It’s taken me years of training to learn how to get inside my audience’s head, but the conversion rates I get are simply out of this world.

Now, you may not be able to read your visitors’ minds (let’s face it, the Force isn’t strong in everyone’s family), but that doesn’t mean you can’t be an expert in psychological warfare.

The truth is, business empires aren’t built on logic.

People rely on a variety of emotional cognitive biases to make decisions—online or otherwise—and with a few simple tricks, even the Force-insensitive can influence people do their bidding (er, convert on their page).

So, join with me and experience the full power of conversion rate optimization!

1. Color Usage

While most people know that specific colors can create different emotional responses, they often don’t know how effective they can be.

The Sith know better…why do you think our lightsabers are red?

Red is the color of passion, anger, hate, power…but I digress.

Color has a powerful influence on your audience’s ability to connect with an idea visually and emotionally. In general, warm colors like red, orange and yellow are typically associated with happiness, optimism and urgency (and power…).

Neutral colors give your pages a clean and open feel to balance out the other hues that may be competing for attention.

For example, I have all of my stormtroopers wear white. This is a stupid color for an army—it’s hard to keep clean, creates so much glare that it’s impossible to shoot straight and makes you an easy target for the enemy.

But, believe me, the white armor is totally worth it, because when I step out of my shuttle with my legions, you know every eye is going to be on me and my sweet red lightsaber.

Make sense?

So, warm colors for power, neutrals to make sure you (or the most important thing on your page) get noticed. And then, we have the cool colors like blue, green and purple.

Sure, people find these colors calming and soothing, but who wants that? If you ask me, cool colors make you look like a wimp.

I mean, have you ever met a Jedi and thought, “Oh, that blue lightsaber is so scary!”

Okay…I take it back. That is scary.

In any case, depending on how you want to influence your audience, you can pick different colors to evoke specific emotions. For more information, check out this article.

2. Social Proof

Social proof is important. You may say that you have a world-killer weapon, but most people will think you are just posturing.

On the other hand, actually blow up a planet and social media will go nuts!

@reyintraining @EmoKyloR3n The Death Star blew up my home planet! #sadday #wherewereyou #deathstarwannabe pic.twitter.com/vWj7Ans4D2

— Aden Andrus (@AdenAndrus) June 24, 2016

Once people start saying, hey, “the Empire blew up my planet!” you can use those sorts of testimonials to make your landing page more compelling.

Another great way to make your business seem more credible is to link your business to a bigger, better-known person or company.

For example, I do this with Darth Vader’s mask.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t struggle with short man syndrome…no really, I don’t!

I parade Vader’s mask around because it makes me more credible. Darth Vader was a bad dude—he killed a lot of people.

Therefore, if I keep his mask in my bedroom and whisper sweet nothings to it, I must be a pretty bad dude too.

It’s just simple psychology…not short man syndrome.

Make Your Social Proof Compelling

Now, you might tempted to only include perfect, unbelievably wonderful reviews of your product or business, but people want to feel like your reviews are genuine.

Sure, I’ve got trillions of reviews and testimonials like this:

Oh my gosh, Kylo Ren is the absolute best! He’s so powerful and awesome. I love his mask and his lightsaber with the mind-blowing mini-crossguard.

Yes, that’s a real testimonial, but for some reason, people seem to resonate better with a testimonial like this:

I used to be part of the Rebellion, but then I realized that the Empire just wants to make the galaxy a better place for everyone. That’s a cause I really believe in.

Now you know why I keep the rebellion around. Nothing sells like a redemption story!

Putting “authentic” reviews (okay, I admit that getting that testimonial took a bit of Force persuasion) like that in a prominent spot on your landing page creates a natural trust between you and your customer. And, if they trust you, they are much more likely to convert.

3. Scarcity

Fear is a powerful motivator. In fact, I think we need to add that to the Sith code…

Anyways, to create fear, all you have to do is make people think they are about to lose something. For example, it’s a lot more effective to say, “Tell me what I want to know or I’ll kill you” than “Would you mind revealing the location of Luke Skywalker to me?”

In other words, answer me or you’ll soon have a scarcity of life…

See? Isn’t that motivating?

Using this tactic in selling a product or service can be a great way to get people off the fence and into action. Depending on your audience, though, you may not want to threaten them with death.

Instead, phrases like “limited time offer” or “act fast before they’re all gone!” can be a surprisingly effective way to get people to convert on your page. In addition to creating a sense of urgency, this can also increase the perceived value of your product or service.

The moral of the story? Whether you’re interrogating a prisoner or crafting a landing page, scarcity is your friend.

4. Visual Cues

Finally, people follow visual cues. Why else do you think we Sith gesture when we manipulate people’s minds?

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make certain gestures to pull off a “Jedi mind trick.” However, waving your hand in front of someone’s face lets them know that you are about to manipulate their mind.

Since they are expecting to be psychically pushed into doing something, they are much more likely to do it (to be honest, half the time I don’t even use the Force…I just wave my hand and people think I’m using the Force, so they do what I tell them to).

See what I mean? People follow visual cues.

You can use the same “mind tricks” to get people to convert. For example, a hero shot of someone who is looking at your form or call-to-action directs your visitor to what they should be doing on your page—converting.

Don’t you feel a compelling urge to look at the form…this is the form you’ve been looking for, right?

In fact, you don’t even have to be that subtle about it—try using big arrows on your page to direct people to where you want them to be looking!

If you are clever, you can find a variety of ways to use this technique. For example, if you have an especially long landing page, try using navigational markers to break up the flow and keep the content interesting at the viewer scrolls down.

You may not be Force-sensitive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play tricks on your audience’s minds.

Conclusion

With these 4 psychological tricks in hand, you might not be a Dark Lord of the Conversions, but you’re well on your way to building your own empire.

Remember, people don’t convert because of logic, they convert because you make it easy for them. And that, my young apprentice, is the secret to the Dark Side…

The post Mind tricks: Kylo Ren’s guide to landing page optimization appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Instead, you’ve probably run into a problem with your site…one that you hope optimizing your website speed will solve.

Maybe your bounce rate is high. Maybe your online marketing results are poor. Maybe your friend (or worse, a client) sent you a text saying, “I tried to check out your site and it took forever to load.”

Regardless of why you’re here reading this article, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to go over what you can do to evaluate and improve the speed of your website—without hiring a developer to go over your site with a fine-tooth comb.

Why Does Website Speed Matter?

These days, we all expect instantaneous gratification. We want our food to be ready now, groceries (and pretty much everything else) delivered to our door, packages to arrive in two days (or less)…and web pages to load in less than a second.

In fact, according to Google, simply increasing the load time of a page from 1 second to 3 seconds increases the bounce rate by 32%. And that’s just a difference of 2 seconds! At a 10 second load time, bounce rate goes up by 123%.

Since Google’s goal is to connect people with the web pages and sites that they’re looking for, they pay a lot of attention to things that increase bounce rate. After all, a high bounce rate indicates a poor user experience. Since Google doesn’t want a reputation of sending people to frustrating, poor-quality websites, sites with slow load times get deprioritized by Google’s algorithms.

This is true for both organic search results and paid search results.

So, if you’re looking to improve SEO performance, SEM performance or just your overall user experience, increasing your website speed is a great place to start.

What is Website Speed?

There are a lot of different ways to evaluate website speed, but the most important is user experience: how long does it take before your users feel like your page is loaded?

