Part 3: Implementing Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Previously in this series, we discovered how your conversion rate optimization process can be improved by adding some critical planning and research. In this article we will see how Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend taking those learnings and applying them. Take a look at part 1 and part 2 to see the previous steps.

Step 7: Design your experimental web pages (your "challengers")

This is the point at which you’ll create the content that you’ll be testing. Create wireframes of the new pages (or page elements). 

 

Create your wireframe first

Pay particular attention to critical copy elements such as the headline, introductory paragraphs and calls to action. Carry out several usability tests on the wireframe and discuss them with anyone who has an empathic understanding of your customers.

Step 8: Carry out experiments on your website

For each split test, follow a procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is, why you’re running it, how it fits into the site, how it aligns with the business goals, and how you’ll measure success. These experiment plans create a valuable archive of your business’s evolution. Once a test is started, the software takes over. All split-testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page has generated statistically significantly more conversions than the others, at which point you can end the test and promote the winning version to be your new “control”. If you are new to split-testing tools, check out this quick start guide to Google Website Optimizer and conversion rate optimization.

Step 9: Transfer your winning campaigns into other media

Diversifying your customer acquisition channels gives your business more stability. Your increased conversion rate will mean you can profitably invest more in advertising channels such as SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing and offline media. Also, explore how the insights from your winning experiments can be implemented in other parts of your marketing funnel.

• A winning appeal in a landing page test can provide a winning headline for your AdWords campaigns (or vice versa)
• A winning landing page can be adapted for space advertising in offline media
• If a particular offer performs well in your own marketing materials, your affiliates may benefit from using it too

Insights from winning experiments can be implemented in other media such as print advertising.

Summary

As you can see, while a lot of work, your results will reflect the effort that you put in. Keep in mind that the process is not a one-off event, rather it is an iterative methodology. Subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments and each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones. 

With iterative testing your profits can only go up—because you only keep the winners.

Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. Hopefully this series will give you some ideas that you can take and implement into your own Conversion Rate Optimization processes. If you want to see the whole process in more detail, check out the full Conversion Rate Experts Process.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 2: Critical Research that Can Boost Your Conversion Rate Optimization Results

Tuesday 20 December 2011 | 19:28

This is the second part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

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In the first part of this three part series, we looked at how many marketers rush into setting up their conversion rate optimization process but Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend instead applying a little bit more strategic planning, and how this can get you a much better outcome and avoid you overlooking some fundamental factors. Now we need to drill further into this approach so that you have can be armed with all the research that you need and make an informed decision going into your actual experimentation. Make sure you check out part 1 to see the previous three steps.

Step 4: Research the market

No business exists in a vacuum. You need to understand the ecosystem that you are working in. Study your marketplace by researching

• Your competitors
• Expert commentators
• Social media
• Review sites
• Anywhere your target market gathers.

Explore possibilities for improving your positioning against that competitive environment by building upon your company’s core strengths.

Step 5: Reveal the hidden wealth in your business

You will likely have elements within your business that would be highly persuasive to your prospects, if only your prospects could get exposed to them. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process. In effect your website should be a "proof magnet", incorporating all the necessary support material, persuasive content and evidence necessary to move your prospect forward with confidence.

Your website should be a “proof magnet”.

It can also be useful to identify assets that would be compelling to your prospects —

• Invest time in gathering your company's existing material and sort through your collection to find under-used persuasive assets.
• Create missing assets that would be persuasive to your target market, if only you had them.
• Compile a wish-list of persuasive content and material that your company needs to acquire from outside sources, such as paying for material to be created or interviewing clients for case studies and results.

Step 6: Create your experimental strategy

Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research, and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

1. How likely is it to double your conversion rate?
2. How easy it is to implement the test?
3. Has this idea worked before?

Summary of Part 2

Rather than starting with the first optimization experiments that come to you, it will pay big dividends if you take a short step back and really research and prioritize what you should be working on. As you have seen, there might be gold hiding in terms of your positioning in the marketplace and in your previously under-used proof elements. You can see how Conversion Rate Experts used this exact process to ​quadruple Voices.com's conversion rate from under 5% to 22% here in this case study. In the next and final part of this series, we will put all of this research and planning to good use.

 Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 1: Improving Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Monday 19 December 2011 | 17:33

This is the first part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

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Many marketers start their Conversion Rate Optimization process by going straight into creating a list of things to test.  Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants), however, advise you to resist the urge at this stage. Here are two good reasons why:

1. You don’t know why people aren’t converting yet.
2. You need to experience your business as a customer rather than a marketer.

Conversion Rate Optimization isn’t about tweaking a particular type of page element or simply setting up new tests. Instead it’s a well-defined, systematic process — a list of things you need to do. In this article series we will take you through the Conversion Rate Experts methodology so that you will have a full process to follow.

