You can shed a lot of sweat and tears redesigning each page of your website, however if the last page of your funnel, the form(s), is not optimized with the same precision and personal touch as the pages before it, your time and money are as good as wasted.

Click here to download the eBook

After analyzing the forms of 830 of the web’s top performing websites, ClickTale has developed and summarized 21 of the most helpful tips in this easy-to-navigate Giant Book of Form Optimization. Learn all the key tips you need to personalize your web form redesigns according to both the industry and type of form you are optimizing, enabling your visitors to reach their goals, while simultaneously achieving your own.

This eBook is divided by the five usability components of web form analysis, including:

1)      The CTA (call to action)

2)      The Supporting Elements

3)      The Page Design

4)      The Form Field

5)      The Convenience Factor

Download the eBook if you want to optimize your forms for maximum conversions.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section below or on Twitter, or Facebook where we are always listening.

Want to learn more about how the ClickTale system can help you optimize your website and increase conversion rates? Click here.

Bummer! you just missed another one. Someone clicked on your ad, took a few seconds to look at your page… But then, his mouse started going slowly upwards… and left… and before you know it he hits the back button and he’s gone. Probably forever… This is why you need to master landing page optimization techniques. The more landing page optimization you practice, the less back buttons you’re going to see.

It takes only a few seconds for the landing page visitor to decide whether he or she is going to convert or add up to the grim statistic called “bounce rate”. This mere fact makes landing page optimization such a crucial process for every business aiming to increase online sales or lead generation.

In his 2005 book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell presents an idea from psychology and behavioral economics of a mental process called “blink”—an unconscious process that allows people to make decisions rapidly and automatically with relatively little information. On your landing pages “Blink” can work for you or against you—which is why some well-optimized pages get off-the-chart performance while others muddle along.

The main challenge when optimizing landing pages is that traditional web analytics tools offer very little insights to what users are doing on the landing page and what drives them to convert or leave. Conventionally, the best web analytics tools are designed to measure traffic between one page and the other, while stopping short of any analysis of what happens on the landing page itself. Web analytics reports are great if you want to measure traffic, but for measuring user experience you need something else…  Here are 5 tips that marketing pros leverage for optimizing landing pages:

1. Mouse Move heatmap

One of the major breakthroughs in user experience analytics is the discovery that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse moves and eye movement.  Therefore, website mouse tracking offers an affordable alternative to costly eye tracking studies. In fact, mouse tracking can be one of the best ways to see what users are doing once they reach your landing page and is an invaluable tool in landing page optimization.

One of the best ways to optimize your lading page is to look at segmented mouse heatmaps. Examining the mouse movement tracking heatmaps for users who converted against heatmaps of users who did not convert can reveal powerful insights about the parts of the landing page that drive conversions and those that do not.

2. Mouse Movement Recordings

Bring the popcorn and sodas, you’re about to watch what your users are doing on your landing page.  Mouse movement recordings allow you to optimize your landing page by watching visitors’ mouse movements step by step. This is one of the best tools for understanding user experience—almost like looking your visitors over the shoulder.

This is also one of the more simple types of analysis that you can do in order to optimize your landing page.  No numbers, no reports, just putting yourself in your visitor’s shoes an trying to understand what makes them tick on your landing page.

3. Web Analytics Click Through Analysis

Here is a surprising fact—most of the clicks on your landing page are actually in places where there is no link… It’s not that you landing page visitors are not smart; it’s more about unclear user experience.  Click heatmaps can show you whether users are finding your landing page unclear, or think that some of the images or graphics are clickable.

Another important landing page optimization tactic with click through analysis is to see whether users click on your call to action. If the call to action is under the fold or users just don’t notice it, a landing page redesign may be in order. Your click heatmaps are a great tool for fixing these users experience issues and optimize your landing page.

4. Landing Page Form Analytics

The form on your landing page is the moment of truth.  All of the blood, sweat, work and tears, including tons of advertising dollars and web design effort went to this one crucial moment, which will determine whether you landing page will get another conversion or not.

You cannot complete a landing page optimization process without conducting a thorough form analysis.  This tool tells you which fields generate the highest abandonment rate on your landing page form. You can see the statistics for the proportion of users who’ve decided to abandon the form after each step. In some cases, removing one field can do wonders for your landing page conversion rate.

Another benefit of Form Analytics for your landing page is the ability to spot form validation problems that are hard to find any other way. For example, some international visitors have postal codes with more digits than what your form permits. All in all, form Analytics is crucial for every landing page optimization project.

5. Traffic Sources Analysis

Not all traffic is created equal.  With different advertising channels and keywords, it’s important to optimize your landing page to the different traffic sources. There are two ways that you can work on the optimization process:

First, see which traffic sources deliver the best value. If you can optimize your budget by moving some of the investment from channels with lower conversion to channels with higher conversion you immediately improve your ROI.

Second, conduct your landing page optimization by channel—examine your heatmaps, visitor recordings and form analytics to see whether you need to create additional landing pages for some channels. Just remember, “Blink” means that if your landing page didn’t resonate in the first few seconds, it probably never will.

Are You Ready to Optimize Your Landing Page?

