Landing Page Optimization: 5 Killer Tips for Nailing Conversion Rates and Crushing Lead Gen Targets
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.
So How Much Is Improving Conversion Rate Worth? Calculating the “Return on Web Analytics”
Web analytics are a major investment for any online website both in terms of tools and personnel. However, web analytics teams and tools face the challenge of actually showing their contribution to the top line in order to compete for budget. More specifically, the challenge is to take all of the advice and suggestions for improvement and show how much incremental revenue they contributed to the company.
Can web analytics experts just sit idle when organizations are scrutinizing every investment and CEOs are looking for higher ROI? How can web analytics increase accountability and turn its perception from a cost center to a revenue generating machine? Avinash Kaushik and Jesse Nichols suggest that it is time to start calculating the ROI, or as Nichols calls it, “Return on Analytics” (ROA).
It seems that everyone is jumping on the ROI bandwagon these days. Marketing is measured by Return on Ad Spend and new product features are measured on incremental sales. Internal tools are measured on the work (and cost) that they save to the organization.
According to Kaushik and Nichols, the challenge in Web Analytics is that it improves the ROI and performance of other teams which makes it hard to calculate its contribution directly. For example, if an analyst improved conversion rate by 50%, marketing can then say that ROI on ad spend is 50% higher and therefore more budget should be allocated to Marketing.
Kaushik and Nichols have a different suggestion. Their solution is to sum up the improvement over a period of time and divide it by the total investment in analytics.
For example, let’s imagine company is investing $30k in analytics and gets a return of $120k in monthly sales—or overall a 400% ROI. Now, they hire a web analytics expert that is able to take the same investment in marketing increase conversion rate and user experience and turn it in to $180k in revenue.
The challenge is that right now, the Marketing team actually claim credit for the improvement, while it is hard for the analytics team to be recognized for it. However, by calculating the ROA, the web analytics team can show their true worth.
Let’s assume that the company invests $5k per months in web analytics tools and services. So a monthly improvement of $60k in revenue and $5k in cost delivers an ROI of 1,200%. You don’t need to be a finance professor to know that is a great return.
To get the place they deserve in the organization’s totem pole, the analytics team need to be able to show indecisively the contribution that they are making to the organization’s top line. If they would like to justify the investment in more sophisticated tools they should compete with the other departments on ROI or ROA.
Hi-Tech Geo Hot Spots Around the World
Today, we’re heatmapping for red hot engagement with the hi-tech world. We want to know where exactly do us tech geeks hang out for endless working hours, where do our sparks of genius come alive and benefit modernity for a short while until the next best thing surfaces. These here below are my tech city picks across the globe, but comment below to clue me in on some of your other favorites!
Asia
Tokyo, Japan
This is the birth place of hi-tech toilets. Need I write more? Seriously, these TOTOs you won’t find in Kansas, but they are just one example of the constant hi-tech innovation coming out of Japan, including the big names we have come to know and love such as Samsung, Panasonic and Sony, among many others.
ClickTale’s Top 5 Favorite Infographics (So Far)
By Shara Matalon, Project Manager at ClickTale
Ever since opening our Pinterest account, we’ve been kvelling over the stunning infographics we’re finding.
Below is a list of our favorite infographics that we’ve found and pinned so far.
5. Social vs. Search
Aside from the fab Mexican wrestler theme, this eye-catching infographic is quite insightful in its comparison of Social Media vs. Search Marketing. In assessing the productivity of each individually for different tasks (lead generation, brand awareness, business visibility and interactivity), the overall proven outcome is that Social Media and Search Marketing work best hand-in hand.
ClickTale and MailChimp Joint Webinar; Bring on the Monkey Business!
ClickTale and MailChimp are joining forces for a 30 minute webinar class that’ll walk you through the implementation and values of our new email tracking integration!
Learn how to successfully:
- Lead traffic to your website from your email campaigns.
- Understand what email subscribers are doing once they click through to your website.
- Target your email campaigns to specific visitor profiles.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST
ClickTale’s Free Research Hub, Now Open!
