Kurt Philip, Author at Convertica

Empire Flippers Lead Generation Conversion Rate Optimization Case study

Today, I’d like to share a case study with you.

Convertica’s experience working on the Empire Flippers valuation tool is the perfect example of the power of CRO done the right way.

Analytics & Conversion Rate Optimization doesn’t have to be complicated, it just requires a well managed process.

With a systematic approach, hard data, and experience gained from CRO’ing hundreds of sites (plus a bit of UX magic), we were able to increase an already successful website’s conversions by over 50% in just over 6 weeks.

I’ll detail the exact steps we took to CRO the tool plus the thought process behind it.

To see the full 2,500+ word conversion optimization case study on the Empire Flippers Blog, click here.

Synopsis

Empire Flippers is an Inc. 500 online marketplace with over 11,000 members. As website brokers, they facilitate the sale of established, profitable online businesses.

The Empire Flippers Valuation Tool lets business owners get a good idea of their site’s value based on dozens of proven and tested metrics.

Even though the tool had already successfully evaluated 45,000 businesses, Empire Flippers knew it could do better.

They turned to Convertica due to our past experience with lead-gen sites that we personally owned or managed for clients.

Fortunately, I had been both a buyer and a seller on the site multiple times before, so I had unique from a CRO perspective. This allowed me to put myself into the user’s shoes (which ended up playing a HUGE role in the campaign’s success).

The Challenge: The tool was already a major success by any measure: $47 million dollars worth of businesses sold and over 45,000 evaluation isn’t too shabby if you ask me.

However, there were a few sticking points that I myself had encountered that were holding the tool back from reaching its potential. Mainly, the fact that the valuation submission process wasn’t very intuitive and required A LOT of user input. Convertica had to find a way streamline everything, and it all had to be done on Empire Flipper’s Frankenstein mash-up of a WordPress site.

Our Hypothesis: Based on past wins for our lead-gen clients (62% average increase) and my perspective as a former user of the tool, we theorized a solution based on a simple hypotheses:

The more a user has to think, the lower conversions will be.

CRO doesn’t have to be complicated. This simple hypothesis had worked for plenty of clients in the past. We thought if we could simplify the process and make it more engaging(read more cases here), Empire Flippers would see a major boost to submissions.

Think about it—in 2018, we use apps for everything: dating, ordering lunch, finding a dog sitter, you name it. Most of them are so intuitive (a swipe here, a button press there) we don’t even notice we’re using them. Everything is done in the subconscious (like a game). This is a HUGE for CRO. We knew if we could keep users in that stream, we’d bump conversions significantly.

Even we didn’t expect 51.6% in just 47 days, but looking back on it, it makes a lot of sense. Here’s the exact process we used for achieving our goal.

Convertica’s CRO Process

We Set a Goal

Based on our past wins, we knew more than 50% gains were achievable.

We wanted to set a realistic but ambitious goal.

The point of setting a goal is framing your success.

You never want to settle for mediocre results — jump over to the study case in increasing monthly revenue within a short time!

Increasing leads by 20% is by all means a success, but when compared to our goal it would have been a failure, especially considering our past wins.

Gamify the Lead Capture Process

One strategy that had worked for nearly all of our lead-gen clients in the past was “gamifying” their lead capture tools. By making the process more like the rest of the apps a user is glued to all day (more engaging, easier to use, simpler), we knew we could increase conversions. Our goal was to get the user to think as little as possible.

How we “gamified” the tool

The first page of the lead capture was already very intuitive; no thinking, just clicking a button.

However, once you chose your monetization method, you were brought to this screen:

This type of static form is not intuitive. Now the user actually has to enter data (and exit their subconscious stream).

ENTER: our kick-ass in-house team armed with a year’s worth of lead-gen tool data.

All of those tests we ran on lead-gen sites taught us that if the initial 2 or 3 fields of a tool require no specific input, conversions increase in a big way.

Here’s what we did:

Multiple-Choice Questions: Multiple-choice or yes/no questions automatically generate the form without the user realizing. It also keeps them fully engaged.

Sliders: Instead of the user manually entering their monthly income and expenses, we had them use an interactive slider.
Progress Visualization: Never underestimate the power of visualizing progress. According to the lead impact case study, when the user can see how close they are to completing the process, it keeps them engaged.

Here’s what the new submission process looked like;

You can view the live version here.

Did you notice there isn’t a “Next” button? If it doesn’t have to be there, why put it? They’ve entered the data, now move to the next step.

TIP: Minimize your visitor’s actions. The less times the user actually has to make a decision, the better. Try and make some for them.

With our new submission process, the user is 40% done before they have to enter any data.

Test the New Tool vs. the Old

We don’t like to be too full of ourselves, but we knew the new tool was a winner. Still, as part of our standard operating procedure, we always test (and you should too).

We ran a split-URL test. This sends 50% of traffic to the new version of the lead capture and 50% to the original.

As we suspected, the test showed a pretty clear winner relatively quickly. The new gamified version killed it: + 40% in just two weeks.

Our custom reporting software provided valuable insight as to which type of user (segmented by device) converted by each version. Which brings me to my next point:

Always use data collected from tests to further refine your testing.

Data collected from this first test allowed us to create a more targeted second test. A 40% increase is great, but our goal was 50% so we weren’t satisfied.

Implement the New Lead Captures

Pretty straightforward here, right? The old version was clearly inferior, so we rolled out the new version and sent 100% of the traffic to it. We instantly saw a jump in conversions, which was just the validation we needed.

Use Live Data to Optimize Further

If there’s one takeaway from this case study, it’s to use data to further refine your results.

Good CRO is a constant process of refining based on the data (click here to know more).

We had already increased conversions by 40%, but our goal was 50%. Using our new data and some awesome CRO software, we could further identify some key friction points.

By using the data from the first test, we were able to double down and gain even more conversions for Empire Flippers. It was like the icing on the cake.

Optimizing for Mobile with Formisimo

After running a split URL test, we gleaned an important piece of data: the desktop version of our variation outperformed the mobile version by a good margin (36% conversions vs 26%).

We used a killer piece of form-tracking software for lead-gen sites called Formisimo that let us see the top drop off points for users who need to fill out forms. Basically, it speeds up your CRO by allowing you to conduct more focused and effective tests through identifying bottlenecks. In simpler terms, it’s freakin’ awesome.

Using Formisimo, we segmented visitors by device and discovered a major sticking point for mobile users: their thumbs.

The mobile thumb problem: Most people use apps with just one hand. The layout of the new variation was such that reaching the important areas with just one thumb was difficult to say the least.

The solution: We had our UX magician work her magic. Anywhere toward the top of the screen was too hard to reach, so the layout had to keep most of the important stuff toward the bottom so it could be used with just a thumb. Now, instead of having to use both hands (or god forbid reach a bit further!), the entire page was in what we considered the “easy to reach” zone.

The result: Guess what? 10% more conversions! — not only that we also do coaching to maximize conversions.

Summary

Challenge: Increase Empire Flippers’ lead-gen tool’s submissions by 50% and make it appealing to hundreds of visitors using their phones with one hand.

Solution: Gamify the tool to make it more engaging and decrease user thinking by making it more intuitive.

Result: + 51.6% conversions in just 47 days which was significantly optimized even further over the following months.

Key Takeaways:

Set challenging goals
Keep the user in their subconscious by decreasing their workload. Remember, the more thinking the lower the conversions
Display their progress and delay specific input as long as possible
Test and track everything!
Use data learned from initial tests to further refine later tests
Segment down to device level to get even more easy wins
Never settle for mediocre results. Keep testing!

To see the full 2,500+ word case study on the Empire Flippers Blog, click here.

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

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High Traffic & Low Conversions: Our 12-Step Checklist for Perfecting Your CRO Process

When it comes to CRO, the hardest part can be deciding what to start optimizing.

I have already done a post showing where to start if you’re new to CRO.

The questions is, when you have the areas to focus on identified, what do you start testing?

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

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We all know the feeling; traffic is rolling in but you aren’t making a lot of conversions.

If you own an affiliate, Lead Gen or eCommerce store, chances are you’re either facing this problem right now or have had it in the past.

If this sounds familiar, then you are obviously hungry to make some changes and start making major sales or commissions. If you’re getting thousands of visitors a month, your site holds massive potential.

You just need to unlock it.

At Convertica, we have helped hundreds of clients increase their conversions by making small changes based on systematic testing.

We have brought in major returns for site owners by applying a proven testing process.

I asked my team of CRO magicians to uncover the secret and help me put together a list of the highest-value tests we run on a new site to increase conversions.

Each of these minor improvements could help increase your conversions big time.

Remember: In CRO, there is no “magic bullet”, or one-size-fits-all.

If there was, none of us would be in business.

You can never be sure what will work (or even what is working) unless you test, test, and test some more. However, with this systematic approach, you increase your chances of success exponentially.

Now we have listed the best conversion rate optimization guidelines.

1) Locate Easy Comparison Table Wins: Features and CTAs

Features: General wisdom states you need product features front-and-center so the buyer knows what they are getting.

At Convertica we are interested in what works, not in theories. We’ve actually found that sometimes, having no features increases conversions (you only know if you test it!).

A visitor searching for a fridge will almost certainly want to see specs, but if they’re just looking for a pair of socks, it’s not worth the bother.

CTAs: It’s not only what you put in your CTA, it’s where you put it.

What we’ve found effective are horizontal tables with CTAs aligned vertically (along the y-axis).

2) Do You Explain Why You Chose Your Number 1 Recommended Product?

If you’ve got a number 1 product (or top model or merchant’s choice), are you just displaying the product and saying it’s the best? If so, this could be a big reason why you aren’t making sales.

