Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the newest darling of Internet Marketers, after all what good is traffic if it doesn’t convert. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), unlike Pay Per click (PPC) marketing, CRO isn’t a game of how much money you can throw. In fact, this field requires as much creativity, as it requires monetary investment. That’s what makes conversion rate optimization a fair arena. Your well-funded, bigger competitors can of course beat you at generating more traffic but they can’t beat you at the conversion rate game (unless you allow them to).
Every website has unique conversion goals, so the approach to conversion rate optimization is unique for every website. You should not expect to follow tips from a “best-practices” article and boost your conversion rates instantly. Chances are high that what worked for others may not work for you. So, the biggest step in increasing conversion rates is coming up with creative ideas and designs that can work.
Even though conversion rate optimization is a very custom process for every website, over the course of last couple of years (and course of more than 1000 split tests) I have observed a few general patterns which yielded great results. Different ideas for increasing conversion rate are worth discussing because they become a great source of input for coming up with your own ideas. In this article I will discuss all such generic ideas for conversion rate optimization detailed through different case studies. Let’s start by discussing what role does design play in increasing conversion rate.
Role of Design
From conversion perspective, design of a website is the most important aspect amongst all variables involved. The difference between better converting design and worse converting design usually boils down to not confusing the visitor in what he is expected to do on a page. Take a look at the examples below:
Base camp homepage design: 14% increase in conversions
What made newer design convert 14% more visitors? A clean design. The new design clearly guides a visitor towards Plans and Pricing link while the old design presented a whole lot of choices. Need more proof that having less choices on page can increase conversion rates? Have a look at the case study below:
Gyminee homepage redesign: 20% increase in conversion rate
In addition to reducing the number of choices for the visitor, having a design that shows you as a professional and trustworthy company can also increase conversions. Take a look at the following case study, where the redesigned sales page has various trust elements (seal, money back guarantee, testimonials) and the design has various little tweaks (color scheme, buttons instead of links for download, layout, etc.) which made it look professional. Note that the sales (not just conversions) increased by 20% just by changing the design. No additional products, no additional traffic, pure conversion rate optimization:
AquaSoft sales page redesign: 20% increase in sales
There are more such case studies where design played a key role in optimizing conversion rates. Have a look at them below:
- How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%
- Skype.com homepage redesign
- Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store homepage redesign
- Performance Based Design - Web Design Book: 131.2% improvement on landing page
Role of Headline and Copy
When you receive an email it’s the name of the sender and the subject line of email that influences your decision to open it right way or to post pone it to future. Similarly, when a visitor arrives on your website, it’s the design/brand name AND the headline of the page that influences his decision to engage with your page. Visitors’ attention is the costliest commodity on the Internet and your page’s headline is where it goes right after arriving on it.
Take a look at the case study below where 37Signals tested different kinds of headlines (and the winning one boosted conversion rate by 30%).
Highrise Headline test – 30% increase in conversions
The winning variation said “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts” and worst performing variation said “Start a HighRise Account”. Note that clear, no-nonsense headline won. If you think about it, if a visitor is on Signup page he obviously knows that he is signing up for HighRise account. The winning headline clearly convinces the already interested visitor that there is nothing to loose as they offer a 30-day free trial.
Another example of how much headlines matter: CityCliq, a startup in local marketing industry, split tested the positioning of their product.
CityCliq headline test: 90% increase in conversions
Here are different headlines they tested:
- Businesses grow faster online! (too fuzzy and so what if they do)
- Get found faster! (found where?)
- Online advertising that works! (too generic)
- Create a webpage for your business (clear, concise and to-the-point)
The winning headline “create a webpage for your business” tells the visitor what exactly does CityCliq does and no wonder it increased conversions by 90%. As they say, don’t make your visitors think.
Right after looking at headline, if his interest is piqued, a visitor looks at the (text/video) copy on the page. That’s why a combined optimization of headline and copy proves to be effective, as it did for SEOMoz:
Conversion Rate Experts’ How we made $1 million for SEOmoz
They tested a variety of headlines and copy elements on the landing page for Pro subscription. In the end, they found out that a headline that piqued interest and a copy that laid out what exactly constitutes a Pro subscription won (no matter how long it turned out to be).
