Why Your PPC Campaign is Bleeding Money
When you have the perfect business, you need to make sure everyone else gets a chance to see it. With effective marketing, you get traffic to your website and you show off your products or services to the world. It’s a win-win situation. However, if you are focusing your marketing on pay-per-click (PPC), you could be hemorrhaging money. There are a variety of reasons that PPC marketing is not effective.
You Probably Aren’t Marketing in the Correct Markets
Image via Flickr by zoetnet Read the rest of this entry »
What Typography Tells People About Your Landing Page
You want your website to say something to the customer as soon as the page loads. There are many ways to do this – with color, composition, and images. However, one thing that many website owners forget is typography. When you really want your website to evoke a feeling, make sure you are using the correct typography.
Fun and Laid Back Fonts for Casual Sites
Image via Flickr by tarrytown
Are you building a website where you are trying to show a fun, casual, laid back face? If so, it is important to show this with the typography. Make sure you use font faces that are considered less formal. When trying to show off a fun website, consider the following fonts:
Keep in mind that many ‘fun’ fonts are also considered cheesy. Additionally, they may be difficult to read if used in a large amount of text. It is a good idea to use them in moderation. Read the rest of this entry »
A/B Testing vs. Multivariate Testing: Which is Best For You?
If you have a website, you need to make sure that you market it well. However, to do that, you need to know exactly what your customers are looking for. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the two most debated options are A/B testing and multivariate testing. What are the differences? Which is better for your site?
Learning the Basics of the Two
First, you need to understand the differences between A/B testing and multivariate testing. There are several key differences, so establishing those is the first move creating the most effective landing page.
- A/B testing – After creating two versions of a website, you split the traffic coming to your site evenly between the two.
- Multivariate testing – You only have one version of the website. You are testing a variety of elements inside the page, to see what is most popular.
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Your Own Fault Your Cart Was Abandoned
Let’s be honest – as a business owner you, are doing something wrong. Now, this isn’t something to cry about, but it is important to acknowledge and understand. You can’t convert potential sales to real money unless you know why people are leaving their carts without making a purchase. So, what are some things you are doing that are causing people to abandon their carts?
Offer Long-Term Saving
Image via Flickr by the_english_guy
Whether someone wants to compare prices, they don’t have the money today, or they just wanted to get an idea of your products, many people leave their carts because they simply don’t plan to buy today. However, if you give customers a long-term cart, they are more likely to come back to you and purchase. A username and password can ensure that a customer’s cart is ready any time they are.
Our Experience Using Olark Live Chat for Conversion Optimization
If you browse our blog regularly, you may have noticed a little green tab at the bottom of the page that reads “Chat with us!” – if you ever come across it, feel free to chat with us! There’s a real person behind it and we don’t bite!
We are always looking for the next best thing for conversion rate optimization, and we’ve noticed lots of websites are popping up with live customer support chat. People usually want instant customer service, rather than calling a 800 number and waiting on hold for 15 minutes for a question that takes 30 seconds to answer. Elements like this can also help decrease shopping cart abandonment, as they can get their questions/concerns dealt with in real time. There are a couple different options in this space, but we decided to go with Olark.
Setting up Olark is extremely simple to install, even more simple if you have a dynamic website. All you need to do is take the code they give you and paste it in your HTML code, thats it!
How to Stop Vultures from Stealing Your Landing Pages
Copywriting and landing page optimization are an investment. You put in the effort and the time, and you get a reward. People known as “vultures” try to steal this reward by copying your landing pages and copy. We know this is true because, hey, it happens to us!
Competitors have stolen our services page, our homepage, and we assume other pages as well. Had they read our blog, they would know that stealing a competitor’s landing page is insane. They’re probably not big on reading, though (one even forgot to change the phone number from our homepage. Need we say more?).
We’re always looking for the positive in life. Instead of publicly shaming these companies as vultures, we will consider their scavenging a form of flattery. Today, we turn their theft into our opportunity to show you how to prevent competitors from stealing your landing pages and what to do about it when it happens.
Scare the vultures away
People will grab your content for all types of reasons. Some will scrape your blog to help their site’s SEO. Others are just lazy. They would rather eat your leftovers than write and test their own landing pages.
Online Checkout Forms – Get Inspired Now!
Normally we focus on landing pages, but today we’re opening it up to online checkout forms. Too many companies are killing their completion rates. We can stand by no longer.
These sites are prime candidates for cart abandonment. If visitors scurry when they hit the checkout page, consider a solution that will capture visitors emails as they leave and allow you to remarket to them with a targeted campaign.
To see our comments, just rollover the images and our notes and suggestions will popup.
If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter . . .
“Dr. Suess wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 words, so his editor bet him that he couldn’t write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Suess won the bet with Green Eggs & Ham, which became one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.”
This is a quote from my favorite chapter of Steal Like an Artist titled “Choose What to Leave Out”, and it applies directly to EVERYTHING in CRO.
Communicating rich thoughts and ideas with minimal waste is called “word economy” when we’re copywriting or designing headline experiments.
This is directly applicable to minimizing page elements, focused messaging, effective elevator pitches, or building your deck.
On the CRO side alone I’ve written out several examples of this concept in motion:
- Using simple language will improve your conversion rate
- Using simple, ugly design will improve your conversion rate
- Dramatically cutting your content will increase your conversion rate
Simple, beautiful and distilled messaging ALWAYS wins in my experience.
Kind of like this: “Full service conversion rate optimization on a performance basis – contact us today!“
Holiday Themed Landing Page Design Inspiration from Top Online Retailers
Holiday season is one of the most important times for retailers online and offline, so we wanted to look around their sites to see how they are doing things differently for the holiday season. We expect lots of sites to start including ample holiday themed elements, and elements like a shipping table so you know you will get your items shipped by Christmas time. We’ll post more holiday themed landing pages as we find them. Have a rockin’ Holiday Season!!
Backcountry.com
- Completely different background image/color for holidays season
- Lots of winter related items on this page
- Nice headline “The holiday gift guide”
Simple JavaScript trick to boost Christmas conversions by 10% – Code Included!
Hot off the conversion press and just-in-time for Christmas.
Last year we posted about our Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays test we ran for one of our clients. This year we decided to create a Christmas timer that you could download and instantly implement on your site!
If you’ve followed our blog before, you know that creating a sense of urgency for your users to act usually increases conversions. Since we practice what we preach, we decided to run a headline on one of our client’s websites doing just that. We tested a headline that reminds them how near Christmas is. We came up with 2 variations of this headline: one that just states the days, and another that states the days, hours, minutes, and seconds and counts down in real time.
The test:
Here’s the countdown:
And here’s a larger version: