8 Brilliant Tips That Boost Conversions
Did you know that about 40-50% of your site’s visitors leave after seeing just a single page?*
If half of your traffic disappears, it will take a heavy toll on your site’s conversion rate. Understanding why visitors leave and how they interact with your site is crucial to your business, and bottom line.
ClickTale has helped thousands of sites like yours gain insight into customer behavior by showing actual visitor sessions, mouse movements, clicks, scrolls and more.
Based on the feedback of many of our customers, as well as our own experiences, we have prepared a set of 8 ‘best practices’ to help you boost conversion rates and improve site usability.
We’d love to hear your feedback and about your experience using ClickTale to optimize your website.
*According to two independent surveys by Anil Batra and Panalysis.1. Visual-ize it
Images and movies are the easiest types of content to absorb quickly, and using them effectively can boost your readers’ attention span and encourage longer interactions.
Don’t forget to make images clickable! They will be clicked!
Schwan’s uses images superbly and, in fact, are one of the highest converting retail websites around.
Did you know?
People love looking at faces, especially the faces of attractive people…
Esquire.com uses lots of images to get visitor attention. How many faces can you count? We counted 9!
2. Read this and Win
Did we get your attention? Are your headlines working for, or against you? If your visitors aren’t immediately captured by your headlines, they’ll quickly leave your site. Don’t worry! You don’t need to be a world-class copywriter to come up with great headlines. With a little bit of practice, and some testing, you can hone your headline skills and grab the attention of your audience.
Ask yourself these short questions:
- Is the headline short and to the point?
- Is it worded in terms of benefits to the visitor (and not product features)?
Your headlines should encourage the visitor to continue reading, highlighting the benefits of doing so while keeping it believable and specific.
Apple.com website says so much with just a few well chosen words.
Want to learn more about writing headlines? Read about how to write the “World’s Best Headlines” in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
3. Put your Best Stuff up Top
Most readers never scroll down, and when they do the drop-off rate follows a distinct pattern (see graph below). In fact, page areas near the top of the page get about 17 times more exposure than the areas near the bottom of the page, according to a research report by ClickTale. This means that everything important or newsworthy, or any call to action, needs to be above the page fold.
The chart above shows where on the page visitors are paying attention, as they scroll towards the bottom of the page. To see your own visitors’ scrolling behavior, we recommend using ClickTale’s Scrolling Heatmaps.
4. Make content Pop
The really important stuff, the things you want to stand out, should be emphasized. Did you notice how we use bold typeface to draw your attention to certain words or sentences? Experiment with font size, bold, italics, color and highlighting to find the most effective places and methods to grab your readers’ attention and call them to action.
Conversion Rate Experts do an excellent job using different font styles and colors to get their messages across.
5. WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)
Sites usually get it wrong by focusing on themselves (the site) and not the user (i.e. “Me”). Chapter 3 of Dan Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a fantastic manga-style career guide, puts it this way: “It’s not about you”.
That’s right, accept it, it’s not. It’s about the user community, that is, your sites target audience. Your site exists to serve this audience, and everything done on your site should have this focus.
This Best-Practice is actually quite simple.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is this page/form/offer/etc actually of real value to my audience?
- Why should they care?
- How is it useful to them?
Mint.com homepage concisely conveys what’s-in-it-for “you” (their potential customers).
6. You ask TOO much
We hate to be the one to tell you this, but you ask for too much info on your signup forms and checkout pages! Visitors are extremely sensitive to the quantity and type of information asked from them, and every additional question significantly decreases the likelihood of form completion, harming your conversion rates.
Did you know?
The least-intrusive and fewest-question forms are the biggest winners.
Facebook is a great example of a simple, short and effective sign up form.
Two Tribes used ClickTale’s Form Analytics to optimize their online forms and got a 50% increase in conversion rates.
7. Watch your visitors
Running usability tests used to be difficult and expensive. Not anymore. With ClickTale (start using it for Free) you’re able to conduct usability testing by watching your visitors’ actual browsing sessions.
Usability testing will help you discover what’s “broken” on your website, and answer questions like:
- Why are visitors leaving my landing pages?
- Why do they fail to make purchases?
- Which pages never get scrolled?
Watch this short (about a minute) ClickTale video to learn how to run online usability testing.
Did you know?
Breaking down problems makes it easier to fix them. After running usability testing, compile a list of the top 5 things that are “broken” on your site. This will help you focus on the most urgent problems, and prioritize issues. Once you’re done, go to step #8 (Testing).
8. Test - Repair - Retest
Small changes often make major impacts on the bottom line, which is why we recommend that you test every section of your site, in order to maximize revenue and conversion potential. Using a service such as Google’s Website Optimizer to run “multivariate tests” or running a simple A/B test, is a great way to see what works best.
Run your testing in three stages:
I. Fix all of the things that are “broken” (which you’ll discover during your usability tests, see #7 above). This is worth doing first, because it’s the easiest way to make quick improvements.
II. Watch your visitors again with ClickTale, to make sure you actually fixed what was broken. If things are still screwy, or if further tweaking is necessary, go back to step I.
III. Test new ideas that have the potential to significantly grow your business. Again, it’s important to watch the results of your changes to see how they are really impacting your business.
Here is an example of an A/B/C experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to web design, there are no firm set of rules. But following these simple guidelines will help you optimize your site and improve conversion rates, as it has ours and thousands of other websites.
So remember:
- Fantastic visuals grab visitors attention
- Great headlines encourage action
- Float your best content to the top
- Make important content stand out
- WIIFM
- Fewer questions boost conversions
- Run usability tests
- Test, repair, and retest
We would love to hear how these guidelines (or any other tips) have helped you with your site optimization. Send us your experiences and we will mention your feedback in a future follow-up article!
