TOOLS, TIPS AND GETTING READY FOR TESTING · Tools, Tips and Getting Ready For Testing: A...

TOOLS, TIPS AND GETTING READY FOR TESTING

A Quick-Start Guide To CRO

Tools, Tips and Getting Ready For Testing: A Quick-Start Guide To CRO

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Contents

3 Introduction

5 What is CRO?

9 Why You Should Make CRO A Priority

12 A Recipe For CRO Success

18 Setting Time Aside For CRO

20 Avoiding Common Pitfalls

22 Conclusion: Whatever You Do, Start Now

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W hen you hear the words conversion rate optimization (CRO), what comes to mind?

Does it sound too expensive? Too time-consuming?

Too complex? Too boring?

Well, that’s what your competitors want you to think.

They don’t want you to improve the user experience

on your website, and they certainly don’t want you to

reach your business goals faster!

In the simplest terms, CRO is all about leveling up. It gives you an

opportunity to really get to know your audience, understand their pain

points, and get them to the goal line more effectively.

As you make changes to influence website visitor behavior, you get to

see a real lift in your conversions, and you have hard data to back up best

practices you want to put into place.

It’s actually one of the best strategies out there for seeing higher

revenue over time.

Introduction


https://neilpatel.com/blog/marketing-wrong/

https://neilpatel.com/blog/marketing-wrong/


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And it shouldn’t take a lot of your time, either. We’re talking a mere 15

minutes a week dedicated to analyzing visitor behavior and making UX

adjustments accordingly (more about that later).

The benefits are enormous, not just in terms of increased customer

insights and a positive lift in revenue. Simply put, CRO helps you make

the most of the marketing activities you’re already investing in. If you’re

sending email, writing content, or running ads, CRO improves the

performance of all those existing channels.

In this ebook, we’ll explore:

• What CRO is and why it’s so valuable

• How to start your own conversion optimization strategy

• Some tools and resources to help you at every step

• How to avoid common CRO pitfalls

We’ll also offer some case studies and real-world examples along the way,

to show you how brands have applied a CRO framework and gotten great

results.

The goal of this guide is to get you observing and analyzing behavior on

your website so you can make changes confidently, and set your A/B tests

up for success.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started!

Introduction



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F irst, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about what conversion rate optimization is.

Despite what you may think, it’s actually pretty simple.

There are three basic steps to performing an effective CRO strategy:

Observing User BehaviorPopular CRO tools like scrollmap and heat map reports can help you

see and understand what your visitors are doing when they’re on your

website.

For example, they may be getting stuck in certain places, clicking on

elements that aren’t clickable. They may not be clicking on CTAs or

purchase buttons because it’s not clear what their next action should be.

Basically, you’re trying to understand whether your visitors are actually

achieving the goals that you want them to, and if they’re not, figuring out

what you can do to fix that.

What is CRO?



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Concepts to really consider when thinking about the user experience are:

• Decision Paralysis: Is there just too much choice for visitors when they arrive on the page?

• Navigation: Is the desired customer journey clearly signposted?

• Copy: Is your copy generic, and what could you do to drive sense of urgency or tap into visitors’ emotions?

• Images: Does your hero image tell a story? Or is it just there for the sake of being there? With visitor attention at a premium, a poorly chosen Hero image can make or break conversions.

A lot of marketers get mired in data overload, collecting information

without framing it first.

If you approach your analysis with questions like the ones above in mind,

you’ll be in a much better position to take action on the user behavior that

you observe.

What is CRO?

WEBSITE DESIGN CASE STUDY:

How Crazy Egg’s Minimalist Homepage Came to Be

As we mentioned above, decision paralysis -- or offering an overwhelming amount of information

to your customers upfront -- can be a major factor in deterring your website visitors from

continuing down the path to your ultimate business goal.

We’ve taken this to heart as we’ve spent the last 10+ years honing our homepage to strike the

right balance of “Hey, sign up for our free trial!” and “Need to learn more? Here are just a few

features and benefits before you sign up.”

Our friend Wes Bush at TrafficIsCurrency.com was curious about what designs we’d tested over

the years, and what the outcome was on signups. You can take a gander here.


https://trafficiscurrency.com/acquire-more-free-trial-signups/


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What is CRO?

Making Adjustments Based on Your ObservationsOnce you understand what the problems are, it’s time to build an action

plan for improving the user experience. For example:

• If your goal is to decrease your bounce rate and you see that people aren’t engaging with the content on a certain page, your action might be moving your “how to” video above the fold, or updating your hero image.

• If your goal is to get people from your homepage to your product pages, and you see that people are interacting with a dropdown menu but not clicking on any of the links, you might be giving them too many options. As an action item, you might want to consolidate your categories - or get rid of the dropdown altogether.

