How to optimise your conversation rate?

Conversion Rate Optimization:
How to Turn Prospects into Visitors
and Visitors into Customers

By Miroslav Chodak for jeffbullas.com

Table of Contents
Introduction 4
BONUS: Want a tool that will improve your conversion rates? Check out
Sumo! 4
Understanding Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) 4
What is a conversion? 4
What is a conversion rate? 5
What is conversion rate optimization? 8
Why is conversion rate optimization important? 9
The Basics of Conversion Optimization 10
Motivation (m) 11
Value proposition (v) 12
Incentive and Friction (i-f) 14
Anxiety (a) 15
Conversion Optimization Strategy and Plan 16
Set goals 17
Establish a baseline 17
Form hypotheses 18
Design and run tests 19
Evaluate 20
Start over 20
Conversion Optimization Techniques 20
Copy optimization tactics 21
Design optimization tactics 24
Call-to-action optimization tactics 28
Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Turn Prospects into Visitors and Visitors into
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Pricing tactics 29
Conversion Optimization Tools 31
Analytics 31
User surveys 34
User testing 36
Conclusion 39
TIP: Jeff uses Sumo in his website to help convert website traffic into active
users, subscribers, and customers. 39

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Introduction
If you already have website traffic, I bet conversion rate optimization — that
is, turning more of your website visitors into customers — is high up on your
list of priorities.

This guide will walk you through pretty much everything you need to know
about conversion rate optimization — from why it is important to how you can
go about building your own testing and optimization strategy.

You’ll find information that will help you improve the performance of your
website, as well as the tools you’ll need to be successful.

BONUS: Want a tool that will improve your conversion rates? Check out
Sumo!
Understanding Conversion Rate
Optimization (CRO)
What is a conversion?
A conversion is any specific action taken by your prospects, anywhere
throughout your sales process, on your website or outside of it.

For example, for an e-commerce store, one of the most important actions (if
not the most important one) would be the purchase of a product.

But, depending on the type of business you’re running and your business
model, there could be many different actions happening:

● Purchasing a product.
● Signing up for a newsletter.
● Registering for a free trial.
● Downloading an ebook.
● Clicking on an advertisement.
● Etc.

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You can also go one step further and break each major action into smaller
micro-steps.

Thus, for example, the main action of purchasing a product could be broken
down into the following steps:

1. Clicking on a Facebook or AdWords ad.
2. Visiting the product page.
3. Adding the product to the cart.
4. Filling out the order form.
5. Checking out / making the payment.
6. Receiving the product.
7. Returning the product for a refund.
8. Coming back to purchase more/other products.
What is a conversion rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a specific action
or a micro-step.

By measuring conversion rates, you can find out if your efforts are effective.
You can also compare different efforts to decide which one performs better.

The higher the conversion rate, the better the performance.

What is a good conversion rate?

Conversion rates vary from action to action, business to business and industry
to industry.

Therefore, to answer the question of what constitutes a good conversion rate,
is not that simple (and, often, can be misleading).

Luckily, there exist reliable data sources, which will allow us to set at least some
benchmarks.

One such source is a study performed by WordStream where they analyzed
thousands of AdWords accounts with a combined annual spend of $3 billion.
The results were short of amazing.
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The first conclusion is that there is a huge gap between the worst and the
best performers.

The median click-through rate (CTR) for all accounts in the study was 2.35%.
The worst-performing quarter averaged conversion rates of less than 1%. The
best-performing quarter averaged 5.31% or more.

Most surprisingly, however, the best 10% achieved conversion rates of 11.45%
and above. And, this data isn’t for individual landing pages. These advertisers
are averaging 11.45%+ conversion rates across their entire accounts!

Image Source: WordStream

Now, obviously, this data doesn’t take into consideration the types of offers
made in the ads (for example, an offer for a free ebook would likely convert
much better than an offer for a high-ticket item with limited appeal).

At the same time, the difference between the worst performers and the best
performers is enormous.

The lesson here is that, even if you’re already achieving median-level CTRs
from your AdWords ads, there is a significant room for further improvement. In
fact, the difference between the best and the average performers is over 100%.

The second conclusion is that conversion rates differ by industry.
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The folks at WordStream also took a closer look and identified average CTRs
from AdWords ads across twenty different industries.