Other case studies where headline and copy mattered:
- Dustin Curtis’ “You should follow me on Twitter here” – 12.8% increase in conversions
- Marketing Experiments Response Capture case study – triple digit increase in conversions
- Landing Page case studies from SiteTuners
- Toolbar Paid Search Landing Page Test – 73% increase in downloads
Role of Call-to-Action
So, you optimized your design, optimized headlines and page copy. You got visitor interested and motivated to try whatever you are offering. There is still one last hurdle before you can throw a success party for your CRO project. Yes, call-to-action is the last hurdle for you to cross. Even though call-to-action may be considered as minutiae for CRO, the following case studies demonstrate that even simple A/B testing of call-to-action can result in great improvements.
A highly motivated visitor will sniff out even the poorest of all call-to-action buttons. So, while optimizing this aspect of your page, make note that you are optimizing for the busy, semi-interested visitor. If he can’t locate how to try out whatever you are offering, he will hit the back button. (And in CRO, back button is the greatest enemy of all).
37Signal’s call to action – signups increased by 200%
The now-omnipresent “See Plans and Pricing” increased signups for HighRise by 200%. I have included this case study not to convince you to replace all your buttons with this text (it may not actually work for you). Rather, the point is to convince you that even small changes in call-to-action can have dramatic impact on conversion rates. And the best thing about call-to-action is that they are so easy to test. It literally takes 5 minutes to get such test up and running.
Another oft-repeated test is to see which color works best for a call-to-action (unsurprisingly, a bright color such as red mostly works better, this may be because they are eye catchy and drives visitors attention towards them). As an example, along with testing test “Signup for free” v/s “Get Started Now”, Dmix also tested Green v/s red buttons and found out that red colored works button.
Dmix case study – 72% increase in conversions
To repeat my earlier point, with call-to-action sometimes surprisingly trivial changes can produce significant results. Take a look at the following case study:
Soocial’s homepage – 28% increase in conversions
Notice that all they did was to add “It’s free” alongside Sign up now to boost conversion rate. This is definitely a trivial change, but why won’t you test such trivial changes if they don’t take much effort and have potential to fatten your bottomline?
Some other case studies where call-to-action helped increase conversion rate:
- Get Feedback v/s Respond Now – 13% increase in conversion rate
- Another Red v/s Green button case study - 21% increase in conversions
- RIPT Apparel’s Buy Now button test – 6.3% increase in sales
- Firefox Download button test – 3% increase in downloads
Role of You
The framework of optimizing design, headline, copy and call-to-action should provide you with a good plan to design your CRO program. What matters in increasing conversions is not making your visitor think about what you are offering and how to actually try that offering. Try to make everything obvious and simple, guiding your visitor from headline to copy to call-to-action like a smooth flowing river.
However, no matter how many case studies you read and what theory I propose here, in the end your conversion rate optimization program will turn out to be unique because your website is unique, your audience is unique and your goals are unique. The real key to increasing conversion rate is to keep experimenting and keep doing tests.
Author Bio: Paras Chopra is the founder of Visual Website Optimizer, world's easiest A/B split testing software. Thousands of companies and agencies have been able to increase sales and conversions upto 90% within first few days of using the tool (read published case studies). You can follow the company on Twitter @wingify.
Great post Paras.
Similar to everyone else i find that testing these elements that you outlined works. But I do offer caution: It is easy to fall into a never ending cycle for testing make sure you are not testing just for the sake of testing.
Hi Michael,
You make an excellent point. Testing for the sake of testing is a waste of effort. Testing inherently doesn't provide any gains; it should always be a result of business objectives and resources you have.
-Paras
I've never heard of CRO until this post. This just goes to show how intricate SEO is when you search for these little gems. Your article also indirectly introduced me to Google Website Optimizer on one of your case studies. I'm definitely going to play around with that along with GA to test these tactics. Thanks for the great post!
Ironically, I hoped the post will introduce my tool: Visual Website Optimizer :)
But I'm glad you found a split testing tool you can play with.
Ironically, I hoped the post will introduce my tool: Visual Website Optimizer :)
LOL. You know what Steinbeck said about "The best laid plans of mice and men"
Ecxellent study Paras, I'll be sure to put it to use thank you
Great article. Goes to show if you follow 2 simple rules it can mean big results. We tested moving the main headline above the fold and changing the title and it resulted in a 20% drop in bounce rate.
If you follow the term of KISS and AIDA it can deliver brilliant results.