CRE Methodology Mind Map

First, in this article, we will cover some preparation steps:

Step 1: Define your strategy, long-term goals, and how you’ll measure success

First decide the strategy and vision for your business. You need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will ensure you meet your goals. Next, it is important to have customer empathy and to understand the thought processes your visitors are going through, so become a customer of your own site. Discover what the actual visitor experience is really like. The insights gleaned from these activities will give you a better guide for what you need to work on.

Step 2: Understand (and tune) your traffic sources

It’s impossible to critique a website without knowing where its visitors are coming from, which landing pages they arrive on, and how they navigate around the site.

1. Seek to understand your entire conversion funnel
2. Aim to work on the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your goals.
3. Also prioritize your efforts on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to.

Discover blockages and missing pieces in your funnel with web analytics tools.

Search for any aspects that are under-performing and any required parts of your conversion funnel that have not yet been created. For example:

• Turning a one-step sale into a multi-step sale
• Adding a well-placed refer-a-friend program
• Adding an effective email autoresponder sequence
• Adding a series of post-sale offers
• Growing a customer community
• Rolling out successes into other media

Step 3: Understand your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)

Your key question to answer at this stage is, “Why is the visitor not converting?”. The answer typically comes from research in these core areas:

1. Understanding different visitor types and intentions
2. Identifying user experience problems.
3. Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.

There is a list of 15 tools here that will help you with your visitor research.

Summary for Part 1

By the end of this part of the process you should have a great idea of the priority areas that you need to work on, both from a funnel and an end-user experience point of view. In the next article we will look at further refining your strategy so that you get the best possible outcome from your efforts. If you would like to see more about how to implement the CRE Methodology we have been outlining here, check out this case study which describes how sunshine.co.uk used the process to almost double their revenue.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Introducing Flow Visualisation: visualising visitor flow

Thursday 20 October 2011 | 09:54

Labels: New Google Analytics

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualise and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualising visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

So we are releasing “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyse site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualisers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualiser on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.

Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll also notice that we made the visualisation highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.

This type of visualisation allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.

We realise that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualiser to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.


Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.

You can find the Goal Flow visualiser in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

• The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
• The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
• Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
• How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualiser. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualised to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.

Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualisation for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualisation truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

- Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Google Analytics User Conference, Madrid.

Thursday 13 October 2011 | 18:17

There will be a Google Analytics User Conference on in Spain later this month. Organised by our Google Analytics Certified Partners and sponsored by Google, please see the site below if you'd like to attend.

Madrid, Spain - October 27th 2011
Partners: metriplica, Watt, webanalytics.es

Event Site: http://googleanalyticsconference.es

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Google Analytics Premium - a new option for our largest customers

Friday 30 September 2011 | 09:30

Labels: Google Analytics, Google Analytics Premium

We built Google Analytics on the principle of democratising data -- giving all website owners, big and small, the ability to learn from their visitors. Many websites use Google Analytics, ranging from personal blogs to large enterprises whose products and services we use daily. We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can't meet in their entirety. Today we're addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers: Google Analytics Premium.

We developed Google Analytics Premium around these pillars: more data, advanced tools, dedicated support and guarantees. Here’s a summary of what that covers:

• Extra processing power - increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis - attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support - experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call - all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google Analytics Premium was developed in close coordination with some of our largest clients. During our pilot phase, we’ve been working with Gucci, Travelocity, TransUnion , eHarmony and others, to make sure Google Analytics Premium meets their needs. We’re very happy with what we’ve built and we’re now ready to make it available to all interested clients.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee in the United States, Canada, and the UK. You can get it directly from Google or through Google Analytics Premium Authorised Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or our authorised resellers.

We're more committed than ever to providing our customers, large and small, with options to measure and improve their marketing efforts. Google Analytics will continue to offer a powerful, free product as it always has and you’ll see plenty of new features and enhancements in the future. We’re pleased to help all of our customers to work more effectively with Google Analytics. Happy analysing!

Enrique Muñoz Torres, Senior Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium

Part 4 - Mobile Website Optimisation: 10 Tips to Make Mobile Conversions Easier

Monday 19 September 2011 | 21:09

This is the fourth post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. The previous three posts covered Content Prioritisation, White Space and Big Buttons

In Summary: Making it easy to convert on a mobile device is key to maximising conversion rate. Mobile conversions must play to the strengths of mobile devices and simply replicating the desktop experience is often not enough.

As in previous posts in this series, I invite readers to think about the way the mobile user experience is different from desktop. On desktop, many conversion funnels require visitors to jump through a series of hoops (often forms) before the visitor can become a customer. While this is often an unsatisfactory experience for a person with a mouse and a keyboard, mobile visitors are even less likely to put up with this in order to convert.

Mobile devices are increasingly touchscreen and the majority of smartphones have only a virtual keyboard. Mobile users also don’t have the speed of multi-finger typing and many will enter data solely with relatively large unwieldy thumbs. While there are vehicles for data-entry specific to mobile which can really help, like voice entry and text completion, these methods are rarely useful when a visitor is using uncommon language such as when they are entering a postal address or email address.

