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Article

May 2, 2018

8min read

What Lies Behind Website Optimization?

Anthony Brebion

If you run a website, then you’ll know just how important it is that the site is optimized to attract traffic and generate sales (or leads) thanks to a good conversion rate.

But what do we really mean by website optimization?

Definition: Website optimization encompasses all the technical and marketing techniques used to acquire traffic, engage visitors and then convert them into prospects or buyers using a clearly defined method which meets a number of pre-defined goals.

Beyond this definition, it’s hard to distinguish between the various constituent parts of website optimization – there are so many of them.

In reality, the topic is so vast that it involves several professions and skills needed to be able to take all the website optimization and corrective actions.

From design to development and from display speed to SEO, we take you through the basics of website optimization with a three-step approach.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is a digital marketing discipline that encompasses sub-activities linked to the creation of website content based on keywords targeted in advance in the search engine of your choice.

In the US and Europe, the vast majority of SEO focuses on Google: Yahoo and its competitors have never really managed to penetrate the markets.

And “Google” means “algorithms”: the Californian company frequently updates the algorithms underpinning the “laws” that dictate if your company can boost its ranking by using this or that keyword.

Search Engine Optimization thus means your company’s ability to boost its Google ranking in a targeted, precise way: you’re looking above all to rank on keywords that will deliver qualified visitors.

While there are lots of myths around SEO, remember that the era in which people would buy low-authority links in bulk is over: Google now penalizes websites that have external links which have no relation to their sites.

In 2018, SEO is based on 3 fundamental pillars which will enable you to boost your ranking.

Website Content

The content of your site is what drives your ranking: it is what Google “crawls” your site and parses your content in order to display results in its search engine.

More than just padding out your site, creating quality content and resources allows you to engage your visitors and sell your products and solutions: along with design, it’s the most crucial aspect of your site.

Of course, the content of your site can be presented in various forms (written, visual and video) and will contain keywords you want to use to drive your ranking.

Lastly, quality content necessarily lends itself to sharing: when your content is shared, Google interprets it as a positive sign.

On-page optimization

In SEO, on-page optimization covers all the technical aspects needed to rank in Google.

Getting down to basics:

Your tags must be consistent and must contain your targeted keywords.
Your site must load quickly.
Your site must be responsive.
Your site must be HTTP Secure (HTTPS).
Your site architecture must be consistent and organized.

Links

This is becoming less true but links fuel SEO. In quite an intuitive way, Google takes it as a positive sign when several sites linked to your business point to yours using an external link.

When you share content or your users share your site, you make it more likely that a site will share information or talk about you: you, therefore, create external links organically.

2. Optimizing technical performance

Page speed optimization

Technical performance is the driver of your website; on it depends on the ease with which your visitors will be able to visit and interact with your site: it is, therefore, a crucial aspect of website optimization.

Complementing SEO, technical optimization also determines performance factors which will influence your site’s Google ranking.

To get straight to the point and save you time, we’ve split this section into three:

Optimizing site speed

Site speed is one of the most critical performance indicators of all: it’s estimated that you risk losing traffic when a site takes over 2.5-3 seconds to load and that the abandon rate shoots up after 5 seconds.

A site can be slowed down for any number of reasons. However, there are several (fantastic) tools that will give you a quick appraisal of the situation:

By boosting speed, you cut abandons caused by slow loading and also help to improve your SEO.

As an example, the BBC calculated that it was losing 10% of its traffic for every extra second its pages took to load (see the study).

Display on mobiles and tablets

In 2018, 52% of global traffic is generated by mobiles, on which web browsing has improved markedly in the last five years. For some sectors (including shopping), the proportion of mobile traffic can be higher still, rising to 70-80% for some sites.

Given this high rate of mobile web browsing, it’s imperative that your website is optimized (or “responsive”) for display on mobiles and tablets.

If you build landing pages, remember there are various landing page builders which offer 100% responsive templates: a good way of saving time when creating your pages.

Making sure your site is responsive therefore means building your page so that the content displayed adapts to the size of the display window the visitor uses.

For more information, see the Google guide to creating adaptive web pages.

Page errors and hosting performance

Loading errors: we’ve all experienced them. They take the form of an HTTP protocol starting 4XX or 5XX. The most common are:

404 (not found)
403 (forbidden)
401 (unauthorized)
400 (bad request)
500 (internal server error)

The problem with page errors is that visitors who encounter them, they often signal the end of their visit. Using a crawler, you can identify the page errors on your site so that you can redirect visitors to useful resources. Tools like Screaming Frog or Botify might help you with this.

When it is not your site that is causing the performance problems, they might be caused by your host: i.e. the company that hosts your site data which are loaded by internet users visiting your site.

There are two ways of solving this problem:

Change hosting subscription (should your traffic exceed the limits included in your package).
Change hosting provider (if you’re hosted by an inferior low-cost solution).

3. Optimizing conversion and user experience

Conversion Rate and UX Optimization

Optimizing conversion rates covers everything you do to give visitors to your site a better browsing and interaction experience: this is a crucial aspect for any ecommerce site.

If you improve the user experience, you will naturally also improve your site’s conversion rate: users are reassured more quickly and gain a better understanding of your added value.

As well as improving your conversion rate, a good user experience (UX) will also increase customer loyalty: your users will be more likely to return and make other purchases.

To improve your UX, you should start by identifying problems by analyzing your data. Tools like Google Analytics will help you gain crucial insights into:

User type (age, location, sex, etc.)
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
Abandonment rate

Of course, there are other data you can use to understand all the UX mechanisms at play on your site, but these four will help you make a start on targeting the biggest obstacles.

To take things further, you can then use a more advanced data analysis solution like AB Tasty’s. With our A/B testing tool, you’ll be able to track your users’ behavior and understand how they interact with your site using the following features:

User Session Recording. Record your visitors’ sessions and then view how they interact with your site to gain more insights into their behavior.
Heatmaps. View clearly how your visitors interact with your site using heatmaps: you’ll know where they click and where the logjams are.
Surveys and user feedback. Save time and ask users how they think your site could be improved!
Visitor Segmentation. All your customers are different: segment your site traffic to create standard profiles to which you can push content and exclusive offers.
Advanced A/B testing. Use A/B testing to put your hypothesis to the test: improve your pages and compare them with previous versions to find the formula that works best.

When seeking to optimize a site, people will often focus on a single type of optimization (SEO or UX, for example): this is a common mistake which will not help you to substantially boost your revenues.

In digital marketing, we take the view that the 3 types of optimization (SEO, technical, and UX) work hand in hand: there’s no use acquiring traffic if it is not qualified and if your site cannot convert it. Conversely, a technically optimized site will be of little use if it doesn’t attract qualified traffic.

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Feb 28, 2018

6min read

The Science Behind Purchasing Anxiety

AB Tasty

Note: This is a guest post by Anand Srinivasan, founder of Hubbion

There are dozens of concerns a prospective customer might have when they are shopping on your website.

Would the product actually do what it promises to do? Can they trust you with their credit card details? Would you actually ship the product and not run away with their money? Can your company be trusted on your shipment and return guarantees?

‘Purchasing anxiety’ is the term used to refer to these thoughts, and is many times the reason why a customer might abandon their cart midway through the buying process. Not surprisingly then, such anxieties are more common on startup and small business websites than for big retailers like Amazon. So what’s really causing this anxiety? Let us look at the science behind this.

In 2013, filmmaker and author Errol Morris, in association with the New York Times, conducted an experiment to study the link between reader perception and typefaces. His study showed that readers are more likely to agree with an essay if it were written with the Baskerville font instead of Comic Sans or Helvetica.

Purchase anxiety

It is not difficult to see why. The Baskerville font shown above demonstrates a level of authority that Comic Sans does not. If you were a buyer who is just about to spend a hundred dollars on a product, it is easy to trust a sales copy written with Baskerville over one written in Comic Sans.

Morris’ experiments are thus relevant not only for newspapers but also for eCommerce stores trying to persuade visitors to buy their products. Sometimes, even seemingly trivial elements like the font or your brand name can have an impact on the way visitors engage with your website. This is because such elements influence your perception of the product and the brand. A brand that does not exude credibility often sees their ecommerce conversions go down.