This is actually an important question, because many pages continue loading elements (ads, scripts, tracking codes, etc), long after your users believe the page is done loading. That’s why Google reports that the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds to “fully load”, but most of us rarely run into a page that actually takes that long to appear.

What your users care about is the perceived load time.That’s very different from your full load time.

So, tossing Google’s “22 seconds” number out the window, what’s a normal load time for a page? According to MachMetrics, the average perceived load speed is about 8.66 seconds.

Here’s how the data breaks down across industries and countries:

These numbers are all based on mobile landing pages, but since over 50% of web traffic is mobile(and pages tend to load more slowly on mobile than desktop), we’re going to focus on mobile load times in this article.

Now, all of these numbers are well under the 22-second mark that Google reported. That’s a good sign, but there’s a problem.

Going back to Google’s study of website speed, Google reports that 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Do you see any perceived load times below 3 seconds on that chart? Neither do I.

That’s actually good news for you. The bar really isn’t set that high. Since most websites load slowly on mobile and slow loading times result in poor marketing performance, if you can drop the load time of most of your pages to less than 3 seconds, there’s a real opportunity here to stand out from the competition.

What is Your Current Website Speed?

At this point, you’re probably wondering what your website speed actually is. How do you measure up?

Well, there are a few ways to check this.

The first is to pull out your phone and use your stopwatch app. Open your page on a new, private browser tab and time how long it takes for your page to load.

This is good for checking your practical user experience, but it may not always be the most accurate way to measure site speed. Depending on the speed of your internet and a variety of other factors, your page could load faster (or slower) for you than it does for most of your customers.

Still, if you’re looking for a good gut-check, this isn’t a bad place to start. For example, I’ve compared dozens of websites and noticed that certain platforms—like Shopify—do a great job of optimizing for perceived loading time. Their full loading time might not be all that great, but from your users’ perspective, it doesn’t matter.

The other, more official way to check loading times is to use a website speed testing tool. These tools load your page using specific servers in specific countries and use that data to evaluate the speed of your site. They provide you with a lot more information, too, like details about what elements on your page are slowing things down.

There are a lot of site speed tools out there, but here are a few of my favorites:

1. Google’s PageSpeed Insights

Honestly, while a lot of the more technical people that I know have complaints about PageSpeed Insights, for a quick, direct-from-the-source analysis, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great resource.

As a quick example, let’s use this website. Right after I built it, I took some screenshots of my PageSpeed Insights results, and they’ll give you a good feel for the sort of information you can get from Google’s tool.

First off, Google shows you how your site compares to the rest of the sites that Google has seen:

All in all, it’s not too shabby. Not the fastest site in the world, but not terrible, either.

The good news is, Google gives you a lot of information about how fast your website loads and what you can do to improve things:

Many of these suggestions are fairly technical advice for developers, but some of them you can probably handle yourself. We’ll get into those in a bit.

2. GTMetrix

GTMetrix is another great place to look for insights. In many ways, the information is more approachable than what you get on Google PageSpeed Insights, so it’s usually my number 2 go-to resource.

To show you how it works, let’s take a look at a website I recently built for a company called New World Viking:

Here, you can see that the website is in great shape. It loads in 1.4 seconds and has a PageSpeed score of 95%. Could they improve a few things? Sure, but compared to most sites, this website is really fast.

The great thing about GTMetrix is that it also includes your YSlow score, which uses Yahoo!’s web page performance criteria to give you an alternative measure of your site speed. Nobody uses Yahoo! anymore, but if you’re looking for ways to up your website speed, it’s nice to have another set of criteria to look at.

Here, you can see that there are a few additional ways to improve website speed, but most of them are fairly technical. Again, we’ll get into ways to improve your site on your own, but if you have a developer handy, you may want to ask them to take a look at your GTMetrix score and give you their input.

3. Pingdom

Finally, for a really in-depth, on-going analysis of your website, you might want to give Pingdom a try. In addition to helping you evaluate the speed of your website, Pingdom will also monitor the speed of your pages over time.

Of course, you have to pay for their page-monitoring service, but with rates starting at $14.95, it isn’t too expensive.

That being said, if you aren’t very technical and don’t have ready access to someone who is, Pingdom may be more than you need. It all depends on you, your resources and the demands of your website.

How to Increase Your Website Speed

Now that we’ve talked about how your website speed affects your online marketing performance and a few tools you can use to check your load time, let’s look at a few easy ways to improve the speed of your site.

Maximizing your website speed is a massive topic that requires a good deal of technical know-how. That’s probably more than you want to tackle on your own, but there are several simple things you can do to improve performance without hiring a developer. Let’s take a look.

Decrease Image Size

Unfortunately, images are something of a double-edged sword. While high-quality images are an important part of creating a compelling website, they can also slow your load time down a lot.

Remember, most people will only tolerate a page load time of 2-3 seconds, so if those beautiful images don’t load quickly, they could end up killing off potential sales instead of aiding them!

As a general rule of thumb, most of your images should be less than 100 kb.

But that poses a problem. Most high-quality photos are a lot bigger than 100 kb, so you’ll probably need to resize them. Fortunately, if you know what you’re doing, that’s actually fairly easy.

For example, to resize your photos in Photoshop, open your image in Photoshop and click File > Export > Save for Web:

From there, you can play around with a variety of settings until you find the right balance between file size and image quality (color-coded to match where they show up in the image below):

• Quality. Lower numbers = lower image quality and lower file size.
• File format. In terms of file size, JPEG < GIF < PNG. But, the same rule applies to image quality.
• Optimization. Checking the box tells Photoshop to optimize your image for web use (decreases image size).
• Color. Fewer colors = lower image quality and lower file size.
• Image size. Allows you to choose the actual number of pixels in your image. Fewer pixels = smaller image and lower file size. Keep in mind that if you save an image at a smaller size than it will be shown on your page, your image may be stretched to fit your page, resulting in heavy pixelation and/or image distortion.

You can see the file size in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. This number—along with a preview of your final image—will update as you make changes to your export settings.

Photoshop’s “Save for Web” tool makes it fairly easy to balance image quality and file size. That way, you can make sure that your pictures really sell your products without compromising on load speed.

If Photoshop is out of your price range, give GIMP a try. It’s free, and GIMP has a tool that does the same basic thing as Photoshop’s “Save for Web” tool.

Honestly, of all the website speed optimizations you can do on your own, optimizing your images will have the biggest impact on your site speed. The fewer kilobytes (kb) of data that the server has to process to display your page, the faster it will load.

Clean Up Your Plugins

Speaking of plugins…they aren’t all helpful when it comes to site speed. While plugins are a great way to modify your site and make it unique, they add extra, non-native code to your theme. That code can create issues that make your site load more slowly.

While running their websites, businesses add all kinds of plugins. But, over time, a lot of those plugins fall by the wayside. They are no longer needed, but they remain in the system—active, but useless.

Actually, worse than useless.

As mentioned earlier, those plugins burden your website down. That isn’t a big deal if you are actually getting value out of the plugin, but if it’s not a plugin that you need, leaving it on your site can slow your load time.

The solution? Go through your plugins and delete any plugins that you don’t truly need. If you end up wanting it later, reinstall it then—don’t leave it to muck up your load times.