Just a few seconds—and they’re gone.  This is what makes landing page optimization such a crucial endeavor for online marketers. Mastery of landing page optimization is what makes marketing superheroes.

These five tools offer a great foundation for increasing your landing page conversion, sales and leads. Just remember, landing page optimization is an ongoing process, and if you don’t convert everybody, you always have room to improve.

There is nothing worse for an online retailer than a high shopping cart abandonment rate. According to Monetate, 8.01% of visitors added items to their cart in Q4 2012, but only 1.42% actually checked out—suggesting that global cart abandonment rate is around 82%. Here are five strategies that you can use to reduce your cart abandonment and increase conversion rates.

You spend a fortune bringing visitors in; you see them engaging with your carefully curated products… But then, just as you are waiting for them to open their wallet, they leave. There is nothing more frustrating and annoying than a high shopping cart abandonment rate, seeing those engaged potential customers going away. Cart abandonment is here to stay, but there are some things that you can do to save some of those dollars:

1. Do the analysis

Shopping cart abandonment may not only be the fault of price comparison or indecisive shoppers. Some of it may be due to problems with user experience or even due to undetected website errors. Segmenting users who abandoned their shopping cart and looking at their visitor recordings and heatmaps can uncover many of these problems and potentially save users from going to the competition. For example, visitor recording can reveal that international users cannot check-out since they don’t have an US phone number.

2. Create a multi-step checkout process

In a multi-step checkout process, you capture a potential customer’s email address, which allows you to contact him or her by email if they choose to abandon their shopping cart.  Only then, you ask for other details including shipping address and credit card information.

This has two main benefits for lowering shopping cart abandonment rate.  This way if they do not complete the checkout process, you have an email you can reach-out to. Second, it is much less intimidating: instead of one long form, you have a short one at each stage.

3. Offer free shipping

In many cases, the additional cost of shipping comes as a surprise to many visitors during the check-out process. In an era when many online retailers offer free shipping, charging a few dollars extra for shipping may be a point of friction and drive customers to abandon their shopping cart. Therefore, try to experiment with free shipping and see whether the added revenue from lower abandonment rate overweighs pocketing shipping costs.

4. Have a great return policy—and make it explicit

When you can’t touch the merchandise, customers want to know that they’re not going to get stuck with a pair of shoes that don’t fit. You may not need to go as far as Zappos.com and offer 365 day free return on everything. However, even if you have a return policy already, making sure that it is explicit during the checkout process may make it easier for customers to spend the money.

5. Give lowest price guarantee

One of the things that can increase your shopping cart abandonment rate is if customers feel that they need to check out another website or two to make sure that got the best deal. A price match guarantee can give shoppers the assurance that they can check-out now and get the difference if they find lower prices anywhere online.

No silver bullet

There is no silver bullet to lower your shopping cart abandonment rate. Yet rigorous analysis that includes watching visitor recordings, analyzing heatmaps and incorporating other best practices can lower abandonment rate, earning your precious extra revenue. And in the competitive world of online retail, every fraction of a percent counts.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for our Form Conversion Webinar. Online forms are an incredibly important component of the conversion process, making it crucial to maximize their conversion potential.

If an online form is not meeting the needs or expectations of your visitors, converting customers becomes that much harder. Understanding where and why your visitors encounter trouble is the first step to form optimization.

We were happy to receive great feedback from our webinar participants about our best practices and Forms Analytics Suite, providing online businesses with tools to build, design and optimize their online forms.

For those of you who missed out, you can check out the webinar below. We look forward to hearing more of your feedback

Are Your Forms Performing?

We’re hosting a FREE UX Optimization Webinar tomorrow, July 14th at 11am EST to help you find out!

To Reserve Your Webinar Seat, Click HERE

Forms are a huge part of the conversion process and therefore need to be consistently optimized to meet visitor needs and dynamic online behavior. ClickTale’s Form Analytics Suite is a tool that helps you get this job done easily, efficiently, and effectively.

This webinar gives you the behind the scenes best practices that you may not have yet discovered and help you gain more from your analytics solution.

You definitely do not want to miss out!

Whether a checkout, a contact us, or a download, online forms are a large part of e-business success. However, if an online form is not meeting the needs or expectations of your visitors, converting customers becomes that much harder. Understanding where and why your visitors encounter trouble is the first step to form optimization.

Form Analytics is an essential tool that lets you learn and zoom in on exactly this. ClickTale’s own Form Analytics suite is dedicated entirely to helping you see exactly how to optimize your online forms and avoid visitor stumbling blocks.

ClickTale is hosting a FREE webinar dedicated entirely to showing you exactly what can be done with the powerful data your visitors are providing you. Learn what simple improvements can be implemented in your form redesigns that can have a huge impact on your bottom-line. This will take place on:

Thursday, July 14th @ 11am EST

To Register, Click HERE

We will feature a special guest speaker, Peter Tyler of Freestyle Accounting that will share how he was able to achieve his own form optimization using ClickTale.

Remember, space is limited, so reserve your spot today!