Even seemingly trivial elements like the font or your brand name can have an impact on the way visitors engage with your website.

But before we look at ways to bring a visitors’ anxiety down, it is important to know what makes them convert in the first place.

Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford University coined what is now known as the Fogg Behavior Model (FBM). According to this theory, the trigger for any behavior comes from three specific elements – Motivation, Ability, and Trigger (B=mat).

Fogg Behavior Model (FBM)

Applying the FBM theory to eCommerce conversions, you can say that for conversion to happen, the prospective buyer must have sufficient motivation, ability and must be exposed to the right trigger. Your motivation to buy a gift for your spouse, for instance, dramatically increases when you get closer to their birthday. At the same time, no amount of motivation is enough to gift your husband his favorite car if you cannot afford it. The trigger to convert can come in the form of a rightly worded ad copy or CTA.

A highly motivated visitor who is exposed to the right triggers and has the ability to buy could convert even if you do not demonstrate adequate trustworthiness. This is the reason why a lot of scams still work – people who fall for the ‘get rich quick’ schemes are sufficiently motivated and do not stop due to their purchasing anxieties. That is however not true for regular product purchases where there are dozens of rival stores vying for the customer’s attention. Conversion in these cases only happens if the store demonstrates adequate credibility to reassure potential customers.

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Elvira Aletta, anxiety thrives on ignorance. By educating a prospective customer and addressing their concerns, you help fend off the anxiety that they may have before placing an order. The bad news, however, is that there is no foolproof method to fend off all kinds of purchasing anxieties. It depends to a great extent on your industry, the products you sell, the pricing and the buyer in question.

Product Details

A buyer deserves to know everything about the product, not just the advertised claims. This means that in addition to providing the complete specifications and details about the product, you should also include feedback and reviews from other customers and any third party product ratings. If you are an apparel store, you may also encourage past customers to share pictures of them wearing these accessories – this further helps a prospective buyer with their purchasing decision and brings their anxiety levels down.

Pricing And Shipping Details

The one thing that holds a customer back even after they are convinced about the quality of the product is the price. This, of course, does not apply to all businesses and some industries are more price-elastic than the others. Convincing customers that they are indeed getting a good deal is thus paramount for some stores. There are a couple of ways to do this – you could either offer a discount coupon to reduce sticker shock or you could make shipping free. It is a good idea to have a dedicated shipping page where you explicitly mention the shipping options, cost of shipping, shipment duration, handling time and restrictions. No matter what you do, make sure that the customer is not made to pay more than what they think they would be paying.

Business Details

The other most important thing that worries a buyer is your business credibility. Many online stores regard pages like ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’ as a mere after-thought. In reality, though, a lot of visitors look these pages up to assess your business credibility. A good ‘About Us’ page should include your company history, photos, and profile of your team members and well-made visuals to highlight your business achievements, clientele and so on. Do not make the mistake of merely including a web form in your ‘Contact’ page. Make it a point to offer multiple channels of communication (like email, snail mail, phone support, and so on). This demonstrates that you are here to stay and are not going to run away with the customers’ money.

Author Bio: Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a free project management tool for small businesses. Hubbion has been ranked in the top 20 in its category by Capterra.

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Feb 20, 2018

4min read

The Pros and Cons of Multivariate Tests

AB Tasty

Wait! New to multivariate testing? If so, we recommend you first read our article, Multivariate Testing: All you need to know about multivariate testing

During an A/B test, you must only modify one element at a time (for example, the wording of an action button) to be able to determine the impact. If you simultaneously change this button’s wording and color (for example, a blue “Buy” button vs. red “Purchase” button) and see an improvement, how do you know which of the wording or the color changes really contributed to this result? The contribution of one may be negligible, or the two may have contributed equally.

The benefits of multivariate tests

A multivariate test aims to answer this question. With this type of experiment, you test a hypothesis for which several variables are modified and determine which is the best combination of all possible ones. If you change two variables and each has three possibilities, you have nine combinations between which to decide (number of variants of the first variable X number of possibilities of the second).

Multivariate testing has three benefits:

avoid having to conduct several A/B tests one after the other, saving you time since we can look at a multivariate test as several A/B tests conducted simultaneously on the same page,
determine the contribution of each variable to the measured gains,
measure the interaction effects between several supposedly independent elements (for example, page title and visual illustration).

Types of multivariate tests

There are two major methods for conducting multivariate tests:

“Full Factorial“: this is the method that is usually referred to as multivariate testing. With this method, all combinations of variables are designed and tested on an equal part of your traffic. If you test two variants for one element and three variants for another, each of the six combinations will be assigned to 16.66% of your traffic.
“Fractional Factorial“: as its name suggests, only a fraction of all combinations is actually subjected to your traffic. The conversion rate of untested combinations is statistically deduced based on that of those actually tested. This method has the disadvantage of being less precise but requires less traffic.

While multivariate testing seems to be a panacea, you should be aware of several limitations that, in practice, limit its appeal in specific cases.

Limits of multivariate tests

The first limit concerns the volume of visitors to subject to your test to obtain usable results. By multiplying the number of variables and possibilities tested, you can quickly reach a significant number of combinations. The sample assigned to each combination will be reduced mechanically. Where, for a typical A/B test, you are allocating 50% of your traffic to the original and the variant, you are only allocating 5, 10, or 15% of your traffic to each combination in a multivariate test. In practice, this often translates into longer tests and an inability to achieve the statistical reliability needed for decision-making. This is especially true if you are testing deeper pages with lower traffic, which is often the case if you test command tunnels or landing pages for traffic acquisition campaigns.

The second disadvantage is related to the way the multivariate test is brought into consideration. In some cases, it is the result of an admission of weakness: users do not know exactly what to test and think that by testing several things at once, they will find something to use. We often find small modifications at work in these tests. A/B testing, on the other hand, imposes greater rigor and better identification of test hypotheses, which generally leads to more creative tests supported by data and with better results.

The third disadvantage is related to complexity. Conducting an A/B test is much simpler, especially in the analysis of the results. You do not need to perform complex mental gymnastics to try to understand why one element interacts positively with another in one case and not in another. Keeping a process simple and fast to execute allows you to be more confident and quickly iterate your optimization ideas.

Conclusion

While multivariate tests are attractive on paper, note that carrying out tests for too long only to obtain weak statistical reliability can make them a less attractive option in some cases. In order to obtain actionable results that can be quickly identified, in 90% of cases, it is better to stick to traditional A/B tests (or A/B/C/D). This is the ratio found among our customers, including those with an audience of hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors. The remaining 10% of tests are better reserved for fine-tuning when you are comfortable with the testing practice, have achieved significant gains through your A/B tests, and are looking to exceed certain conversion thresholds or to gain a few increments.

Finally, it is always helpful to remember that, more than the type of test (A/B vs. multivariate), it is the quality of your hypotheses – and by extension that of your work of understanding conversion problems – which will be the determining factor in getting boosts and convincing results from your testing activity.

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Feb 19, 2018

5min read

A/A Testing: A Waste of Time or Useful Best Practice?

AB Tasty

A/A testing is little known and subject to strong discussions on its usefulness, but it brings added value for those who are looking to integrate an A/B testing software with rigor and precision.

But before we begin…

What is A/A testing?

A/A testing is a derivative of A/B testing (check out A/B testing definition). However, instead of comparing two different versions (of your homepage, for example), here we compare two identical versions.

Two identical versions? Yes!

The main purpose of A/A testing is simple: verify that the A/B testing solution has been correctly configured and is effective.

We use A/A testing in three cases:

To check that an A/B testing tool is accurate
To set a conversion rate as reference for future tests
To decide on an optimal sample size for A/B tests

Checking the accuracy of the A/B Testing tool

When performing an A/A test, we compare two strictly identical versions of the same page.

Of course, the purpose of an A/A test is to display similar values in terms of conversion. The idea here is to prove that the test solution is effective.

Logically, we will organize an A/A test when we set up a new A/B test solution or when we go from one solution to another.

However, sometimes a “winner” is declared on two identical versions. Therefore, we must seek to understand “why” and this is the benefit of A/A testing.

The test may not have been conducted correctly
The tool may not have been configured correctly
The A/B testing solution may not be effective.

