How much traffic are you missing chasing something new?

All too often I see my clients chasing the new shiny marketing toy. A CEO or whomever jumps in the room with a “We need more traffic” and the next thing you know everything is thrown to the curb for the next best marketing idea. It’s all hands on deck and if you aren’t with it, get out!

Unfortunately, so many get stuck in this line of thought.

If you want steady growth, don’t be that person…

For consistent growth and customer satisfaction, it's crucial to listen to your customers. One effective way to do this is by setting up a heat map or analytics tool on your website. This will allow you to monitor visitor behavior and gain insights into their interactions with your site. By analyzing this data, you can make informed decisions to improve user experience and drive business growth.

Have questions on how to do this? Reply or visit my site to setup a time to chat.

How to know when to optimize a page?

I usually answer this with a question. Is this the very first and only page you have created? If so, what is working and what isn’t? If you have already tried multiple pages, what pages have worked and what hasn’t and why?

This should give you a starting point. If you’ve only tried one page, but it’s not successful. It could be the page layout, or it could simply be your messaging is wrong.

This is where heat maps can be very helpful.

For Example: I had a client that had a home page with roughly 1,500 visits daily organically. Very good quality traffic, however, they only had 3% of their customers clicking on their main call to action in the hero of their page. Something is / was definitely off.

What makes this case even more interesting is the fact that the company was able to generate form submissions from almost 5% of their customers, despite the form being located below the fold. "Below the fold" refers to the content that appears after a user has scrolled down a webpage. Typically, traffic drop-off rates increase significantly when users have to scroll down a page, with 40-60% of users abandoning the page upon scrolling.

This means, of the traffic that scrolled, 10% of those customers were actually submitting the form. That’s generally a good conversion rate on a 5 field form for that industry.

In this example you - OPTIMIZE the page!

Moving the below the fold content above the fold (to the top of the page), would be a very simple and easy test to do. This client used Adobe for their analytics and software, so for them it would be a very easy to A|B test. If you need help understanding how to setup a good A|B test. Check out how MR. Beast does it.

Typically traffic that drops off above the fold in my experience is more likely to convert then traffic that didn’t. Why? Because they are there for a purpose. If that purpose isn’t met they are going to find it somewhere else.

Picture your website like a store front. You go to the grocery store to buy groceries right? However, if you get there and the first and only thing you see is they sell furniture. You are likely to mistake them for a furniture store and move on to another “grocery store”.

That’s how website traffic works, if you have customers coming to your site expecting to purchase something. Give it to them. Don’t try to be cute, creative or witty with something else. Save that for when you’ve already made them a happy customer. Once you have met their needs, you can try and sell them the furniture or the shiny new shoes. Don't Just Build A HomePage | Solve A Problem

To show you just how powerful this can be. Of the example above, my client had roughly 1500 site visits daily. 750 customers left right away because they didn’t like the layout or didn’t think the website was going to meet their needs. My client was missing out on 750 high intent ready to purchase customers.

By moving that content up above the fold, where it will be seen by many more potential customers, we can expect to see a significant increase in engagement.

The overall conversion rate for the form was 75/1500 = 5%. However, if we take into account the actual conversion rate of the remaining customers dropping off, we see that it is more like 10%. This is because the customers who were previously missing the content never had the chance to convert.

But, I believe that this number could actually be even higher, perhaps as high as 15%-25%. This is because the content that should be moved up is highly relevant to the products and services offered by the client. It’s the same theme they were offering above the fold, but said in a way that makes more sense. It was in essence, meeting the customers demand.

What did the client do? They decided to chase a new marketing idea on the page overall…. Why?

I should probably stop myself, but what would be the fun in that?!?!

The Results

Their conversion rate increased 15% from 3% to 3.45%. WOW that’s great!!

However, had they gone with my recommendation they could’ve had an increase of 300-500%+ .

This is why it’s so important to listen to your customer. Or in this case your customers data. If you see customers taking action on the page. Ask yourself a few basic questions:

Why are they doing that?

What is leading them to make that action?

Why are they dropping off and when?

When it’s a good idea to try something new

I should probably clarify, optimization really is trying new things. However, it’s the process in which it’s done. If you test 5 different messages that’s a good thing. Want to test 500 more, I love it! However, if you clearly see a direction in your messaging that is working better than others. Explore that and variations of that OR pay attention to it’s positioning if it’s not working well enough. It could literally be the best message possible, but it’s just in the wrong position so your customers aren’t seeing it.

How I like to do optimizations myself.

I start by looking at the data. I really want to let that dictate the direction that needs to be taken. In the early days of a company it’s very easy, you simply pick a few problems to solve then solve them with your product and messaging.

Start with a landing page theme. Generally a good baseline is to look at what competitors or similar companies are doing in your vertical. Maybe don’t copy them outright, but it’s always helpful to get a baseline of their conversion rate by changing their content to fit your product. Then run a bunch of tests (A|B tests) to see if you can do better.

Go back to the data, what’s it saying? Is the conversion rate still low? Maybe you haven’t quite found product market fit. Now would be a good time to learn how to find product market fit. Maybe you and everyone else in the industry are missing the mark on the ad messaging and landing page.

Pay attention to the ads being run. Maybe they are too aggressive or they aren’t aggressive enough. Keep in mind, bait and switch tactics rarely ever work. You don’t want to run an ad for free sex then try to sell the customer a bed. However, free sex may be a very aggressive ad for a sex addiction treatment program. Might also be unethical, so…. make sure to match your ad with your destination and customer expectation!

What about when the customer is visiting a page, then clicking to another step before dropping off? Depending on the page, price and vertical, chances are that means your optimization should happen on that next step. Is the product offering too abrupt, confusing or expensive? What can you do to change the customers mind?

Don’t simply throw the first page out, concept or funnel because the overall funnel isn’t working. Break everything down piece by piece and see if the data will give you a direction. Often marketers refer to “Branding or Awareness” or look to the next new idea when campaigns don’t work out. That shit may have worked back in the days of Mad Men, but you should be ashamed of yourself today if you are still taking that approach. Listening to your customers is key to solving their problems and unlocking a ton of traffic.

Thanks for reading! In the next issue, I will dive a little deeper into conversion rate optimization and what it means for your paid media. Have a good rest of your week!