We are looking forward

About

Freestyle Accounting is an industry leading firm of contractor accountants providing accountancy and tax planning service to UK contractors, freelancers and consultants. Their comprehensive limited company accountancy service includes everything a contractor needs from initial company formation, business bank account setup and PAYE/ VAT registration, right through to quarterly VAT returns and annual accounts preparation, personal tax return, professional indemnity insurance, plus unlimited IR35 contract reviews and tax advice. The service is offered to contractors and freelancers throughout the United Kingdom, with offices based in Coventry and London.

Objective of Website

The main objective of the Freestyle Accounting website is to provide information on the company’s services and to persuade visitors to engage by completing their online enquiry form used as leads for its sales team.

Challenge

Freestyle Accounting was using Google Website Optimizer to run split usability testing on its webpages. However, it was still not able to explain why visitors were abandoning its homepage or failing to complete the enquiry form. It needed to understand what visitors were doing inside the webpages.

Solution

Freestyle decided to use ClickTale to discover why a large number of visitors were abandoning its homepage and its form conversion funnel.

These are the tools Freestyle used and what it discovered using each one.

Read More »

May Marketing Madness Content Week, Post #19

By Adam Greco

Senior Partner, Web Analytics Demystified

While every business hopes people read everything in glorious detail on their website, the truth is that in today’s busy world of 140 characters, people skim content. It is the reason CNN puts bullets at the top of its articles because it knows people are too lazy to read the entire thing!

I can illustrate the skimming effect in a fun story…As a frequent blogger, I often write pages of (what I think) is super-useful information. I spend time thinking about the content, come up with good examples and do my best to structure it in a way that makes sense to the reader. The same is true for any website content. However, I never really knew how people consume my content. Using web analytics I could see which blog posts were more popular than others and look at time spent on the page for an indication of interest. I thought I was pretty good.

Read More »

Form Optimization Tips – Focus on the Fields That Matter
By Adam Greco

May Marketing Madness Conversion Week, Post #5

People hate forms…let me say that again…People hate forms! Having spent a few years working at one of the most well-known lead generation sites in the world, I have learned everything there is to know about forms. Given how easily accessible/shareable personal data has become on the Internet, people have become extremely greedy with their personal information.

Less Is More

One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is asking for too much information. If you were single and saw a groovy person across the bar, would you go up to them and ask them for their name, address, phone number and e-mail address the minute you said hello? Of course not! They would think you are a stalker! Then why are you doing that online? Like in the bar, sales is about building relationships – the more I get to know about you and like you, the more open I am to giving you my information.

The Ugly Truth

Here is a real-life story to show you how bad it is out there. For one website I worked with, we noticed that the most prevalent scenario was that visitors were clicking the “Form Submit” button without filling out any fields. We weren’t exactly sure why they were doing this so we implemented ClickTale on the form so we could watch people exhibiting this behavior and make sure it was really happening! Sure enough, we saw it over and over again. Then we did a few surveys asking why people were doing this and, finally, someone summarized it for us by saying, “By clicking the submit button, I can see which fields are truly required and only fill out those fields…” Pretty sneaky huh?

Don’t Be Lazy!

The ironic thing is that it is usually the companies that do the least with the data collected that ask for the most number of form fields to be filled out. The primary reasons for asking for information should be so that you can give your prospects something in return. For example, “if you give me your e-mail address, we can send you a cool white paper that would normally cost you money to read” or “if you have filled out a form for Product X, we will make your next visit more meaningful by tailoring it to your stated needs”.

Read More »

May Marketing Madness Conversion Week, Post #3

Converting customers want to feel safe and in control when making their purchases. Therefore, in return for their honest info, you need to be up front about yours.

Safe and Secure Forum: First off, it is definitely worth your while to invest in TRUSTe logos and an HTTPS URL for payment transactions. Creating a secure channel over an insecure network is especially important for customers doing their online shopping outside the comfort of their own home. This reduces their hesitation and increases their chances of completing a purchase.

Safety first! Give your customers reassurance during their checkout process, including abundant product, delivery, and shipping information.

Form Fields: Just the sight of a ridiculously long form is already cause for caution and page abandonment. Before you add honest info, see what fields you can take away. Determine which are necessary for your site’s individual checkout process (not anyone else’s). Form analytics can help you determine which fields take too long to fill, are most frequently left blank, and cause your visitors to leave.

Images + Quantity of Product Purchases: Include this information in the product information. This decreases customers’ need to browse back and waiver on their purchase.

Delivery Details + Shipping Costs: The more info you can provide here, the better. This leaves the visitor with little or no doubt as to how much and approximately when they should expect their purchase, encouraging them to proceed onwards with the purchasing process. You may also want to consider discounting your shipping costs and letting your customers know, right on the checkout page itself.

Bold, Clear Totals and Order Reviews:The color, text, and placement of purchase totals and order reviews should ease customers towards that final click.

Divulging a lot of personal and financial information can bring a lot of customer insecurities. These best practices can help reduce buyers’ hesitation and increase your conversions.

This post is one out of ClickTale’s month long May Marketing Madness series. Each of our daily posts will highlight and explain today’s best practices, useful tips and smart tools to measure and improve your online business performance. This week focuses on conversion. Make sure to stay tuned for more great posts!