Setting a reference conversion rate

Let’s imagine that you want to set up a series of A/B tests on your homepage. You set up the solution but a problem arises: you do not know to which conversion rate to compare the different versions to.

In this case, an A/A Test will help you find the “reference” conversion rate for your future A/B tests.

For example, you begin an A/A Test on your homepage where the goal is to fill out a contact form. When comparing the results, you get nearly identical results (and this is normal): 5.01% and 5.05% conversions. You can now use this data with the certainty that it truly represents your conversion rate and activate your A/B tests to try to exceed this rate. If your A/B tests tell you that a “better” variant achieves 5.05% conversion, it actually means that there is no progress.

Finding a sample size for future tests

The problem in comparing two similar versions is the “luck” factor.

Since the tests are formulated on a statistical basis, there is a margin of error that can influence the results of your A/B testing campaigns.

It’s no secret how to reduce this margin of error: you have to increase the sample size to reduce the risk that random factors (so-called “luck”) skew the results.

By performing an A/A test, you can “see” at what sample size the test solution comes closest to “perfect equality” between your identical versions.

In short, an A/A test allows you to find the sample size at which the “luck” factor is minimized; you can then use that sample size for your future A/B tests. That said, A/B tests generally require a smaller sample size.

A/A testing: a waste of time?

The question is hotly debated in the field of A/B Testing: should we take the time to do an A/A test before doing an A/B test?

And that is the heart of the issue: time.

Performing A/A tests takes considerable time and traffic

In fact, performing A/A tests takes time, considerably more time than A/B tests since the volume of traffic needed to prove that the two “identical variants” lead to the same conversion rate is significant.

The problem, according to ConversionXL, is that A/A testing is time-consuming and encroaches on traffic that could be used to conduct “real tests,” i.e., those intended to compare two variants.

Finally, A/A testing is much easier to set up on high traffic sites.

The idea is that if you run a site that is being launched or has low traffic, it is useless to waste your time doing an A/A test: focus instead on optimizing your purchase tunnel or on your Customer Lifetime Value: the results will be much more convincing and, especially, must more interesting.

An interesting alternative: data comparison

To check the accuracy of your A/B Testing solution, there is another way that is easy to set up. To do this, your A/B Testing solution needs to integrate another source of analytic data.

By doing this, you can compare the data and see if it points to the same result: it’s another way to check the effectiveness of your test solution.

If you notice significant differences in data between the two sources, you know that one of them is:

Either poorly configured,
Or ineffective and must be changed.

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Feb 7, 2018

8min read

Recommendation vs Personalization

Anthony Brebion

Recommendation and personalization are often wrongly used as interchangeable terms relating to online marketing. They are both essential practices for almost all businesses with an online presence, however. Along with A/B testing and broad optimization techniques, these tools are the future for marketing in the 21st century. While they are complex methods of reaching and retaining customers and visitors, the premise itself is quite simple, and learning how to optimize a website and customer experience is key to helping a business reach its full potential.

The Difference Between Recommendation and Personalization

For most people, personalization and recommendation are the same things. When a business tailors its service to meet our needs it can use recommendations to personalize our interactions, so these words are synonyms, right? Well not exactly.

A recommendation is a form of personalization, but personalization is not a form of recommendation. For example, YouTube might suggest related videos based on previous viewing habits, this is a recommendation based on what other YouTube users also watched. A restaurant, however, might suggest a table by the window based on a previous booking you have made. This is personalization, as it is based on the specific habits of the individual and not a broad algorithm. The more you know about a person, not just their viewing habits, the better. In other words, a recommendation is often built around items, whereas personalization is built around individuals.

There is of course much overlap, and the more informed and well designed a recommendation engine becomes, more on that in a moment, the closer to personalization such methods become. For now, though, it is important to separate the two categories and their techniques by definition and practice to understand fully their implications, potential, and use.

Recommendations

Recommendations are best known to most as algorithms that suggest further content on media websites. The previously mentioned YouTube relies heavily on this model in order to keep users on the site for as long as possible to generate ad revenue.

But the concept of recommendations is not confined to media companies and viewing habits.

There are three main recommendation concepts. Each one of these concepts has their own advantages for specific sectors. These are:

Recommendation engines
Product recommendation
Rating recommendation

Recommendation Engines

Sometimes referred to as a recommender system, recommender engines are the previously mentioned algorithms that are primarily used for media sites. Netflix, for example, might use your previous viewing habits to recommend another series or film. If, for example, you have watched Star Trek, it stands to reason that it will recommend another Sci-Fi series. So far, so simple. However, by tracking the viewing habits of other customers, Netflix might well find that Star Trek viewers are also often interested in nature documentaries. What’s more, specific Star Trek releases, such as the original series, might correlate with specific nature documentaries, such as those related to large predators of the sea.

So how does Netflix find such seemingly unrelated links? By tracking every one of its many millions of viewers. In 2006 Netflix offered a reward of $1m to find the most effective algorithm in tracking and predicting user behavior. The original winners of the prize improved the system by 10%, which may not seem like a lot, but such enhancements are worth enormous sums of money. The better the system worked, the more people joined, the more people joined, the more data Netflix had to work with and the better the system became. This snowball effect has led to them becoming one of the most successful media companies in the world.

But it isn’t only media companies that use recommender engines. To some degree, search engines are recommender engines, filtering out unrelated data to make results more effective.

Product Recommendation

Product recommendations are simply an extension of the recommendation engine’s ability to filter out irrelevant items, but in this case, it is related to products. It requires it’s own category as it relates purchasing items rather than content.

E-Commerce, which also uses many other features of both recommendation and personalization, has always been an innovator in the field of recommendation engines. Most famously, Amazon uses the technique in various ways to increase its sales by a reported 35%. It should be noted that Amazon is notoriously secretive about such data, however, so this is something of an estimation.

The most successful product recommendation engines don’t just provide suggestions on site. Email conversion rates, sales garnered by links sent via emails, are known to be extraordinarily high for companies like Amazon. This is partly made possible by the data collected by recommendation engines and well-targeted campaigns.

Rating Recommendations

Rating recommendations work across all sectors, or at least they can in theory. The previously mentioned Netflix and Amazon both have rating systems that provide feedback from other customers. For Amazon, it is the ubiquitous star rating, where users rate each product out of five. For Netflix, this is a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, which also helps the recommendation engine filter out specific suggestions, making the algorithm more personalized.

Rating recommendations are sometimes referred to as “Implicit feedback” (which also includes comments). Surveys have shown that the vast majority of users, 88% according to a BrightLocal survey in 2014, are influenced as much by this feedback as a personal recommendation from a friend.

Personalization

Personalization, unlike recommendation, is only at the beginning of its potential.

This is partly because the more a company knows about a person, the more effective it becomes. What is sometimes referred to as one to one marketing, it’s ambition and scope could change the way we interact with technology forever.

In truth, right now the technology available isn’t capable of collating the individual data to reach anything like the potential businesses crave, and there are many issues relating to privacy that the Internet is still coming to terms within its relative infancy. It seems, however, that in the future businesses will likely be using some form of personalization.

It should be noted that there are two types of personalization, product, and website. These are two very different concepts.

Product Personalization

Product personalization is a much simpler concept and one that most of us have used, or at least been aware of, for some time. A common example would be choosing the color of a piece of clothing from a varied selection, such as a shoe. Sometimes product personalization can become quite detailed, allowing customers to construct a product almost from scratch.

Website Personalization

Website personalization, by contrast, uses the complex, big data. The devil is in the detail, and the detail can be minute. What sets it apart from the recommendation is this data is personal.

Age, gender, location, the shopping habits and ratings left on websites, social media likes, incentives that might have been successful from other marketing campaigns, the time of day and even how the weather is at that current moment all can be taken into consideration.

This all begs the question, how does personalization help? Firstly, people are bombarded with images and information every time they go online. Usually, at best, this vaguely relates to some interest or other, at worst it is an irrelevant distraction. As seen above, this information can help websites target offers, present the customer with the most relevant and helpful information and suggest the most likely products they might wish to purchase.

App personalization uses the same principles as website personalization. At this point, app personalization is quite some way behind website personalization in terms of its development, but the gap is narrowing as more and more businesses become aware of its advantages.