Average Click Through Rate (CTR) by industry:

Source: WordStream

(GDN stands for Google Display Network.)

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Industry Average CTR (Search) Average CTR (GDN)
Advocacy 4.41% 0.59%
Auto 4.00% 0.60%
B2B 2.41% 0.46%
Consumer Services 2.41% 0.51%
Dating & Personals 6.05% 0.72%
E-Commerce 2.69% 0.51%
Education 3.78% 0.53%
Employment Services 2.42% 0.59%
Finance & Insurance 2.91% 0.52%
Health & Medical 3.27% 0.59%
Home Goods 2.44% 0.49%
Industrial Services 2.61% 0.50%
Legal 2.93% 0.59%
Real Estate 3.71% 1.08%
Technology 2.09% 0.39%
Travel & Hospitality 4.68% 0.47%

The third conclusion is that conversion rates differ by marketing channel.

From the example above, the average CTRs from AdWords ads in Google
Search were almost 7 times higher (at 3.17%) than the average CTRs from
AdWords ads in Google Display Network (at 0.46%).

So, not all marketing channels are created equal.

At the same time, this doesn’t automatically mean that a channel with lower
CTRs is worse than a channel with higher CTRs. Many other factors come to
play, including the total cost per acquisition, the average customer value,
revenue and profit per transaction, your business objectives, etc.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is what you do to improve your
conversion rates.

Most definitions imply or state that the optimization takes place on your own
website. However, as we already discussed above, conversions regularly take
place outside of your website, too.

From that perspective, CRO can be defined as a process that leads to more of
your target audience members completing a desired action.

Conversion rate optimization is therefore a process of analyzing the behavior
of your target audience and making adjustments to various elements of your
sales process that leads to a higher percentage of people completing your
goal.

All individual conversion rates that you measure along your customers’ journey
become your key performance indicators (KPIs), which will guide your
optimization work.

Summarized, conversion rate optimization is:

● A structured and systematic approach to improving the performance of
your marketing funnels.
● Informed by data, specifically, analytics and user feedback.
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● Defined by your unique goals and objectives.
Why is conversion rate optimization important?
The biggest concern of most website owners is how to get more people to see
it. The number of unique visitors then becomes a source of bragging rights.

Only later they come to realize that not all traffic is created equal and that
certain types of traffic produce better results.

This is when they start to care about conversion rates and optimization.

CRO is important for several reasons:

● Everything can be improved. No matter what you already did and how
much time you spent optimizing for higher conversions, your results can
likely be further improved.
● Advertising is getting more expensive. At one point, you will hit a
ceiling beyond which spending more per customer is no longer
profitable for you. Optimizing for higher conversions counterbalances
the ever-increasing costs of advertising.
● Helps you get the right kind of customer. It’s not just about
immediate conversions. Optimization can help you find people who will
love your product and help your marketing efforts by telling everyone
they know how great you are.
● Is essentially free. CRO capitalizes on traffic you already have. This
means instead of spending more money on getting new visitors, you are
doing a better job of converting those you already have. As a result,
optimization improves your return on current investments.
● Lowers your customer acquisition costs. For example, if you manage
to double your conversion rates, you have essentially reduced your
cost-per-acquisition by half.
● Increases your profits. Continuing with the example above, halving
your customer acquisition costs basically means you just increased your
gross profits by the same amount. And, that profit goes straight to your
bottom line.
● Gives you more money for acquisitions. More profit means you can
spend more on acquiring new customers. So, another way to look at
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optimization is that halving your acquisition costs allow you to get twice
as much business with the same amount of money spent.
● Makes you more valuable to affiliates and partners. Your conversion
optimization success can be extended to your partners and affiliates,
allowing them to get more business for less money, thus making you
more valuable to them.
● Helps you increase your market share. The better your conversion
rates, the more traffic you can afford to buy, the more customers you
get, and so on. Having better conversion rates than your competitors
means, you will be growing faster because you will be able to spend
more money overall and you will be paying less per each new customer.
The Basics of Conversion Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is all about testing different elements on your
landing pages, in your marketing copy, in your ad targeting, etc.

However, determining what elements in your conversion process to test and
optimize can be quite challenging.

Luckily, the MECLABS Conversion Sequence Heuristic offers a framework of
five factors, on which to focus your optimization efforts.

It is a part of a patented, repeatable methodology developed by Flint
McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute, based on years
of testing and research of real product and service offers presented to real
customers.