Keep the articles coming, there great to read
Even at 3AM this gave me some great ideas.
Really solid info. I'm sharing this with my team.
Glad you liked it!
Subtle but proven effective design changes. good info
Leon Solomon
great sharing,
This is by far one of the best CRO articles I've read in a long long time. Thanks for it! :D BOOKMARKED!
I'm glad you liked it!
Really great resource on all things CRO... I like the focus of several posts as of late on this extremely important topic!
Great article Paras. I hope you get a lot of new visitors to your A/B testing site
While I absolutely agree about the need for individualized solutions for websites, there is a category of sites that aren't able to A/B test effectively due to low visitor numbers.
That's when articles like this that point out best practices shine. In the absence of A/B data, you build the site according to best practices and hope for the best until you increase your visitor numbers.
That's right. In absence of traffic to test, you should go with common sense and best practices. Usability tests and feedback from visitors are a great substitute for testing, in my opinion.
Awesome article, Paras! Thanks much for sharing the wealth of knowledge. Lots to chew over. Now to do the hard part and begin to implement...
Great articles, well put. Now I can show my stubborn clients why they need a make offer :)
Wow.. I've never heard of Conversion Rate Optimization. This is very interesting. It's like playing on the psyche of the visitors on the Web. Now, color psychology is not just a fluff; it actually works. In the end, less clutter, more sense, smarter colors, better wording makes the difference. I wonder if this will be the end of flashy, fancy sites made with flash? We can only see.
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This was my first introduction to CRO as a concrete concept, it's always been in the back of my mind when I design, but more as intuition than fact. You're article was very clear and easy to understand, good job.
I'm hoping for some advice, I'm designing for a new company, not web, and their website is terrible. I don't have anything to do with it, but it needs to be fixed. They don't seem to see the value in online marketing as much, but I do. How do I show them that this is important to growing their business. It is a niche magazine publishing company, very small. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Perhaps you should send this article link to your client? :)
Awesome post man!
Very nice post. I like how you embedded the examples so you could see them side by side.
Hello Paras,
Great information from conversion point of view. Small changes can really impact conversion. Also, i like to share some case studies which may be you will find interesting.
Thank you.
Great article! Recently we published an awesome case study: https://blog.usabilitytools.com/great-orchestra-christmas-charity-420-conversion-rate-increase/
$300,000 was donated via website. It is a 420% conversion improvement. I hope our insights will be relevant to your work :)
Cheers,
Bart
Love it! What a great way to lay this out plain. I'm talking with my boss about implementing a plan like this for our sites, and this was a great brushup for me and introduction for him.
What a fantastic Post! Thank you for sharing this helps a lot!
This was an incredible post. I just made a ton of changes on my new blog based on some of your findings.
I just added a newsletter component to what the site offers so hopefully this will get more people on board to become consistent visitors!
Thanks so much for this.
I cannot begin to say how under-utilized testing is for conversion as well as usability. The interesting part as an SEO is the difficulty in some case between the optimized winner "decluttering" and reducing page content Versus, performance in SEO with ample textual content...
But then again that's where the creativity comes in I would supose.
wonderful blog, thanks a lot for the share
Great read. I like how many Case Studies from/for/by Big Brands you included in your post.
The one that I still can't believe is 'Red vs Green' Case Studies. How come Red wins?
Yep, surprisingly, it always works!
Fantastic article.
We're looking at this a lot lately.
This article was interesting enough to take away my sleep, thanks Paras.
Very interesting collection of case studies. It once more shows that even samll changes that you thought would be irrelevant can have huge affets on the conversions. Test...Test... Test .... or you will loose out!
Excellent post. Very informative and it is another case of performing some of the easiest actions can give you potentially huge returns. You can adapt the same methods to most things that are visual that customers are exposed to in that everything now is about ease of use and convenience. If a website is difficult to use, not laid out properly and not particularly inspriing then there will be a large percentage of customers that will hit that dreaded "back" button. When you drill down to the nuts and bolts of this it is common sense that you would use the most attractive colours, use the right sort of headers and titles to entice and to use certain words that grasp customers attention. I`m sure that people involved in marketing would be familiar with most of these methods and it is about time websites adopt the same techniques to maximise their selling potential.
Excellent point, Charlie. Yes, finally it boils down to common sense. But with so many variables involved on a website, it is hard to get all of them right. So, testing one at a time is a great way to approach conversion rate optimization.