Minify CSS

Every website uses cascading style sheets(CSS) to manage the look and style of the site. While most website platforms and builders offer a user-friendly interface that automatically adjusts the code of your site to match your preferences, CSS is always in the background doing the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, if the backend CSS used to create your website isn’t well-designed, it can really slow down your site. To load your site, browsers read and interpret your CSS. So, the more complicated your CSS is, the longer it takes a browser to figure out what it’s actually supposed to be showing.

The good news is, this is such a common problem that there are a variety of plugins out there that you can use to “minify” (aka, optimize) your CSS. It isn’t free, but if you’re using WordPress, WP Rocket is a good option to consider.

For example, after minifying my CSS with WP Rocket, here’s how my rank on Google PageSpeed Insights changed:

A 15-point difference in loading speed is nothing to sneeze—especially when it only took 5 minutes to set it up. WP Rocket costs a bit of money ($49.95), but it’s incredibly easy to use and I’ve had good experiences with it to date.

Conclusion

Optimizing the speed of your website might not be the most exciting thing you do this year, but it can have a big impact on the success of your online marketing. Your website experience will be more attractive—to Google and your potential customers. That means more traffic, conversions, and sales.

While your site might need more tweaking than what we’ve covered here, this article is a great place to start. Learning the basics of how loading speed works and what you can do to keep it under control will improve the performance of your site for years to come.

What’s your site speed like? Did you find this content helpful? Have any questions that we can answer? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

The post A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to Website Speed Optimization appeared first on Aden Andrus.

After all, it’s only natural to spend your time trying to improve your traffic. In fact, PPC platforms like Google and Facebook make it so easy to test new bidding strategies and compare ads that it isn’t hard to get stuck endlessly tweaking things.

All of that is well and good, but it doesn’t really answer the question, “What happens after someone clicks on your ad?”

The fact of the matter is, no matter how good your ads and targeting strategy are, if your website and landing pages don’t convince people to convert—they won’t convert. Your post-click experience is just as important as your pre-click experience…or perhaps even more important.

However, despite that fact, most businesses have a hard time investing in their post-click experience. There are lots of reasons for this, but they all basically boil down to the following 3 reasons:

1. “It’s too expensive”
2. “We don’t have the time”
3. “Our site experience is already working well enough”

In this article, we’re going to take a look at each of these arguments against doing site testing and see if and/or when they really make sense. Let’s dive in.

1. “It’s Too Expensive”

Now, I won’t argue that conversion rate optimization (CRO)is cheap. Depending on your site and needs, it can definitely feel like a big investment—especially when your budget is limited.

But does this argument hold up?

At first blush, it’s easy to see why people have a hard time investing in their post-click experience. No site experience will work for everyone, so isn’t PPC advertising something of a numbers game? Isn’t it better to invest your money into driving more traffic to your site?

Perhaps, but only up to a point. See, the thing is, PPC advertising can only get you so far. At a certain point, you’re reaching the majority of your audience and you have to look for other ways to get more bang for your buck.

The easiest place to do that is your post-click experience. Conversion rate optimization is a great way to get more out of your PPC campaigns. After all, if you can get twice as many sales from the same investment, that’s a huge win!

A Quick Example

To show you how this works, one of our clients runs a large commerce website where they sell 371 products that fit into about 12 different categories.

Shortly before we started working with the client, they had redesigned their home page. Putting their heads together, the marketing team had come up with a collection of products that with high margins and/or high sales volume and decided that would be a good lineup to place on the home page.

Since the page was new and unproven, we theorized that many of the products on the page were not the perfect fit for a consumer, and the overload of possibilities decreased the likelihood of purchase.

So, we decided to test removing different elements from the page to see how that would affect the performance of their home page.

To the client’s astonishment, this test revealed six winners and increased their revenue by thousands of dollars in just 2 weeks. And that was just a small test!

So, if you think that you don’t have enough money to invest in CRO, I would argue that you can’t afford notto invest in your post-click experience.

Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?

As a general rule, most businesses use PPC advertising like a fire hose. To save their business from burning down, they turn up their budget and hope that more water—er, traffic—will solve the problem.

However, if the water can’t get to the fire, pumping more water on the blaze won’t actually make a difference.

In the same way, if your site or landing pages aren’t converting well, pushing more traffic at them just means more wasted money. In this situation, choosing to push more budget into PPC doesn’t really help your business. However, putting that money into CRO could help you get a lot more conversions out of your existing budget…and your future budget, if you choose to increase it in the future.

When Budget is a Factor

The only time that budget should really influence your decision on whether or not to optimize your post-click experience is when your budget is so small that you aren’t driving much traffic to your website.

To get meaningful results from your CRO, you have to have at least a few thousand visitors a month. Otherwise, it will take so long to get useful datathat it simply won’t be worth the effort.

If you’re in this situation, CRO probably isn’t right for you…yet. Unless your website is truly, obviously horrible, work on getting your traffic, revenue and marketing budget up to the point where it makes sense to start optimizing your post-click experience.

But, if you have a decent amount of site traffic—either organically or via PPC—budget really shouldn’t be a reason not to do CRO. Optimizing your website almost always makes every aspect of your marketing work better, which just means more money in your pocket, not less.

2. “We don’t have the time”

When most people think about optimizing their site or landing pages, they immediately assume that it will take time—a lotof time.

After all, if you’ve ever put a website together, you probably still have PTSD from the process. Creating a website takes a ton of time and effort. It’s not a task for the faint of heart.

So, it’s natural to assume that redesigning your website will take a ton of time and effort. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

While it can take time to get results—depending on how much traffic you’re getting—actually putting together your tests is surprisingly quick and easy.

A Quick Example

One company that we work with gets millions of dollars a month in online revenue. But, they knew their website needed work, so they came to us for help.

So, for our first round of tests, we decided to try something we call existence tests. Like the test discussed above, with an existence test, you don’t actually create anything new. You simply remove various elements of the page to see how that content was influencing your conversion rates.

If the content was helping people convert, the conversion rate will go down when you remove the element. If the content was hindering them from converting, the conversion rate will go up when you remove the element.

For this particular client, we ran 5 variations, each one with a different element removed. How long did it take us to set up this test? About 5 minutes.

Then, we hit the go button, and waited. Over the course of 6 days, the winning variation increased sales by 14% from the control, increasing the sales by $70,000 per week!

When Time is a Factor

Generally speaking, time concerns shouldn’t prevent you from optimizing your post-click experience. With software services like Optimizely, VWO or Convertize, you can get a variety of tests off of the ground in a matter of hours.

However, if you’re running a small business that you’re trying to get off the ground, even that kind of time investment can be more than you can afford.

In addition, learning new software takes time, effort and know-how. So, trying to wrap your head around CRO on your own can take quite a bit of time in and of itself—even if setting up the actual test itself is fairly quick.

In this situation, it’s often easier and quicker to simply hire someone to help you out. Here at Disruptive, our clients barely have to invest any time into their post-click experience. We take care of all the legwork for them, so all they have to do is sit back and enjoy the results.

3.”Our site experience is already working well enough”

For many businesses, it’s easy to assume that their website is already well-designed. They’re getting a decent number of conversions from their site and their PPC campaigns are profitable. What more could you ask for?

If anything, though, these companies could benefit more from ongoing CRO than almost anyone else.

After all, if your marketing and website are already working, optimizing your post-click experience can take your campaigns from good-to-great. You just need some fresh ideas and new concepts to get you going in the right direction.

