shock if it’s appropriate for your brand. The most important thing you can do with your headline is get right to the point. A good headline grabs attention immediately and encourages people to read more.
  • Subhead –Now that you’ve generated interest, this is your opportunity to add meaning to the headline and further draw in your audience. This is a good place to use a keyword, something that reinforces your brand values, or resonates with your customers’ pain points.
  • Body –This is where you’ll deliver the bulk of your advertising message. Communicate what you want your audience to know about your brand, service, or product.
  • Call-to-Action –It’s not enough to get your brand in front of people. You need to tell them what you want them to do now that they know about your brand, product, or service. If you don’t explicitly tell them to click on a link, subscribe to a mailing list, or pop into your store, don’t expect them to do so on their own.

Setting Advertising Objectives

Just like with any effective strategy, start with the end goal in mind. With advertising, the end goal is generating action from your audience. Whether you’re driven by increasing sales or boosting brand engagement with your target audiences, you have to hone your advertising copy to achieve your specific objectives.

To learn more about maximizing your advertising budget by creating more compelling advertising copy, reach out to C-leveled.

The post How to Write Effective Advertising Copy that Improves Conversion Rates appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.