Monitoring the ResultsDid your design change lead to the desired behavior, or better yet, an

increase in conversions? We’ll talk about what you should do if you got

an unexpected result -- and what to do if you hit your goal -- later in the

ebook.



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Case Study: TSheets by Quickbooks

Tracking and scheduling software TSheets, by Quickbooks saw amazing

engagement with their content, but in the end, only half their traffic converted.

They used heatmaps and session recording videos to watch how visitors were

interacting with their pricing page.

What they found was that people were

scrolling back up to the nav bar and

clicking away from the page.

Once they understood what was

happening, they began testing a pricing

page without a nav bar and with more

information about their products.

Mike Loveridge is the Head of Conversion

Rate Optimization at TSheets, and he is leaning into regular testing to improve

their plan subscription signup rates.

In the case of the pricing page, he says “We wouldn’t have known that if we

hadn’t watched the video.”

What is CRO?

Rinse and Repeat1. Observing a problem

2. Implementing a change

3. Checking whether you achieved the desired outcome

Repeating these three simple steps will get you incremental growth and

improvements in your conversion rates that compound over time.


https://www.crazyegg.com/case-studies#anchor-intuit


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B efore we get into CRO strategy, let’s look at why you should be excited to dive in:

1. You’re Dodging the Best Practices TrapA lot of marketers listen to what thought leaders say. They’ll say “try this

one cool trick and then you’ll see this crazy result.”

Maybe it will work for you, but maybe it won’t.

CRO is about the behavior of your customers and making your decisions

based on that, not on a one-size-fits-all approach.

2. You’re Avoiding Opinions And AssumptionsA lot of marketing decisions, unfortunately, are based on the opinions of

various stakeholders — “I think this subject line is going to perform better”

or “I think this CTA button should be red instead of blue.”

Sometimes it’s your team members that have different opinions, other

times it’s other teams within your company that are weighing in.

That’s not to say they’re pulling those opinions out of thin air. Often,

they’re based on years of experience in their field.

But with CRO, you’re basing all of your decisions on fact. So you can say

“Actually, this subject line isn’t better” or “this CTA button is performing

Why You Should Make CRO A Priority



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better now that I made this adjustment,” and it’s all based on hard

evidence.

3. You’re Making the Most Out of What You Already HaveA lot of marketers invest money in new strategies, whether they be ads,

video, social media, or some other technique to get more leads and

prospects to their websites.


Case Study: Radio Free Europe

News site Radio Free Europe assumed that their most recent news articles

would be the most popular, and naturally should appear toward the top of their

homepage.

They checked that assumption using heatmaps and scroll maps to see where

people were paying attention and where they were dropping off.

As stories became less timely and, therefore, less relevant, they expected to

see a gradual change in color from red to blue in their scroll map, indicating that

people weren’t engaging with the content anymore.

But they found that this wasn’t always the case.

Now, they use heatmaps and scroll maps to make sure their content is in the

optimal place to get readers to click. And they can move more popular stories

further up the page to get even more eyeballs on them.


https://www.crazyegg.com/case-studies#anchor-radio-free


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And many marketers will say things like, “I’m too busy driving traffic to my

site to focus on site optimization.”

Think about that for a minute, and then consider this stat:

According to AdRoll, 98% of your first-time site visitors won’t convert on

your homepage.

Before you spend another dollar trying to get more traffic, it’s worth

exploring why your current traffic isn’t converting. That way every dollar

goes farther.

4. You’re Working With An Audience That’s Expressed Intent

The reason CRO works so well is that people are already on your site,

looking at what you do. They are the most qualified audience you’ll ever

have. Which is why it’s so easy to tie CRO to ROI (return on investment).

You’re acting on your highest qualified audience, at a point where they’re

closest to your most important digital goal.

The moral of this chapter: If you have people visiting your website, your

app, and/or your product, you’re ready for CRO.



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A s we mentioned in Chapter One, the cornerstone of CRO is observing visitor behavior. To do that, you’ll need a

few tools.

The most common ones used by UX designers, growth marketers, and

small business owners alike are heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recordings.

If you’re not quite sure where to get started connecting the dots between

what you see your visitors doing on your site and what that means you

should change or test design-wise, here’s a brief, step-by-step guide.

Step One: Pick Your Most Important Pages For AnalysisHeatmaps, scrollmaps and user session recordings will help you answer

the following questions:

Where are people leaving quickly? Where are they not engaging with

you?

But first, you have to know which pages on your site to run them on.