Testing has shown us that adding 3-4 reasons explaining why you chose it and then hitting your visitor with a CTA right there increases clicks in a big way.

Bonus: If you’re using a sticky widget, do the same thing. We see too many widgets with just the product name and an image. Don’t let clicks to your affiliate slip away.

3) Is Your Comparison Table too Congested?

A major mistake we see on affiliate sites is comparison tables with too many columns.

Buyers love comparison tables because they make it easier to digest a product’s important data. If you have too many columns, it makes it harder to consume that data and decreases conversions. We’ve found that one column called “features or details” with all of the info listed outperforms multiple columns by a good margin. It occupies less space and makes life way easier for your customer.

4) Are You Sure You’re Selling the Right Products?

You can have the best comparison table in the world, but it won’t do you any good if it doesn’t have the right products in it. Review your Amazon sales data regularly and see which products are actually being sold. You’d be surprised how many times a client comes to us asking for a solution only to find out that they had the wrong products in the table. When you find out what is selling, review it and put it in the comparison table.

Remember: CRO doesn’t have to be complicated. Sell products that people want and they’ll make it to checkout!

Bonus: Always make sure that the 1st product in the table is “Available” or “In stock” on your Affiliate partner site. The first product is the one which has the highest CTR compared to all other products reviewed on the page. If the product isn’t available, it might turn off the visitors, and you probably won’t get the sale. — For your query get a quote from our website optimization service for free.

5) Make Sure Your Table is in “the Best” Position

When people search for keywords with “best”, they are in buy-now mode. Don’t beat around the bush with this one. Make sure your comparison table is right at the top the page (within the first 2 paragraphs). We’ve increased clients’ CTR by over 10% just by moving the table closer to the top of the page.

6) Test Your Pop-Ups

Sometimes a pop-up can be a good thing. Sometimes it puts customers off and decreases conversions. The only way to know is to test (are you noticing a pattern here?). If you aren’t getting conversions, stop throwing offers at your customer’s face and see if that leads to an uptick.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

7) Try Out Pros and Cons Below the Review

Having cons clearly visible on products increases consumer trust. Reviews that list pros and cons often outperform their counterparts by a good margin. If you’re simply stating why a product is good, it doesn’t drive a customer to take an action. Pros and cons are straight to the point and allow a visitor to think, “Aha! That’s the benefit I’m looking for.” Put the pros vs. cons comparison below the product review and see if that helps out.

8) Are Your Images Hi Resolution Enough?

67% of consumers stated that product images are VERY IMPORTANT in purchasing a product. In fact, they might even be more important than your descriptions. Don’t skimp in this department. Larger, clearer images are one of the easiest wins you can get and will almost certainly lead to better conversions.

One thing that we noticed with a lot of affiliate sites is that the images in the comparison tables are too small. Just by doubling these image sizes in our variation tests we have seen an increase in CTR of about 10%.

9) Make the Checkout Process as Simple as Possible

The more your customer has to think, the loweryour conversion rate will be. Everything needs to be as seamless and intuitive as possible. Each link is an extra distraction. Each extra step is another chance for them to say, “You know what? Nah. I don’t want this anymore.” Whichever action you want them to take (buying something or signing up, for example), you need to simplify the process. There are two ways to do this:

Make it easier: Delete unnecessary steps. Combine multiple steps into one. Having a “product preview” and the payment gateway on the same page is one easy way to combine two pages into one.

Make it fun: Make the process engaging and fun by gamifying the process. Add slider bars, multiple choice questions, or even a questionnaire to help them find the right product.
Remove forced sign up: If they have an account already, add an “Already have an account” section to the top of the checkout form. If they don’t, create an account for them automatically when they fill out the form.

Lesson: The more barriers to the goal, the harder it is for your customer to complete that goal (simple, isn’t it?).

10) Test Every Page

There is no magic bullet to CRO (I’m thankful for that). What works on one page might not work on another. It depends on the nature of the product and the type of consumer. We’ve seen certain layouts bomb on certain pages and perform like champs on others. Run tests on every page to see what’s working and what isn’t. And remember, don’t assume anything. Let your customers decide which version is best, and always keep testing/refining.

11) Full-Width vs. Sidebar

We totally understand why you love your sidebar. It’s a great place to display some prominent information that you think the user needs and to run some ads (we’ll cover this next, but for now, I advise you to study about common split testing mistakes done by a newbie). It could very well increase your sales…but you never know!

Try a full-width page instead of a sidebar. The sidebar might be counterproductive if it’s a distraction to your visitor. Not having it keeps them focused on what’s in front of them: your products. It’ll help put more emphasis on the things you’re trying to sell.

12) Test Turning off Amazon Ads / Adsense

Ads are a great way to make some extra money, but they could distract users from the products and turn them off big time. Try removing ads from your page and see if that does the trick.

Final Tip: Never test blindly. Yes, these step by step conversions will increase your chances of CRO success immensely, but taking a shot in the dark has major opportunity costs (especially for eCommerce stores). If you make the wrong change, you could cost yourself a great deal of sales. Instead, run heat maps for a while to get live data. Test the highest volume areas first.

We’ve CRO’d sites for over a hundred clients, and these are the exact tests we run on each new site. So far, they’ve produced the best results. The important thing to remember is that this is a systematic process and EVERYTHING has to be tested. You never know what’s going to work, but if you follow this checklist, we’re sure you’ll find what does. Be part of our conversion rate optimization class and learn more particular conversion strategy.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

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4 A/B Split Testing Mistakes Newbies Should Avoid

What if I told you, you could find conversion rate increases with every single A/B split test by avoiding a few newbie mistakes.

It’s true. But that’s the tragic feast or famine reality of A/B testing. Get it right, and your affiliate site is now a CRO BEAST that literally forces customers to put money in your pocket. Get it wrong, and you could invest money in the wrong changes, miss out on major opportunities, or even doom your website to failure.

The ironic thing is the mistakes that hurt the most are sometimes the easiest to fix; a missed detail here, a wrong hunch there. Sometimes it’s just because you’re too eager to find the miracle fix that can double your sales overnight.

Remember: Conversion rate optimization checklist doesn’t need to be complicated.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

At Convertica, we have run over 1000 tests in the last 12 months. After working with 100s of clients, we have found the 4 most common mistakes people make that kill their earning potential and even ruin their chances of making more sales. By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly which changes I made to my strategy that helped take my success rate with clients to nearly 100% (hey, nobody is perfect. Not even me).

Mistake #1: Not Tracking Enough Sample Data

You’ve got to resist the urge to crown a champion too early. I know that feeling: you have a hypothesis, set up your test, click run, and BOOM, right out of the gate the data starts confirming what you knew all along. The variant is pummeling the control into the dust.

Chill.

There are a million and a half reasons why the variant can be outperforming the control, and most have nothing to do with the changes. Time of day, week, month, or year; a sudden mood change; random luck. This is where statistical significance comes into play. Statistical significance is the probability that your result is NOT due to random chance (variables outside of your control). Industry standard is 95% + statistical significance to be certain. This means if your test confirms a winner with a statistical significance of 95%, that there is only a 5% chance that this result is due to chance.

We don’t even start to draw conclusions until around a minimum of 1000 views. The more iterations of the process, the more you eliminate statistical anomalies, the closer to the truth you get.

Fix the Mistake: Don’t jump to conclusions. Keep the test going until you reach a high degree of statistical significance.

Even VWO can call a winner too early. Generally speaking though, the clearer the winner the earlier the test will be concluded with statistical significance.

Mistake #2: Not Refining Your Data Analysis

You’ve run your first test, anxiously waited a few long weeks, and now the results are in…..

-0.48% decrease overall.

What? Is that really possible?

It is, but the chances are it only appears that way, and you just need to take a closer look to find the gold. If you pull the data out of VWO (or your preferred AB testing tool) and do some digging, you will find the devil is in the details.

We see it often: mobile and desktop results often cancel each other out. That -0.48% decrease overall is actually just -0.48% averaged across the total visitors and doesn’t account for the nature of those visitors (in this case, the device they are using).

A test that initially showed no change to visitors actually held valuable data. The changes caused a conversion increase for mobile device visitors and a decrease to desktop ones. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though-what works on desktop doesn’t always work on mobile (fat fingers make life tough).

So now, we install a device-only plugin and show the changes only to mobile, and suddenly you get a 22.21% overall website conversion rate increase from a split test that you thought was no good.

This technique alone, will increase your chances of success with split testing to nearly 100%.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

Are you starting to see the power of CRO?

We see this ALL the time with tests we run, and it caused us to refine our process. Here’s how it works now:

1. Run split test for all visitors
2. Segment the concluded test data into mobile and desktop and analyze each separately
3. From the findings, run a test to mobile-only traffic and another to the desktop. Check our CRO blueprint here…

This has literally 10x’d our success for our clients. We have an almost 100% success rate on all our tests now by segmenting the data and running separate tests to each device. Refining the process like this reveals far more valuable data.

Fix the Mistake: Testing only for desktop will reveal what works best on desktop (remember, CRO doesn’t have to be difficult). Same for mobile. Refine your processes by segmenting audience so you don’t get results that cancel each other out.

I have gone through in detail how to do device level testing.

Mistake #3: Focusing on the Wrong Areas to Test

Opportunity costs for A/B testing are astronomical. Each test should be run for 500-1000 views on each variation. It all comes down the the difference in conversion rates for each variation.

If you own an affiliate site, this means that testing the wrong thing can screw up a whole month of sales. You should never test too many elements at the same time (I’ll cover this in detail next), so make sure you choose the most effective ones first.