Optimization

The only way in which a business can be sure that their recommendation engine or personalization system is as effective as it can be is by A/B testing. This is part of the process of optimization called recommendation testing. AB Tasty provides recommendation tools that pinpoint optimization and filter out those that are ineffective. Every aspect of website interaction can be improved, leading to a higher return on investment. Server-side A/B testing also gives you more flexibility to test recommendation algorithms.

Advantages of optimization include:

Better experience for the customer, cultivating customer retention
Higher basket totals, more sales per visit
Focused recommendation for better conversion rates
Improved general content, better website ranking
Greater return on investment
Focused Email campaigns
Improved leads and ranking
Attracting newcomers
Filtering out unwanted ads (SPAM)
Increasing basket totals

Each and every aspect of optimization has the potential to focus the attention on what is working for a website and what can be improved upon. Several metrics, both simple and complex, can form a formidable and deeply insightful method for optimization, for all business when applies correctly.

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Feb 2, 2018

8min read

Revenue Per Visitor: Definition, Formula & Best Practices

Anthony Brebion

Revenue Per Visitor, or RPV, is a highly effective way to measure how your online sales are performing. With so many metrics available to businesses, it is one of the most comprehensive available, covering the myriad of blind spots that are inherent in many other data metrics.

What Is Revenue Per Visitor?

Revenue Per Visitor is a way to accurately assess average revenue per visitor to your website.

The calculation is made by dividing the total income by the number of visitors during a specific time period. For example, if your income for January to March is $20,000, during which time you attracted 5,000 visitors, then your RPV would be $4.

RPV works differently from Conversion Rate (CVR), although it is a similar metric using some of the same data. As we will see, CVR is not as accurate as RPV, and can lead a business down something of a blind alley and affect both website design and marketing campaigns.

Why Use Unique Visitors?

Revenue Per Visitor does not use the total number of visitors to your site in its calculations. Instead, it counts only unique visitors, with each individual counting as just one visitor. In other words, visitors, not visits. This is because almost all first-time visitors to a site, more than 99%, will not make a purchase. Typically they might want to compare prices or offers on another site, or perhaps they want to mull things over before making a purchase, particularly if it’s an expensive one.

This can skew the results considerably and provide falsely negative data on how much a company will earn per visitor. On the other hand, if you are gaining a lot of recurring buyers, you may wish to document this trend and use total buyers instead. This might depend on what it is you are selling, as well as whether you want to track individual habits as well as revenue.

Why Use Revenue Per Visitor?

RPV is a much more thorough and insightful metric for those who wish to measure online sales than Conversion Rate (CVR).

In fact, many of the metrics used in e-commerce have enormous blind spots that can lead you to make poor decisions made with accurate, but incomplete, data.

Put simply, conversion rate tracks the percentage of visitors to your site that makes a purchase. If the product or products you are selling are of one price, this would paint a complete picture of how your business is performing. Most e-commerce platforms, however, are selling products of different value. For example, a conversion rate of 3% for a fidget spinner worth $2 is very poor, but for a sofa worth $1,000 it is highly desirable. So what is needed is a metric that takes into account AOV – Average Order Value.

The average order value is the average revenue made per visitor. The aforementioned fidget spinner has an AOV of just 6p, but the sofa has an AOV of $30. So why not use this metric to calculate how much a business earns per visitor? Well just because conversion rate comes with an inherent blind spot, doesn’t mean it’s a metric without merit. If the only data you have is AOV, how are you to know if your website is performing to its full potential? Also, a low conversion rate directly affects your website’s ranking. The lower the ranking, the less likely customers are going to find it in the first place. The answer? Combine both metrics. This is how RPV came into being.

How To Improve Revenue Per Visitor

There are many methods and ideas that help improve a business’s average revenue per customer, but each tip should not automatically be considered a one size fits all deal. In fact, a lower RPV is not always a sign of a poorly performing website. For example, high traffic that garners low sales, and therefore a low RPV, can lead to higher sales over an extended period of time. It is therefore often good practice to keep every metric in proportion to other data.

Having said that, there is a little doubt about the power and insight that revenue per visitor can provide. These include:

Upselling
Recommendations
Reward programs
Basket reminders
live chat
Optimization

Upselling

A tried and tested method of commerce since humans began trading, upselling is the method of suggesting upgrades or add-ons to the original purchase. For example, a tech salesperson might suggest that spending an extra $50 would result in a faster processor, meaning the laptop will avoid becoming obsolete in the near future. Or perhaps the next model up, which is only $70 more, has a free upgrade for the latest operating system.

Upselling is a balance, one where it is important to make the customer feel as if they are getting something of worth, or perhaps that it would be foolish not to when spending that little bit more. According to a study from Predictive Intent, upselling increases sales by over 4% for e-commerce businesses, and is twenty times more likely to be effective than non-complimentary recommendations.

Recommendations

Despite what was said in the previous paragraph, recommendations can be a highly effective way to increase revenue. By simply suggesting other items, there is little doubt that basket totals increase. By how much will depend on the effectiveness of the recommendation engine. This can be tricky for small businesses with little or no data on their customers, the more information you have, the better recommendations work, but some common sense can work wonders here.

For example, complimentary suggestions, those related to the purchase, will likely result in higher purchase totals. If someone buys a laptop, suggesting a wireless mouse or external hard drive will likely be yield better results than stereo equipment.

Reward programs

It is hard enough finding customers in the first place, when you have their attention, creating an experience and incentives for them to return is essential. Reward programs are perfectly designed to achieve this.

Much like supermarket reward points, these systems encourage customers to return to an e-commerce website, rather than a rival business, by making it worthwhile for them to do so. Reward points are just one method of encouraging loyalty, however. Exclusive offers for returning customers have proven to be highly effective when implemented in the right way. This can be particularly useful during the Christmas period when businesses are most likely to encounter new customers.

Basket Reminders

Revenue per visit can be greatly reduced by those abandoning their purchase halfway through the process. Some estimates have the rate of abandonment at almost 70%. There are many reasons why this might happen, and some, such as the process taking too long, can be dealt with by redesigning parts of the website. Whatever the reason, it is possible to turn some of those near misses into hits.

Simple apps and email campaigns can target those easily distracted customers into big spenders, and such solutions are highly cost-effective. What’s more, setting up such apps and campaigns take the minimum of effort and can lead to loyal customers that make regular purchases.

Live Chat

Depending on the size of a business, setting up a live chat feature can increase revenue in some surprising ways. Firstly, customers are more trustful of a website that has an easy to use customer service platform, and live chat is the most convenient online source.

Secondly, particularly if it’s a major purchase, many customers seek reassurance or extra information about a product. Such reassurance not only makes it more likely a sale will occur, but that returns and unsatisfactory experiences can be greatly reduced.

There is also the opportunity for additional revenue from upselling or special offers to be presented to the customer, one to one. Don’t forget as well to A/B test your live chat solution. You may be surprised!

Optimization

Website optimization is key to best practices in e-commerce and is the most thorough and data-driven aspect of understanding how well a website is performing. This might include heat maps, where businesses can see which part of a page’s content has been engaged with most or testing different versions of a website to ascertain which setups work best. This is known as A/B testing.

Optimization provides data beyond simple metrics and allows a business to make sense of the data at a much more profound level, putting into context what might otherwise be cold, hard numbers that lack context.

Calculating Year Over Year Revenue

Site revenue is pretty straightforward to calculate over the course of a single year. For example, in 2014 Business A’s revenue was $200, in 2015 it was $250. Subtract the $200 from the $250, leaving $50. Then divide the increased total by the original figure from 2014 (50 divided by 200), equalling 0.25. Lastly multiply that by 100, giving you the figure of 25% growth.

For year on year calculations you will need to use Excel, so as you might imagine, it isn’t so straightforward. This method works for any growth calculation beyond one year.

Year	Revenue
2014	$200
2015	$250
2016	$350

To calculate overall growth, from 2014 to 2016, simply use the formula above, but the calculating year on year requires three steps. First using the year ending figures for 2016, divide it by the yearly figures for 2014 (350 divided by 200 = 1.75).

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Client and Server-Side A/B Testing – The Best of Both Worlds

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We’re enriching our conversion rate optimization platform with a server-side A/B testing solution. What is server-side A/B testing, you ask? It’s the subject of an announcement of ours that will make anybody who’s passionate about experimentation pretty excited…because it means they can now test any hypothesis on any device.