A Quick Example

One of our clients is a college that was looking to increase their prospective student base. As a college, they were fairly well-established and had a polished website.

Or, at least, they thought they did.

To help them get even more out of their website, they asked us to run a few tests on their site. Here’s one of the key pages that we worked on:

The page certainly isn’t bad, but “Get Started on the Right Path: Prepare yourself for a better future by earning your degree from Pioneer Pacific College” isn’t the most compelling value proposition. It sounds very academic, but it’s not the sort of content that gets someone excited to apply.

To explain Pioneer Pacific’s value proposition in a more compelling way, we decided to focus their copy on the benefits of earning a degree (more money) and minimize the perceived costs by pointing out that college tuition is an investment:

This simple change increased form completions by 49.5%. The forms themselves weren’t any easier to fill out—50% more site visitors were motivated enough to complete them.

Now, Pioneer Pacific had spent countless hours working on their website and marketing themselves, so why hadn’t they figured this out before?

The simple answer is, they hadn’t tested this aspect of their post-click experience. Sure, their site was good enough, but it wasn’t nearly as good as it could be with a little testing.

When Good Enough is Good Enough

All that being said, sometimes there are times when testing your site or landing pages isn’tthe right decision. If you’re in the middle of some other massive marketing optimization push, throwing CRO into the mix can cause more problems than it solves.

For site testing to work well, your marketing needs to be fairly stable. So, if you’re revamping your PPC campaigns, building out a new marketing automation strategy or overhauling your site content, it’s probably best to wait on CRO.

However, if your marketing is generally stable at the moment, testing your site can be one of the best ways to improve your results. It doesn’t matter if your marketing team has been working on your site for years, a little CRO can give you a ton of insight into your audience. You may even discover things that improve your marketing campaigns themselves!

Conclusion

To be honest, if you’re going to put time, money and effort into your pre-click experience, you should be investing in your post-click experience, too. While there are times and situations where CRO isn’t the right choice, most of the time, optimizing your site is one of the best things you can do for your business.

Do you think your post-click experience is important? Is it worth investing in? Any arguments for (or against) CRO that you’d like to add? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Why Aren’t You Paying Attention to Your Post-Click Experience? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Well, this article explains exactly how to find the answers to all of those questions. Stick with me and you will become the guru of online optimization. Your name will be whispered in hushed and reverent tones around the office.

This article discusses in plain terms one of the least understood and most important aspects of digital marketing: statistical interpretation.

Now wait, give me a minute before you hit the back button. I’m not going to drone on about equations or theories. This is nuts and bolts information—statistics for the real world.

Believe it or not, your math teachers were right when they told you math would important after graduation. In today’s data-driven world, math is central to business success and online profitability. However, while most of the calculations are now done by computers, most people still don’t know how to really make the most out of their data.

Why statistical significance matters

To optimize your digital marketing, you have to conduct tests. More importantly, you have to know how to evaluate the results of your test.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen marketers (including conversion rate optimization experts!) point to a positive result and say, “Look at what I figured out!”

Unfortunately, in the long run, the promised results often don’t pan out.

Optimizing your marketing is about more than just getting a little green arrow on your screen. It’s a balance between human intuition and statistical data that drives the kind of results your digital marketing needs to succeed.

At this point you’re probably thinking, Okay, I get it. Testing is important. But a test is only as valuable as its interpretation—how do I know if I’m getting meaningful results?

That’s a good question. Actually, it’s an incredibly important question. To answer it, though, we need to ask the question a bit differently.

The real question is, “How do you know if you have statistically meaningful results?”

To get actionable information out of your tests, you need to understand 3 key aspects of your data: variance, confidence and sample size.

1. Variance

The first thing you need to understand about your data is its inherent variability. In a nutshell, variance is how much your numbers will change without any intervention from you.

That’s nice, why should I care?

Let’s look at a practical example. Since conversion rate is one of the most important measures of digital marketing success, we’ll use conversion rate optimization as our model scenario.

Say your average quarterly conversion rates for a year are 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6%. That means your conversion rates vary between 2% and 3%.

This variance could be due to changes in competition, economic factors, seasonal effects or any other market influences, but your average conversion rate always hovers between 2% and 3%.

Now, imagine you eliminate the sidebar from your website.

For 3 months, you send half of your traffic to the original page and half to the sidebar-less page. 2% of the traffic sent to the original page converts. 2.8% of the traffic to variant page converts.

Wahoo! Getting rid of the sidebar increased your conversion rate by 40%! That’s great, right?

Well, maybe (we’re talking statistics here, so get used to that answer).

Unfortunately, both numbers fall within the normal variance of your data. Yes, a 2.8% conversion rate is 40% higher than a 2% conversion rate, but maybe the people you sent to the sidebar-less page just happened to convert 40% better due to external factors.

After all, up to 3% of your traffic normally converts anyways.

Let’s try that again…

Now, say you try adding a lightbox to your page and run the test again. Same parameters: send half of your traffic to the original and half to the variant for 3 months.

This time, the conversion rate for the original is 2.5% and the conversion rate for the variant is 3.5%.

It’s a 40% improvement again. This time, though, the conversion rate is 17% higher than the highest 3-month conversion rate you’ve ever seen with your site.

Is the difference potentially meaningful? Yes!

We usually define variance in terms of wobble around the middle. In this example, our average conversion rate varies from 2-3%, so our variance would be 2.5 ± 0.5%.

Add 0.5% to 2.5% and you get 3%. Subtract 0.5% from 2.5% and you get 2%.

Make sense?

A word to the wise

There are a lot of ways to determine variance.

One easy way is to run an A/A test. You just send half your traffic to a page and the other half of the traffic to an identical page and measure the difference.

Unfortunately, while you’d think that a lot of software packages would have a built-in way to track variance, they usually leave such things up to you.

Running an A/A test is an important way to both determine your site variance and check to see if your software is working properly. For example, if your conversion rate is significantly higher for one arm of your test, you probably have a problem.

Overall, you need to know your variance so that you can decide the value of your results. No matter how much money you might make off of a 40% increase in conversion rate, if it falls within normal variance, you don’t have any evidence that your change actually made a difference.

2. Confidence

Now that I’ve made you nervous about the validity of your results, let’s talk about confidence.

In statistics, confidence is an estimate of the likelihood that a result was due to chance. It’s possible that you just happened to send a bunch of more-likely-to-convert-than-normal visitors to your lightbox page in the previous example, right?

So, the question is, how confident are you in your results?

I have a feeling we’re going to talk about standard deviation…

In statistics, we look at populations (like the visitors to your site) in terms of standard deviation.

Standard deviations cut populations into segments based on their likelihood to convert. Remember the Bell curve from school? Well, that’s basically what’s happening on your site.

If your site from the previous example gets 2,000 visitors in 3 months (hopefully not actually the case, but it works for the example), here is how their likelihood of converting breaks down:

As you can see from the graph, the majority of your visitors (1364 or ~68%) convert 2-3% of the time. That’s your first standard deviation (SD).

There are also other 2 other main groups of visitors to your site. Some (272 or ~13.5%) convert 3-3.5% of the time. Another 272 convert 1.5-2% of the time.

That’s the second standard deviation, which represents about 27% of your traffic (544 people).

All told, these two standard deviations represent about 95% of your site traffic. In other words, out of the 2,000 visitors to your site, approximately 1,900 of them will convert between 1.5% and 3.5% of the time.

Okay, but what’s my confidence?