I have discussed this before in detail. When you are testing, make sure you are testing the areas that have the highest impact on conversion rates on the page. These are some of the lowest hanging fruit for A/B tests on your affiliate site are:

● Headlines
● Calls to Action
● Images
● Product Descriptions
● Prices

OK Kurt, but how do I decide which area to test first?

Tip: The best way to figure out where to run the juiciest A/B tests? You don’t decide. Let your visitors decide. Run heatmaps (Hotjar or some other software) for a few weeks and see where the hotspots for testing are. Start with this article on the best heat map tools for websites.

Fix the Mistake: Be sure to test the elements that matter most to avoid high opportunity costs. Run heatmaps to hone in on the best places to start testing rather than wasting time on elements that don’t matter (looking at you, button color!).

Mistake #4: Split Testing Too Many Things at One Time

The same is true for testing too many areas on your website at the same time as well. Once you get that first taste of victory, it’s natural to want to test everything and go overboard.

Resist.

When you test multiple elements on the same page, you run a major risk of polluting the results, and this is a poor scientific process. The two tests can “cross pollinate” and leave you not knowing which change is responsible for the results. The best-case scenario if you do this is that you confuse the results. The worst case? All your tests become invalid.

EXAMPLE

You decide to run two A/B test at the same time.

Test 1: You change all of the text links in the comparison table to graphics buttons. Result: + 30%.
Test 2: You add images to the mini-reviews below the comparison tables. Result: -23%.

The results now give off a distorted view of how the campaign is performing. In fact, you can’t actually be certain that the results aren’t polluted (meaning the changes from the first test are affecting conversions in the second). Be patient and test one thing at a time. In case the worst happens you can click here and get a quote from our professionals.

Fix the Mistake: You might think running multiple tests will help you grow faster, but it’s a dangerous game if you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t test too many elements at one time. Unless you’re a bad-ass pro at CRO (and even if you are) we suggest you stick to testing one single thing at a time.

The road to affiliate site CRO hell is paved with good split-testing intentions. I recommend keeping things as simple as possible. Don’t make CRO harder than it has to be.

Focus on the right elements, segment your audience, and don’t stop the test too soon. Lather, rinse and repeat. This is exactly how we increased our success rate 10x, one win at a time, and it isn’ hard at all. Fixing just one of these simple mistakes can lead to massive upticks in revenue.

What do you think are the most disastrous A/B testing mistakes? Also, check out our conversion rate optimization service, the end goal of our service is to turn qualified users into satisfied customers.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

A Simple Conversion Rate Optimization Blueprint (for Newbies)

I live and breathe CRO.

Every single week I talk to newbie, intermediate & high-level SEO’s and 99% of the time, the conversation goes the same way.

These are actual comments from guys making more than 100k a year from SEO.

“I can build and rank them, I just don’t have the time to focus on the CRO stuff.”
“I’ve done virtually no CRO because it seems like a hassle.”
‘The whole process is slow and painful.”

If we analyze those comments above and break them down, we can see some seriously limiting beliefs in action:

“I can build and rank them, I just don’t have the time to focus on the CRO stuff.”

Don’t have time?

Setting up PBNs, creating content, making sure you don’t have footprints, IP addresses, hosting, managing it all and then creating the systems to run all that efficiently, makes running an SEO business one of the most complicated businesses to run long-term.

CRO is so simple in comparison.

Let’s examine the other comments:

“I’ve done virtually no CRO because it seems like a hassle.”
“The whole process is slow and painful.“

Do you remember the first time you heard about SEO?

Maybe it was a friend who made their first $100 in a month online. The wheels started spinning in your head.

Do you remember the first time you looked at Matt’s blog or first jumped on to Lion Zeal to watch some interviews with industry leaders?

The thing is: Any processes is slow and painful, if you want to be good at a skill.

The thing is, there is a way to speed up the 10,000 hours of learning by managing the optimization of your site with this CRO Checklist

That would be like working 8hrs a day for 3.4 years.

Just on the one topic.

That’s how pro skateboarders get good at their art.

That’s how Matt Diggity got good at SEO.

A true master of his art.

Everything seems hard at the beginning.

You need to practice an skill or subject for a long time until it is easy.

It is when you can see things that others can’t. It’s when you are in the stage of unconscious competence that the magic happens.

It’s how good stock traders make successful trades they can’t explain.

It’s when you get to the stage when you are really good and you can’t explain why or how you did something, that you have mastered it.

The same goes with CRO.

You need to start learning skills on the subject, apply the skills and then learn some more.

The thing is, there is a way to speed up the 10,000 hours of learning.

Trim the Fat

I use the following principle or technique in every area of my life.

It’s called the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 principle.

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

The Pareto principle was made famous by Tim Ferriss in the 4HWW. A lot of the people view this book as the bible in our industry, check it out if you haven’t, it is the one book that completely changed the way I view the world, and is the reason I live the life I have today.

When I first heard about this theory, I was running what I guess I would call a “Digital Marketing Agency”:

I really had no idea. I could make websites, I could graphic design, I could code. So the logic was that I would be able to make the most money and travel if I just did everything.

I won’t get into to much detail about this or it could take up a whole blog post on it’s own.

I worked out that SEO was the 20% that I should focus on, and I decided to kill the rest of the business.

My income tripled the next year.

The point is, with anything in your life, apply the 80/20:

20% of your friends create 80% of your stress.
80% of customers only use 20% of software features
80% of your sales come from 20% of your products.
80% of your complaints come from 20% of your customers.
80% of wealth is owned by 20% of people

20% of CRO efforts creates 80% of the CTR% or revenue gains.

I have done all the courses I could find on CRO Academy. I have examined in detail all the case studies on other blogs about winning campaigns they have run for their clients. Here at CROGuy, we have processed over 100 sites in just the last few months.

We are starting to see some pretty clear trends when it comes to optimizing websites:

Most of it, is so far over everyone’s head, we get what is called Paralysis from Analysis, and we go grab a beer, sit down on the couch, put on some Family Guy and do nothing.

Today I am going to go through what I have developed as a consistent, repeatable strategy which it comes to CRO.

The process is very simple, almost too simple, you will want to complicate it.

The Simple Conversion Rate Optimization Blueprint (for Newbies)

The current webpage you are wanting to test is your control.
Identify the 20% of the areas where people click that make up 80% of the clicks.
Create a variation of the control.
Run 50% of the traffic at one variation, run 50% at the other.
Run for a week.
See what performs best.
Repeat.

That’s the process, you can click here how this CRO Blueprint increases revenue over a year.

I have put a video together step by step, showing how I work through the process.

If you missed my video on setting up and reading heat maps, you can watch it here, it’s step one of the strategy.

Why most fail.

Most people fail at things in life because they don’t have a dependable process to get a desired outcome.

If I do this then I get that outcome.

If you create a consistently repeatable outcome, you can scale.

Tools we use.

We keep it simple. The tools we use are outlined below.

That’s how we get consistent conversion increases for our clients.

It takes discipline (waiting for VWO to conclude an experiment), management (setting reminders in google calendar to check tests and manage client expectations and creativity.

The thing is, the more tests we run, the more data we get and the better results we get for our clients.

I have kept it super basic in this post so that you can go out there and start your own tests and see for yourself.

Looking forward to hearing about some successful campaigns from all my readers; make sure you share them with us.

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

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4 Step CRO Blueprint for Increasing your Revenue in 2018.

January 16, 2018

The SEO world is changing rapidly.

In 2012, SEO was so consistent you could run the same system and get the same results over and over. At the start of 2018 it has completely changed, and no longer as straight-forward as it once was.

Times have changed. Amazon.com in the 90’s. Got CRO? Photo cred

To stay in the game, you need to constantly evolve your skills with the times or you’ll be drowned by competitors. If you’re neglecting CRO (conversion rate optimization) entirely, or failing to pay attention to the key areas I’ll discuss below, then you are making a huge mistake.

In this article, I am going to go through the key focus areas for 2018, with detailed guidance on how-to. I’ll emphasise on the things that are constantly neglected time and time again, that is losing clients (and probably you) money.

Let’s get right to it.

What you should be focusing on in 2018 for those quick CRO wins:

Most of the websites we optimized for conversions through the first half of 2017 were niche affiliate sites (not just Amazon affiliate). — eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

One thing we saw time and time again was that these websites were being built on scale by SEO’s, and apart from new content and links, weren’t improved upon after the initial build.

It was clear most were following the same blogs on how to build these sites which didn’t have any focus on conversions at all. Well, there are certain ways to increase your chances for a higher customer conversion rate.

Tip #1: Really optimize your websites for mobile

This usually gets the same response:

“My site is responsive.”

A website being responsive and a website being optimized for mobile conversions are two very different things.

In our testing, our data has repeatedly shown that the highest rated comparison table plug-ins tend to convert the worst on mobile. With most sites having over 50% of their traffic coming from mobile, often the gains from desktop visitors were completely negated by the low conversion on mobile.

Let me show you why:

Here is a very common layout we saw on sites using Tablepress.

Here is what works much better on mobile. You can see why. Be careful with star ratings for amazon affiliate websites.

The issue with a lot of the “premium” table plugins for wordpress is that they are not at all optimized for mobile. There are ways to make them optimized for mobile with a few work arounds, but out of the box they are no good.

When optimizing your site for mobile you need to consider:

Are the call to actions visible on mobile?

Quite often, the call to actions, the links that were used to get users over to affiliate partners, weren’t even visible on mobile. You would have to scroll sideways on your phone to see them (This isn’t Tinder, people rarely swipe sideways unless told to).

Is everything aligned and uniform on mobile to be in alignment with your branding?
Are you using buttons for your call to action?