No matter if you want to test visual modifications suggested by your marketing team or advanced modifications tied to your back office that are essential in the decision-making process of your product team, we’ve got the right tool for you.

What’s the difference between A/B testing client-side, and A/B testing server-side?

Client-side A/B testing tools help you create variations of your pages by changing the content sent by your server to internet users in the web browser. So, all the magic happens at the level of the web browser (called ‘client’ in the IT world), thanks to JavaScript. Your server is never called, and never intervenes in this process: it still sends the same content to the internet user.

Server-side A/B testing tools, on the other hand, offload all of this work from the web browser. In this case, it’s your server that takes on the task of randomly sending the internet user a modified version.

4 reasons to A/B test, server-side

Running an A/B test server-side has many advantages.

1. Dedicated to the needs of your product team

Client-side A/B testing is often limited to surface-level modifications. These refer to visual aspects, like the page’s organization, adding or deleting of blocks of content or modifying text. If you’re interested in deeper-level modifications related to your back office – for example, reorganizing your purchase funnel, or the results of your search or product sorting algorithm – it’s a bit more complicated.

With server-side testing, you have a lot more options to work with, since you can modify all aspects of your site, whether front-end or back-end. With server-side testing, you have a lot more options to work with, since you can modify all aspects of your site, whether front-end or back-end.

All of this is possible because you remain in control of the content sent by your server to your website visitors. Your product team will be overjoyed since they’ll gain an enormous amount of flexibility. They can now test all kinds of features and benefit from a truly data-driven approach, to make better decisions. The price of this increased flexibility is the fact that server-side testing requires your IT team to get involved in order to implement modifications. We’ll get back to this later.

Your product team will be overjoyed to test all kinds of features

2. Better performance

Poor performance – loading time or the flickering effect – is often the first criticism made about client-side A/B testing solutions.

In the most extreme cases, some sites only add the JavaScript tag to the footer of the page to avoid any potential impact on their technical performance. This policy automatically means excluding using any client-side A/B testing tools, since a ‘footer’ tag is often synonymous with flickering effect.

When using a server-side A/B testing tool, you don’t have any JavaScript tag to insert on your pages, and you’re in control of any potential performance bottlenecks. You also remain responsible for your company’s security policy and the adherence to internal technical procedure.

3. Adapted to your business’s rules

In some cases, your A/B test might be limited to design-related modifications, but you have to deal with profession-specific constraints that make it difficult to interpret a classic A/B test.

For example, an e-commerce merchant might understandably wish to take into account canceled orders in their results, or else exclude highly unusual orders which skew their stats (the notion of outliers).

With a client-side A/B test, a conversion is counted as soon as it occurs on the web browser side when the purchase confirmation page loads or a transaction event type is triggered. With a server-side A/B test, you remain in complete control of what is taken into account, and you can, for example, exclude in real time certain conversions or register others after the fact, by batch. You can also optimize for more long-term goals like customer lifetime value (LTV).

4. New omnichannel opportunities

Server-side A/B testing is inseparably linked to omni-channel and multi-devices strategies.

With a client-side solution – which relies on JavaScript and cookies – your playing field is limited to devices that have a web browser, whether it’s on desktop, tablet or mobile. It’s therefore impossible to A/B test on native mobile apps (iOS or Android) or on connected objects, those that already exist and those still yet to come.

On the other hand, with a server-side solution, as soon as you can match up the identity of a consumer, whatever the device used, you can deploy A/B tests or omnichannel personalization campaigns as part of a unified client journey. Your playing field just got a lot bigger 🙂 and the opportunities are numerous. Think connected objects, TV apps, chatbots, beacons, digital stores…

Use cases for server-side A/B testing

Now, you’re probably wondering what you can concretely test with a server-side solution that you couldn’t test with a client-side tool?

Download our presentation: “10 Examples of Server-side Tests That You Can’t do With a Client-side Solution”

Included are tests for sign up forms, tests for order funnels, tests for research algorithms, feature tests…

How can you put in place a server-side A/B test?

To put a server-side A/B test in place, you’ll need to use our API. We’ve described below in general terms how it works. For more information, you can contact our support team, who can give you the complete technical documentation.

When an internet user lands on your site, the first step is to call our API to get a unique visitor ID from AB Tasty, which you then store (ex: cookie, session storage). If a visitor already has an ID from another visit, you’ll use this one instead.

On pages where a test needs to be triggered, you’ll then call our API passing in parameters the visitor ID mentioned above and the ID of the test in question. This test ID is accessible from our interface when you create the test.

As a response to your API request, AB Tasty sends the variation ID to be displayed. Your server then needs to build its response based on this variation ID. Lastly, you need to inform our data servers as soon as a conversion takes place, by calling the API with the visitor ID, and data relevant to the conversion, like its type (action tracking, transaction, custom event…) and/or its value.

Don’t hesitate to use our expertise to analyze and optimize your test results thanks to our dynamic traffic allocation algorithms, which tackle the so-called ‘multi-armed bandit’ issue.

As you’ve seen, putting in place a server-side A/B test absolutely requires involvement from your tech team and a change in your work routine.

While client-side A/B testing is often managed and centralized by your marketing team, server-side A/B testing is decentralized at the product team or project level. While client-side A/B testing is often managed and centralized by your marketing team, server-side A/B testing is decentralized at the product team or project level.

Should you stop using client-side A/B tests?

The answer is no. Client and server-side A/B testing aren’t contradictory, they’re complementary. The highest performing businesses use both in tandem according to their needs and the teams involved.

Client-side A/B testing is easy to start using, and ideal for marketing teams that want to stay autonomous and not involve their head of IT. The keyword here is AGILITY. You can quickly test a lot of ideas.
Server-side A/B testing is more oriented towards product teams, whose needs involve more business rules and which are tightly linked to product features. The keyword here is FLEXIBILITY.

By offering you the best of both worlds, AB Tasty become an indispensable partner for all of your testing and data-driven, decision-making needs.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch to discuss your testing projects – even the craziest ones!

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Jan 8, 2018

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Customization and Personalization: Two Sides of the Same (Millennial) Coin

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Whether you believe Millennials are narcissistic, ‘special snowflake’ generation or an economically squeezed, misunderstood cohort, most agree they deserve a marketing strategy all their own. Digitally savvy, uncompromisingly mobile, participants in the sharing and gig economies, owners of ‘networked selves’…Millennials’ formative experiences are distinctive enough to warrant a closer look when trying to understand their consumer habits.

This is where we come to our double-sided coin: customization and personalization.

Strategies that have come into their own since the advent of the internet, customization, and personalization are perhaps two of the best marketing ideas that Millennials actually respond to. Here’s why:

First: Let’s Define Customization and Personalization

To the untrained ear, customization and personalization sound more or less the same. In fact, they refer to two distinct processes. (Also, if we’re getting technical, we really should refer to our first term as ‘mass customization’.) First identified in 1987 in the book, Future Perfect by Stan Davis, ‘mass customization’ has come to mean, “the process of delivering wide-market goods and services that are modified to satisfy a specific customer need.” Distinct from mass production – mass customization’s homogenous, less evolved precursor – mass customization allows consumers to assemble their own, unique product according to their particular tastes and needs. Think of picking out colors, patterns, and designs to craft your very own Nike shoe or Burberry coat. It’s still branded Nike or Burberry – but it’s also distinctly you. Mass customization is a practice driven by the consumer that allows them to become ‘co-producers’ with the brand of their own uniquely personal product and is a process that must be reproduced at scale by the company.

The high-end brand Burberry launched their mass customization option, Burberry Bespoke, in 2011.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Personalization, on the other hand, is a marketing strategy driven by the company, based on consumer data, that aims to create personalized, or ‘one-to-one’ communication with a single consumer or consumer segment. We might date the idea back to the 1993 book, The One to One Future, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. When you receive an email that uses your first name in the subject line or see product recommendations algorithmically chosen ‘just for you’, or if a website’s homepage changes to reflect your past purchase history, location or gender…you’ve experienced personalization. The company in question is trying to create a hyper-relevant message designed specifically for you, in the hopes that it will cut through marketing noise to grab your attention and bring you through the sales funnel.