The heuristic can be expressed as the following equation:

Image Source: MECLABS
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The way to think about this equation is not to solve it. Rather, you should
regard it as a thought tool (or checklist), to use as you work on webpages and
marketing material.

The numbers in front of the different elements indicate how much they
impact the probability of conversion. As you can tell, the elements do not hold
equal weight.

So, how does optimization work?

By making changes to the right areas.

While you can never guarantee that conversion will happen, by making
changes to the right areas you can increase the probability of conversion
happening.

Five factors that lead to higher conversions

Before you start optimizing for the elements on the right side of the equation,
stop and consider the most important question, first: your objective.

In other words, do not proceed without truly understanding:

1. Who are you trying to convert?
2. What are you trying to convert them to?

It can be dangerous to immediately begin working on tactics (adding,
removing and changing things) before stepping back and asking yourself
what the true objective you are trying to accomplish is.

Therefore, before looking into motivation, value, incentive, friction, and anxiety,
first define what your ultimate success, or conversion, is.

With that understanding, you can proceed to…
Motivation (m)
The motivation of the user is the single most important factor affecting
conversions.
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The motivation of the user is also the only element that you cannot change. It
is intrinsic to your potential customers.

You can, however, gain an understanding of your potential customers’
motivations to better tap into those natural motivations and better serve your
ideal customers while improving conversion.

This means getting an answer to questions, such as:

● Where is the customer in the thought sequence?
● Where are they coming from?
● What conclusions do they need to make before converting?
● What are their pain points?
● What do they value?

Once you’ve understood the motivations of your potential customers, you can
use them to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing message through
segmentation and through creating different versions of your marketing
materials..
Value proposition (v)
The value proposition is all about differentiating yourself from your
competition.

At the core is the question, “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from
you rather than any of your competitors?”

Answering this question forms the foundations of your value proposition.
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Image Source: MECLABS

But thinking about value propositions and what differentiates you from your
competition goes deeper than that. Four levels deep, in fact:

1. Primary Value Proposition. This is the core level, represented by the
core question: “Why should my ideal prospects buy from me rather than
any of my competitors?”
2. Prospect-Level Value Proposition. This level breaks out the primary
value proposition for each key prospect, or segment, that you are
targeting. The question then becomes: “Why should [PROSPECT A] buy
from me rather than any of my competitors?”
3. Product-Level Value Proposition. Now that you’ve identified your
prospects, you want to define the value from the point of view of the
product: “Why should [PROSPECT A] buy my product rather than any
other product?”
4. Process-Level Value Proposition. Finally, you have to define a value
proposition for each conversion step associated with a specific product.
For example, if you are running PPC ads, the question you need to
answer is: “Why should [PROSPECT A] click my PPC ad rather than any
other PPC ad?”

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Additionally, there are also four elements that increase or decrease the power
of your value proposition at any level mentioned above:

● Appeal. “How much do I desire this offer?”
● Exclusivity. “Where else can I get this offer?”
● Credibility. “Can I trust your claims?”
● Clarity. “What are you actually offering?”

Your “sweet spot” (or, your “only-factor”) is at the intersection of appeal and
exclusivity.

You can further improve your messaging efforts by better communicating the
“only-factor” — i.e. the value your company and product or service provides
that customers can’t get elsewhere.

You do this by highlighting the appealing and exclusive aspects of your offer.
Incentive and Friction (i-f)
Incentive and friction are two sides of the same coin. Together, they define the
prospect’s psychological resistance to a given element during the sales
process.

Friction is the “aggravation factor” or the hoops the customer has to go
through to complete the action. It consists of two components: length and
difficulty.

Length-related friction relates to fatigue, irritation or aggravation caused by
forms or processes that ask for more time or information than feels reasonable
to the prospect.

Examples of design elements that can cause length-oriented friction are:

● Length of pages
● Number of fields in a form
● The layout of a form
● Number of steps in a process

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Difficulty-related friction causes confusion or requires an undue amount of
effort to complete.

Examples of design elements that can cause difficulty-oriented friction:

● Non-optimal eye-path
● Non-intuitive button design
● Organization of elements on a page
● Poor use/choice of technology

An incentive is a positive element which can offset friction that you cannot
eliminate. The key to incentive is choosing one with a high perceived value —
it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it has to be of high value to the customer.
Anxiety (a)
Anxiety represents any kind of concern that ideal prospects have at a given
moment.