Most people’s fingers make it very had to click a text link on mobile. Make it easy for users to click your affiliate links. Buttons tend to work better for mobile users, while sometimes text links work better on desktop.

Are you trying to show too much info in your comparison tables on mobile?

With CSS it is very simple to show and hide elements that show up in your tables. Make it easy for your clients to quickly compare the rows in your comparison tables. It is called a comparison table for a reason. If they want to read more info about the product, make more detailed summaries down below in the page.

Most people just want to get a quick summary and are already sitting there with their credit card ready.

Do you actually use call to actions at all?

In the review sections below the comparison tables, people would often have an image that would link to their affiliate or just link from the product name itself. They wouldn’t actually tell the user what to do. I am always all about designing sites suitable for a 5 year old. Not content wise, but if you want the user to do something, tell them to “check price” or “click here for latest pricing”. Hold their hand and nudge them in the direction you want them to go.

Link your product images to your affiliate links. ‘Nuff said.

These are just some things we tested with consistent gains on mobile.

For clients’ sites, we always test every change. We never make a change to a website without running a split-test that proves better conversion rates first. We use data to make decisions, not intuition.

Our reporting at CROguy/Convertica always uses raw data from split-tests to allow us to see what the conversion rates were right down to the device level. Here is a conversion rate optimization diagram example:

Tip #2: Pull the raw data from split-tests.

You get A LOT of insights from this export. Here is how to do it on VWO:

These detailed reports have all the data, specific to device type, location, screen size and much more. The report shows how even though we had an increase on mobile as in this example, we had a near-equal decrease on desktop which completely offset the mobile gains. We have to go ahead and create some pretty reports with some tricky calculations to get it look appealing but out of the box, the data is all there.

The great thing about having this data is that you can then make an educated decision about test results.

From there you can then choose to display one variation for desktop and another for mobile, allowing us to still get that increase on mobile while just displaying the original variation on desktop, and then going ahead and running another test, just to desktop.

Displaying different styles and layouts can be done with some simple CSS or even done by outputting different HTML to desktop or mobile visitors with PHP.

Here is a cool tutorial on how to do that with CSS.

Tip #3: Test every page.

Websites that generate most of their traffic from organic search, often have different pages ranking for different keywords. Because of this, the psychology of the visitors to each page can be very different. We see regularly that the exact same split test run on 10 different pages of a site will return very different results.

Sometimes a change will show a 30-50% increase in conversions on one page, while another page on the same site shows a -10% in conversions.

Be responsive to the data and be open to getting micro-specific about changes you make to your site.

I’ve had conversations with a lot of SEOs that have tried split testing and haven’t been able to get any increase in revenue.

This is probably why;

They would have tested one page, got a nice big increase in conversions then just rolled the changes out site wide. Our data shows it’s very possible for 4 of the highest traffic pages to see an increase, for 3 to see no real change at all, and for 3 to see a decrease, completely offsetting all the increases from the tested page.

The lesson here is to always test every page. Always test every change on every page.

Don’t know where to start? You can see my tutorials on setting up heat maps here.

Don’t know how to set up a split test? You can see my tutorial on setting up your first split test here.

Tip #4: Test mobile and desktop separately.

Let’s just say you have run a split test to all traffic and worked out that desktop had a 40%+ increase in conversions, awesome.

Mobile however had the complete opposite results and returned a -37% decrease.

We’ll assume that you have gone ahead and rolled out the desktop version live on the site but kept the mobile the same as the original variant.

So now you’ll need to test something new on mobile that might work, right? Let me show you how to deliver a test to mobile visitors only.

How to set up a Mobile visitors only test in VWO.

This tutorial is done in VWO.

VWO is our preferred software here at Convertica. If you use another AB testing service the strategies will be the same but implementation will be slightly different.

I have shown how to set up a standard split test here. You can catch up on that if you missed it.

Setting up a mobile-only split test is not difficult at all. Before you start the campaign, you just have to change one setting:

I kept the tutorial basic so you get the concept and implement it.

If you have any questions about more advanced strategies, join the CRO Academy Facebook group and ask me a question.

You should probably join the group anyway, if you have any interest in learning more CRO, which everyone does, right?

Times have drastically changed since SEO in the late 90s.

Photocred

The first website I ranked #1 on google for was “pokemon rom downloads”.

It was 1998.

You might not even know what a “pokemon rom” is.

It’s a version of the original pokemen from Gameboy, ripped from the cartridge for PC and run through an emulator so you can play it on your PC, for free.

It was 1999, I was 14, the internet was starting to take off, and Pokemon on Gameboy was huge.

I had a 33.6kb/s modem which allowed 2kB per second download. I had to leave my PC on overnight to let internet explorer update.

That was less than 20 years ago and the online marketing scene is unrecognizable compared to now.

Over the years, I have changed with the times, learning new key skills as they became relevant: My small Freelance SEO business evolved to a client SEO company, to a 90% affiliate business, then to a CRO specialist (CROGuy), and now to Convertica.

Introducing Convertica.

CROGuy has now re-branded under a new name: Convertica.

2017 was an amazing year: We had a huge list of successful happy CRO clients, and we have a rapidly growing team of talented people. We gained CRO expertise in a number of industries and niches allowing us to get better results as the year went on by growing our team of talent and building better processes.

The chart below illustrates the increases in conversions we got over the year for all our 2017 completed client campaigns. (This does not include clients with active campaigns still running.)

We had to move on from CROguy, because Convertica is not a one-man show. We’ve been able to achieve this success only due to our talented and hard-working team members, through which we were able to culminate 20 years of experience in online marketing to get astounding results for our clients.

Where to next with Convertica.

We went from servicing micro niche SEO websites and a few authority niche sites to now partnering with almost all exclusively authority sites and industry leaders.

The more sites we process, the more data we have, and the more industry-specific CRO expertise we develop:

The results just keep getting better and better for our clients.

My hope is to demystify the CRO industry and give information back to the community that we gain from our campaigns, to enable more people to make more money from the same traffic visitors and rankings.

If you have a website with pages over 1000 views per month, you should be split testing (or getting someone to do CRO for you). If you aren’t, you are leaving money on the table.

Jump over to the CRO Academy and let me know what tutorial you would like to see next.

Until next time,

Kurt Philip.

Head of CRO at Convertica.

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

[AFFILIATE CASE STUDY] Part II: Increasing Monthly Income by $32,532 in under a 90 days.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m packing my suitcase in preparation for my trip back to Chiang Mai for the Diggity Marketing annual SEO conference.

My phone starts ringing.

It’s Robert.

Me: Rob, what’s up.
Robert: We did it man! Check your skype.

Me: Wait, you hit it?
Robert: Damn rights.

3 years ago, Robert set a goal, and a pretty audacious one at that.

Goal: $100,000 a month in affiliate income.

Reward:

This is the actual photo Robert sent me on Skype: A 2015 Mercedes c400. His dream car he was able to buy, in cash.

The Proof (from just two of his accounts):

This case study is for 1 of Robert’s websites in his portfolio. 100k was for his total income across all his sources.

We were able to achieve these numbers by constantly running split tests. Over the 3 month period, we ran over 50 tests which allowed us to get incremental compounding gains over time. This process was made a lot easier by having a huge amount of traffic to work with.

The Truth about CRO

There are a lot of misconceptions around CRO and how split testing works. In the CRO Academy, I regularly post examples of wins and losses. One thing that I mention often is that in order to be successful at split testing, we have to disconnect from the urge to always be right. This is confirmation bias and it is dangerous.

This can be hard. Especially if there are no conversion rate optimization experts to give you inputs and ideas.

We are socially conditioned to always want to be right.

Don’t get me wrong, there are conversion rate optimization best practices that are a must on any site.

A few of them, in no particular order:

High quality images of the product being promoted.
Clear call to actions.
Features and benefits displayed to the user to allow them to make an educated decision.
Making sure all elements look good and display properly in mobile. (yes, alarmingly many sites still don’t do this, in fact over 50% of the websites we audit.)

I won’t get into too much detail about that in this article. I have done that, here, and here.

Once you have what I call a CRO baseline in order, we need to work on getting a large targeted list of experiments ready.

When-ever I ask a potential client if they have ever done CRO and they say no, I get very excited – I’ll explain why.

Just this month, I ran a test using the two variants below:

A simple re-alignment of the calls to action from center to left increased clicks to the calls to action by +23.5%. Seems too easy right? Seems a bit like B.S right? Well, you can grab your phone and do we can do coaching call with CRO experts and see if this is true or not.

This is where it ties back into my story about Robert.

Now, let’s say Robert has finished baseline CRO after reading one of my posts. Clicks to his affiliate account jump 16%. Awesome.

As an example, and to keep the calculations simple. Let’s say Robert’s site was generating $20,000 per month before he did baseline CRO roundup. With a 16% increase that would mean that he would make $23,200 next month.

Same rankings, same traffic.

That would mean that he could take an extra trip somewhere next month, or he could get that new iMac next month that he wanted. No extra costs, just more profit.

Ok now it’s time to set up a split test, he has a goal to get to $30,000 a month from this site by the end of the year and god damn it, he will do it.

That means, he has to increase revenue by another 30% roughly.

Let’s say he tries the same layout as my example above.

He sets the split test up, this is his first one.

He sets his goals as a click on the calls to action button, makes sure the split testing software is installed and functioning correctly.

Robert starts the test and runs it for 1 hour and because he has roughly 2500 visits a day, he checks again in 60 mins to see if everything is registering correctly.

He sees the initial data after an hour and a euphoric feeling washes over him.

Relative Improvement against original;

Because the algorithm inside VWO doesn’t have much data, it is showing the possible result of the test based on current data could be between -41.1 and +641.9%.