Since only 44 of your 2,000 visitors convert more than 3.5% of the time (and on the other end of the spectrum, 44 convert less than 1.5% of the time), it seems unlikely that the lightbox page would average a 3.5% conversion rate simply by chance.

As a result, you can be about 70% confident that the lightbox page did not convert better by mere luck.

Where did you get that number?

To understand how confidence is calculated, we need to look at the situation we created with our test.

By sending our traffic to two different versions of our page, we created 2 traffic populations. Population A (1,000 visitors) went to the page without the lightbox. Population B (the other 1,000 visitors) went to the page with the lightbox.

Each population has its own Bell curve and is normally distributed around its average conversion rate—2.5% for Population A and 3.5% for Population B.

Now, if you notice, both populations actually cover some of the same conversion rate range. Some of the traffic in Population A and some of the traffic in Population B converts between 2% and 4% of the time.

That means there is overlap between the 2 populations.

If there’s overlap, there’s a chance that the difference between the populations is due to luck.

Think about it. If the two populations overlap at all, there is a possibility that Population B randomly has low converting people in it and/or Population A is randomly made up of conversion-prone visitors.

Remember, Population A and Population B are just samples of the total population. It’s completely possible that they are skewed samples.

But what are the odds of that? Let’s look at the overlap of the 2 populations and add up how many visitors fall into the overlap.

In this case, about 632 of your 2,000 visitors convert between 2% and 4% of the time—no matter which page you send them to. As a percentage, this means that 31.6% of your traffic could have belonged in either group without changing your results.

Therefore, you can only be about 70% confident that your results indicate a true difference in conversion rate between the lightbox page and the lightbox-less page.

In practical terms, 70% confidence means our 40% improvement in conversion rate could occur randomly 1 out of every 3 times we run the test!

Say what?

Despite the fact that we’ve never converted this well before, we still have a 31.6% chance that our results were produced by nothing more relevant than a cosmic hiccup. How could that be?

This is a perfect example of the importance of confidence and variance.

Your results might look impressive, but if you have a lot of variability in your baseline results, it’s hard to have much faith in the outcome of your tests.

So, how do I get results I can use?

To demonstrate the effects of variability, let’s change your average quarterly conversion rates from 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6% to 2.75%, 2.6%, 2.4% and 2.25%. This drops the variance from 1% to 0.5%.

What effect does that have on our results?

We still have a 40% improvement in conversion rate, but now our 2 populations have a lot less overlap.

Now, only about 84 of our 2,000 visitors fall into the 2.75-3.25% conversion rate category, leaving us with a 4.2% chance our results were a random twist of fate.

In practical terms, that means we can be 95.8% confident that adding a lightbox improved our conversion rate.

95.8%? It doesn’t seem very likely that our lightbox did better out of luck. Now we can “Wahoo!” with confidence!

Is 95% confidence good enough?

After knocking their heads together for a while, statisticians decided to set the bar for confidence at 95%. You may also see this reported as ρ-value (a ρ-value < 0.1 is the same thing as > 90% confidence, a ρ-value of < 0.05 is the same as > 95% confidence and so on).

As we’ve just discussed, there’s always some chance that your results are due to luck. In general, though, if you’re confident that at least 19 out of 20 tests will yield the same result, the statistical deities will accept the validity of your test.

That being said, confidence is a very subjective thing.

You might want to be 99.999% confident that your bungee rope isn’t going to break, but you might try a restaurant that only 30% of reviewers like.

The same idea is true for business decisions. Wasting money on a marketing strategy you are only 70% confident in might be acceptable where going to market with a drug you’re 95% confident doesn’t turn people into mass murders might not be such a great idea.

Now that you understand what confidence is and where it comes from, it’s up to you to decide what level of confidence makes sense for your tests.

While calculating confidence is usually a lot more complicated than what we showed here, the principles behind confidence are fairly universal. That’s good, because you can leave the calculations to the computer and focus your time on making the right decisions with your data.

3. Sample size

Still with me? Awesome! We’re through the worst of it.

Now that you’ve seen the interplay between variance and confidence, you’re probably wondering, How do I get low variance and high confidence? 

The answer is traffic. Lots and lots of traffic.

Traffic increases the amount of data you have, which makes your tests more reliable and insightful.

In fact, the relationship between the quantity and reliability of your data is so consistent that it’s a bit of a statistical dogma: With enough data, you can find a connection between anything.

Here we go again…

Looking back at our last example, if you have 2,000 visitors per quarter and quarterly conversion rates of 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6%, your average conversion rate for 8,000 visitors is 2.5%.

There’s some variability there, but your average for the year is still 2.5%.

But what would happen if you looked at your yearly conversion rate for four years instead of your quarterly conversion rate for four quarters?

Well, assuming that everything in your industry remained fairly stable, every year, your conversion rate would be fairly close to 2.5%.

You might see 2.55% one year and 2.45% another year, but overall, the variation in your yearly average would would be much smaller than the variation in your quarterly average.

Why? Bigger samples are less affected by unusual data.

Consider the following:

The average net worth in Medina, WA was $44 million in 2007. There are only 1,206 households in Medina, but 3 of the residents are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Craig McCaw.

If Bill moved, the average net worth would drop to $6 million. If all 3 moved, average net worth would only be $224,000.

Source: Hair JF, Wolfinbarger M, Money AH, Samouel P, Page MJ. Essentials of business research methods. Routledge. 2015. p. 316. [print].

When you only look at the small population of Medina, WA, these 3 men have had a huge effect on the average net worth.

However, the average net worth in Washington is only $123,000.

In other words, even though these 3 men are worth $53.1 billion, in a state population of 7 million, their wealth barely affects the average net worth.

So, the bigger your sample size, the less your averages will be affected by extreme data.

What does that mean for my marketing?

If the populations you test are small, unusual groups like Bill and company will have a big effect on your variance.

For example, if 50 of your visitors are lightbox addicts who troll for lightboxes and compulsively convert whenever they find one, that’s going to have a dramatic effect on your conversion rate if you are only sampling from 2,000 visits.

Since you normally only get 50 conversions from 2,000 visitors (2.5% conversion rate, remember?), adding another 50 will have a huge effect on your variance.

Now, all of a sudden, your quarterly conversion rate is 10% instead of 2-3%.

On the other hand, if you have 200,000 visitors per quarter and the League of Lightbox Lovers shows up, the difference will be much more subtle.

Normally, you would get 5,000 conversions from 200,000 visitors, but this time you get 5,050.

Big whoop. Your conversion rate for this quarter is 2.525% instead of 2.5%. That falls well within your expected variance.

Do you see how sample size affects the reliability of your results?

The more data you have, the easier it is to tell if your change made a difference. Most people tend to orbit around average (back to the Bell curve, right?), so large traffic samples balance out the outliers and reduce the variance in your data.

Less variance means more confidence, so it’s an all around win!

How much traffic do I need?

It’s usually best to set up your tests based on conversions rather than overall site visits (unless that’s one of the things you’re testing, of course). That way, you know you’re getting enough conversions to make your data meaningful.

Just to give you a ballpark figure, it typically works well to shoot for at least 350-400 conversions per testing arm.

However, this range will change dramatically depending on your overall traffic volume.

I’ve seen companies that blow past this number in 20 minutes. Other sites take months or years to get that many conversions.