Anxiety can stop prospects in their tracks and result in them never returning
(the back button makes it ultra-easy).

There are three ways to relieve or correct anxiety:

1. Specificity – In order to counteract customer anxiety, you must first
identify the source of the anxiety and then effectively address each
concern. The source of anxiety may be issues such as quality, reliability,
price, security, etc.
2. Proximity – Once you’ve found a way to specifically address every source
of anxiety, next you have to figure out the optimal place for these anxiety
reducers in your marketing copy. The trick is to place the corrective
measures where a visitor will experience them simultaneously with the
source of anxiety.
3. Intensity – The intensity level of corrective measure must address two
things: the substance and perception of the concern. The substance
requires you to address the rational foundation of an anxiety source
based on a realistic view of risk. However, a customer’s perception of a
particular anxiety can extend beyond what you would consider as
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realistic. It is an extra challenge to identify these perception-based
sources of anxiety and to over-correct for each of them.

BONUS: Want to further increase your website’s conversion rates? Check
out Sumo!
Conversion Optimization Strategy and Plan
There are two kinds of people doing conversion optimization: tacticians and
strategists.

Tacticians focus on following “best practices.” Strategists focus on building a
repeatable process that generates valuable insights into the conversion
process.

Tacticians are usually very good at testing, but they rapidly hit a limit on the
benefit they can achieve from tweaking individual elements, such as form
fields, pop-up windows, or button color.

It’s because there are usually no hypotheses attached to these tests and,
therefore, the tests don’t generate any marketing insights that lead to big
marketing breakthroughs.

A strategic approach, on the other hand, focuses on more fundamental and
ongoing improvements. It aims for gaining marketing insights, which can
then result in big marketing wins.

Good strategists document why they are running tests and what needs they
are trying to address. These hypothesis-based tests are far more important
than making a button the right color because they provide a structured
process of continuous learning and improvement over time.

Instead of simply taking test results at face value, strategists always look for
meaning behind the numbers and are always aware that conversion rates are
just a means to an end, which might be total revenue, profit or something
totally different (depending on the organization’s strategic objectives)
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Set goals
This is why every conversion optimization strategy has to start with setting the
goals and objectives.

Is your goal to maximize revenue or profit? Or, is it to gain maximum market
share? Perhaps, it is something entirely different (e.g. push Competitor X out
of the market)?

Whatever your strategic goal is, it informs your conversion optimization
strategy. It is what ultimately gets measured and to what all optimization tests
get compared against.
Establish a baseline
Once you are clear on your goals and objectives, you will want to establish your
starting line or baseline.

Only by establishing your current performance can you measure the changes
and determine if you’re making a progress or not.

To establish your baseline, you will want to refer back to the goals you
identified in the previous step and:

1. Identify all the metrics you will want to measure.
2. Identify your best sources of this information.
3. Determine how you will collect this information, now and in the future.
4. Go ahead and collect that data.

Your basic toolbox will include a combination of the following:

● Analytics – software to track and report on what’s happening on your
site day in and day out. You will likely need an analytics package such as
Google Analytics or similar that has advanced analysis tools like
audience segmentation and conversion tracking.
● User Surveys – these will allow you to collect qualitative insights from
your users directly in the moment, to hear their concerns in their own
words.
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● User Testing – these tools will allow you to observe how users interact
with your site, directly without interrupting them, test changes and
document how they play out in real life.

Once done, you will have the baseline against which you will measure all
future changes. Whenever you alter something, you will compare
performance before and after. This is how you figure out if you make things
better or worse.
Form hypotheses
Now it’s time to look at the conversion heuristic discussed earlier, your baseline
data and hypothesis of your biggest barriers to conversion, the reasons for why
they are occurring and the possible solutions.

Image Source: WiderFunnel

A well-structured hypothesis provides insights into whether it is proved,
disproved, or results are inconclusive. It should be written as a statement that
can be rejected or confirmed.

Furthermore, it should be a statement geared toward revealing insights.

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A real-life example of a testable hypothesis could look like this:
“Changing the wording of the CTA to set expectations for users (from “submit”
to “send demo request”) will reduce confusion for visitors coming from my
email campaign about the next steps in the funnel and improve order
completions.”

