Analytics Expert Blog

Deciding which website A/B tests to prioritize can be a dilemma at best and a nightmare at worst. But, do it right and you can save your team months of work and your company millions in revenue.

But before we even get to that happy point, we need to look at how a typical web optimization analyst would arrive at what options to even test. This is how it’s done using the ClickTale software:

The screen shots below shows a typical travel website. In this site, ‘conversion’ is defined as a straight journey from the ‘Home Page’, to the ‘Trip Planner’ page (where they choose which country they want to visit) to the ‘Book a Hotel’ page where they actually book their hotel and pay.

Step 1: So Where is My Conversion Low?

From the ClickTale instantly generated conversion funnel we see a good conversion from the ‘Home Page’ to the ‘Trip Planner’ page (63%). But only 15% converted from the ‘Trip Planner’ page to the ‘Book a Hotel’ page.

So our challenge is obviously to increase the conversion from ‘Trip Planner’ to ‘Hotels’ page. But how do we go about doing that?

Step 2: Compare Success vs. Failure

One of the fastest ways to improve a page is to compare visitors that converted with visitors that didn’t.
We can then make elements that are correlated with success even more noticeable, and conversely, we can minimize elements that are correlated with failure. These changes then become our A/B tests. Stay with me as I explain how, below:

Step 3: Start Listing Your Possible A/B Tests:

From this Clicktale side-by-side heatmap comparison of success (left) vs. failure (right) we can now make 3 significant observations:

1. Visitors that succeeded (to the ‘Book a Hotel’ page) had a greater tendency to scroll down the page than visitors that didn’t (88% vs. 54% in this example). So one A/B test would be to move the ‘Check Accommodation’ button higher up the page – above the fold.

2. Visitors that succeeded had a greater tendency to save their trip (28% vs. 8%). So another A/B test could be to move the ‘save trip’ button above the fold or make it more noticeable.

3. Visitors that succeeded had a much lower tendency to price their trip (1.4% vs 6.8%). So a third A/B test could be to make the ‘price trip’ button less noticeable or remove it all together.

But Which Test Do I Perform to Bring Most Value?

Well, if you have an enormous web team you can probably test all 3 at once. But even still, testing can take weeks and during that time you’re losing valuable business revenue. Ideally, you want to be able to prioritize your test according to how much value each fix will bring.

Step 4: Create an Instant Funnel for Each Hypothesis!

With ClickTale you don’t just get an automatically generated conversion funnel which we saw above. You can also program specific funnels to see how much value a certain A/B test will bring you! For example:

From our third observation above, we suspect that we’re losing visitors from the ‘price trip’ button. But how many visitors are we actually losing? To find out we can build a segmented funnel to show people that did price their trip vs. those that didn’t price their trip:

How Much is a 360% Conversion Rate Increase Worth to Your Company?

We can see from this funnel that clicking the ‘price trip’ button lowers our conversion rate from 3.78% to 0.82%.  So, resolving this A/B test issue can raise our conversion rate by an incredible 360%.  Its then a simple step to build similar funnels to check the conversion value for our other 2 tests above.

How much would a 360% conversion rate increase be worth to your company in revenue terms ? It could be millions. Not just that, but also consider the incredibly fast ROI associated with the discovery of the whole ‘price trip’ problem and how easy it is to resolve by the simple change in the position of the ‘price trip’ button!

Watch our Free Demo This Coming Monday!

Join Shai Tamari, Pre-Sales Manager for ClickTale, in this 30 minute webinar where he explains the above scenario in practical detail!

This webinar will show you how to really understand and interpret what visitors are doing on every page of your website and how this knowledge can be used to monetize far more efficiently and effectively! Join our webinar.

This blog post came out of a discussion between myself and Liraz Margalit, Customer Experience Psychologist for ClickTale, who originally suggested the concept of the ‘Digital Hierarchy of Needs’. 

Maslow first put forward his hierarchy of needs back in 1943. The model consisted of a 5 step pyramid explaining how people are motivated to achieve the things in their lives.

Essentially, Maslow was saying that one must first satisfy lower level basic needs before progressing on to higher needs.

While impossible to draw an exact parallel, the pyramid of human needs does share something in common with the digital world of websites and website experience:  Basic website requirements also need to be fulfilled before we can move up to higher level requirements.