His mind only registers one thing: 600% increase!

That would mean that his possible increase in revenue could push him above $100,000 per month.

Robert can’t sleep that night. His mind is going crazy with ideas on what he could spend all this cash money on, he goes to sleep with a big smile on his face.

How does this Tie into Split Testing and CRO?

Robert wakes up at 6am, and he opens his laptop instantly to check the numbers:

It’s not looking good.

Robert’s mood is instantly crashed, quite the opposite of last night.

The split test is now showing a likely gain of –10 to +32%

Not 600%+ like it looked like last night.

More data has come in and it has evened out the gap between the two variations with the actual test concluding at around 30%+ increases in CTR%.

This is where statistical significance comes in.

You can read about that in more detail here.

Due to us being conditioned to always wanting to be right. When the data tells us otherwise, it creates an uneasy emotional response.

Getting into the right Psychological Frame.

We have to just rely on the data for split testing.

Us wanting to always be right doesn’t have a place here and we need to recognize this early to have any success at this. We have to take a purely rational viewpoint when it comes to split testing. This is where our CRO consulting services can you help you, a lot.

For rationals this may seem quite easy, for the more emotionally reactive, this may take some practice.

When we take on a new client, we don’t have any emotional connection to the website, we didn’t build it, we don’t have any history attached to it.

This allows us to be in the best position to be able to purely rely on data to make decisions.

This is how we view split testing, objectively.

The power of compounding conversion rate increases.

Let’s use our original baseline of 100 clicks for an easy number:

In split test 1, we increased click rates to our calls to action by 23.6%.

New Control Baseline: 124 clicks roughly.

In split test 2, we increased click rates to our calls to action by 6.5%.

That now takes our baseline click rate to 132 clicks.

We are now up 32.6% on our original click-through rate. From just 2 split tests.

This is why we have to disconnect emotionally from the outcome and keep running the campaigns systematically.

Our Emotions Around Money

We have these two emotions that are connected to money:

Greed and Fear.

These two emotions make us perceive data differently at different points in time without us realising it.

The hardest thing about running a split test, especially if you have a larger income website, is managing your emotions throughout a campaign.

We have to set ourself up to expect nothing.

When you run a test, you should not want to expect anything.

When setting up a split test, it is merely a test of Variation A vs Variation B.

That is it.

We have to condition yourself to not have to be right in our presumptions of what will perform better.

Organizing Your Workflow.

In order to be successful at testing, especially at scale and over the long term you need to follow a very clear process:

Like any good business, you need a systematic process that can be repeated over and over again, without those pesky emotions coming into play.

You need to know;

1) Which tools to use, and

2) How to use them to get results.

Understanding the process.

When I get asked to look at someone’s website and tell them how to improve conversions, my simple answer is always:

I don’t know yet.

I need to implement my process that works out what works.

The example above of increasing clicks by 20% just by moving a button to the left, may not work at all on another website. Does this mean we always start from scratch with every website and have no previous takeaways? No.

Because what we do have is a long list of layouts, buttons, and combinations that have worked well in the past on similar sites for us to test.

As time goes on this list grows and it refines our process, so that we get it right the first time, more and more often, but we always test.

It’s all a numbers game.

I’m going to say it right now so it’s clear:

The more traffic you have on a site, the more success you will have with split testing.

Let me explain why:

Let’s call the first site Site A.

Monthly Revenue: $1000

Monthly Visitors: 5000

Highest Traffic Page: 2300

Normally at CROguy we focus on the top 5 pages of a client’s website, but in this example we’ll just test one page.

The top 5 pages, in most cases make up 80% of the revenue of the site. Not all the time, but that is what the data has shown us over time.

Ok so let’s set up our first test on Site A.

Control: CTA Button: View Price

Variation 1: Check Price

In order for us to declare a winner for this site, we would need a few things.

1. Enough difference in clicks on one variation over the other.

2. Enough views for a statistically significant winner. (So we can be sure the results were not due to chance.)

Let’s say it takes 2 weeks to declare a winner in this split test.

That means, during the split test, the control had 575 visitors and Variation 1 had 575 visitors.

Because you have waited 2 weeks to get this result, you would damn well want it to be a winner, right?

Wrong, Variation 1 was –10%

You wouldn’t be in the best mood if you just spent two weeks waiting for this test to conclude and it was a loser.

F!@k split testing.

Looks like emotion just came into play didn’t it?

Now let’s rewind a bit.

It’s far easier to get better results with sites that have larger revenue and more visitors.

We can run multiple tests per week, get quicker feedback and can find those winners quick and faster.

That is how we got such big increases for Robert:

What we did have was a plan, documentation of results and management of each campaign. We also took advantage of the available conversion rate optimization software.

We didn’t test just one page on Robert’s site, I believe it was closer to 50 tests. If you didn’t have a process to follow, on that scale, it would be impossible to manage.

Due to Robert having over 200,000+ unique views a month, it allowed us to very quickly run a lot of tests back to back and uncover the winning variations thats allows us to increase his revenue for this site by over 100% which in turn, helped him to reach his 3 year goal of $100,000USD per month.

Tools we use:

Hot jar
VWO
Google Calendar
Slack

In conclusion.

Managing your emotions can be easy once you have the right systems in place.

Have a process allows you to make quick, relatable decisions based on data.

The data holds all the secrets. Don’t let those pesky emotions get involved.

Click here to join the CRO ACADEMY where we ask, help, share and collaborate on all things Conversion Rate Optimization.

Until next time,

Kurt Philip

CROGuy

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

Client Case Studies

[AFFILIATE CASE STUDY] – How we Generated an Extra $15,048 in Monthly Revenue in 34 Days

The headline sounds like click bait right?

It got your attention. That is what it was meant to do.

You are about to learn exactly what web optimization techniques we did to increase one of our client’s monthly income by over $15,048.

By the end of this post, you will be able to implement most of what we did too.

Every time I write a post, I say the same thing:

“CRO doesn’t need to be complicated.”

In August we took Robert’s site monthly revenue from $20,403 to $ 35,451 in just over a month.

That is an extra $15,048 for the month of August.

Let me start off by saying: This site is a beast, an absolute beast. It is in fact, the beastiest site I have ever worked on.

Over 200,000 unique views a month.

We didn’t use any tricky plugins and we didn’t even touch any sales copy.

What we did do, was use our methodology that I have talked about many times.

Sure, we did have 4 of the Convertica staff making the changes, managing the tasks and pulling together the reporting and tracking, but whether you have 100,000+ unique views per month or 1,000 views per month, the same system applies.

It just comes down to consistently applying the process.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

The Earnings Proof i.e the “Show Me the Money” Screenshot

Amazon is just one of this site’s monetization methods. Like any good business you should always diversify.

How to Get Started.

We have had hundreds of sites apply to work with us over the last 6 months. We have seen everything from lead generation sites for local businesses, multi-million dollar eCommerce brands, micro niche and absolute beast Amazon affiliate sites.

One thing that has helped us get these results so quickly is that we get to see websites in a bunch of different industries across a huge amount of niches. This variety of experience has allowed us to develop tried-and-tested systems and know what works very quickly, allowing us to get quick results for our clients every time.

It all goes back to something else I say frequently.

Find the 20% of the areas of your website that are getting 80% of the clicks and generating roughly 80% of the revenue. This of course isn’t fixed in stone, the ratios are not going to match up perfectly. However, it is a great way to systematically process a large batch of websites and get consistent results. Sometimes it’s 90/10 sometimes it is 95/5. Regardless, there are always certain areas that you can use to scale up the revenue of a website with relative ease.

See more about the 80/20 principle here.

Now, let’s use a very general type of buyer intent keyword for this example.

In order to keep Robert’s identity confidential, we are going to use a generic keyword “best dog trimmers” as the example.

When someone types in “best” in front of the keyword in Google, they’re typically looking for the best of something to buy for themselves. They know the solution to their problems, they are trying to figure out what is the best one to buy.

For some people, they already know what they want, for others they are still browsing.

Either way, a good review of that product can be the tipping point that convinces the user to make a buying decision, gets them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase from your affiliate partners site.

This is not a post on keyword research and how to write converting copy, Matt Diggity has done one of those recently.

This is a post on how we helped Robert increase revenue on his site by $15,048 for the month of August.

Not in one year, but in just one month.

How we found the 80/20 for Robert.

We used heat maps to figure out where the users were clicking. Heat maps were also tracking what call to actions got the audience’s attention and made them click over to Robert’s affiliate partner, only one of which was Amazon.

Do you want a 20-100% conversion rate increase?

Get started →

Pro Tip: Don’t just rely on one affiliate partner. See what other affiliate programs are available for the products or keywords you are ranking for. Don’t just rely on amazon if you can, they regularly ban partners without warning or any clear reason. Have a google around, there are often other programs available. It’s all about not having all your eggs in one basket.

To see how to to set up and read heat maps, I have done an in-depth tutorial here.

We run the heat maps for around 1000 views and it will show us where the action is. Once we have that data, we can start implementing the changes.

There are certain things we do every time after we review the heat maps.

Check How the Site Shows Up on Mobile.

This seems like common sense, but a lot of people still don’t focus on mobile when optimizing for conversions. The majority of your users, especially in the B2C (business to consumer) market, coming to your website will either be mobile or will be in the coming years. Mobile will increase in importance and you need to keep that in mind with every website you build and plan to monetize. You can find out more about CRO coaching if you plan on monetizing your site like a beast.

Are the Call to Actions Buttons or Text?

We have to remember, we have pretty fat fingers. If your call to action is text only that is linked, sometimes we can’t click the link easily. Use nice big buttons for your call to actions. You can make them easily here.