This hypothesis is well-formed because it answers:

● What: changing the wording on the CTA from “submit” to “send demo
request.”
● Why: reducing confusion about the next steps in the funnel.
● Where: on this page, before the user enters this funnel.
● Who: visitors coming from the email campaign.

You will want to create similar hypotheses for all your tests.
Design and run tests
Armed with your hypotheses, it’s time to design and run your tests.

Start by making a list of your priorities. Look at your analytics data, your user
surveys, and any user testing results.

What seem to be your biggest issues, and which ones do you need to address
first? Double and triple check your numbers and keep a written record of
everything.

Here are a few points to consider when designing your tets:

● Start small. Look for something that won’t be too complicated to change
and measure, but with real potential for improvement.
● Begin with simple A/B tests. Make only one change at a time, or you
won’t know what caused the change.
● Get a second opinion.
● Look for benchmarks from other companies in your industry.
● Double and triple check everything before you begin testing.
● Don’t end your tests prematurely. Set a sample size and stick to it.
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Evaluate
You will measure success and evaluate results against the baseline you
established previously.

The data resulting from your tests will determine what you do next:

● If the test was a success, you can either cross this concern off your list
and move on to the next one or continue refining and re-testing the
same thing, until you’re happy with the result.
● If this test was a failure, you should reexamine the data, and design a
new test. You learn as much from a negative outcome as you do from a
positive outcome.
Start over
Regardless of the outcome of your initial round of testing, you should think of
optimization not as an end goal but as an ongoing process.

If you’re able to glean new insights from each test, you are able to create new
and new hypotheses and design new and new test that result in continuous
improvement.

Additionally, because the business landscape is always evolving and
customers’ needs change over time, there will always be reasons to repeat
tests and run new ones.
So, whenever you’ve improved a specific sticking point in your user experience,
quickly pat yourself on the back for a job well done, and then go back and ask
yourself what else can be improved upon.
Conversion Optimization Techniques
The number of optimization techniques or tactics that you can implement is
practically infinite.

Your actions should always be informed by your conversion optimization
strategy.

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The following list, compiled by Backlinko, should ONLY serve as a source of
ideas (not a checklist) and its only purpose should be to give you some ideas
and get your creative juices going:
Copy optimization tactics
● Add the number of likes, users, followers or customers as social proof
● Add numbers in your headline
● Add reassurance copy

Booking.com is a master of using reassurance copy.

● Add urgency to your CTA
● Ask for micro-commitments
● Clearly mark your top sellers
● Directly counter objections
● Don’t show the number of people already on your email list (yes, really)
● Evoke emotion
● Feature high-revenue products above the fold
● Get new users engaged immediately, even if they don’t buy right away
● Give people more information
● Hide negative social proof
● Increase the number of your landing pages
● Leverage loss aversion
● Make your About Us page more human

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Example from Wistia’s about us page.

● Make your headlines super-specific
● Persuade with image captions
● Remove your coupon field
● Replace blocks of text with bullet points
● Replace jargon with plain English
● Replace the word “Buy” with benefit-rich CTAs
● Show the work that went into creating your product
● Show where your product was made
● Show why you’re better than the competition
● Sweeten the deal with bonuses
● Test different prices to maximize total revenue
● Test first and second person copy in CTAs
● Test free trials vs. freemium

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Unbounce uses free trials and clearly communicates that in their CTA.

● Test negative words in your headline
● Test upsells, down-sells and cross-sells
● Turn a boring form into a fill in the blank
● Use a long-form sales page for pricey products
● Use action-oriented copy
● Use guarantees
● Use information gaps to create curiosity
● Use inline validation
● Use no-nonsense headlines
● Use price anchoring

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Amazon has used price anchoring from day one.

● Use qualitative surveys to get breakthrough insights
● Use scarcity
● Use specific statistics and numbers
● Use the same language customers use
● Use weird call to action copy
Design optimization tactics
● Add (awesome) site search
● Add auto-complete suggestions in product search

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Using powerful auto-complete in search is another thing Amazon does very
well.