Scale your tests to the traffic volume that works for your site. If you’ve been testing for 3 months and have a consistent 40% improvement in conversion rate but only 60 conversions between the arms and 70% confidence, that might be enough to convince you to declare a winner.

After all, your data might look better after a year, but is that worth missing out on an extra 20 conversions per quarter while you wait?

Unfortunately, sample size can be one of the trickiest aspects of your tests to optimize. Depending on your goals, you can often best-guess things or just run your tests until you get what you need.

However, if you find yourself in a pinch, there are online calculators for determining what sample size you will need.

The most important takeaway from this section? The more data you have, the more reliable your results will be.

Conclusion

Variance. Confidence. Sample size. To truly understand your data and its implications, you need to understand each of these aspects and how they interact.

Variance acts as the gatekeeper for your data. To even be worth considering, your results need to exceed the normal variance of your website.

Once you’ve hit that benchmark, you need to determine how confident you are that your results aren’t simply due to chance.

Finally, if you want to minimize variance and maximize confidence, choose a sample size that’s big enough to be truly representative of your traffic and small enough to be achievable.

Okay, you made it! Let’s wrap up this post.

Now that you’ve got this knowledge under your belt, you’ll be surprised how often it comes in handy.

Just a word of warning, though, once you start saying things like, “Well, that data looks good, but what’s our normal variance?” you are likely to evoke awe in those around you. Might even land a promotion.

Like I said, math really is valuable…

The post Statistical significance: Is it significant to you? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Ask most marketers or business owners these questions and you’ll usually get a lot of very specific answers. “We have the best prices”…“Our product has more features than the competition”…“Our customer service is incredible”…

Now, all of these answers are great, but most of the time, they don’t answer the real question: why do your customers buy from you?

What do your customers really care about?

When someone clicks on an ad and visits your page, it’s true that they might be looking for the best price or a certain set of features. It’s even possible that they might be looking for testimonials about customer service.

But how do you really know that your customer service testimonials are why people convert on your site?

Maybe you think it’s your testimonials, but it’s really your price…or your features…or that cute puppy in your hero shot. When you get right down to it, most of the time you don’t really know why people decide to buy from you.

However, that doesn’t stop us from assuming that we know why people buy from us. Humans have this funny tendency to believe that “if it matters to me, it must matter to everyone!”

So, if you value your customer service, those testimonials about your awesome customer service reps must be why people convert, right?

Well, maybe.

But what if you change your site to emphasize your testimonials and your conversion rate goes down? What then?

Was it a bad month? Did you use the wrong testimonials? Or did you change the wrong thing on your site?

Testing your website

As any good scientist will tell you, if you really want to prove something, you need to run a test! In online marketing, we call this conversion rate optimization, but it’s really just the art of creating hypotheses about your website and testing them.

To show you how this works, let’s use SurvivalLife.com as an example. When Survival Life set up their site, they used a clean, minimalistic site design—you know, the kind web designers rave about.

The team at Survival Life loved the design, but they were smart enough to realize that what they loved might not be what their audience loved. So, they decided to test an “uglier” design against their award-worthy template.

To their surprise, the ugly design far outperformed their original template.

But why? Most web designers and even conversion experts would tell you that a clunkier, uglier site will get worse results than a simple, beautiful template. In fact, that’s what the team at Survival Life believed, so why did their uglier site design work better?

The answer is fairly simple. The “ugly” site design was what their audience resonated with.

Although website design best practices can help improve the performance of your site, your site traffic is always unique to your site. That means no one—including you—can completely predict which site elements or changes will improve your conversion rates.

However, just because you can’t predict how your audience will respond to a change in your site doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try out new ideas. The key is to test them. That way, you can tell which changes make a difference…and which ones don’t.

How to effectively test your website

So, if simply making tweaks to your site that you think will improve performance isn’t a great idea, how should you test your website?

Once you’ve come up with a few testing ideas, here are a variety of tools you can use to test your site (VWO, Optimizely, Google Experiments, etc). Each of these tools has different strengths, but they all serve the same fundamental purpose: they allow you to compare the performance of different designs and site elements.

Since the specific tool isn’t as important as the tests you’re running, we’ll focus on how to run and analyze your tests in this article (for more info on testing tools, click here). To run an effective website test, you need to understand 3 basic testing concepts:

1. Your traffic changes over time

As any good marketer knows, your traffic changes over time. You have good months and bad months. As a result, your conversion rates are constantly changing.

Why is this important? Well, say you added a bunch of testimonials about your customer support team to your website. You run your test and conversions increase by 15%!

That’s awesome, right?

Well, maybe (this statistics, so get used to that answer).

What if a competitor just went out of business and all of their former customers came to your site and made a purchase? That’s great for your business, but it doesn’t mean that the change you made was the reason why your conversion rate improved.

This is part of the reason why it’s always important to include your original, unchanged design as a control in your test. That way, you can directly compare the conversion rates of both pages—even if your traffic changes.

So, if that competitor goes out of business and the conversion rate on your new design goes up by 15%…but the conversion rate on your old design goes up by 20%, you know that your new design actually hurt your conversion rate.

2. Confidence

Yes, I’m about to get statistical on you. But, before you hit the back button, give me a chance! This is critically important information and I promise I’ll explain things in the simplest, most painless way possible.

Still with me? Good.

In statistics, confidence means the same thing it does in everyday life. The only difference is, in statistics, confidence comes with a number.

So, if you were married to a statistician, you might tell your spouse, “I’m confident that I’ll be home by 5:30.” Your spouse might reply, “When you say you’ll be home and when you’re actually home are different 68% of the time, so I’m 68% confident you won’t be home by 5:30.”

Then, your spouse might text you the following image…

…followed by the statement, “I’m about 84% confident you’ll be home by 6:30, so I’ll have dinner ready then.”

As you might imagine, being married to a statistician could be a bit harsh…

That being said, this is exactly how confidence works in statistics. Essentially, confidence describes the likelihood that two groups or situations (when you say you’ll be home vs. when you actually get home) are not the same.

The more overlap you have between your two groups, the less confident you can be that they are different. Case in point, the more often you are home when you say you’ll be home, the less confident your spouse will be that you’ll be late.

Similarly, if you create a new version of your homepage with a 50% better conversion rate than your original design, but your confidence is only 50%, that means it’s even odds that your improved conversion rate is solely due to chance.

As you might imagine, more statistical confidence is always better.

In website testing, most people shoot for at least 95% confidence. At 95% confidence, there’s only a 1 in 20 chance that the difference in your conversion rate is due to random chance, so you can feel both emotionally and statistically confident in your results.

The good news is, most website testing programs calculate confidence for you. All you have to do is use it to decide your winner.

3. Traffic volume

At this point, you’re probably thinking, Okay, I get it. External changes can affect my conversion rate and I need high confidence…but how do I get those?

The answer is fairly simple: traffic volume.

If your normal conversion rate is 15% and you run a test on 10 visitors and one of the visitors to your new design converts, guess what, your new conversion rate is 20%!

Your confidence, however, is probably around 0%.

In this scenario, there’s a very good chance that your one converting visitor would have converted on your old page design, too. There’s really no way to know.

But, if you run that same test on 10,000 visitors and 20% of the visitors to your new page convert while the old page keeps converting at 15%, you’re looking at a confidence of over 99%. With that much traffic, you know you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The exact amount of traffic volume you need to get meaningful data from your test will vary from test to test. With that in mind, it’s usually best to keep running your tests until you get to a confidence level you’re comfortable with. Otherwise, your test is basically useless.