If we were to put together our own version of Maslow’s pyramid for the digital world, it could look something like this:

Level 1: Website Infrastructure

Where human’s require biological and physiological needs such as air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, websites require a basic infrastructure including a web content management system, servers and Cloud infrastructure. Without these your website simply doesn’t exist.

Level 2: Website Functionality

Once your biological needs are met, humans look for safety: protection from the elements, order and law. The components of a civil society achieve this for us today. For the online world, the next level up is functionality. This translates into your basic web analytics tools and error monitoring systems that ensure your site actually performs and doesn’t just exist.

Level 3: Digital Customer Experience

The next level for Maslow’s hierarchy are social needs: the sense of belonging and the feelings of affection and love you get from peers, friends and family. This is closely followed by esteem needs – for mastery, independence, achievement, respect and self-respect. These are the highest of Maslow’s ‘basic’ needs.

For the digital world, our equivalent steps are encompassed under digital customer experience. This is the ability of visitors to feel that they are in the right place when they get to your website; that they intuitively understand where they are on each page in relation to where they want to go in their online journey; that they can easily find what they’re looking for; and that they can achieve their intentions without a struggle.

 Achieving Basic Website Needs Are Not Enough

Now if a website can achieve all of the above; it’s technically sound, it functions well and it gives the customers the right experience then your website has begun to serve your business goals and  you can start to measure its success against your business KPI’s.

But in a highly competitive online business world it’s not really enough. In the same way that for humans, being respected, having a big house and being successful are, for most, not the end of their ambitions and goals. Which is why Maslow added a ‘self-actualization’ layer to his pyramid. This is the ability to use your creative talents to fulfill your maximum personal potential. And Maslow (1962) believed self-actualization could be measured through the concept of “peak experiences”. Hoffman (1998) also states that self-actualization is a continual process of becoming rather than a perfect state one reaches – something we’ve mentioned before on this blog: 5 Reasons Why Your Website Optimization Should Never End.

Level 4: Business-Actualization

In the digital world, we could call the top layer of the pyramid business-actualization. The ultimate goal of a website or online business is not that people just visit and buy. Rather, that through the right digital experiences (build upon all of the preceding factors that we mentioned), the customer enjoys visiting, wants to visit often, and wants to develop his identity in-line with your brand. And that’s what sets a winning online experience apart from an average one.

Becoming the Ultimate Digital Hub

Most websites have already achieved steps 1 and 2 of our digital hierarchy. And many are implementing step 3, a better digital customer experience, using tools such as ClickTale, VOC, A/B testing and others. If these tools are tied together successfully, then your website can become the ultimate digital hub for your customer. And I say ‘hub’ because this includes mobile, desktop, apps and more. And like Hoffman points out – it’s a continual process. Not a one-time step.

To start you need to be able to live your website experience through your customers’ eyes. And just as Maslow (1970) believed that only around 2% of people ever achieve self-actualization, probably far fewer than 2% of websites are currently doing what they need to reach the top of the digital pyramid.

But that should only spur us on harder. Because whoever gets to the top of the pyramid becomes a brand winner with the power to reshape entire markets according to their vision. And if that’s not business-actualization and indeed self-actualization, then nothing else is!

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Want to start seeing your website through your customers’ eyes?

Book your own private demo with a ClickTale expert consultant.

In today’s commodity-hyped age, where every website is trying to garner more traffic and online sales, the e-commerce cart and checkout facility has become the cornerstone of any successful online business.

So how hard can it be to get a fairly standard shopping and payment facility right? Well, like any optimization issue, the details of customer struggle can often be as plain as the nose on your face: If it’s your face, you simply won’t know it’s there.

But as soon as you start to experience your website through your customers’ eyes (or by holding up a mirror, just to follow that great nose analogy), then the problems become clear and the solutions obvious. And often, they’re simpler that you’d imagine.

So here are 3 small ways to make big enhancements to your cart checkout rate. These are based on examples that our Customer Experience Analysts here at ClickTale have discovered using our digital customer experience software and implemented with some of the world’s largest retail and e-commerce accounts. (As I’m sure you’ll understand, we can’t release the names of those accounts.)

1. Shorten the Checkout Funnel

ClickTale Conversion Funnel. Removing one step improves conversion by 24%

This sounds rather obvious. But that’s because it is. Shortening the funnel and simplifying the customer journey results in a significant increase in conversion numbers as we can see from the ClickTale Conversion Funnel from a real e-commerce website, here.

By cutting the checkout process by just a single step for example (from 5 to 4 steps – not forcing visitors to go through the cart), this retail giant saw a very significant increase in conversion of 24%.