A Recipe For CRO Success



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If there is overlap between your most popular pages and the pages with

the highest bounce and exit rates, then you’ve got the perfect place to

start your conversion optimization.

Step Two: Get To Know Your CRO ToolsIn Crazy Egg terminology, a Snapshot is a digital screenshot of your page

that we use to track the click and scroll behavior of your website visitors.

Snapshots give you a bird’s eye view of how your

audience is responding to your site and whether

they’re skipping over crucial elements.

We even log information like referral source,

whether they’re new or returning visitors, what

search terms they used to find you, and much more.

There are five different kinds of snapshots:

Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Confetti reports, Overlay

reports, and List reports.

Each of the different reports and data points validate each other so

you can approach your design adjustments with confidence. Here’s an

overview of how each Snapshot can help you optimize your website:


PRO TIP:

Use Google Analytics to identify your most important pages:

• Highest traffic

• Highest Time Spent on Page

• Most Goal Conversions

• Highest Bounce Rate or Exit Rate



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Look at Hotspots With a Heatmap

A heatmap is always a good starting point when you

begin a new website optimization project.

Because the Heatmap report shows you where

people are focusing their attention, you can use its

results to identify and then remove any distractions

that might be hurting your conversions.

This makes it easier to create a web page that is

uniquely designed to focus the attention of visitors,

and drive them towards taking a specific revenue

generating action.

Identify Key Attention Points With a Scrollmap

Scrollmaps help your analysis along by showing you

the elements on your page where people are the

most engaged with your content, and the areas of

your page that are getting completely overlooked.

The most valuable real estate on any web page is

the area above the fold. The fold is the aggregated

screen size of all of your visitors; it tells you what they

see when they arrive on your page without needing to

scroll down.

The drop offs in color tell you people are no longer

interested in your page: red to green, and then green

to blue.



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Analyze Visitor Demographics With a Confetti Report

While you may have a target audience in mind when

you create landing pages, the Confetti Report tells you

about your actual visitor segments. You can sort each

of the clicks on your page by 22 different criteria.

One of the most useful aspects of this report is

helping you determine the content that should be

on the page based on whether it’s appealing to your

most valuable leads or customers.

It’s also extremely useful for helping you drill down

into the behavior of website visitors that have come in

from a paid ad campaign, or a specific email marketing

campaign.


Dig Into Desired Visitor Behavior With the Overlay Report

Each element on the Overlay Report is color

coordinated so you can easily see the most popular

elements (red) and the less popular elements (green

and blue).

The Overlay Report lets you drill down on the exact

clicks on every single element of your page. You can

see what areas are non-clickable but are still attracting

clicks (in which case you might want to add in a link),

and what Live elements are the most popular.



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Gather Action Items With the List Report

The List report is very similar to the Overlay report;

they both display visitor engagement data with all

the elements on your page in different ways. It’s

worth noting that the List report can be exported as

a CSV file for easy sharing.

The tabular view in the List report makes it easy

to see the most popular pieces of content on your

page (those with the highest percentage of clicks).


It also helps you quickly figure out where you’re falling short on your

goals. If you’re analyzing an email submission page with 1377 clicks on

the collection form but only 280 clicks on the “Submit email” CTA button,

that’s your cue to take a closer look at the reasons why that might be.

Speaking of which…

Gain Superpowers With Recordings

Recordings are videos of your visitors’ navigation and click behaviors as

they move through your entire website.

Whether you choose to track customer journeys based on multiple

pages or just a single one, you’ll be able to see exactly how visitors are

interacting with your site. The value here is a dynamic video experience

where you can take note of glitches on your site, and any factors that are

blocking or facilitating conversions.



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For example, you may have seen a dip in sales demo requests lately - it

could turn out to be a form submission error that you hadn’t known about

until you watched a few people rage clicking on the “Submit” button.

By setting up Recordings on specific pages you’ve noted have low

performance, you can look at what your visitors are doing and understand

in one afternoon why they’re struggling — and how to fix it.




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Step Three: Come Up With An Observation-Based Action PlanWhen you’re looking at your Snapshots, the first thing we suggest you

investigate is your CTAs:

• Are they a hotspot in your heatmap report?

• Where are they placed on the page in relation to where people stop paying attention in your scrollmap report?

If your CTA is below the fold or in a place on the page where traffic has

dropped off, you definitely want to move it up.

That’s an easy win and a way to get incremental growth and revenue from

one small change.

• Another place to start is looking at your Overlay and List reports together:

• Are your most-clicked elements the ones that are most important to you achieving your revenue goals?

Are people clicking on elements that aren’t clickable, or not clicking on

things that are?

If people are clicking on elements that don’t tie to your objectives (like

a purchase or a signup), you may want to remove those elements to cut

down on distractions.