So, how do we help mobile users complete a conversion or even partially complete? By partially completing a conversion I mean allowing them to perform an action that they can complete conveniently through another medium. Here are some ways that can help make mobile conversions easier:

Have a Single Customer Experience Across all Platforms
The means by which visitors can interact with your site are varied. Mobile users will be using small screens and their thumbs; tablet users will be using medium size screens and their fingers; and desktop users will be using medium to large screens and a mouse and keyboard. However, it should be possible for a visitor to begin the conversion process on one platform and complete it on any of the others. This is what we mean by a single customer experience. For example, with amazon.co.uk a visitor can login to their account on a desktop and start adding things to their shopping cart. If they need to leave their desktop, they can simply login to their account on their mobile device and complete the transactions while they’re on the move. And this functionality is not limited to ecommerce websites. On autotrader.co.uk a visitor can add a car they are interest in to their garage on their desktop and then open their garage on mobile or tablet and find the same car there as they travel to see it.

On Amazon.co.uk, it is possible to begin a conversion on one device and complete it on another

Allow Visitors to Save Searches
The ability to save searches can be particularly useful for travel or local website owners but really it is suited to any website where a user is likely to search for the same things repeatedly. In the case of travel, it is not unusual for visitors to have favourite destinations or even for them to re-visit a site multiple times before completing a purchase. Or a take-away restaurant is likely visited time and again by users who have a favourite meal. Allowing visitors to save their searches makes the journey to their regular purchases that little bit easier. If the visitor doesn’t have an account, make it easy for them to save searches by just adding an email address or use cookies to remember the last search they completed.

Have Clear Calls To Action
This one stands to reason everywhere but it is still a barrier to conversion on many sites. Often the website owner has provided too many conversion options or not clearly enough labeled to the visitor where they are expected to go next. Avoid using multiple conversion options and use button colour and size to clearly indicate to a visitor what you want them to do next.

On Mothercare.com, the call-to-action is clear and easy to find

Allow Visitors to Save Baskets
For website owners with a basket for their visitors to fill prior to checking-out, it is a good idea if those visitors can save their baskets for their return or even for them to access the basket again from another platform. This will also encourage cross-platform purchases. Easy account login is imperative for this to work. Have an account login button on every page and keep login simple. If a visitor doesn’t have an account and is not making an immediate purchase, entering their name and email address should be sufficient for them to save their basket and access it again elsewehere.

Keep Forms Short
The best way to ensure that conversions are easy is to make sure that all forms are only as long as absolutely necessary. Get your conversions in before asking irrelevant marketing or cross-sales questions. By keeping forms short you can make conversion on a mobile device much easier indeed.

Use Top-Aligned Labels
When a mobile phone user taps on a form field, very often the browser zooms in to that field. Mobile devices are also long but narrow when vertically orientated. Thus, having form field labels to the left as is common on desktop is less feasible. By implementing field descriptions above the field it is easier for a visitor to see where they are and it allows more space for form fields.

Booking.com uses top-aligned labels in their checkout

Use HTML5 for Form Fields
By using HTML5 in form fields, it is possible to help users to complete those fields more efficiently. For example, a field for telephone number will be filled using the number keypad. Find a simple introduction to HTML5 in plain English here.

Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Data entry needs to be kept to a minimum when a user has only their finger or thumb and a virtual keyboard to help them. By using check boxes, lists and scroll menus to make data entry easier, you will be helping the visitor to proceed through the conversion process. However, it is important not to give a visitor too many options in these lists or they may be less decisive.

Implement Click-to-Call
Mobile users are much more likely to make a phone call than a desktop user. If your business converts over a telephone line, make sure that all references to phone numbers on your website are tagged for click-to-call and where possible make those links into buttons.

RAC.co.uk have implemented click-to-call buttons for their breakdown service

Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions
A key difference between mobile and desktop users is that mobile users are using a device with location based technology. Where a conversion can take place offline, it is advisable to use this technology to help a visitor find their way to your store. In such cases it can be useful for there to be a stock checking functionality on the page and a button which will link to directions, preferably with a map, to the nearest store with the product(s) in stock. If you wish to track purchases which began on a phone, consider allowing visitors to reserve products in advance and attributing a unique tracking code to each reservation. Or to encourage quick offline sales, you might also consider having a discount code for mobile shoppers who come to the shop and convert quickly.

So, in summary, 10 ways to make conversion completions easy from a mobile device include:

Have a Single Customer Experience across Channels
Allow Saved Searches
Have Clear Calls to Action
Allow Saved Baskets
Keep Forms Short
Use Top Aligned Labels
Use HTML5 in Form Fields
Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Implement Click-To-Call
Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, test it on different devices to make sure it looks well on different sized screens. Check out this tool to replicate phones from different operating systems on your desktop.

In my next post, I will be looking at best practices for Search & Refinement on mobile websites. If you have a comment, please post it.