This is an important indicator to keep in mind as we see more and more websites moving to one-page checkout with multiple steps.

2. Create a Sense of Urgency

A banner from the US Mint’s website promoting free standard shipping and reminding customers of the 30th September deadline.

Improve conversion by giving customers a sense of urgency. Although this is a tried and tested method from the travel industry, from our experience, e-commerce and retail sites can gain a lot from adopting this method.

Promotion deadlines are a great way of doing this. And make sure that you place the time remaining for a promotion next to the relevant product. Not only on the product page, but also on the checkout page.

Another idea: If you have a limited quantity of product on offer, then state it! Don’t bury the fact in the product page or the category page but keep reminding visitors as they journey towards the checkout.

By including a sense of urgency on the checkout page you can help visitor overcome that last second of hesitation where they would normally press Back or the red ‘X’.

3. Allow Visitors to Return to their Last Cart Entry

Enabling visitors to save or print their cart improves eventual conversion

Research shows that window shoppers “just browsing” are one of the major causes of cart abandonment.

This alone accounts for between 37% and 57% of the total online shoppers who abandoned the various sites we examined.

Let’s face it,  for most of us the cart and checkout process is never going to be fun or 100% stress free.

But – we can significantly improve our visitors’ experience by allowing them to save their cart or email their cart and make a final decision on it later on. Alternatively, use cookies to allow visitors to return back to their last point in the checkout process when they next browse the same site.

This helps to alleviate the stress of having to start the shopping process from scratch. And as a result, it significant decreases abandonment rate and improves overall conversion.

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Want to see how customers really experience your website?

Book your own private demo with a ClickTale expert consultant.

Are Web Carousels Legacy?

Web carousels were all the rage back in 2012 and 2013. Now fast-forward to the present day and we find many companies unsure of when, where or how to use them.

So have they turned legacy? Indeed, a number of studies (this from the University of Notre Dame, and this from the Nielson Group) seem to suggest they are by highlighting various problematic engagement issues and some very low click-though rates.

But these studies only highlight the symptoms at the surface of digital customer experience, not the underlying causes.

To do justice to the subject matter, the Customer Experience Analysts here at ClickTale have diagnosed how web visitors really interact with carousels, and how their experience translates into online decision making, purchase and engagement.

The results are a mixed bag – with both pros and cons. The main thing is to take away what works best for your website, industry, brand and target audience. So don’t fire your UX team just yet!

Arrows invite engagement but are detrimental to conversion

1. Arrows are distracting!

An analysis of customer heatmaps from various industries all indicated that web visitors love to engage with the arrows that make a carousel scroll.

But the results also show that because users are so focused on clicking the arrows and watching the panels move, most find it hard to focus on the actual content of the individual panels.

Click-through rates and engagement times have been found to be low across the board where arrows are used.

2. Don’t use web carousels for showcasing products

An example of a product carousel. These don’t significantly improve click-through rates.

Carousels are not practical for showcasing products. And they don’t help you make a purchasing decision. If anything, the opposite is true. Users are typically too absorbed in activating the carousel to focus in-depth on any one panel’s message.

Instead, they spend those valuable seconds trying to figure out how many panels there are and how they get back to the offer they may have been initially interested in.

The bottom line is that if you want people to click, static product images and banners with fewer options tend to work much better.

3. Do use web carousels to brand your site or offering

Despite the observation that web carousels are not ideal for showcasing products, ClickTale’s Customer Experience Analysts found that the converse is true when it comes to branding.

If the carousels are populated with attention-grabbing images showcasing happy customers and atmosphere shots accompanied by short snappy text then they can aid substantially in developing a desired customer experience and brand perception.

Hilton Hotel develops a winning web atmosphere using carousels that feature beaches and happy holidaymakers.

4. Web carousels are not ideal for desktop websites

All of the above insights were based upon the ClickTale Core software, which is designed to analyze customer experience for desktop websites. However, when our Customer Experience Analysts then looked at the visual data from the ClickTale Touch software for smartphones and tablets, a different picture emerged:

5. Web carousels get very significant taps on mobile!

The ergonomics of swiping make carousels ideal for smartphone and tablets.

Web carousels really work on mobile sites! But with one major qualification; images. Analysis from any number of mobile sites has shown that customers love to tap images on their smartphone and tablets devices.So a carousel that presents a variety of images on a smartphone will get heavy interaction.