Conclusion

Website design doesn’t have to be a guessing game. I’ve seen site tests that have increased clients’ profitability by millions.

The key is knowing how to run an effective test.

If you’re willing to challenge your own preconceptions about your traffic and test all your ideas, you can identify exactly what your potential visitors want from your site. All it takes is a little time, effort and statistical know-how.

Have you ever made a site change that didn’t work out? What happened? How do you improve the performance of your website?

Note, this article was originally published on Duct Tape Marketing.

The post What your customers really need is…more site testing? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Unlike click-through rate or cost-per-click, conversion rate describes how good your marketing is at getting people to do what you want them to do (we call this “converting” in the marketing world). Generally speaking, the higher your conversion rate, the better your marketing is!

In this article, we’re going to discuss what your conversion rate is, how to calculate it and—most importantly—how to improve your conversion rate.

What is Conversion Rate?

To put it simply, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or landing page that convert (aka, do what you want them to do). Depending on your business goals, a “conversion” could be almost anything, but here are a few common types of conversions:

• Making a purchase
• Submitting a form (contact us form, lead gen form, etc)
• Calling your business
• Engaging with your online chat
• Signing up for a subscription (either paid or free—like a newsletter)
• Registering on the site
• Downloading something (software trial, eBook, mobile app, etc)
• Using something (new/advanced feature on your software or app, simply using your software/app for a certain amount of time)
• Upgrading their service
• Engaging with your site in some way (time on site, repeat visits, number of pages visited)

There are plenty of other conversion actions people can take on a site, but this should give you a feel for what a “conversion” is. Basically, a conversion is a measurable action that progresses a potential customer towards becoming a paying customer in an important way.

How Do I Calculate Conversion Rate?

Calculating conversion is actually fairly easy. All you have to do is divide the number of conversions you get in a given time frame by the total number of people who visited your site or landing page and multiply it by 100%.

Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%

For example, if your site had 17,492 visitors and 2,305 conversions last month, your conversion rate is 13.18%. Easy enough, right? In fact, if you set up your tracking right, most online advertising (eg, Google Ads, Facebook Ads) and analytics platforms (eg, Google Analytics) can actually show you your conversion rate right in their interface.

One of the great things about conversion rate is that you can be as specific or as broad with your conversion rate as you want to be. Here are a few different types of conversion rate you can use and ways you can use this data to examine performance:

• Overall conversion rate (how well does your website convert traffic from any source?)
• Marketing channel conversion rate (is Google Ads traffic or Facebook Ads traffic more likely to convert?)
• Page-level conversion rate (which of these pages is better at converting traffic?)
• Campaign conversion rate (did my targeting changes improve anything?)
• Individual ad conversion rate (do I need to change my ad copy? does this ad drive more qualified traffic?)
• Keyword conversion rate (which keywords deserve more budget?)

Obviously, this list just scratches the surface. Conversion rate is a great metric for evaluating the performance of almost any aspect of your online marketing. Driving clicks is great, but if those clicks don’t end up doing something that is beneficial for your business, something needs to change.

Conversion Rate vs Click Conversion Rate

Now, you might be thinking, “But what if the same person converts multiple times? How does that affect my conversion rate? Should I count that as one conversion or multiple conversions?”

Those are all great questions. To deal with the whole “total conversions vs converting visitors” problem, marketers use different terms to describe each situation.

As we discussed above, conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. To see what percentage of visitors converted (regardless of how many times they converted), you divide converting visitors by total visitors and multiply by 100%. We typically call this your “click conversion rate”.

Click conversion rate = (converting visitors / total visitors) * 100%

For many businesses, their conversion rate is virtually identical to their click conversion rate, so we’ll focus on conversion rate in this article. However, click conversion rate can be handy in situations where you get a lot of repeat conversions and want to see what percentage of your actual visitors are converting.

Getting Meaningful Data

One thing to keep in mind as you calculate your conversion rate is the quality of your data. For example, I have seen campaigns and pages with a 100% conversion rate…which seems great until you realize that they only had one visitor.

If your traffic sample isn’t very big, it’s hard to trust your results. If 5% of 20 people convert on your site and one of them converted by accident (it happens), is your page working very well? Probably not, since your only conversion was an accident.

On the other hand, if 5% of 10,000 people convert and 5 of them converted by accident, your conversion rate drops from 5% to 4.95%. That’s still fairly dependable data.

Since every traffic source has a certain amount of natural randomness (accidental conversions, people who meant to convert but didn’t, random periods of high or low conversion rates, etc), the only effective way to look at your conversion rates is to use a sufficiently long timeframe.

Of course, like most other conversion rate-related concepts, there is no “right” timeframe for every business. Many marketers like to use a month as their go-to timeframe, but if you’re a big site like Wal-Mart, you might only need a day to get meaningful data. If you only get a few hundred visits a month, it may take 6 months to really get a feel for your conversion rate.

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

As you can probably imagine, conversion rates vary considerably depending on your traffic quality, industry, business, what you’re selling and even the specific conversion action you’re tracking. As a result, while you can find broad conversion rate statistics out there (like this handy study conducted by Unbounce), what qualifies as a good conversion rate for you will ultimately be specific to your business and your marketing campaign.

In addition, it’s important to remember that a conversion is not always the same thing as a purchase. While conversion rate is a handy metric, the goal of most marketing isn’t to produce conversions—it’s to produce sales.

For example, let’s imagine that you are a partner in a law firm that averages $3,500 in revenue per new paying customer with a 50% profit margin. You run 5 marketing campaigns where a conversion is someone who submits a lead form on your landing page.

Here are your results:

Both campaign 3 and campaign 4 have the lowest conversion rates, which means they could need some work. But, none of this data gives us any insight into the profitability of these campaigns. Are these leads turning into sales? We can’t really tell.

To answer that question, let’s take a look at the return-on-investment (ROI) for your campaigns:

All of sudden, it’s crystal clear which campaign is actually benefiting your firm the most. Although campaign 1 had the best conversion rate, it has a much lower than campaign 4. In fact, while campaign 4 produced the most expensive leads, for every $1.00 you invested in campaign 4, you get $7.52 back.

Now which campaign looks like the best investment?

As you can see, while conversion rate data is incredibly handy, it still doesn’t tell the whole story. Even a “good” conversion rate can be bad for business if you can’t turn those conversions into sales. To learn more about tracking and optimizing your ROI and return on ad spend (ROAS), check out this article.

Conversion Rate Tracking

While conversion rate may not be the ultimate measure of success, it is a great tool for tracking performance. But, to calculate your conversion rate, you need to be tracking conversions. As I mentioned earlier, with a little extra effort, you can actually track conversions directly inside of most advertising and analytics platforms.

With all of the possible conversions and platforms out there, covering how to implement conversion tracking is an article series in and of itself, but here is a quick reference list for several big name platforms:

• Google Ads
• Google Analytics
• Facebook Ads (includes Instagram Ads)
• Twitter Ads
• Pinterest Promoted Pins

Setting up conversion tracking is easiest if you have a good developer around, but trust me, good conversion tracking is worth the effort. You can’t improve what you don’t understand and if you aren’t tracking the results of your online marketing, how do you know what’s working and what isn’t?