● Add product filters
● Add trust symbols
● Allow customers to zoom in on your products
● Avoid false bottoms to keep users scrolling
● Do usability testing (with real users) to get live feedback
● Encourage customers to share their purchase on social media
● Follow traditional design conventions
● Guide users with directional cues
● Incorporate video into your sales funnel
● Keep the number of items in the cart visible
● Make calls to action look like buttons (instead of text or pictures)
● Make your load time lightning-fast
● Optimize your site for mobile
● Pimp expert social proof
● Prominently display social sharing buttons in blog posts
● Prominently display your phone number
● Put key information on the left side of the page
● Reduce distractions
● Reduce the number of fields and options a user has to sift through
● Remove graphics or images near or touching your CTA
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● Remove trust symbols
● Remove visual deadweight
● Replace drop-down menus with other options
● Run surveys to figure out what your customers really want
● Ruthlessly remove useless links
● Show multiple high-quality product images
● Show off user reviews
● Show your product in context

Ikea excels at showing their products in actual context.

● Test button size
● Test different colors for call-to-action buttons
● Update your outdated design
● Use a large font for your headline
● Use a notification bar at the top of your pages
● Use a popup to capture more emails
● Use a single column layout
● Use a slider at the bottom of your pages
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● Use a smaller button
● Use BIG product images
● Use competitive intelligence
● Use hand-drawn visual cues
● Use heat map tools
● Use image sliders instead of video
● Use image testimonials
● Use images that represent your USP
● Use photos of real people
● Use real faces instead of icons or stock photos

Faces naturally draw our attention.

● Use short landing pages for small commitments
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Call-to-action optimization tactics
● Add a benefit to CTA
● Add countdown timers to time-sensitive offers

Example of a countdown timer for an event.

● Explicitly tell users to scroll
● Generate email subscribers from your About Us page
● Place your CTA above and below the fold
● Put a CTA in the top right corner of your page
● Put your button in a more prominent place
● Repeat key benefits during checkout
● Show a bigger phone number on mobile sites
● Use a 1-step opt-in
● Use a 2-step opt-in
● Use a contrasting color for your CTA
● Use anchor text navigation links
● Use multiple CTAs on a single page
● End your prices in “7” and “9”
● Remove hidden fees
● Show your price on landing pages

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Market Dialer found that including a price boosted conversions by 100%.

● Split up a larger product into individual products
● Test lowering AND raising your prices
Pricing tactics
● Add live chat support
● Autofill fields at checkout
● Collect emails and nurture (instead of trying to sell immediately)
● Give people a product tour
● Keep your message and design consistent through your entire funnel
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● Let buyers checkout as a guest
● Offer free shipping
● Segment by different user types
● Show progress

Example of using a progress bar for multi-step form submissions.

● Test different payment options
● Test the number of pages in your checkout process
● Test the weakest links of your funnel first
● Use a Social Squeeze Page to capture emails
● Use A/B testing
● Use The Content Upgrade to capture more emails from blog posts
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Conversion Optimization Tools
There is a huge number of tools for every conversion optimization task. Many
are very similar. Others specialize in very narrow types of tasks.

As impressive as it would look, listing all the tools here wouldn’t make sense.
You still wouldn’t know which ones to choose.

Instead, I’m giving you a couple of recommendations for each tool category.
They are the tools I consider sufficient for most conversion optimization tasks.

(Of course, if you have special needs or run a large conversion rate
optimization team, you will likely have an entire suite of other tools at your
disposal.)
Analytics
Google Analytics

Because it’s free and because it is so powerful, Google Analytics should be one
of the default tools in your arsenal. It allows you to measure almost everything.
Therefore, it makes sense to invest in learning it.

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The best approach to using Google Analytics (or any kind of analytics software,
for that matter) is by first defining what you want to measure and the type of
information you need to collect in order to be able to make sound decisions.

For example, you will want to create a list of all desired actions a user could
take on your site, such as:

● click on ‘add to cart’ button,
● change the sort order from ‘featured’ to ‘best-selling’,
● interact with widget X,
● narrow down product selection via price filters,
● use site search,
● use comparison tool,
● join an email list,
● buy stuff,
● etc.

But, you will also want to create a list of all the negative actions that a user
could take:

● enter incorrect login,
● see error messages when filling out billing info,
● error 404 – page not found,
● remove the product from the cart.

Google Analytics allows you to measure all of these by setting up Goals or
using event tracking.
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Kissmetrics

The main premise behind Kissmetrics is to understand what people are doing
on your website and deliver behavior-based engagement every step of the
way.

