Website optimization helps you get a better return out of the money you’re already spending to drive traffic to your site.
In Wednesday’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EDT – “See the Research Applied Live: Dr. McGlaughlin personally optimizes your landing pages” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will offer live optimization suggestions for audience-submitted webpages to give you ideas for improvements you can make to your own website.
First, we asked your peers what website optimization tactics worked for them. Here are a few of the responses that we thought were the most helpful …
Keeping offers to just the action we want the prospect to take
Any more than one available action leads to confusion. One other thing we find important is having a “take action” button above the fold on a webpage as well as one at the bottom, and depending on the length of the copy, we may add another somewhere else. Of course, even with multiple buttons, they all go to the same offer.
– David Hawke, Lead Generation Specialist, Marketing Velocity
Address optimization over a series of steps so that you can appropriately manage the flow on effects of each change as it impacts the business
We manage a website and online strategy for an organization that provides vehicle transportation services. From the outset, we worked with this company to determine their target market (married professional women with a young family who are having to relocate due to a change in job, most often their husband is the reason for the relocation) so that it would be designed and built to best match their target as much as possible (a pseudo-Agile approach was used).
The call-to-action for the website started out being: ask visitors to ring for a quote. After the business began getting too many calls in their call center, we were asked to change the call-to-action.
The website call-to-action was redesigned to focus on getting visitors to complete an online quote request form (this was a legacy solution with a few problems that was utilized until something with a more appropriate user interface and user experience could be implemented).
After this change, there was a drop off in calls to the call center and some increased traffic to the quote form. However, the call center began to report more inquiries from people not knowing where to find the online form when going to the website (something we had also observed in the analytics).
Rather than continue on with looking at problems with conversion for the call-to-action, we focused on the conversion problem that was problematic for the business.
To make access to the quote form more visible, we first changed the menu item in the nav to be a contrasting color, which marginally increased the clickthrough rate to the quote form.
Next, a new 300 x 100 button was added to a right-hand sidebar on all pages of the website. This created an almost immediate increase in the number of people visiting the quote form, though the call center was still reporting people who couldn’t find it.
Testing then began on color and font style, changing from white text on a red button to the most successful combination of black text on a yellow-orange colored button.
The improvement from this testing showed up first in analytics and then from the call center.
By keeping optimization aligned with the impacts to the business, we have been able to increase their trust in our ability to get them outcomes they want. It has also given the client confidence that their online marketing is actually working, as well as the data, information and insights that they had been missing previously so that they could make informed business decisions.
– Indra Chandon, Director of Research and Internet Marketing Strategies, Semantia Pty Ltd
Lead generation strategy reduces cost per acquisition from $9.46 to $1.10, nets 26.7% conversion rate
In the past, I’ve set up a system that is able to update dynamic text in multiple areas on a landing page through WordPress, so you can create hundreds of pages with dynamic text really easily. It’s great for targeting specific keywords on AdWords and improving quality score.
You basically create the page and have all the elements that you want dynamic. So once all the code is set up, you’d just write the keyword or phrase into the post title and it updates the whole page automatically – page titles, headline titles and all other dynamic inserts you choose. You can even do it with images if you want to take it a step further.
I made a short YouTube video about it.
I found this to be really successful in targeting specific keywords on AdWords and converting new leads.
There is also usually such a lag in dev time inside companies to keep up with marketing requirements. I found this to be a great way to be able to optimize and test new ideas faster without getting stuck in slow dev cycles.
– Daniel Kohn, founder and Marketing Director, The Crown Agency
Related Resources:
See the Research Applied Live: Dr. McGlaughlin personally optimizes your landing pages — Wed., Sept. 19, 2012 at 4 p.m.
Website Optimization: How you can improve conversion by finding your buried treasure
Conversion Optimization for Content: Publishing site decreases bounce rate 43%
Conversion Rate Optimization: Your peers’ top takeaways from Optimization Summit 2012
Marketing Research Chart: What are the most prevalent website optimization priorities?
I am very careful now on optimizing my website because if you have a wrong move by optimizing your website it can effect your business or our site and I learned a lot if this article.