Notice how I mentioned fat fingers? Mobile is becoming more important. People are now tapping on a link with their fingers rather than clicking with a mouse. Make it easy for them. A good conversion rule of thumb to follow is to make the entire sales process as frictionless as possible.

>> CLICK HERE TO BUY THIS PRODUCT <<

Use a Comparison Table.

Most people are already looking to buy the best product listed on your review page. Don’t make it hard for them. While a 1,000 word+ review is great from an SEO perspective, it is not super valuable from a CRO perspective. If you were looking to buy the best dog hair trimmers, are you more likely to a read 5,000 in depth detailed buyer guide or more likely to skim through the entire content to see the conclusion the article came to as to which trimmer to buy?

While having that 5,000 word buyer guide is awesome, you need to format it to accommodate these people skimming for the answer. You do this by adding a comparison table.

A Comparison table lets people see the bare bones statistics compared against each other. Also, these tables are visually pleasing and give your site a feeling of authority on the subject.

Make sure this comparison table can be used on mobile and is viewed correctly on these devices. Tables are somewhat notorious for showing up bad on mobile. You can also seek help from our conversion specialist anytime you need one.

Now, when all these changes are made to your website, reset the heatmaps for all pages and let the data gather for 1000+ views.

Doubling Down on Revenue

The next step makes a lot of sense but rarely happens in reality. This step is also used mostly in a series of conversion case study and testing.

The quickest way to grow your revenue once the 80/20 has been rolled out is to make the changes and let them gather data for a week or two.

Then we do an export of all the revenue generated and work out the 80/20 for where the sales came from.

Nearly every time I do this on a clients site, 80% of the revenue will come from just a handful of products.

→ Export all your revenue into a spreadsheet. Make sure you have each product that you have sold listed, with total revenue for each.

→ Divide the revenue of each product by the total revenue generated.

→ Group the 20% of items that total roughly 80% of the revenue.

→ Move those products to a new list.

→ The New List is Where the Gold is

Now let’s go back to our heat maps and make a list of all the places that we have call to actions or links to the shortlist we have compiled.

Testing Further – The Icing on the Cake.

This is where we get the biggest increases.

Not only have we doubled down on where the action is on our website, but we have also doubled down on where all the revenue is coming from.

These are the areas we split test to get super quick results.

If you don’t know how to set up your own split testing campaigns, I have done a tutorial here. It is far easier than you think.

I am putting together a tutorial on the 80/20 of split testing soon, so keep an eye out for it on the Convertica blog.

Whenever you do a test, change just one thing at first on your site. If you do a ton of changes at once, you won’t ever be able to know what caused the uptick or downtick in revenue. Once you’ve made the changes, get at least a 1,000 views to that change to see if there are any noticeable differences.

Here are a few things you can test your shortlist with:

Changing out button colors
Changing what the actual text on the buttons say (i.e Click Here for More Info vs. Learn More)
Your page layouts (does the page convert better if the comparison table is above the fold or below? What other page elements can you test?)

The Results from Client Reporting.

Closing Thoughts.

As you can see, the process behind how we increased Robert’s website from $20,403 to $35,451 in just over a month isn’t complicated. You have to however have a clear process, be patient and roll out the changes step by step while tracking them.

This is just one of the conversion rate optimization case studies of many sites we have rolled this process on. Since I was originally an SEO before getting into CRO, I’m extremely process driven. We have (and continue to do so) processed dozens of high earning sites using our processes. Every site refines our process.

If you follow the simple checklist I’ve talked about above, you can see some easy wins for your website.

These changes can be the difference between an extra $500 per month, or in Rob’s case it could be an extra six-figures annual income… without ever adding a single article, back link or increasing his traffic.

When you put it that way, is it really so tedious to change a few elements around to claim the cash you’re leaving on the table?

I didn’t think so.

Kurt Philip

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Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

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The How-To of CRO: Step 1: Heat maps – Top Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

Today I’m going to go through and talk about my favorite heat map software and what we use them for.

I’ll go through my website that I’ve actually been running heat maps on for a while like a live case so that you can see a how it all works.

I will go into this in more detail in the future, but for now, we don’t want to complicate the process too much. I think with CRO a lot of people will get confused by the amount of information don’t do anything.

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Many website optimization experts document all the experiments they run on their websites. So I’m going to try and keep it nice and simple so you guys can roll out heat maps on your site and then you can start to implement heat maps and start to get an idea and get some insight into what the users are doing and why they’re doing it. You’ll be able to see where they’re clicking so you can then start to increase conversions on your website.

It’s really not a hard process and it all starts with heat maps.

So I’m going to go through and show you how heat maps to works, so now we’ve logged in to the backend of my website and we’ve been running heat maps for a while now.

So to enable heat maps, click heat map, open up, okay. Now here heat maps are loaded up on my home page, so when you first sign up for heat maps you’ll have to actually go to all of the separate pages and sort of turn it off for a second so you can see what I mean.

So you’ll have to go to all the pages if you left five-page you were allowed five pages as plug change, but then you just hit record and it’ll start recording your user interaction on the page.

This is really important for affiliate sites. My site is a lead generation site so I’ve only got one call to action on it — Click here and be our guest on CRO Academy.

You can see here it gives you a breakdown of what all the users are doing, obviously the more red spots, the more high clicked areas and where they click, and this really does give you really good insight into what these are doing you wouldn’t have seen before when day after day I’m checking through clients websites.

It just gives you a really good insight, they could be clicking an image or maybe clicking one image out of ten and you can turn it into a lead capture or maybe it’s not linking to a product and you can see that it needs to be linked to the product or to the affiliate offer.

I’ve kept this nice and simple for this video, my site has just got one call to action on the actual home page and it’s got a few links people trying to find its information but those are secondary 0.07%. We can see here 8.6% want to know who the hell I am, 6 percent maybe you’re looking to sell their websites been interested in that.

We can see here, this is very obvious that it’s coming up over here actually because that’s the difference, it’s a little bit inaccurate that’s why I don’t use heatmap.me on my client sites. I like a different service which I’ll go into in a minute, but we can see here 16.10% of all my users and clicking my “Apply Now” button which is pretty good. (Recommended: 2 Must-read books for understanding CRO )

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That’s it heatmaps.me and now we’re going to jump over to my favorite which is what I use for CROguy and it’s called hotjar.

We’re going to jump over to my back-end for CROguy and now we can see in here all the page that I’ve recorded and also my number of page view and you’ll see when we jump into this how much more detailed it actually is, so in order to use sign your account, add your site, add your heat map, super simple home page.

So let’s jump over to my home page because that’s our main page of focus at the moment and we can see it’s much more in-depth.

Now the reason I like hotjar too is because it shows a breakdown of different screen resolutions which is really important especially when I’ll optimizing Amazon affiliate sites, because 99% of people don’t even think about Amazon affiliate sites and that’s where we get our 30 to 50 percent gains, because that’s where most the traffic coming from.

Now we are here, most of the people here are reading it, I have found in some of my client’s affiliate sites before that certain words the people by clicking on the words because that’s what they interested in, and then you can actually link that through them to the offer too.

Once again 17.43% click the button, so we would test the button for once, but now it’s very good interesting they can jump over the mobile it shows a very different story.

The user interaction is very different on mobile.

So if you can see here this is not rendering probably it doesn’t drop off like that, but obviously where people are swapping and a bigger one nice thing called action down the bottom 50% of all users to read.

So let’s look at my sole page, the same sort of thing, again it’s very simple, as I said I’m keeping this nice and simple and I will go more into detail later on in some more in-depth CRO case studies.

I just made this video is to show you guys how I use heatmaps and how is step one of this for the testing process.

We start every site like this here at CROguy, we’ll run them on heat maps until about a thousand or two thousand page views a get enough data where we can see what users are doing, and then we’ll start to come up with experiments that will run from that data.

So I recommend everyone goes out there, sign up for hotjar or heatmap.me, you get out there get you into any heatmaps loaded and then wait for the next video and I’ll show you the next step of the conversion rate optimization in action process which will be coming up with experiment ideas from after analyzing the data and then we’ll go through and set up our first campaign in the VWO and also look at using optimizley.

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Best Heat Map Tools for Websites

Are your website visitors not converting as much as you want?

Use heatmap tools to find where they drop off.

Are your users adding products to the cart but not checking out?

Use a heatmap software tool.

Do you want to know if your CTA button is doing its job?

Start with a website heatmap.

That’s right.

A heat map is step one in every conversion rate optimization process.

A website heatmap provides a comprehensive understanding of user behavior on your site, illuminating how customers interact with each page. With this powerful analytics tool, you can make informed decisions to optimize performance and provide the best experience possible for visitors.

Heat mapping a website is like opening a window into your users’ behaviors. It gives you insights into what they do when they’re on your site. Which elements do they focus on? And where they get frustrated or stuck. In short, it allows you to see the quality of user experience as website visitors navigate your site.

By knowing these things, your CRO campaigns can be tailored to your audience’s behaviors.

This means that you’re not just shooting in the dark and using best practices that worked on someone else’s site. Much like a doctor first needs to know what the disease is before he can prescribe a cure, you also need to know your visitors’ problems first before you can make changes to increase conversions.

But how do you know your visitors’ problems when you’re not in their houses to watch them as they navigate your site?

Enter heatmap tools for websites. These tools open the virtual wall between you and your visitors so you can “watch” your users’ behaviors and find your site’s bottlenecks.

Today, I’ll show you how to do this and which are the best heatmap tools to use.

We’ll talk about:

What is a Website Heat Map?

Web page design for effective conversion.

A website heat map is a visual representation of how individual users interact with a website. It shows where visitors click, scroll, session, and hover on a website, and can be used to identify areas of the website that are confusing or difficult to navigate.

