Test Plan for Conversion Rate Optimization

Building an effective website is hard work, but all that hard work would be wasted without ongoing analysis and continual website improvements. There is a lot of chatter about optimizing site performance and integral to that is a good test plan to know the areas of the site that could perform better. It can be a tough task with hundreds of pages, multiple conversion points to measure, and competing priorities across departments. Setting up a precise testing structure is the first step towards achieving your goals.

What is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Test Plan?

CRO is the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. Based on KPI (Key Performance Indicators), CRO can be used to improve any website metric. This is where optimization or conversion testing comes in, to improve conversion, interaction and engagement on your website. There may be many conversion … Continue reading

Making Your Website Profitable with Conversion Optimization

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you have amazing content on your website. You spent a lot of time writing the content and picking images and you feel that it represents your company well. Your design is fresh and fun. But you are still not quite sure that your site is optimized for generating revenue.

First of all, I want to start by saying this is not an article about how to search optimize your site, (SEO). While SEO is something very important, conversion optimization is quite different. Here, I will give you a few pointers on how your ecommerce website can be optimized to accumulate its maximum potential for generating revenue.

While content is most important for (nearly) every site, it alone will not bring in profit. Good content is your diamond in the rough and you need to make it shine as much as … Continue reading

Harness The Power of Intent Data To Supercharge Conversions

intent-marketingWhat Is Intent Data and Should It Matter?

When your prospects take a series of online actions, their digital footprints can be knitted together to tell us a story about their purpose – or intent. These footprints can come from many sources, such as search queries, website visits, downloads or even engagement with various social platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube or blogs.

Not only can we discover their current objective but we can also surmise their future intent.

Each individual signal already tells us a lot, but when we group them together, live and in order, we are able to extrapolate dynamic and powerful engagement patterns that can tell us even more about their preferences, information needs, propensity to take an action and finally, their intent to make the purchase. This not only helps us with an individual prospect, it informs us about similar audiences.

Live intent data goes … Continue reading

Why Should You Care About Your Bounce Rate?

I was speaking to a prospective client this past week and he said, “we definitely need to increase our conversions and our bounce rate is over 90%!” First reaction, YIKES! that is a really high bounce rate; no wonder they are not getting any conversions. As I started to explore and ask some questions of my expert team members, I learned a few things.Bounce Rate
Just so we are all on the same page, Google Analytics defines Bounce Rate as the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.)

Your bounce rate is driven by so many different variables and honestly it depends on the goals and other KPI metrics that have to be considered along with what you are trying to achieve!

If your goal is to drive phone calls in a fast sales situation, the … Continue reading

How Does Your Website Make People Feel?

One of my colleagues here at LocalDirective when asked to review a potential client’s website had this response,  “At first glance I feel like the font is yelling at me.  No bold.  Bold makes me feel even more like I am being scolded.”  I‘d venture to say, she did not feel there was a good user experience!  How many visitors do you think bounced off that website almost immediately?

There are two important website design elements when you think about your website:  The User Experience (UX) and The User Interface (UI) or Interaction.

Is your website clear and easy to use?  A powerful program that has a poorly designed user interface has little value.

There should be one primary goal per page and you should be asking these questions:

  1. Who is my ideal audience?
  2. Where do I want to send them on my site?
  3. What call to action will best
… Continue reading

A/B Testing: How to Make a Good Start

It is every marketer’s dream to design a campaign or a website with massive appeal to the target audience and exceptional conversion rates. More often than not, there are some tweaks and iterations to get to a marketing piece that attains its highest performance.

However, the most important question is whether the changes made to the website or a marketing campaign are driven by intuition or data. The data-driven approach, such as A/B testing, is more likely to lead you to success, and at a faster pace. Split testing or A/B testing helps you finalize the design that works for you in a methodical fashion.

A/B testing is a method of running various marketing experiments where in groups of customers receive marketing material with variations. The metrics derived from the behavior of these various customer groups are then analyzed to determine the design that attains the highest performance. A/B testing … Continue reading