Recordings can also help you troubleshoot obstacles that people may be

experiencing.




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While you’re watching a recording of visitors interacting with your website,

keep these crucial factors in mind:


How did people arrive on this page?

Are there any particular triggers that cause visitors

to complete your action?Are there any broken or faulty elements on your page that are creating a negative design experience?

How are people interacting with this page? Are you noticing

any patterns?

How are people leaving your page?

Are there elements in your navigation that are acting as escape hatches for

your visitors?



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T he other thing you will need is a little bit of time every week to devote to watching what people are doing on

your site, and making adjustments based on what you think would make their experience better.

If all of the above sounds daunting, keep in mind that you don’t have to

do all the steps at once! There are several ways you can break down each

part of the process, depending on how much time you have.

Setting Time Aside For CRO

15m - Select Pages to Focus on in GA; Set up Snapshots/Recordings

15m - Look At Snapshots On Your Most Impactful Page

15m - Look at Recordings On Your Most Impactful Page

15m - Come Up With An Action Plan Based on Observations

15m - Run An A/B Test Or Edit One Element on the Page and Set Up a New Snapshot Wait for enough data to come in (generally this is when you hit 5,000 visitors)

15m - Look At The A/B Test Results or Compare Snapshots (Before and After)

Here’s what your schedule might look like if you had just 15 minutes a week to devote to CRO:



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In just 90 minutes, you’ll:

• Have a good sense of how people are interacting with your most important webpages

• Know whether your design adjustments resulted in a desired outcome

And if your A/B test is successful, you may be looking at a nice boost in

your conversion rates!

Setting Time Aside For CRO

PRO TIP

For a lot of people, CRO is not the primary focus of their job, which unfortunately makes it easy to overlook. We’ve found that the best way to add it to your schedule is to set up recurring time blocks in your work calendar.


https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/time-blocking-tips/


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A s you’re getting started with conversion optimization, there are some common traps you need to look out for.

These are misconceptions and assumptions about CRO that will seriously hurt your efforts, and will make CRO seem like an overwhelming challenge.

The Fail MentalityA Crazy Egg customer reviewed her heatmaps and recordings, came up

with a new version of a landing page with a video that she thought would

better engage her customers, and launched an A/B test.

The variant didn’t beat the control, and she was disappointed.

Her instinct was to think “I failed at this. I didn’t get the desired result.” To

her, that was the end of the story.

But actually, she learned something! She learned that a video was not the

content format her customers preferred.

This was a signal to try something different, like an ebook an infographic

— not a signal to stop.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls



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The One-and-Done MentalityLet’s say you are successful with an A/B test. You should still keep trying

out new variations. You shouldn’t stop and rest on your laurels. Here’s

why:


Ecommerce Case Study: WallMonkeys Goes the Extra Mile

Ecommerce company WallMonkeys wanted to optimize their homepage.

They tested a variant on their featured image and saw a 27 percent

increase in conversion rates. Anyone would be satisfied with that

outcome, but they kept going.

That win inspired them to keep testing elements on the page. When they

did a little more digging into user behavior, they noticed their nav and

search bar could use some work, too. With a few small tweaks they saw a

550 percent increase in conversions.

Good thing they didn’t just stop at 27 percent, right?

To see the adjustments WallMonkeys made to their homepage, you can

check out the whole case study here.


https://www.crazyegg.com/case-studies?#anchor-wallmonkeys


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To wrap up this chapter, here’s a quote we love from content marketer Jay

Acunzo, which encapsulates both avoiding the fail mentality and the one-

and-done mentality:

Jay was talking about being a speaker and an author, but constant motion

forward is the whole point of CRO, too.


To be great at something, you need to be bad for a while. If you focus on building a body of

work and constant improvement each time out, instead of ‘success’, you will have success.

You’re not settling for the bad work. You’re in the business of constant improvement. That’s

the goal, not just the path to the goal. The byproduct is you get more leads, bigger stages

and higher fees. There’s no finish line, just constant motion forward.

“



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C RO is something you master over time. As Jay said, you’re not going to be good at it off the bat, so be patient with

yourself.

It takes practice. It’s a learned skill.

To recap, here are the most important things to keep in mind:

• Just get started

• Focus on your most important pages and biggest opportunities

• Set aside time every week

Oh, and have fun! You now have powerful tools at your fingertips that help

you pay attention to your customers and figure out how to make their

experience with your business better. That’s pretty awesome.

Conclusion: Whatever You Do, Start Now


https://www.crazyegg.com/case-studies

Make the most of every visitor with our

heatmaps, user session recordings and

A/B testing tools.

http://crazyegg.com

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