The good news is, tracking and using your conversion rate puts you in a relatively elite group of online marketers, which can give you a big competitive advantage. I’ve audited over 2,000 Google Ads accounts and discovered that 42% of Google Ads advertisers aren’t tracking any conversions:

Share this Infographic On Your Site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to www.disruptiveadvertising.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><a href=’http://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords/good-conversion-tracking/’><img src=’https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/instagram-conversion-infographic-01.jpg’ alt=’Does Good Conversion Tracking Matter? [Infographic]’ width=’600′ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p>

Can you say, “golden opportunity”?

And that’s not all. Of the 58% of Google Ads advertisers who are tracking conversions, only half of them actually have good conversion tracking in place (you know, the kind you can actually use to improve your online marketing…).

If your competition doesn’t have good conversion tracking in place, they can’t optimize their campaigns for maximum profitability. But, if you are tracking conversions, you can optimize your campaigns and blow past the competition!

In fact, according to Hubspot’s State of Inbound report, 97% of inbound marketing campaigns fail without good analytics. So, if you’re tracking conversions and using that data effectively and the competition isn’t, who do you think is going to win in the long run?

Conversion Rate Optimization

Knowing what a conversion rate is and how to track it is one thing, but what do you actually do with your conversion rate data? More importantly, how do you improve your conversion rate?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your landing page and website to—you guessed it—produce more conversions from your traffic!

The great thing about CRO is that it helps you get the most out of the traffic that you already have. For example, even without increasing traffic to your site, improving your conversion rate from 1% to 2% will double your conversions.

Can you see why CRO is such an important part of your online marketing strategy? If you’re not optimizing your conversion rate, you are wasting money.

Testing Your Website

So, how do you get at all those lost conversions? It’s not as difficult as you might think. Here are a few ways to start doing CRO today:

1. Create a Dedicated Landing Page

If you are doing any sort of paid advertising (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc), you should be sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page. There are so many good reasons to do this, but the biggest reason is page optimization. If you’re going to pay to get traffic to your site, you want to send them to a page that is designed to sell.

Landing pages are also the easiest type of page to do CRO on. So, if you’re still sending your traffic to your homepage, this is the first place I’d start. For more information about landing page creation and testing tools, check out this blog post.

2. Come Up With a Hypothesis

All good CRO tests start with a hypothesis. But, to put your hypothesis together, you’ll have to make some educated guesses about which site elements have the biggest impact on your conversion rate and profitability.

Here are a few areas you can look at first:

• Headline. Your headline needs to sell and sell hard. 80% of your audience won’t get past your headline, so—even if you don’t test anything else—you should at least test your headline.
• Offer. Your audience isn’t you, so they don’t always respond the way you think they will. Try different descriptions and layouts to see what resonates best with your prospective clients.
• Call-to-action. Like your offer, the right call-to-action (CTA) may take a few tests to discover. Try more descriptive CTAs or different button sizes.
• Media. Sometimes a new picture or video can make all the difference.

Once you’ve got a hypothesis and two page designs to assess, all you have to do is get your test running!

3. A/B Test

The easiest way to start doing CRO is the A/B test. If you’ve got traffic coming out your ears, you can do some really cool (and complex) multivariate testing, but for most companies, A/B testing is the easiest and most effective way to go.

To run an A/B test, all you have to do is set up two different variants of a page and split your traffic between them. Half of your traffic goes to variant A and half goes to variant B.

To split your traffic, you’ll need the help of some sort of CRO software. If you’re serious about CRO, there are some fantastic, albeit expensive ways to run your A/B test. But, if you’re just starting out, here are some cheaper options to try first:

• Google Optimize. This is actually free, so you really don’t have any excuse for not testing. However, it doesn’t give you real-time results, so it may not be a great option for everyone.
• Unbounce. If you only need to A/B test a landing page, Unbounce is the way to go. It’s a powerful and easy-to-use system that allows you to quickly create and test a variety of landing pages.
• Optimizely. This is a more expensive option than Google experiments, but it also has some extra features that provide additional CRO insight.
• Visual Website Optimizer. VWO is slightly cheaper than Optimizely and has a very intuitive interface, so it’s one of our favorite CRO platforms at Disruptive Advertising.

Each of these testing platforms will give allow you to test different versions of your website or landing page and see which version has the best conversion rate.

Testing Your Traffic

In addition to testing your website, another great way to improve your conversion rate is to test your traffic. Obviously, if most of your traffic comes from organic search results on Google, that’s not really an option, but if you happen to be running any sort of pay-per-click campaign, you have a lot of control over who is visiting your site or landing page and why.

This is important, because the wrong traffic won’t convert…even on the perfect page.

So, how do you make sure you’re sending the right traffic to your landing page? Here are 4 things to consider.

1. Do Your Homework

Before you even start working on ad copy or a landing page, you should first take the time to do a little research on your target audience.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Have you advertised to this segment before? What worked? What didn’t?
• If this is a new audience for you, talk to some people in your target audience. Run a couple of ideas past them. Often, what works for you doesn’t work for your audience.
• What’s the best way to target your audience? Are there certain intent-based keywords they use? Certain interests on social media? Do they have a certain income level, fashion preference or other defining trait you can use to target them?

Once you’ve nailed down these details, use them to build your targeting strategy. A little bit of forethought can help you avoid wasting a lot of money.

2. Create the Scent

Unbounce’s Oli Gardner is fond of saying that landing pages should “maintain the scent.” In other words, the content of your marketing material should match the content of your landing page.

The reverse is also true. If you want to market a particular product or offer to a specific audience, your ads need to connect the needs and interests of your target audience to what they will find on your landing page.

In effect, you need to “create the scent.”

Ideally, your message should be so well crafted that only people who would be interested in the content of your landing page will click on your ad and—when they actually hit your landing page—they should immediately feel like they’re in the right place.

3. Get Granular

Expanding on the previous point, it’s perfectly okay to have different marketing material and different landing pages for each type and subtype of audience. Remember, each audience has different reasons for coming to your landing page and will respond to your page in unique ways. So, the more audience-specific you can make your ads and landing page, the more likely they are to convert.

Depending on your advertising medium, there are a variety of ways to do this: single-keyword ad groups (SKAGs) for PPC, social media targeting options, YouTube interests, etc. Just remember, the more granular your ads and landing pages, the better your conversion rate will be.

4. Pay for What Works

Finally, as you identify traffic sources that have consistently poor (especially unprofitably poor) conversion rates, either change something or quit spending money on that traffic source. You don’t have to keep investing in the wrong traffic!

Instead, create a testing budget for exploring new traffic or targeting opportunities and focus most of your budget on known winners.

And, since you’re now pointing the right sort of traffic at your landing pages, you can expect your A/B tests to really start producing. You’ve got the right audience on your page, make sure the user experience is irresistible!

Conclusion

Conversion rate is one of the most important marketing metrics. Unlike click-through rate, conversion rate tells you what percentage of your traffic is actually doing what you want them to do. You can buy all of the clicks you want, but if those clicks don’t convert…something is wrong.

Now that you know what conversion rate is, how to use it and how to improve your conversion rates, it’s time to put conversion rate data to work for you!

By the way, if you’d like help setting up conversion tracking or optimizing your conversion rates, let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to help.

How do you feel about conversion rate? Do you think it is a useful metric? Would you add any tips to this article? Leave a comment and let me know!

The post What is Conversion Rate? How to Calculate and Improve Your Conversion Rate appeared first on Aden Andrus.