As a keen observer of the usage of CRO techniques I can say I've seen a lot. Good examples of CRO to me always include - answers to questions and reassurance for the buyer.
You must anticipate questions the buyer might have (how much does it cost?) - It's free! Such as your example with the Soocial homepage.
And reassurance that they are getting what they expect. As a Basecamp user, I can say the way it is presented - with big, easy to use buttons and clear language - influenced my buying decision. I thought to myself: if their website is clear and easy to use their product must be too.
Regarding service websites: I when there is a big button that says "View our Plans and Pricing". Its usually what I look for first, when it is hard to find I don't stick around long.
I'm curious about your thoughts on the pricing pages. In your opinion, is it better to have the most expensive plan on the left or the cheaper one? I read something about 37 signals doing tests on this and converting better with the most expensive plan on the far left side.
Well, I don't have a generic answer to that question. Testing left to right v/s right to left is trivial, so it is best to test it yourself.
Though basic psychology 101 would suggest that if your app is priced higher you wouldn't want $249/mo as the first price to hit the eye. So, we use left to right on our pricing page https://app.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/signup.php
However if your highest plan is a two figure one, you are probably good with right to left layout.
Paras,
Thanks for your reply. I think for sites that have a custom plan like yours that says "call us" definitely you don't want it to be the first one. But for Basecamp, for example, they have the highest price first. I think its called staging, where you create (in the potential customer's mind) a value for your product with the first price they see. So for example on Basecamp they see $149 and think, "oh that is too expensive for me but it must be a good product" - then they pan to the right to see the other plans and think "Oh I can afford $49/month, I'll buy it". The perceived value is what i'm talking about.
I have heard this called "price anchoring." And I agree with you. From what I've read about it, it might be useful to put the most expensive first.
There's an interesting book called "Predictably Irrational" which explores this and other interesting concepts about economics.
Good article - always good to read about CRO.
As a side note, it's interesting that the current Highrise design is the same as the old Basecamp one that was ditched...
It's amazing how just the color of the action button can get such a huge change in the response rate....man, we have some testing to do.
Yeah, someone else has finally validated what I've been seeing from all the testing that I've done and seen. a simple rule of thumb is "What do you want the visitor to do?" That should be easy for the user to understand and accomplish. Great information. Thanks.
Excellent post. Would you like to test, how the 'Sign up for FREE 30 day trial' button next to 'watch a short video' button on your website homepage will improve your conversion rate? That's the first thing i searched for, the moment i landed on your website. Right now the button is down at the bottom right. This should improve your signups :)
Yup, call to action on our homepage has been under experimentation for long time now. We have tested tons of different variations of what it says. We had also tested placing two buttons (as you say), but with choice comes a bit of confusion. So there wasn't a significant improvement.
Rarely a user goes straight to sign up after arriving on the homepage. We want him to first know what the tool does. There are plenty of free trial buttons inside the website.
actually i struggled to find the free trial button on your website. Normally i would have given up and made an exit. But i took the pain (becuase of your convincing post) and found it on the 'features' page. I saw the free trial button later on the home page when i scrolled to the bottom. Take this as a free usability test from my side :) It is not necessary that visitors will always follow the path you expect them to follow to achieve website goals. So I for example wanted to try your product straight away. And i fail to understand that how 'Sign up for FREE 30 day trial' link at the top will not have any positive impact on conversions esp. for repeated visitors or visitors who come from posts like the one above.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, your argument makes sense. Visitors who want to sign up directly may find it a little hard to do so.
We shall be testing the placement of 'Free Trial' again :)
Sorry to chime in a month late but wouldn't it make sense to have different landing pages depending on the path the user takes? I have not looked at your software thoroughly but does it allow this? I think that a person who reads an article like this may want a "Call to Action" easier to find since they already have knowledge of the product vs a person that is not familiar with it. I assume your product does this and I plan on looking at it closer as it looks like an amazing product! I have to admit that I do not have a lot of conversion experience and am just starting to optimize pages with A/B testing. I do think that creating different landing pages (and doing A/B testing on each one of those pages) based on where the customers come from is always beneficial. I could see it getting increasingly confusing as more pages were created though.
Yes, what you describe is called referral targeting. You can certainly do that using our tool.
bottom line? people still like to click the big shiny red button - go for it.