Sephora personalization — Our client Sephora saw a 16% increase in transactions after personalizing their website according to whether visitors were loyalty card members or not

Customization Deep Dive

There is a premium on individuality, especially with millennials and gen Z. The customization thing is like the ‘you but better’ movement, but almost the reverse. It’s like ‘this thing but better, because it’s about me.’

– Jackie Chiquoine, Racked 2016

You can certainly see the similarities between the two strategies. Both aim to make consumers feel uniquely understood and marketed to as individuals. Both put a high value on self-expression and personal tastes and experiences. Both create the illusion that consumers are being given bespoke treatment and have a one-on-one relationship with the brand. And both, in a way, involve the consumer as a co-producer of value – for customization, it means relying on their predilections to craft the product, and for personalization, it’s sharing their data (unbeknownst to them or not) to create personalized marketing messages.

You can see how those who dramatize Millennials’ navel-gazing tendencies certainly favor these two strategies for targeting them. But customization and personalization also speak to Millennials’ ability to see right through traditional marketing, their distracted viewing habits (customization and personalization more easily grab attention), and their penchant for social networks. Burberry, for example, savvily allowed anyone to share their customized Burberry creation on social networks, even if they couldn’t actually afford to buy the product.

Burberry share my design — Even if the consumer can’t afford their £1,295 creation, note the ‘share my design’ buttons on the bottom right: they can still express themselves through their customized creation – and promote the brand – on social networks.

Source: Luxury Society

Why Does Customization Work?

If we want to dig a bit deeper as to why customization techniques work – for Millenials or anyone else – Customer Experience Psychologist Liraz Margalit has a few ideas. She explained to TechCrunch that two general principles are at stake: “I Built It, Therefore I Own It”, and “I Own It, Therefore It Is Superb”.

“I Built It, Therefore I Own It” refers to the idea that participating in the elaboration of an item – even virtually, as on a website – leads to a sense of ownership of that item. In Margalit’s words, “The opportunity to take part in a process and influence the end result promotes emotional attachment that leads to psychological ownership, the feeling that something is “mine” even without legal ownership.” She then referred to work by Dan Ariely and his so-called ‘Ikea Effect’, which shows that people put a higher value on objects they have actually worked to produce.

Similarly, “I Own It, Therefore It Is Superb” refers to the Endowment Effect or the finding that, “consumers value an object more once they have taken ownership of it.” Margalit talks about a study at Cornell University in which students favored objects they had ‘owned’, even for a short time, over those they had never had a claim to.

Basically, when you customize an item, you pour a little part of yourself into it, you feel that it already belongs to you, and you value it more – and are therefore motivated to finalize your purchase, and even pay a premium.

These psychological underpinnings, in addition to Millenials’ particular need to be wrenched from constant multitasking and their penchant for self-expression, makes customization a good choice for this age bracket. Throw in the idea that co-creating a product with a brand approximates what Pine and Gilmore call ‘an experience’ (à la, The Experience Economy), and you’ve got yourself a winning hand.

Joseph Pine BBC — Joseph Pine explains how Mass Customization led to the Experience Economy – and what’s next in line in terms of virtual experiences.

Personalization Deep Dive

Millennials want a customer-centric experience in which they feel wanted and valued. Whether it is in-store or through social media channels, showing interest in these shoppers creates loyalty. In order to do this, retailers need to closely examine what they’re currently doing with customer data, and ensure this information is being utilized to deliver a more personalized in-store experience.

– Tom McGee, Forbes 2017

Ultimately, though a product strategy on the part of the company, mass customization is driven by the consumer. Especially appealing to Millennials, it’s a way of validating their own sense of self through ‘build-a-bear’ style product production.

With personalization, the onus is much more on the company to bring value and deliver meaning to the consumer audience they’re targeting.

Because of their ‘digital native’ status, and possibly due to some kind of ‘me me me’ generational fluke, Millenials are more receptive to personalization techniques. Salesforce noted in their State of the Connected Consumer report that, “Sixty-three percent of Millennial consumers and 58% of GenX consumers are willing to share data with companies in exchange for personalized offers and discounts.”

Salesforce personalization — Source: Salesforce

This is, of course, a boon for marketers, since data is the backbone of any personalization strategy. It opens up many avenues for creating relevant – and therefore high converting – experiences for consumers. Personalization strategies can go from relatively simple campaigns, like segmenting emails by industry and inserting someone’s first name into the text, to more sophisticated onsite personalization campaigns to complex multi-device operations. Finding the kinds of scenarios and messaging that will resonate with Millennials will probably take some brainstorming sessions, inspirational reads and inevitably some trial and error – and will, of course, depend on your industry and product. Here’s a quick look at what some marking executives are using for personalization efforts:

eMarketer Personalization — Source: eMarketer

Aside from the platitude of, ‘the more relevant, the better’, is there any psychological data to explain why personalization strategies lead to higher conversion rates?

The quick answer is ‘yes’ – namely a study conducted at the University of Texas that was picked up a few years ago by HubSpot. As they explain, this research admitted the efficacy of digital personalization techniques and boiled its success down to the human desire for control and information saturation.

People naturally crave to be in control of their surroundings (and their own fate, free will…) and personalization techniques create a cherry-picked environment that feeds into that need. Bargain hunting for low-priced kitchenware from your favorite outlet? If ads for the very items you’re looking for suddenly appear all over the internet, it somehow creates a feeling of empowerment, as if in some impossible way, your wishes and needs automatically manifest.

As for information overload, this is the classic argument that contemporary consumers are exposed to a dizzyingly high number of marketing messages, far too many to ever register consciously, let alone remember or act on. Personalization strategies both (hopefully) limit the number of marketing messages a consumer is exposed to in the first place, as well as stimulate the brain to recognize these stand-out strategies, as opposed to letting them sit in the background of our consciousness. This is the idea of selective attention or the fact that your brain will automatically pick up on potentially important stimuli – i.e. those most relevant to you.

The Takeaway

Though not the same, (mass) customization and personalization strategies revolve around people’s deep-seated desires for self-expression and recognition – as well as their limited attention spans. Particularly relevant for the Millenial age bracket, successful customization strategies will make the consumer a co-producer of value alongside the brand, and successful personalization techniques will identify valuable data and use them to create and deploy ultra-relevant marketing messages.

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The Ecommerce Conversion Funnel Survival Guide

AB Tasty

What is a conversion funnel?

All online businesses are comprised of a certain number of steps that transform visitors into clients. With that in mind, if you’re reading this article, it’s probably because you’re interested in the thorny questions, How can I convert my visitors into clients, and, even more importantly, How can I make them loyal clients?

Whether you want your website visitors to leave their email address, download an ebook or buy your products, they’ll pass through a certain number of steps before this objective is realized. These steps make up your site’s conversion funnel.

Purchase Funnel

The idea behind the conversion funnel (or ‘purchase funnel’, ‘sales funnel’…) is the funnel metaphor: many people will land on your site, and only a small percentage will actually end up buying.

To optimize your conversion funnel, download our ebook on limiting shopping cart abandonment.

Why? Your visitors go through several decisive steps during the purchasing process, which is often described using the AIDA model: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Attention. This is the first step of your conversion funnel. You attract visitors by increasing your site’s visibility in the hope they’ll get to know your products. You’ll achieve this thanks to ads, social networks, content marketing, etc.
Interest. Once you’ve attracted visitors to your site, the real work begins. You have to spark interest in your products. How? Relevant content, attractive visuals, and special offers are good ways to start. The idea is to entice engagement between you (the website), and your visitors, who probably don’t know you yet. Suggesting they subscribe to your newsletter is another good way of building interest.
Desire. This next step involves creating a relationship of trust and the desire to buy. The idea is to create a reassuring and relevant environment that will help pull your prospect further and further along the sales funnel. Personalized, interesting email campaigns will help you: you can offer special promotions, case studies or client testimonials that reassure your visitors and make them want to take action.
Action. This is the heart of the matter, the final, crucial step of your sales funnel. By this step, your visitors have passed through the conversion funnel and have begun engaging with your brand (they’ve downloaded something, subscribed to something or even called someone). Now, your goal is to convince your prospects to convert by purchasing something or completing another desired action. You’ll want to keep your payment pages clean and simple, only displaying relevant, convincing information that will help turn your prospects into clients.