Why do carousels work better for mobile? It may be in large part because the ergonomics of  ’swiping’ horizontally with your finger is much more intuitive an action than what you do using your mouse and desktop. Having to locate the ‘move’ arrow with your mouse and then click repeatedly is far from intuitive!

6. Limit your mobile carousel to 4 panels

There is a limit however, to how many times a smartphone user will swipe. In fact the optimum number of panels for a mobile carousel are 4 – and if you stick to that magic number, then in most cases all four panels will receive high levels of attention and click-through. Any more than 4 and the attention and click-through rates decline rapidly.

Mobile carousels should be limited to four panels for maximum effectiveness.

7. Limit each panel to one product or image

Due to the limited size of the screen, mobile carousel images need to be kept especially clear and simple.

Don’t clutter panels with multiple images and messages. Also, limit each panel to a single product, image, or call to action with minimal text. And remember – most people like to zoom in, so keep the zoom function enabled on all mobile carousel images.

Opinions on sticky headers and sticky navigation are quite controversial. Some claim it drags a person’s attention away from what they’re reading. Others believe they’re essential to the structure and content of today’s websites. The truth, as in many optimization cases, lies somewhere in-between.

85% of People Prefer Sticky Navigation

Click to expand view

First off, a usability study by Smashing Magazine found that 85% of subjects preferred sticky navigation without knowing why. In addition:

- 22% of the participants found it easier to navigate around the website and individual pages.

-  Sticky navigation saved the same viewers, on average, 36 seconds in finding what they were looking for.

Some encouraging data in favor of Sticky Navigation then. But can we add any further proof to our pudding?

Well actually, yes. Using the insights gleaned from our in-page digital customer experience software, the Customer Experience Consultants here at ClickTale are able to draw some unique conclusions about how people interact with and experience websites of all shapes and sizes. And for the question of Sticky Navigation, we’ve discovered 3 golden rules:

Rule 1: Is My Website Actionable?

Sticky Navigation works better with retail and e-commerce websites

Sticky navigation is most suited to ‘actionable’ sites – sites where the designer intends a specific action – a click to purchase a product for example. For such websites, sticky navigation has been shown to improve the customer experience significantly.

In one example from a very well-known retail site (sorry – we can’t release the name), once the sticky navigation was implemented, visitors began to scroll further and pay more attention to the individual products on the pages. As a result, the company experienced a major reduction in page bounce and a conversion increased from 30% to 33%.

That may not sound like much, but it’s actually a 10% increase in conversion. And if you’re a leading retailer with annual revenues of, say $100 million, we can make a quick calculation to see how much that’s worth to your business:

1. If we assume revenues from online are just 8% (as we mentioned in this blog post), then you currently have $8 million in direct website revenues.
2. A 10% conversion increase on that figure gives you a further $800,000 in additional revenue – from just one small website change!
3. If we then substitute our 8% for 53% which are the proportion of “web-influenced” sales in the US, then we actually have a much larger ROI (in the region of $5 million).

Rule 2: How Long Are My Pages?

In long pages with lots of content, navigation must be friendly and intuitive. Clear and understandable in-page navigation helps visitors make a smooth journey through the content on the page. While in the past this was achieved by “back to top” links, today it’s sticky navigation that does the job.

In the below example, we see part of a long, content-heavy page from a travel website. The left hand ClickTale mouse-scroll heatmap was generated before they implemented Sticky Navigation. Now, compare that to the right hand heatmap showing how much further people scroll down once the site implemented Sticky Navigation:

People scroll further down the page (right) when Sticky Navigation is implemented

 Rule 3: What’s My Audience Demographic?

Among other interactive navigation techniques, the effectiveness of the sticky element was found to improve the performance of older adults in basic selection tasks, and to provide similar benefits (although smaller) to young users (Worden, Walker, Bharat, & Hudson, 1997).

Why do older adults and much younger users respond better to Sticky Navigation? Because of the relatively lower confidence levels of older adults and much younger users on the web, and their subsequent need for additional support, which the Sticky Navigation fulfills.

Older adults and young users respond to the confidence that sticky navigation instills

Here’s a deeper explanation why:

The Psychology Behind Sticky Navigation

At the psychological level, sticky elements increase visitors’ confidence as they scroll up and down the page, giving them a sense of control while interacting with the site.

People need to be in control. Imagine a situation where you are unaware of what is happening around you. Very quickly, the “stress” button is switched on and you try to do everything you can to regain control. You can achieve this by ‘sticking to’ something familiar, adopting an old pattern of behavior, or relying on someone you trust.