Nope, the bottom line is that conversion rate depends on a ton of different parameters. I am sure throwing in a big shiny red button will actually decrease conversions for many websites. Key idea is to test, never to apply CRO ideas without making sure what effect they have on your specific site.
Yep, have to agree with everything above, solid information, realy focussed and to the point, but not only that, providing the 'more reading' to do on each post with relevant article links was extremely helpful... 'You should follow me on twitter' by Dustin Curtis was very interesting and influential, thank you.
nice post Paras, and nice examples.
I had run into the same conclusion. I was once redirecting a group a keyword from a paid campaign to a special landing page. On day we changed the feel on this landing page, gave less choice to the visitors, but clear directions, our CR increased by more than 70%.
wow, thsi artice is really great.. straight o the point. I am a freshman in this field and when I read this article I now really understand what is all about.
But the bottom line is that be CREATIVE in terms of call-to-action..and know what people or users want.. i really love this.. haha... thank you for this great article. Love it.. :)
Great article! Well done!
Great article Paras. Unfortunately for us the idea of landing pages have not worked out so great. We're in the Real Estate business and our goal is to attract owner leads. Only when we used landing pages (we've tried all sorts of landing pages, even had a design/marketing guy help us out) not only it didn't convert as well but we saw a significant bounce rate increase from low 20s to over 60% (this number went down as we stating adding links back to the homepage), also the majority of our keywords quality score dropped below 5. We know we have the right leads by looking at the keywords people are searching for, so is it possible that people want to find out more about you before telling you who they are? Or perhaps different market requires different marketing strategies?
Yes, that's right! Landing pages aren't panacea that will magically increase conversion rate. Nor are any of the ideas I have listed in the article. Every website has unique goals and different kinds of visitors behave in different ways.
Landing pages typically work best if a visitor knows what he is looking for; but if he is kind of semi-interested, you are better off with a traditional website.
-Paras
I have seen increase of 55% in CTR when I have changed red no underline links to default old-fasioned blue underline links.
I saw very similar article somewhere else.
https://storecrowd.com/blog/conversion-examples/
This article hits the nail on the head! Great case studies to improve your landing pages and to expect a better conversion rate;-)
I am going to share this piece with my network!
Thanks,
Claude
Hi Claude,
I am glad you like the case studies. There are tons of more case studies on the Internet, if only I could compile all of them :)
-Paras
Thank you, Paras, for a great article and plenty of case studies to look at.
The thing I love about conversion rate optimisation is that there is no tick list of things you need to do to improve your own. You have to test, test and test again. All sites and their visitors are different and you have to respect and consider that.
That said, articles such as this are very useful for sharing lessons and concepts learned through testing. They serve as good inspiration and I'll be taking a long look to see what ideas I can get for my own sites.
One question I have for you Paras - and anyone else - have you ever conducted tests to understand the impact of people imagery on conversion rates?
I ran an imagery test earlier this year that yielded some interesting results. I took an image of the actor from our TV advert and added it to our main search box on our homepage. The result was an additional 22,000 searches over the default image.
Whats more, we could also see how the conversion rate then dropped the further away we got from the TV campaign airing.
If anyone is interested in the case study it can be read here: https://www.itsdigitalmarketing.co.uk/2010/04/28/impact-tv-imagery-website-conversion-rates/
I'd like to delve deeper into this imagery testing so I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience with it.
Hi Gary,
You may find this case study helpful: Human Photos Double Your Conversion Rate https://thinkvitamin.com/design/human-photos-double-your-conversion-rate/
I agree with you, people engage better if there is imagery on a web page.
-Paras
Thanks Paras, for another good case study. Just what I was look for.
Good Article! Definitely got me thinking about
some things that we have only been talking about.
Thanks for sharing this information. Very readable and full of useful "takeaway" knowledge. Thumbsup!
Love the article awesome and congrats on being promoted to the main blog!
Amazing article! Great insight. Had read about the button colorization improvements. However never realized the difference in conversion.
Thanks for this fab post, when we first started a couple of years ago we were pretty green and had designed our website in-house. We had a very poor conversion rate, but after doing some research (including reading the https://www.conversion-rate-experts.com blog) we made some simple changes and increased conversion rate 5 times overnight!
We still do all our design in-house, and I always read everything I can find on CRO and work out how to apply it to our website.
Thanks. Can u give me some advices to improve The CRO ?