Because the end goal of your ecommerce site is to convert, ecommerce professionals use the sales funnel to analyze how well a site converts visitors into clients at each step of the process.

Why is a conversion funnel useful?

A conversion funnel is a very powerful tool that’s easy to put in place that allows you to understand what problems your visitors bump up against the buyer journey, and how to fix them.

Let’s take a look at this:

Fitzroy's Flower London

On this London flower delivery site, half of the products shown on the right have a display issue: it’s impossible to see or click on the CTA ‘buy’ – this isn’t good!

The idea behind using a conversion funnel is to better understand the steps that a visitor to your website has to go through:

What pages have problems?
What is the conversion rate of each step?
How many people leave the site after one, two or three steps?
What step or page has high drop off?

By analyzing these issues, you quickly get a better idea of the strong and weak points of your site.

Even better: you know what step(s) you have to work on in your sales funnel to get more orders, emails or inbound calls.

By taking a look at your conversion funnel, you’ll see that only a very small percentage of your visitors will actually get to the last step (‘Action’). That’s why even small changes at each phase of the sales funnel can greatly increase the number of your conversions. You can use A/B testing to test and measure the effects of these modifications.

How can you measure and improve the performance of your conversion funnel?

At this point, you’ve understood the importance of the conversion funnel in ecommerce. The goal behind analyzing the conversion funnel is to improve conversion rates on your site (and therefore to increase sales), all the while analyzing visitor behavior to limit drop off at each stage of the sales funnel.

Depending on the kind of site you want to analyze, you can establish conversion funnels of varying size.

A wide funnel is a good choice for a product-oriented ecommerce site that wants to have a global view of how visitors navigate the site from the home page up to the basket, like on the above Decathlon site.

Tunnel de conversion pour Ebook — A narrow funnel is a good idea for sites that don’t have many pages (and therefore fewer steps) or for sites that only want to analyze one single step of their buying process, like in the above example of a (French) gardening site that also proposes an ebook.

In general, there are many best practices that can help you make your conversion funnel smoother and increase sales.

The main idea is simple: Make the customer journey as easy as possible and get rid of any roadblocks that stop your prospects from converting or from abandoning their cart.

Be clear and simplify navigation

A complicated or unclear navigation hinders conversions. Your visitors should be able to intuitively find what they’re looking for, and be guided through the sales process. This means highlighting useful links and sections of your website and deleting secondary or even useless sections.

Payplug — On PayPlug, navigation is clean and the value proposition is simple: ‘try’ or ‘find out more’

Avoid information overload

Information overload is information’s worst enemy. Try to order the information you present to your visitors by importance. Concentrate essential information at the beginning of a visitor’s navigation, and let the really curious ones dig for more info deeper in the site.

On H&M Home, information is classed according to a few categories so a visitor can easily get their bearings: they can choose how they want to explore products and ignore categories that aren’t relevant to them.

Offer help

Many visitors like to ask a few questions before finalizing their purchase, and an even larger number of visitors don’t finalize their purchase because they couldn’t get help at the right time. Putting in place services or a help desk type of chat can help increase conversions while reassuring your visitors.

HubSpot chat — Even when there isn’t anyone to man the ship, HubSpot makes sure there is always a chat option open on their site so that eager visitors can ask questions and get quick answers.

Highlight reassuring elements

‘Social proof’ is a powerful tool for improving conversions. Putting up client testimonials, client ratings or reviews can reassure visitors as to the legitimacy of the site that they’re on, which can have a big impact on increasing conversion rates.

Trello references — Trello displays a lot of well-known references on their home page. This reassures prospects and creates a feeling of trust.

To go even further with the optimization of your site, read our advice about limiting card abandonment.

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Dec 28, 2017

19min read

Examples of the Best Landing Page Designs in 2019

Anthony Brebion

If you run a website, then you know how difficult it can be to convince a visitor to stay on your page and even more to convince them to buy! Your landing page’s design plays an important role.

How to choose your landing page’s design?

Designed to convert your visitors into leads or customers, landing pages focus visitors’ attention on your value proposition in order to get them to perform an action that you have previously determined: purchasing a product, filling out a form or participating in a free trial.

But with all the offers available and all the competitors that exist on the market, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. For this, you must create a striking, persuasive landing page adapted specifically to your business.

Because we know it can be difficult to find inspiration before sitting down to design your future landing page, we have selected for you ten modern and efficient landing pages that convert in 2018.

If you have questions about landing pages and would like to learn more before you get started, check out our articles on landing pages with best practices and concrete examples.

These examples are taken from real sites; see for yourself! Of course, none of these landing pages is perfect: perfection does not exist, and it is up to you to adapt your design to your customers’ requirements. We also recommend you A/B test your landing pages.

10 examples of the best landing page design

LeadQuizzes

LeadQuizzes is a company specialized in selling “quizzes” designed to capture “leads”. We immediately notice the (very well designed) explanatory video of the service that answers basic questions such as:

What is it for?
Is it relevant to me?
What does it offer me?

Secondly, the orange call-to-action stands out from the rest of the page and very clearly invites you to click: “Try it Free” reassures us that we will not pay immediately and that there is a free trial. Find out more about the optimization of calls to action.

The social proof is obvious and well developed: the references are well-known market players, and the text indicates that more than 3 million leads have been generated via LeadQuizzes: it makes you want it!

Design Landing Page Lead Quizzes

Design Landing Page Social Proof

The rest of the landing page does not disappoint either: it is built around educating the visitor of the product’s usefulness. The goal: use a (big) page to convince visitors that LeadQuizzes’s service is powerful and used by the big players in digital technologies.

Design Landing Page Lead Quizzes Social Proof

Social proof is strongly highlighted on the LeadQuizzes landing page. It answers concrete and tangible questions that concern potential buyers:

How many more sales will I make?
How many new prospects can I capture?

GrowthHackers

GrowthHackers is a company that markets software to increase marketing teams’ productivity and coordinates business development actions and new ideas from innovative teams.

Similar to LeadQuizzes, the orange call-to-action stands out nicely from the rest of the page’s colors and invites action. We are also invited to a “free trial” to reassure a large number of visitors who would not be willing to pay until they have been convinced of the service’s usefulness.

Landing Page Design Growth Hackers

The landing page continues with navigation in the form of a drop-down menu that answers the main questions asked by potential GrowthHackers Project users.

“Why should I use the service? “
“Why do managers love the software? “
“Who is this service for? “

We also notice that a “chat” bubble is there to ask questions: a useful feature when we are undecided or have questions.

Landing Page Design Growth Hackers

As for social proof, it is highlighted in two ways:

We see that a “community” exists around the service.
We see that many people use the service and are active in the community.

One could criticize, however, that the numbers may not be visible enough.

Landing Page Design Growth Hackers

ElegantThemes

ElegantThemes is a company specializing in selling WordPress templates or “themes” and also markets a “builder” called Divi, which allows users to create pages in WordPress visually. On this topic, see our examples of landing page templates for WordPress.

We immediately see the social proof: it is the first element put forward that reassures the visitor about the service’s popularity: more than 400,000 users according to the site.

Landing Page Design Elegant Themes

We then notice that the value proposition is twofold and that two separate call-to-actions were created for the occasion: one to discover the ready-made templates and another to discover the brand’s plugins.

Another interesting element: on the lower right side a conversation bubble appears, ready to answer questions that a visitor might ask.

The chat module is especially interesting since it also allows the user to send attachments, emojis, and GIFs which can only enhance the richness of the interaction.

Design Landing Page Divi Builder

While browsing the landing page, visitors are offered the opportunity to try a “live” demonstration of the Divi Builder. This is a significant and compelling value proposition as users can discover the product directly without paying or even registering.

Further down on the landing page, the social proof is reiterated, and the paragraph contains an element intended to reassure potential buyers: a 30-day refund.

Additionally, the red-pink call-to-action contrasts with the blue background of the page, reinforcing our curiosity: we are visually attracted to the button placed in the center of the page.