The same logic can be applied to web navigation and digital experience. Visitors can feel lost trying to find their way through very long webpages. In most cases, this feeling will trigger stress that will cause them to leave the site. This is exactly the purpose of sticky navigation: to help people explore a webpage without sensing that they’re losing control.

The Need to Control Our Environment

Even where participants are told they can press a button to stop the noise they didn’t – negatively affecting their ability to problem solve

In a study in which two groups of participants were exposed to a loud, extremely unpleasant noise, participants in group A were told they could stop the noise by pressing a button, but were urged not to do so unless absolutely necessary.

Participants in group B had no control over the noise.

The results were eye-opening: None of the participants who had a control button actually pressed it. But performance on subsequent problem-solving tasks was significantly worse in group B – in those that had no control (Glass & Singer, 1972).

Translated into the web optimization world; even if people do not take advantage of sticky navigation, just knowing that it is there will improve the digital customer experience, even if the feeling remains at a subconscious level.

British Gas is a two hundred year old company, employing over 30,000 people in the UK. But sometimes even the best of us need help in optimizing our digital customer experience – and the solution isn’t always as intuitive as we think!

In the following online presentation, recorded at the recent Adobe Summit 2014, you can hear ClickTale’s Chief Revenue Officer, David Davidoff and British Gas’ Senior Web Analytics Manager, Tom Fox walk us through a real scenario where British Gas were able to make a significant difference to their form registration conversion by delving deep into the digital customer experience.

Here are some highlights of the story:

Booking a Service Visit is Supposed to Be Easy!

To help their customers, British Gas created an online form where they can book a service visit without having to pick up the phone.

The form was supposed to be easy: Only 2 fields were required to be filled in, a unique reference number and an area code. British Gas then sent out letters and emails to their customers telling them they can book a service visit online.

The problem was that while email recipients were succeeding in completing the online form, too many paper letter recipients were not.

Comparing Email Recipients with Paper Letter Recipients:

Using their Adobe Analytics segments combined with their ClickTale heatmaps, Tom and his team were able to compare the on-page experience for email recipients with paper letter recipients. Here’s what it looked like:

The ClickTale heatmap combined with the tool’s Link Analytics data showed that people entering the form page from a paper letter (right hand heatmap) were hesitating 4 times as long over the unique reference number field compared to people entering the page from an email! The paper letter users were also moving more to the top of the page to the “Where can I find this” link.

Obviously, they were confused about something in relation to the unique reference number. Tom’s suspicions could only be confirmed by a look at how users behaved on the page:

Drill Down to the Session Playback to Confirm Suspicions

Tom’s team looked at a number of the paper letter users’ behavior on the form page using the ClickTale Session Playback tool. Here’s what they found:

People were entering the wrong “unique reference number” into the top field! Users were instead, entering their “letter reference number” which was at the top of the letter they had received. The solution was to immediately change the format of the paper letters to make the true unique reference number more prominent!

75% of Users Tried to Fill Out the Form Field More than Once!

Tom’s suspicions were laid to rest when he then looked at the ClickTale Form Analytics suite’s refill metric. This showed that a massive 75% of form visitors who came from a paper letter were trying to fill out the unique reference number field more than once – a clear symptom of customer struggle and bounce.

To find out how British Gas fixed their form conversion, listen to the full case study.

Does marketing optimization have a life-cycle like a product?

There’s an argument to be made that says yes. When you first introduce an optimization strategy the returns are immediate and clear. In fact, nothing is clearer to web visitors than a website that’s not optimized! So you start implementing A/B testing. You hire an analytics expert and you bring on a Voice of Customer software. And naturally, your website begins to improve rapidly.

And this translates into more visitors and more leads as you fix the obvious problem areas on your site such as headache-inducing carousels, hidden calls-to-action, never-ending form fields and confusing icons.

Great. Now that’s done your website moves into mature phase. Its “optimized”. End of story. Right?

Wrong. Optimizing only ends when the cost of your various analytics and testing tools exceeds the value you gain in terms of qualified leads, returning customers and sales. It’s after ‘maturity’ that the decline stage will come – and quickly if you stop optimizing altogether.  And here’s why:

1. Your products will evolve

What are you actually selling? Is it a free subscription? A demo? A trial? An enterprise offering that demands multiple sales calls?