Heat maps are adequate for observing and comprehending how consumers interact with landing pages and websites. Heat maps can assist organizations in identifying portions of their web properties that are working effectively and regions that may be generating friction or confusion by analyzing the movements and clicks of users.

In addition, they can provide insight into user behavior. With this data, businesses can decide how to optimize their websites and landing pages to get the highest possible conversion rate and user engagement.

Heat mapping technology offers the potential to revolutionize your web optimization efforts. By uncovering audience behavior, improving landing page content and enhancing website appearance – all with intuitive visuals – it’s easy to see why heat maps have become an invaluable asset in conversion rate optimization toolkits. In this article, we explore some of the best available tools and how they can be leveraged for maximum effect. In this article, we explore some of the best available tools and how they can be leveraged for maximum effect.

The best heat mapping tools for your web pages

Websites using heatmap sofware.

If you’re just starting with heat maps, the most confusing part is choosing which heatmap tool to use. There are a lot of options available at varying prices and features which means that it can get a little overwhelming.

And y’all know how analysis-paralysis works.

At Convertica, we use VWO, an A/B testing software that comes with a heat mapping feature. However, the price can be prohibitive especially if you’re just starting out or if you’re using it for only one site. It’s a great option though if you run an agency or a big website.

With that said, there are other heatmap tools that you can easily install so you get started right away. I’m going to try and keep it nice and simple so you can roll out heat maps on your site and get some insights into how users engage with them.

Here are some of the best heatmap software tools for websites that you can use.

Heatmap.com

Homepage of heatmap.com showing the content above-the-fold.

Let’s start with Heatmap. Using a simple Javascript tag that you install on your site, you can easily “spy” on what your visitors do. Heatmap.com tracks the behavior of your users in real time. As soon as you install it, you’ll immediately see what your visitors are doing.

Heatmap.com can be easily integrated with popular website platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Magento, and it’s compatible with most of website analytics tools and CRM tools.

A "spy glasses" watching users interact in the website.

Here’s a quick tutorial I did a while back using Heatmap.me (they have since rebranded to heatmap.com)

PROS

Works on dynamic elements and supports most Javascript libraries
Offers a forever-free plan that you can use for a maximum of 5 pages
Anonymous tracking
Easy to install and operate

CONS

Doesn’t track conversions
Not possible to segment users by device

Hotjar heatmap tool

Homepage of hotjar.com showing the content above-the-fold.

When I first started with CRO, I used Hotjar a lot and loved it. I also used it for my clients’ websites back when Convertica was a one-man team.

Hotjar is a complete platform for enhancing user experience (UX) and web analytics.

Planning by enhancing UX through heatmap software tools.

It gives companies various tools to analyze visitor behavior on their websites and spot areas for development.

Hotjar’s primary features include heat maps, which show how people interact with landing pages and websites, recordings, which display the activities of specific visitors on a website; and surveys, which enable businesses to collect visitor feedback.

Hotjar is appropriate for businesses of all sizes and industries and provides a variety of connectors with various platforms, like Google Analytics and Salesforce.

To increase conversions, Hotjar helps companies optimize their websites and enhance user experience.

Pros

Easy to use. Works out of the box.
GDPR compliant. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a set of regulations that were put in place by the European Union to protect the privacy and personal data of individuals.
Offers a free-forever subscription but with limited reports
You can track the number of clicks, mouse movement, and scroll depth
You can track the website visitor’s journey as they navigate the site. You’ll see where they enter and where they drop off.
Ability to record user sessions

Cons

Does not have iFrame functionality

Crazy Egg heatmap tool

Homepage of crazyegg.com showing the content above-the-fold.

Crazy Egg is one of the most popular heat mapping software. Founded by Neil Patel & Hiten Shah, it is often recommended in internet marketing circles.

Individual users in the internet marketing circles.

Crazy Egg is a platform for user experience optimization that offers companies tools to view and comprehend how customers engage with their websites.

It offers heat map features, scroll maps, and A/B testing, enabling businesses to compare the effectiveness of various versions of a webpage. For example, heat maps show where users click on a website or landing page, while scroll maps show how far down the page users scroll.

Crazy Egg is appropriate for organizations of all sizes and industries and provides integrations with other systems like Google Analytics and WordPress.

Businesses may make educated decisions about optimizing their online properties and enhancing the user experience by using Crazy Egg to identify portions of their websites that are doing well and regions that may be confusing or producing problems for users.

PROS

As well as a heatmap tool, Crazy Egg also has a scroll map and confetti. These are three ways to present data. A heatmap shows which part of the page visitors engage with. A scroll map shows how far down the page they read and the confetti shows the source of traffic of the user clicks on a page. All these three combined, give you both a general and granular picture of visitor behavior.
Gets a snapshot of your pages so you can easily compare visitor interaction between old and new pages
Compares differences in behavior between different devices.
Customizable

CONS

Crazy Egg free trial is only for 30 days. After that, a subscription starts at $24/per month
No WordPress plugin
Too many features can make it overwhelming
Does not have the capability to auto-run heat mapping

Lucky Orange heatmap software tools

Homepage of luckyorange.com showing the content above-the-fold.

In my early days of internet marketing, I used Lucky Orange a lot. That was about 15 years ago. It’s nice to see how they’ve evolved as a company. I haven’t used it recently but I’ve noticed that it’s been getting a lot of traction in the last year or so.

Lucky Orange is a website optimization and user experience tool that helps businesses improve the performance of their website by providing real-time visitor recordings, heat maps, and analytics. The company’s goal is to help businesses understand how visitors interact with their website and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience, increase conversions, and boost website performance. Lucky Orange offers a range of features including session replay, heat maps, conversion funnels, form analytics, and more.

Many business owners in eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Big Commerce rate Lucky Orange very highly. So if you own a shop that’s hosted on one of these platforms, Lucky Orange is a quick way to get started with heat maps.

Ecommerce business website process.

Lucky Orange’s heat mapping tool shows elements clicked, scroll depth, and mouse movement. And like a lot of heat mapping software for website pages, it is more than just a website heatmap tool. It’s also a conversion optimization tool that makes polls and surveys easy, tracks the conversion funnel, and optimizes web forms and other website analytics tools.

PROS

Works on dynamic website pages
Offers a free trial period (7-days) and a very affordable starter package of $10/month for unlimited heat maps and recordings
Offers white-labeling. This means that businesses can rebrand the tool to match their own branding and present it as their own product.
Ability to segment users by device type or browser usage
Track how users engage with every element on a page
The form analytics feature is great for lead-generation sites
Easily integrates with the Lucky Orange live chat feature

CONS

For the beginner, the many different features can be overwhelming
Limited historical data for low-tier subscription

Mouseflow heatmap tool

Homepage of mouseflow.com showing the content above-the-fold.

Mouseflow is a user experience and website optimization tool that allows businesses to track, analyze and improve the performance of their website. The company offers a range of features including heat maps, session recordings, form analytics, and more.

When it comes to its heat mapping capability, Mouseflow has very similar features to Lucky Orange.

Heatmap tools like Mouseflow provide businesses with actionable insights into how visitors interact with their websites by providing heatmap reports on user feedback, page elements, and analytics features. One of the additional features that Mouseflow has is the attention heatmap.

Increase conversion using the best heatmap software.

An attention heatmap is a useful website tool that allows businesses to see how effective a piece of content is by showing them how long a person stays on a page. This information goes beyond the traditional length of time on a page, as provided by Google Analytics. An attention heatmap software tracks exactly which part of the content holds a website visitor’s attention. With these insights, businesses can make better-informed decisions about the types of content to create and where to place important elements like the call to action button on a page. Paid subscription starts at $29/per month.

PROS

Supports iFrame. This can be useful for businesses that want to track and analyze visitor behavior on specific pages or sections of their website.
Easy to get started
A handy auto-tag feature. This makes it very easy for you to quickly see user feedback on a page that usually indicates a problem like a visitor’s click rage, dead time, or taps.
An intuitive dashboard that’s easy for beginners to navigate
Offers a free heatmap software plan. Simply start with a 14-day trial and then you can upgrade to the FREE forever package. It’s not easy to find on the product page. So scroll slowly or you’ll miss it.
Live chat integration possible

CONS

The free plan is very limited
Mobile device screen recording needs improvement

Inspectlet heatmap tool

Homepage of inspectlet.com showing the content above-the-fold.

Last but not least is Inspectlet. With only two lines of javascript, you can quickly and easily use it. Inspectlet on your site. The tool can show your users’ mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and keypress.

Inspectlet also offers a session recording feature, session replays, visitors’ clicks, eye-tracking heatmaps, form analytics, and more. Inspectlet’s platform allows businesses to see how visitors interact with their website in real-time, identify areas of improvement, and optimize the website for better conversions and engagement.

User satisfaction feedback.

PROS

Very easy to use. Just add the javascript code and it immediately starts recording visitor sessions
The very useful filtering function
Has a free plan with limited features

CONS

Pricey for small sites

Heatmap software tools recap:

Don’t overcomplicate this.

This is what I suggest. If you’re an agency looking for an all-in-one A/B testing tool with heat mapping capabilities, get VWO. If you’re looking for a good budget heatmap tool or you run a Shopify store, get Lucky Orange or Hotjar. If you want to improve your content marketing strategy, use Mouseflow for its attention-mapping tool. And if you’re looking for the best free heatmap tool that works out of the box, get Inspectlet.

Most of these heatmap tools also have a free trial period, so you have no excuse. Just choose one and get it running right away.