Still hungry for more tips?
- Check out the 108 Tips from Conversion Rate Experts. Hey, look at that, we’re on the list.
- Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
- 7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert
Daniel Sevitt said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:11 am
Wow, you have enough here for two or three posts. I read through it once, but I have to go back and read it again to squeeze all the juice out. Nicely done!
It’s one of those posts where everything seems to stem from common sense, but the smart part starts with the first question - What do I have to do to boost conversion?
Just asking that question leads to all the superb tips you illustrate so well.
Thanks
John Jantsch said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:14 am
Very simple primer with lots of great detail and examples - nice work.
This is about all most small business owners would need to learn about optimizing web pages for real eyeballs.
Sarah Mae said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:22 am
GREAT info. Thank you so much! I’m going to check out ClickTail and peruse more of you site!
Boost Your Online Conversation Today! « Heart-to-Heart Connection said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:27 am
[...] Test, repair, and retest (Full Story) [...]
Rob said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:36 am
Great post, I never had heard about Clic Tale. I’ll test it!
Good luck!
Ron Spinner said,
June 4, 2009 @ 1:14 pm
I agree that a bounce rate of 50% is not unusual. We see this on many of our client’s sites. Clicktales is great for showing us some of the problems. Combine this with drilling down to the bounce rate details and you can get great insights on how to improve the site. I recently posted on this here: http://www.aims.co.il/blog/bounce-rate-analytics/
CSS Brigit | 8 Brilliant Tips That Boost Conversions said,
June 4, 2009 @ 6:51 pm
8 Brilliant Tips That Boost Conversions…
Following these simple guidelines will help you optimize your site and improve conversion rates, as it has ours and thousands of other websites. With real world examples to guide you.
…
ClickTale offers Web Analytic Tips « Web Builders said,
June 5, 2009 @ 5:05 am
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SlimQuick said,
June 6, 2009 @ 4:07 am
Thank you. Very good tips.
Chuck Bartok said,
June 6, 2009 @ 8:25 am
Fantastic presentation.
I will share this
information with our Community and
looking into your Product.
You did the Job!
Weekly Favs June Seven | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing said,
June 7, 2009 @ 7:46 am
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Phillip Scott said,
June 25, 2009 @ 6:44 am
I prefer Conversion Chicken (http://www.conversionchicken.com) for split testing over Google Website Optimizer, gives results much faster and is so easy to use
Used to love Google Website Optimizer, haven’t used it in months…
Gerrid Smith said,
June 25, 2009 @ 6:51 am
Excellent advice and very well organized.
Love the examples, too!
-Gerrid
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June 25, 2009 @ 8:03 am
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Ben Still said,
June 25, 2009 @ 5:16 pm
I think that is a bit misleading to show the chart you have there:
“The chart above shows where on the page visitors are paying attention, as they scroll towards the bottom of the page”
Our experience, using ClickTale and other tools, has shown that results vary *massively* from site to site depending on:
a) the audience - especially whether they’ve come through organically or via paid search, and
b) the content and type of site - ecomm and blog would be very different, and
c) the design and layout
Each of these factors can influence where and how far people scroll and click. That is- that graph can be quite different. Also, it shows “visitor attention”. You can do this identical test but base it on clicks or eyeball tracking, and you’ll get a different set of results.
When Clicktale posts something like this, I feel there is a tendency for people to think this graph is some kind of overall result from all sites that use Clicktale. There is no reference to where it comes from, so I’m assuming it is from a particular site- it might be helpful to indicate what type of site.
My issue is that people see a graph like that and take that as some kind of gospel that applies to any site - especially as Clicktale is a respected vendor of tools. Perhaps the point that the post is trying to make is that this stuff can be measured with tools such as Clicktale, and you should check out how your own pages perform.
regards
Ben
Joshua U said,
June 26, 2009 @ 5:30 am
Very solid tips to boost conversions. Most people don’t use images because that sometimes requires a whole new area of skill and work.
About split-testing, Google Website Optimizer is clunky and can take forever to see what is effective, especially for sales. Something like ConversionChicken.com is a simple, quick split-tester.
Joey Auto Versicherung said,
June 28, 2009 @ 4:55 am
A very good article. Thanks for that one!
I d like to add another conversion factor: keep it simple. Not only with your messages, but also with any functionalities you have on your website. What if you have a great tool, but no one understands its benefit and how to use it?
Also: in forms conversion increases when you offer descriptions/explanations what you want to know and why!
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ade said,
July 13, 2009 @ 3:01 pm
Great post. Very interesting and educative. The suggestions are easy to apply on any website and we see results almost immediately. Look forward to reading more of this kind of post.
Srom Divid said,
August 21, 2009 @ 10:16 am
Very useful and helpful information.
I would add to make sure you have the proper target market. For example, if you demographics show that you are getting 80% females at 35 to 45 years old. Does your website fit their need?
The google adplanner tool does a great job showing demographics.
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richard said,
September 12, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Google Analytics is a really good way of optimising your site. Those pages with high bounce rates are doing something wrong. Those pages with low bounce rates and high visitor numbers are doing something right - learn from them!
Id also just think about putting yourself in your customers shoes. What would you want to know that would help you make a purchase?
cheers for the article.
Peter Netz Lassen said,
October 4, 2009 @ 4:30 am
Hi Clicktale… This post about Tips to boost vonversions are surely a goldmine… Beeing bad at math and understanding stats makes it diffucult to grasp the importens of analytics … but now I can get it visual !!
Thx for your work and sharing it
Inez Bracy said,
December 10, 2009 @ 6:40 pm
Great information. Thanks.
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