How you communicate, promote and sell your offering online differs whether you’re a start-up, small-to-medium business or enterprise.

Companies often move from selling a  ’niche product’ to a wider ‘solution’, or shift from low quality to high-end niche products or vice versa.

In addition, products evolve as technology opens new doors. The Moore’s Law for example, promises ever growing technological capabilities in return for lower and lower costs – all of which have implications for how you present your offering online and what type of audience you focus your website strategy on.

2. Your target audience will change

Who are your web pages and content designed for? What are your key performance indicators? All of these change as audiences change. Sometimes they leave for other brands. Sometimes they return. And sometimes they might grow old with you.

Changes in product attract different audiences to your website. Take computers for example: Mainframes evolved into mini-computers evolved into micro-computers, and shifted target audience from massive corporations to hobbyists to executives to virtually everyone, thus creating major shifts in how vendors and CMO’s think about and design the experience they present online.

3. Your competitors will act and react

Competitors’ goals, beliefs, strategies and capabilities will change over time. Sometimes these move backwards and forwards in cycles. Competitors will act and react to how you yourself behave. And this has implications to your messaging, the audience segments you want to attract and how you design and optimize your website.

Does your website focus on fast, product-oriented calls-to-action with an e-commerce feel? Or does it focus instead on nurturing the reader; providing informative content; thought leadership and more subtle calls-to-action such as white paper downloads?

Much depends on how you position yourself in relation to your competitors and the opportunities you believe can be developed from that position.

4. Website technology will enable more

Technology is one of the most direct factors affecting website optimization. Back in the early 1990′s when websites were just a series of single columns with text-based pages strung together in HTML, optimization took a back seat.

Then from the mid-90′s we got table-based websites, Flash design and CSS – enabling designers to create style sheets that made it easier to control the look and feel of a website.

Then with Java script, navigation bars began to move to the top of the page, drop down menus became popular and forms began to appear  - suddenly we see optimization in its modern form!

By the time Web 2.0 appeared in the late 2000′s enabling interactive content and integration of applications, we see a shift towards publishing content rather than just selling products. And a move to engaging the consumer via social media. Enter more optimization!

Mobile is the latest of these changes. Mobile internet access overtook desktop for the first time back in 2008 and hasn’t looked back since. As mobile websites adopted a ‘tall and skinny’ layout with an emphasis on browsing, minimal navigation and more specified calls-to-action, designers and marketing professionals are now closely studying mobile digital behavior and consider mobile optimization a dedicated field in itself.

5. People will demand personal service

Finally, people are demanding more attention in the form of customized service. Personalization is now a hot topic, allowing marketers to better engage prospects by providing them with targeted content, promotions and a more relevant digital experience. And consumers expect it. Hell, they demand it! And businesses that aren’t personalizing are losing ground.

Driving this trend are the enormous amounts of analytics data available to the enterprise. Also, location-based tracking, data mining, facial recognition, the ability to record individual on-page interactions and the ability to combine these recordings into visual heatmaps that chart digital experience for entire audience segments.

The ability to use that data to personalize everything is what will characterize the digital marketplace and web optimization in the coming years ahead.

Time to Start Extending your Optimization Life Cycle

Does marketing optimization have a lifecycle? Yes it does. And for the reasons outlined above it’s critical that enterprises find new ways to squeeze more value from their marketing ecosystem. The way forward is by a closer examination of what web optimization means today and how to better align company goals with the digital experience customers receive (see the blog post: Is Your Digital Customer Experience As Good As You Think?).

And like any product life cycle – with the right strategy, decline can be permanently held off, or even reversed altogether. An effective mobile strategy is one way. Laying the groundwork for personalization is another.

We’ll be coming back to these two topics in our future blog posts. So stay tuned!

Does marketing optimization have a life-cycle like a product?

There’s an argument to be made that says yes. When you first introduce an optimization strategy the returns are immediate and clear. In fact, nothing is clearer to web visitors than a website that’s not optimized! So you start implementing A/B testing. You hire an analytics expert and you bring on a Voice of Customer software. And naturally, your website begins to improve rapidly.

And this translates into more visitors and more leads as you fix the obvious problem areas on your site such as headache-inducing carousels, hidden calls-to-action, never-ending form fields and confusing icons.

Great. Now that’s done your website moves into mature phase. Its “optimized”. End of story. Right?