We’ve just opened up ClickTale’s Research Hub, customized to meet all your ebusiness needs. Here, you can gain free access to our latest reference guides, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and much more to keep your website customer experience current and converting.
Popular content featured in our Research Hub includes:
- In-depth Industry Whitepapers
- Master Class Webinar Series
- Comprehensive Case Studies
- Expert Q&A Sessions
- And much more!
Discover unique approaches and useful insights to get ahead of your online optimization process. This includes everything from web analytics and emarketing, to usability and design.
Top 7 New Year’s Resolutions For Your Website
This past holiday season, Cyber Monday became the single top spending day in history, raking in an impressive $1.25 billion. Little by little ebusinesses are doing their homework, getting a deeper look into the online customer experience, improving site navigation, optimizing online forms, and paying attention to usability and optimal design. Round of applause, please.
Yes, yes, this is all very well and good. But, each new year triggers new web standards and design trends, and 2012 is no different.
Over the past year, ClickTale has worked with and helped an elite group of etravel heavy weights, to get ready for the influx of holiday travel visitor traffic. After gathering over 23 million visitor recordings of data during this time, we have documented, defined, and now we deliver a powerful knowledge base of actionable steps to improve your own site’s performance for 2012 in our Online Travel Best Practices Whitepaper.
So You Think You Know Heat Maps?
Do you know how to translate all the extreme color of heat maps into powerful money making action during your website optimizations? These explosions of color narrate visitor usage patterns on your site to help you achieve the highest ROI with your a/b testing and webpage redesigns. BUT, you have to know what to look for.
Some Like It Hot
When a webpage receives abundant red hot attention from visitors, simply put, visitors want and are encouraged to interact with that particular element or section of the page, whether you intended them to or not. Therefore, it is important to know if certain red areas of high engagement are actually helping or hurting your conversion process.
Fact: For many ebusinesses, red hot sections on heat maps are NOT responsible for increasing website conversion, rather increasing website abandonment.
What should you do?
Tealium Tag Management Tool Teams Up with ClickTale
As a good Englishman, it goes without saying that however busy I am, my day stops at 5pm for a cup of tea (with milk of course) and a crumpet. So you can only imagine my excitement when one afternoon, fully revitalized after sipping on Earl Grey’s finest, I came across Tealium one of the world’s leading tag management tools.
After one or two conversations with Ali Behnam, co-founder at Tealium, we were in business and are excited to announce that Tealium have now added ClickTale to the 120 other products offered through their service.
The new ClickTale integration allows users of Tealium’s Tag Management to add ClickTale to their site within minutes, and start watching recordings of their visitors’ browsing sessions immediately. This can all be done without any Javascript knowledge or bothering your IT team.
4 Proven Ways to Educate Online Users About Your Technology
Creating new technology and offering updated products/features is exciting for any business. After all, we techies know what we’ve got is great and ultimately easy to use, but now we are stuck with the challenge of communicating our (modest) genius to a diverse web of users. So, the question is, how do we overcome this challenge?
Introducing a New Feature or Product
As we profess over and over, all visitors are not created equal. Therefore, not only the way visitors use your site, but also the way they acknowledge and handle website changes differs as well. It is for this reason that modifications or updates made to your system/technology need to be subtly, but clearly explained. And the way you do this depends on your own visitors’ behavioral preferences.
Remember, we are all creatures of habit, and even slight positive changes can be a big deal to your users. So be patient with your visitors and they’ll be patient with you.
Learning through Example
Recently Gmail revamped their UI making their many web page components user friendly with a cleaner layout and some guiding instruction to introduce new features.
In order to help gmail users become aware of the new changes and options, they have included education tabs on new features and customizable settings.
Pull down menu education is a great way to teach about new updates, giving users the the option to have the explanation as part of their ui.
As you can see here above, the pull down designs are great for introducing new features, as they allow each individual user the option to display instructions or not. Depending on whether your visitor is a new user, a returning customer, or simply a customer who wants to learn more, the way in which they want to see and experience the UI on your website may differ.