While Google Analytics tracks pageviews, Kissmetrics tracks individual users
and focuses on measuring their behavior. Therefore, it’s a good tool to use next
to Google Analytics (although, the latter offers some basic user-tracking
features, too).

Furthermore, if you’re using a larger number of tools, Kissmetrics allows you to
easily build reports by importing data from those third-party tools. The reports
also display A/B test data and offer a cool comparison of the variations and
clearly shows the winners.
Customers 33

User surveys
Survey Monkey

Probably the most well-known tool in this category, SurveyMonkey is an online
survey tool, which helps create surveys, collect customer feedback and
perform market research.

The free version gives you:

● 10 questions
● 100 respondents
● 15 question types
● Light theme customization and templates

The system is well designed and easy to use. You can also embed surveys on
your pages.

However, you will need the paid version in order to export your data, run more
questions or query more people or use their other features.
Customers 34

Qualaroo

Qualaroo offers unobtrusive inline surveys that allow you to ask questions on
specific pages or at specific points in your funnel.

For example, whenever a visitor fails to complete an action, you can use
Qualaroo to display a quick survey (e.g. “What stopped you from completing
your order today?”), right on the spot.

All you have to do is embed a code snippet in your website template and
you’re ready to start gaining insights of your customers.

Plus, Qualaroo integrates with most analytics solutions, including Google
Analytics and Kissmetrics.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for something new, unusual and fun, check out
Survey Anyplace. Their quizzes and surveys allow you to engage with your
audience in new playful ways and give you useful data in return.
Customers 35

User testing

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is an eye-tracking technology that allows you to visualize where
users are scrolling on your site through the creation of heat maps, scroll maps,
overlay tools and confetti tools.

With its A/B testing feature, you can observe the exact impact of changes
made to your website and it’s easy to experiment with different headlines,
copy or product descriptions. The tool is fast, simple, and can be set-up and
launched in minutes, without any coding.

The snapshots feature shows the way people use your website. Each snapshot
consists of four reports:

● Heatmap – a graphical representation of all the places users clicked on
your website.
● Confetti – all the individual clicks, segmented according to different
criteria in order to show how different types of users behave.
● Scrollmap – how far down the page your users scroll.
Customers 36

● Overlay – the exact number and percentage of clicks for all the separate
elements of your webpage.

The Crazy Egg recordings feature enables you to watch actual users interact
with your website. This is great for finding out where the visitors get stuck and
what you can do to improve their user experience.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an experience optimization platform that lets you set up and run
A/B tests (as well as other test types, called “multivariate” and “multi-page”
tests) with actual visitors, learn from them, and deliver targeted experiences
based on what you learned.

Just take a small snippet of code, and copy and paste it into your site’s code
and you’re ready to start experimenting.

There is a wide variety of tests you can run, including site-wide changes,
testing the call-to-action, identifying and removing distractions from your
pages, rearranging the order of your pricing plans or options, testing
navigation elements, personalizing pages based on cookies or search
campaigns, optimizing forms, testing value propositions, etc.
Customers 37

Content experiments

This tool, integrated with Google Analytics, allows you to test which version of a
landing page results in the greatest improvement in conversions (i.e.
completed activities that you measure as goals) or metric value. You can test
up to 10 variations of a landing page.

Content Experiments uses a somewhat different approach than standard A/B
and multivariate testing. You’re not testing just two versions of a page and
you’re not testing various combinations of components on a single page as in
multivariate testing. Instead, you are testing up to 10 full versions of a single
page, each delivered to users from a separate URL.
Customers 38

For example, you can:

● Compare how different web pages or app screens perform using a
random sample of your users
● Define what percentage of your users are included in the experiment
● Choose which objective you’d like to test
● Get updates by email about how your experiment is doing
Conclusion

Obviously, there is a lot more you can learn about conversion rate
optimization, including for example how to design and optimize your
marketing and sales funnels, how to decrease your bounce and exit rates, how
to optimize your user experience or how to design and test your landing
pages.

For now, however, the article above should give you a good head start on how
to go about converting more passive website visitors into active users that
engage with your content or purchase your products.

Good luck with your efforts and don’t forget to leave a comment below in case
you have any questions or wish to share your experience!

TIP: Jeff uses Sumo in his website to help convert website traffic into active
users, subscribers, and customers.

Customers 39

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