Wrong. Optimizing only ends when the cost of your various analytics and testing tools exceeds the value you gain in terms of qualified leads, returning customers and sales. But even after ‘maturity’ that decline stage will come – and quickly if you stop optimizing altogether.  And here’s why:

1. Your products will evolve

What are you actually selling? It it a free subscription? A demo? A trial? An enterprise offering that demands multiple sales calls?

How you communicate, promote and sell your offering online differs whether you’re a start-up, small-to-medium business or enterprise.

Companies move from selling a  ’niche product’ to a wider ‘solution’, or shift from low quality to high-end niche products or vice versa.

Products also evolve as technology opens new doors. The Moore’s Law for example, promises ever growing technological capabilities in return for lower and lower costs – all of which have implications for how you present your offering online and what type of audience you focus your website strategy on.

2. Your target audience will change

Who are your web pages and content designed for? What are your key performance indicators? All of these change as audiences change. Sometimes they leave for other brands. Sometimes they return. And sometimes they might grow old with you.

Changes in product attract different audiences to your website. Take computers for example: Mainframes evolved into mini-computers evolved into micro-computers, and shifted target audience from massive corporations to hobbyists to executives to virtually everyone, thus creating major shifts in how vendors and CMO’s think about and design the experience they present online.

3. Your competitors will act and react

Competitors’ goals, beliefs, strategies and capabilities will change over time. Sometimes these move backwards and forwards in cycles. Competitors will act and react to how you yourself behave. And this has implications to your messaging, the audience segments you want to attract and how you design and optimize your website.

Does your website focus on fast, product-oriented calls-to-action with an e-commerce feel? Or does it focus instead on nurturing the reader; providing informative content; thought leadership and more subtle calls-to-action such as white paper downloads?

Much depends on how you position yourself in relation to your competitors and the opportunities you believe can be developed from that position.

4. Website technology will enable more

Technology is one of the most direct factors affecting website optimization. Back in the early 1990′s when websites were just a series of single columns with text-based pages strung together in HTML, optimization took a back seat.

Then from the mid-90′s we got table-based websites, Flash design and CSS – enabling designers to create style sheets that made it easier to control the look and feel of a website.

Then with Java script, navigation bars began to move to the top of the page, drop down menus became popular and forms began to appear  - suddenly we see optimization in its modern form!

By the time Web 2.0 appeared in the late 2000′s enabling interactive content and integration of applications, we see a shift towards publishing content rather than just selling products. And a move to engaging the consumer via social media. Enter more optimization!

Mobile is the latest of these changes. Mobile internet access overtook desktop for the first time back in 2008 and hasn’t looked back since. As mobile websites adopted a ‘tall and skinny’ layout with an emphasis on browsing, minimal navigation and more specified calls-to-action, designers and marketing professionals are now closely studying mobile digital behavior and consider mobile optimization a dedicated field in itself.

5. People will demand personal service

Finally, people are demanding more attention in the form of customized service. Personalization is now a hot topic, allowing marketers to better engage prospects by providing them with targeted content, promotions and a more relevant digital experience. And consumers expect it. Hell, they demand it! And businesses that aren’t personalizing are losing ground.

Driving this trend are the enormous amounts of analytics data available to the enterprise. Also, location-based tracking, data mining, facial recognition, the ability to record individual on-page interactions and the ability to combine these recordings into visual heatmaps that chart digital experience for entire audience segments.

The ability to use that data to personalize everything is what will characterize the digital marketplace and web optimization in the coming years ahead.

Time to Start Extending your Optimization Life Cycle

Does marketing optimization have a lifecycle? Yes it does. And for the reasons outlined above it’s critical that enterprises find new ways to squeeze more value from their marketing ecosystem. The way forward is by a closer examination of what web optimization means today and how to better align company goals with the digital experience customers receive (see the blog post: Is Your Digital Customer Experience As Good As You Think?).

And like any product life cycle – with the right strategy, decline can be permanently held off, or even reversed altogether. An effective mobile strategy is one way. Laying the groundwork for personalization is another.

We’ll be coming back to these two topics in our future blog posts. So stay tuned!

One of the most significant measures of conversion, and topping the list of key performance indicators for retail and e-commerce sites is visitor ‘purchase’ or ‘checkout’. And while you can segment your website visitors into ‘purchasers’ and ‘non-purchasers’ using Adobe Analytics, you can’t gain a true understanding of how and why visitors convert unless you have an in-page view of visitor experience and behavior.

