Choose The Right Ingredients For Your CRO Recipe
Every tasty dish comprises of ingredients that were once raw but when put together adds flavor to the dish. CRO process is very similar to this and requires appropriate ingredients and sufficient cooking time to ensure the end-result is yummy!
Cooking time = Time taken for a CRO experiment to complete → Indispensable to the success of your experiments, in turn, increase in conversions.
Most companies today are well aware that increasing conversion is key to their competitive success. Their focus is acquiring new customers, converting more visitors into users and doing so at the optimal cost possible. However, they are clueless where and how to start optimizing.
Where and how to start?
Setting up the CRO process is like cooking a gourmet meal!
It has to be done slow, requires a lot of prep work and the results are just as good. If you try to rush it like a fast food dish, the results would be just as shabby.
Before you begin, set your conversion goals!
It could be signing up for a free trial, making a purchase, downloading your app, or something else entirely. Whatever you set as a goal, this is what you are looking to optimize.
First off, set up a conversion funnel
Sometimes asking your visitors to convert too fast (sign up, subscribe or purchase) can kill your conversions. Slow down, analyze and take time to set up your conversion funnel.
Track series of pages on your website as your users browse through to identify poorly performing pages and also analyze how effective your website is in leading your users to your defined goal. If visitors drop-off from your website or payment page, or from any your pre-set goal, funnel reporting can be used to determine ways to improve conversions and fix drop-offs. Such clear hurdles to your conversion are points that need immediate fixing.
This is how a funnel analysis report looks like:
Run Heatmap
Now that you have identified where in your website drop offs occur, it is time to find out what causes it. When clueless about why people drop off on that particular page, heatmaps can come to the rescue.
Kids are picky when they eat so preparing a meal for them can be tricky.
You need to have the ingredients they love to make sure they eat. Your website visitors are like kids. They are choosy and click only on the spots they love.
Heatmaps give you a visual representation of where your visitors clicks on a particular page. With this, you’ll be able to see how visitors interact with your website and where the drop-off points on the page are.
As a first step, fix on your sample size per page/screen
A widely accepted rule of thumb is 2000–3000 pageviews per design screen, and also per device (i.e. look at mobile and desktop separately). If the heat map is based on 50 users, the data doesn’t have any relevance. After fixing on your sample size, next step would be to run a heatmap experiment.
This is how a sample heatmap report will look like
The higher the click density, the brighter a particular region on the page gets. Analyze these trends to see which parts of the websites are most ignored by all users, across all browsers and devices. This helps you decide where to place your value prop and other important elements.
As with food, a good meal combination is a winner!
My favorite is Rotis with Paneer Butter Masala and in the same way, a platform that has an integrated approach to different CRO tools makes it not only easier but also gives you a different angle of understanding user behavior.
Integration 1: Heatmap + Funnel (Generate a heatmap report for your funnel experiment results)
With the help of funnel analysis, you will be able to see where on the website are your visitors quitting. And by running heat maps experiment juxtaposed, you will know where exactly on your website are they stopping their visits.
Do A/B Testing
In cooking, it’s all about ingredients; in CRO process, it’s all about testing. You A/B test when you want to weigh page variants against each other and see which one works best for your visitors. With heatmaps, you have spotted which works on your page, now the obvious step is to start A/B testing with the ones that are often overlooked by your visitors.
For eg., You notice that the subscriber button is being ignored on your landing page and hence the conversions are dropping. Your A/B test variants should,
- Change the position of Subscribe button
- Change the Subscribe button color
- Try impactful subscribe messages
You are done, man!
As the A/B test progresses, you’ll be able to see the performance of each of the variations. Once you see a conclusive result, the A/B test is complete. Your experiment will provide you with a clear winner, and all you’ll need to do would be to adopt that winner as the page variant you go with.
Integration 2: Heatmap + A/B Testing (Generate a heatmap report for your variation page)
Heatmap gives you click patterns on a web page. You can understand how users interact. When you get to know that your CTA has not received enough attention, then you can try tweaking it by running A/B tests. In case your form analytics report says drop off rate is high on a field then we can view why users drop off there by running a session recording. The output of one experiment will serve as an entry point to test another hypothesis.
Right Tool + Persistent Testing = Better Conversions
Running only heatmap or an A/B test is like eating a carrot. Though tasty and full of vitamins, it can never be a balanced meal. Using the right set of tools, with integrations that provide analytical insights and tests which can stretch across a practical time frame covering good sample size is like a nutritious meal with all the required supplements.
With Zarget, you can instantly optimize your website with our industry first chrome plugin. Gain valuable insights, load your website with our live editor, optimize gated pages and a lot more simple way to test.
Check out my YouTube Channel All About B2B Marketing