Shopify

Shopify is a CMS that allows you to quickly and easily create e-commerce sites without programming knowledge. They stand out with their numerous resources available to users (guides, videos, podcasts, forums) as well as additional services that complement their core business: a store of ready-to-use “themes”, a library of free photos, etc.

Design Landing Page Shopify Hero Image

On the landing page, the value proposition is immediately put forward: “the e-commerce platform made for you”. The idea is therefore to address a large, often independent audience as evidenced by the photo illustration.

The special feature of this landing page is that the call-to-action contains a field for an e-mail address. This field is required to access the 14-day free trial offered just below that specifies that no credit card is required for the test: it is a major argument.

Design Landing Page Shopify Value Proposition

The rest of the landing page focuses on the features of the Shopify service.

With unique illustrations and short paragraphs, the company presents Shopify’s features and benefits to convince visitors to take advantage of the free trial or purchase a monthly subscription.

A major argument in the CMS sector, the widespread use of the service is highlighted with two elements:

The graphical representation of the number of users and the income generated
Testimonials from real customers whose sites are online.

The idea is to create a feeling of mimicry in the minds of visitors: “If 1,000,000 people use Shopify to create real shops without programming, so can I”.

Salesforce

Salesforce needs no introduction. The king of “CRM” (Customer Relationship Management), the American company has several particularly well-developed landing pages that are worth a look.

Design Landing Page Salesforce

The first thing that jumps out is the illustrations and colors. An overview of solutions on Computer-Tablet-Mobile is presented on a background that inspires calm and serenity.

We also note that two calls to action are present on the upper left part above the fold: one for a demonstration and a second for a free trial.

Salesforce also offers a solution for large companies whose call to action is placed to the right of the free trial: great for capturing potential leads from large companies.

Subscription Form Design Landing Page Salesforce

When a visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they go from the home page to a landing page created specifically to convince as many people as possible to sign up for the free trial.

Among the elements that stand out, we can see:

The reminder of value proposition, “30-day free trial”
A telephone support hotline
The statement “no download, no software” in capital letters
Social proof by including logos of well-known references
Easy sign-up with Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is a digital marketing consultant with a big reputation in the United States and around the world. His site receives several million hits a month thanks to an accessible content strategy and a variety resources created for visitors: blog articles, YouTube videos, practical guides, etc.

Neil Patel Design Landing Page

What strikes us first on Neil Patel’s site is its uninhibited and straightforward approach to the issue.

The color theme is extremely simple and plays on the contrast between the orange background and the white text. The idea: ask visitors a direct, simple and short question to build engagement to a maximum.

We also notice that the landing page offers a field (above the fold) designed to perform a live analysis of your site: it is a show of force that leads the visitor to discover by him or herself what could be improved on their own site.

Design Landing Page Benefits Neil Patel

The particularity of Neil Patel’s site is that almost all pages are designed as landing pages each with one goal: to convert a maximum number of visitors.

The “Services” page, for example, (shown above) shows a long set of text that acts as a proof of authority for visitors. It explains what Neil can do for you, but also what he has done (see below) and the clients he has worked for.

Design Landing Page Proof Neil Patel

The approach is always very direct and focused on results and benefits.

Neil’s idea is to prove by A + B that he has the skills to help you improve your SEO.

Neil Patel Call to Action Design Landing Page

On the same “Services” page, the call to action comes at the end (and one can wonder, is it a good idea?). It is structured in several stages that invite visitors to enter their information in order to be contacted later.

UpWork

UpWork is a world-renowned freelance platform. It allows companies to find skilled labor quickly for various assignments and allows the self-employed to register on the platform to offer their services.

Design Landing Page Upwork

On the homepage, we can see from the outset that the graphical design is clear and that it is the “professional” aspect that is highlighted. Interestingly, the chosen tagline is not for freelancers but for companies.

The tone is direct, effective, and clear; we immediately understand the value proposition: to subcontract work efficiently.

The call to action is placed on the left side above the fold. Its green color sets it apart from the rest of the landing page and consists of a search bar used to indicate the type of work that visitors want to outsource. If we pay attention to details, we can see that the background is actually a customer testimonial and we can watch the story: it has a lot of impact!

Design Landing Page Upwork

The rest of the landing page is classic: it details the various services offered by freelancers and shows the paid offers for users.

CodeCombat

CodeCombat is an interesting example. It is an educational game that allows children (and adults) to learn to program using a video game. The concept is simple: you program to progress in the game.

Code Combat Landing Page

The first interesting point of CodeCombat’s landing page is that the audience is twofold: it targets both teachers (who wish to use it in class) and children (who discover it by themselves or through by word of mouth).

The landing page’s focus is therefore on teaching and the program’s ease of use. Thus, we can see two calls to action: one for teachers and one for children/players.

Design Landing Page Code Combat

The rest of the landing page presents the benefits of using CodeCombat as well as screenshots to make the service “tangible”.

Testimonial Design Landing Page Code Combat

In a fairly traditional way, the rest reiterates the service’s strengths and includes a customer testimonial adapted to the target: that of a school principal.

Plated

Plated is a company specializing in delivering recipe ingredients: you select inspirations for recipes, and the company delivers all the ingredients needed to make the dish.

Plated Landing Page

The first thing that strikes us about the Plated landing page is the graphic design; the colors are studied, and the company has a real visual identity. The photos of dishes stand out well, and the illustrations are well chosen.

Words are chosen carefully and are well suited to a target of “food lovers”: we would get hungry just looking at the site!

The call-to-action is clear, well placed above the fold; its green color clearly distinguishes it from the rest of the page.

Call to Action Landing Page Plated

The Plated landing page is long: you have to scroll for a long time to reach the end. However, each paragraph of the home page is thought of as an argument or a benefit in order to convince:

Save time
Large range of choice
No more shopping
Quality products
Save money

Design Landing Page Plated

We can also see a particularly attractive instant discount coupon in the header and whose color stands out.

By offering 50% off the first order, Plated encourages the undecided to take action by decreasing the financial commitment.

Social proof is highlighted at the end of the landing page. Although it could have been placed higher, it remains visible and relevant.

Live Chat Landing Page Plated

Plated offers chat support, something we find more and more on landing pages.

By offering this service, the idea is to make up for the lack of human interactions that one would find in stores and to provide help to undecided visitors.

Plated’s strengths are highlighted successfully using simple, soothing images that convey simplicity and serenity to show that Plated makes your life easier.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an extremely popular automated marketing and emailing company. Their services are used by many to create e-mail, marketing and newsletter campaigns for e-commerce sites.

Design Landing Page Mailchimp

As direct as Neil Patel, this landing page is extremely clear and straightforward: it addresses visitors in a frank manner while remaining vague: “Build your brand, Sell more stuff.”.

This allows MailChimp to address visitors globally by avoiding excluding too many users from the outset.

The value proposition is as simple as possible: build your brand, sell more.

This straightforward and uninhibited approach is prevalent in Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions: the goal is to speak directly to business leaders of all sizes and get straight to the point.

Note that the call to action is very visible: it is located in the central position above the fold and offers a free trial (another one?!).

Call to Action Landing Page Mailchimp

As on Plated, the rest of the landing page details the benefits of using the service. This allows visitors to quickly “visualize” the service’s added value and get a clear idea of the following question: “Is this service for me?”.

By building a long landing page, you allow your visitors to “scroll” as much as they want: this allows them to answer as many questions as possible while acting as a commercial brochure to highlight your added value.

Design Landing Page Mailchimp

By using screenshots, MailChimp allows visitors to project themselves more easily. The idea is to help visitors better understand the service by viewing a sample. This technique can be adapted to video or even in the form of a live demonstration as ElegantThemes does.

We note that the free trial’s call-to-action is always accessible, wherever you are on the page, here at the top right.

Once in the conversion funnel, visitors land on the form page needed to activate the free trial. In order to maximize conversions, the MailChimp registration form is intentionally:

Short
Clear
Specific

By limiting the number of fields to three, MailChimp allows hesitant visitors to take the plunge more easily. The commitment requested is kept to a minimum: an e-mail, a username, and a password.

If it were to be improved, we could consider adding quick signup via Facebook or Google that would encourage even more conversions.

Did you like this article? If you are inspired and want to take the plunge, read our article dedicated to Bootstrap landing page templates. It’s the perfect asset for a successful landing page.