Here’s 4 key conversion enhancement questions that an in-page, digital customer experience solution can answer. And in the process, help you to ramp up your website conversion rates effectively and efficiently.

Question 1: At What Point is My Conversion Weakest?

Any question about conversion must begin with the conversion funnel. The Clicktale conversion funnel shown here gives us high level overview of customers’ journey through the website (and also allows us to determine the ideal path that we want our visitors to take). From this we can see where we’re losing customers along the path.
(If you have Adobe Analytics or other web analytics tools – you can easily use their own funnels and integrate with Clicktale)

In this funnel example (not based on any specific customer) we see that the conversion from the homepage to the pricing page is weakest (only 16%). Of those, only 17% actually ended up making a purchase. So there are two areas to focus on here; improving the homepage so people move more smoothly to the ‘pricing page’ followed by improving the ‘pricing page’ so more visitors actually purchase.

Question 2: What Constitutes Success vs. Failure?

Once we know which pages are a priority, we can then compare interactions that were ‘successful’ (i.e. those that converted) with interactions that ‘failed’ (i.e. didn’t convert).

To do this we have to zoom in a little from the overall conversion funnel to the page heatmap.

Clicktale provides a range of different heatmaps, that let you choose from Mouse Move, Click, Attention, Scroll-Reach, Tap and Exposure (the last two being specific to smartphones and tablets).

In this side-by-side heatmap (click the image to expand the frame) we are comparing the picture of ‘successful conversion’, on the left, with the picture of ‘failure to convert’ on the right.

By understanding what constitutes success vs. failure we can get a clue as to what parts of the page need improving. In the above example from Windstream (listen to the full webinar), we are using Clicktale’s mouse movement heatmap to compare purchasers vs. non-purchasers (Remember? This is from their Adobe Analytics segments!).

From this side-by-side comparison, it’s clear that purchasers who scrolled down to the product features at the bottom of the page (see left hand heatmap) were much more likely to buy, while the non-purchasers (in the right hand heatmap) were sticking more to the hero image and top navigation.

Question 3: Why are Non-Purchasers Struggling?

We can now drill a little deeper by asking ourselves why non-purchasers were not able to find what they were looking for. From the heatmap example above we can then zoom even further – into the individual Session Playbacks to watch how ‘failed’ customers really interacted on the page.

Once you’ve seen a few examples from real customers you can then move on to validating which fixes works best! Check out the video below to see how Session Playback works!

Question 4: How Do I Confirm My Theory?

Here’ where we integrate with our A/B testing tool to validate our hypothesis! In this example from The North Face, you can see a before and after A/B test comparison. (Click the image to expand the frame).

The Session Playback revealed that a large number of visitors were not paying attention to the Checkout button on the Shopping Cart page and instead, were paying attention to a banner that was just above it (see the left hand heatmap)

From their A/B test, the team at The North Face found that moving the ‘Checkout’ button to a spot above the banner created a 21% increase in checkouts. (See the right hand heatmap and the deep red – signifying greater engagement with the checkout button while there’s virtually no engagement with the dark blue banner just below it.)

Conclusion: Quantifying the Outcomes!

For the 2 companies above the recommendations were clear and the outcomes significant:

1. Windstream: They re-designed their page to feature a more product-focused appeal above the fold. They are currently executing a full-page test. But initial results show they have already reached double-digit significance in both shopping and engagement metrics.

2. The North Face: By the simple action of moving their checkout button above the blue banner they effectively increased the page’s conversion rate by a very significant 62% - a figure that’s worth millions in revenue to any company of this size.

To find out more about how Clicktale can improve your website digital customer experience, book a private demo.

Picture this. You’re challenged to a game of darts and shown a dartboard. The only problem is you’re blindfolded and asked to hit the bullseye!

That’s exactly what it can be like trying to validate a website optimization hypothesis using A/B testing.

But don’t take our word for it. Just ask Jeffrey Franzetti, Senior Consultant for Interactive Marketing at Windstream, a Fortune 500 company with over $6 billion in annual revenues.

In this 20 minute webinar, Jeffrey and Simon Harris, Business Development Manager for Clicktale, explain how integrating Adobe Analytics and Clicktale can turn a website into a powerful customer experience tool and revenue-generator. 

In the webinar snippet below, listen as Simon compares the challenge of creating an optimal digital customer experience to managing a ski resort!

Hear the full Adobe Analytics & Clicktale Integration webinar.

(For further information on this and other Clicktale integrations, go to: Clicktale Integrations).