Lastly, remember this:

Heatmap tools can be a powerful tool for businesses that are looking to gain valuable insights into their website’s performance and maximize its effectiveness. When used strategically, heatmaps provide invaluable data regarding user behaviors on your site which allows you to optimize the experience of visitors while achieving your business goals.

Heatmaps allow you to gain valuable insights into user behavior, such as what draws their eye and how far down the page they scroll. With this data in hand, you can make changes that’ll help steer customers towards taking desired actions – like signing up for your newsletter or adding a product to their cart! Leaping from insight gathering straight into action is essential when it comes to optimizing customer experience.

Increasing conversion for ecommerce businesses.

Before you know it, you’ll have a website that’s easy for your customers to navigate, lessens friction and anxiety, and increases visitor engagement.

Therefore, it is recommended to use a heatmap tool if you want to gain a deeper understanding of their website’s performance and make data-driven decisions to improve it.

For more on what to do after using a heatmap tool, check out our other articles

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

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[Updated Feb 2024] Best Books On Conversion Rate Optimization

People constantly reach out to ask me what my favorite reads are on CRO, or if I can recommend books to provide a good foundation in CRO.

Anyone who wants to learn about the fundamentals of CRO can do so by picking up a few good titles. Below are two of my 3 favorite reads on the subject of CRO to get you started.

For someone new to the subject, it can be a little overwhelming to begin with – but these books will provide a solid basis regardless of your background. Whether or not you’re seeking to focus on CRO or remain a generalist, the concepts behind these books will serve you in good stead.

The Conversion Code

Chris Smith absolutely smashed it out of the park here. From sales scripts, preferred testing platforms & software, Chris doesn’t hold back.

This is hands-down, one of the best books I have ever read on the topic.

Pick it up, just do it.

No matter your level whether beginner or CEO, you will get something out of this book. All actionable advice you can put into action straight away and see the results.

Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion

Understanding your visitors and the basics of traffic and conversion.

This is an oldy but a goody. Probably the most gifted book to my close friends and family when they ask me how I got started with conversion optimization.

This book was published in 2011, so a lot of the SEO-related sections are really outdated, but for me, the foundations that Ben discusses in relation to the attention ladder was a massive paradigm shift for me.

In a nutshell, a user goes through steps 1 through 5 starting at not even being aware of a problem, all the way through to being ready to buy from you.

He goes through how he identified simple yet powerful solutions in design, classic optimization techniques, and targeted testing. How to use testing to improve conversion rate, and several other techniques that combine creativity and analysis to produce the best possible results. Ben provides clear guidance on how to research, design, structure, and expand sites from the most important aspects of user engagement and profitability.

Understanding the principles laid out in this book will allow you to see opportunities where before you didn’t even realize it existed.

As I said, outdated books in some respects, but the fundamental principles behind them are timeless. This book is one of the most important reads on conversion optimization for me, and the one I’d recommend to anyone with an interest in the subject start with.

A / B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers

Understanding A/B Testing, also known as split testing.

This book is a must for anyone who seeks to understand split testing. It breaks down the simple idea of showing distinct versions of a site to live traffic and using this to scientifically measure the effect each change has on visitors. How it is used to drive the effectiveness of marketing and user experience, all resulting in increasing conversion rates — (case study). Split testing has been key to the success of giants like Google, Amazon, and Netflix. But now that anyone can learn split testing, and it no longer requires costly engineering and resources, there’s no reason we shouldn’t all apply it to small and medium sites.

This book provides the mental model and frameworks behind this key concept in CRO.

It breaks down split testing and uses case studies to back them up.

The concepts in this book allowed me to remove all emotion from the design decision-making process and instead allowed me to view decisions objectively as “experiments” and make powerful data-driven decisions.

Instead of going through the process of what you think is the right way to design a site or even wild guesses, it removes you from your ego and allows you to change the frame and ask the users what they want to see – by testing.

Dan goes through what to test, how to choose the right test for the purpose, and how to personalize the experience for site visitors.

A must for anyone looking to get started with split testing software, or looking to take their website to the next level, no matter your technical expertise.

After reading these two books, you’ll have developed a rock-solid foundation in the concepts behind CRO. You’ll know enough to get going and learn some more through experimentation and trial and error. But armed with the guiding principles of CRO, everything else comes easy.

[Updated February 2024] Best Books On Conversion Rate Optimization

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the game is crucial, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) plays a vital role in increasing your website’s revenue potential.

To help you become a CRO mastermind, we’ve compiled an updated list of the best books on conversion rate optimization for February 2024. These must-reads will provide you with expert knowledge, practical strategies, and key insights to optimize conversions like never before.

Top Books For Conversion Rate Optimization

Discover the best books on conversion rate optimization including “Landing Page Optimization” by Tim Ash, “The Conversion Code” by Chris Smith, “Conversion Rate Optimization” by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy, and “You Should Test That!” by Chris Goward.

“Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing And Tuning For Conversions” By Tim Ash

“Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions” by Tim Ash is an essential read for anyone looking to improve their website’s conversion rate.

As a renowned CRO expert, Ash shares his invaluable knowledge and experience through real-life examples, case studies, and actionable strategies that you can apply directly to your own business.

One of the most compelling features of this book is its focus on understanding the psychology behind customer behavior. By tapping into the minds of your target audience, you gain a deeper understanding of what motivates them to convert.

Armed with this insight, you’ll be better equipped to create high-performing landing pages tailored specifically for your unique visitors’ needs. Furthermore, Tim Ash provides readers with detailed instructions on setting up A/B or multivariate tests – empowering marketers to make data-driven decisions when optimizing their campaigns for maximum results.

“The Conversion Code” By Chris Smith

“The Conversion Code” by Chris Smith is a must-read for anyone interested in boosting their online conversion rates. This highly-regarded book within the realm of conversion rate optimization books offers both beginner and advanced marketers invaluable insights into generating more leads, driving sales, and ensuring customer satisfaction.

One notable aspect of “The Conversion Code” is its practical approach to implementing effective strategies based on real-life examples and case studies from various industries.

As one of the best books on conversion rate optimization, it covers essential topics such as designing high-converting landing pages, using persuasive copywriting techniques, improving website user experience (UX), social media marketing tactics, email automation for nurturing leads effectively – all with actionable steps you can apply directly to your own business or projects.

“Conversion Rate Optimization” By Khalid Saleh And Ayat Shukairy

“Conversion Rate Optimization” by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy is a must-read for anyone looking to dive deep into the world of CRO. This comprehensive guide helps readers understand the core concepts, principles, and best practices when it comes to optimizing website conversion rates.

What sets “Conversion Rate Optimization” apart from other conversion rate optimization books is its emphasis on both the analytical and psychological aspects of CRO. The authors provide real-life case studies and actionable tips based on their extensive experience working with international clients across various industries.

This balance between theory and practice ensures that readers come away with not only a solid foundation in CRO but also an arsenal of practical techniques they can immediately apply to improve their websites’ performance.

“You Should Test That!” By Chris Goward

Another must-read book on the list of best books for conversion rate optimization is “You Should Test That!” by Chris Goward. The author is an expert in A/B testing, and in this book, he reveals practical techniques for increasing website and campaign conversions.

He provides a step-by-step process to help readers understand how to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not on their website or marketing campaigns. Additionally, he shares real-world examples of companies that have successfully improved their CRO through testing.

Advantages Of Reading CRO Books

Reading CRO books provides numerous advantages, including gaining actionable insights from industry experts, learning practical strategies to improve website performance, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends in CRO.

Gain Actionable Insights From Industry Experts

One of the primary advantages of reading books on conversion rate optimization is that you gain access to insights from industry experts. These are authors who have extensive experience working with websites and have analyzed what works best for different types of businesses.

By studying their recommendations, readers can learn how to implement practical strategies that will improve website performance significantly. For instance, “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing and Tuning for Conversions” by Tim Ash provides a comprehensive guide on how to create high-performing landing pages that convert visitors into customers.

This book has been hailed as a must-read for anyone interested in CRO because it shares valuable insights from an author with years of experience in the field.

Learn Practical Strategies To Improve Website Performance

Reading books on conversion rate optimization enables you to learn practical strategies that can help improve your website’s performance. You’ll discover how to optimize your landing pages, create effective calls-to-action, increase click-through rates and much more.

For example, “Landing Page Optimization” by Tim Ash offers a comprehensive guide for optimizing different types of landing pages while “The Conversion Code” by Chris Smith provides actionable advice for converting leads into customers using a variety of channels including email marketing and social media advertising.

These books are packed with real-world examples and case studies that illustrate how companies have successfully increased their conversion rates.

Stay Up-to-date With The Latest Trends In CRO

One of the advantages of reading books on conversion rate optimization is that you can keep up-to-date with the latest industry trends. As the online marketplace evolves, it’s essential to stay current with new tactics and techniques used by businesses to enhance their website performance.

For instance, a few years ago, personalization was not as critical for optimizing conversions as it is today. The rise in mobile shopping has also led to increased emphasis on creating mobile-friendly websites.

Conclusion

In conclusion, reading books on conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an excellent way to improve your website’s performance and stay ahead of the competition. The top CRO authors offer practical tips, strategies, and insights to help you optimize your landing pages and boost conversions.

From “Landing Page Optimization” by Tim Ash to “You Should Test That!” by Chris Goward, each book provides a unique approach to mastering CRO techniques. By taking advantage of these valuable resources, you’ll be able to implement effective changes that drive results for your business.

Author: Kurt Philip

Hi, I’m Kurt Philip, the founder & CEO of Convertica. I live and breathe conversion rate optimization. I hope you enjoy our findings.

We’ve worked with over 1000 businesses in the last 6 years.
Let’s jump on a quick call to see how we can help yours.

Book FREE CRO Call

See more reviews →

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