Website Conversions

ESPN Top Navigation

• ESPN finally changed the way their top navigation displays itself to users: each section drops down into a mini site with a plethora of links contained in the drop down
• It’s now much easier to navigate around the top half of the site without accidentally mousing over the top nav links only for them to pop up and get in the way
• Good job, ESPN

MDProspects.com PPC Landing Page

• From MDProspects.com: great PPC landing page, great homepage from a conversion perspective (it should rank higher in organic results for “medical lead management”
• Page constantly provides actionable information – what the software does, who it’s for, what benefits it will provide
• Logo is branded with its keywords, which explain what the software does: “Lead Management Software for Physicians
• Present users with rhetorical question: “What can MDprospects do for your practice?”
• Find out by requesting a free demo
• Important all of the initial text a user would see – outside of the popping flash banner text – is likely going to be the aforementioned information: users are told what type of software it is and who it’s for; users are asked told to request a free demo (notice the CTA is orange and stands out)
• Summation of software captured well with the alliteration found in the flash banner: capture, communicate, convert
• Rest of flash banner texts reiterates what it is, who it’s for and what it will help physicians do – handle that damned business side of life
• Four images at the bottom of the fold provide unique selling propositions

Unmarked Required Fields in a Form

• From Serena.com: If a field on a form is required in order to submit the form, then give it an asterisk like the others

30 Grid-Based WordPress Themes

30 Grid-Based WordPress Themes :Speckyboy Design Magazine.

• Themes  built with brains – score!

Purchasing Tickets for the Austin Film Festival

Austin Film Festival – 2010 Lone Star Badge…Buy soon! Prices go up Sept. 30!

• Too many ticketing options without explanation = highly confusing and annoying.  You’re lucky I want to go so will dig through the information and figure it out.

The Browser | Writing Worth Reading

The Browser | Writing Worth Reading

The Browser is one of my favorite sites – I visit it daily to catch up on reading from around the globe.  They recently underwent a site redesign where the columns are much more spaced out, images are now included next to each post and a footer section of sorts that pulls the best posts from last week, last month and last year.  I’m not a fan of the update.  With the spacing, it now seems to take quite awhile to scan from one side of the page to the other, foraging for links to click on that catch my eye.  Previously, the design was much more compact and allowed users to efficiently scan the homepage for delicious links.  Not so much anymore.

Website-Conversions.com Tip:

• After you’ve made a fairly large site redesign, make sure to poll your users about their opinions of the change.  Use a tool like KISSinsights to catch the zeitgeist and react accordingly.  This shift, asking the users what they want and like, is a major shift in business, in web design, in anything web related, but it’s crucial to your success.  People can vote with the click of a mouse in split seconds – it should always be about the user.

Website Conversion of a PPC Landing Page



Notes

• As is mentioned in the image itself, where is the prominent call-to-action?  I didn’t know where to look when I initially hit the page with the first thing to catch my eye being the “Download vCard” link.  Granted, I’m sure some people want to download it, but it’s not the most optimal initial eye grabber
• Note this ad popped up when I searched for “conversion rate optimization”
• There is entirely too much text on the page; another block, literally, that makes me think too hard
• Why is the “Optimization Newsletter” in gray text?  It basically buried an important CTA
• What purpose does the “Related Projects” serve?  I don’t even know what you want me to do, what question you’re attempting to answer

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate

1. Use Google Website Optimizer – test, test and do some testing.  Always.  I think this is one of the fundamental shifts required of business people, particularly business people who are in charge of deciding whether or not to put time/money into an effort such as testing.  We’re a culture in love with science – numbers, numbers, prove it, we’re skeptical – and yet when it comes to something that can be numberized, your site, we don’t do it.  We don’t do it because it’s not going to produce instant results.  But it will!  Anything worth doing takes time, right?  So test.  Sure you may have spent all that money on a site to make it look fabulous, but if you’re driving qualified traffic having properly on-site SEO’d your site and the site still converts at a 1% clip then something is wrong with your site.  Perhaps people can’t find what they actually need/want once they hit the SEO landing page.
2. Put CTAs (calls-to-action) in conspicuous places – the fact that there are so many large sites out there that miss this simple aspect of conversion rate optimization blows the proverbial zeitgeist.  Make it bold; make it loud; put it in the top right corner; the top left corner; put it where people automatically look; remind them that they can fill out a form and get more information from you; they can call you…right then!
3. Use your internal site search engine’s data – if users hit your cloud computing website and the top query searched for once they hit your site is cloud computing management services, then you should make sure to make the link to this section of your site conspicuous as well.  Oh, you don’t have a cloud computing management services page?  Well, then hop to it!  Listen to your customers!  It’s not about you!
4. Be direct, speak simply and clearly – let’s say your a fundraising software company and you know that your primary users break down into three demographic buckets: religious groups, higher education and healthcare.  Consider addressing these groups right off the bat.  Create a tri-fold banner, with accompanying text beneath it so that the search engines can associate you with your keywords, that says: “Are you associated with a religious organization? Click here.  Are you associated with higher education? Click here.  Are you associated with a healthcare organization? Click here.”  Of course the text of the banner should pop a bit more than “click here,” but you get the point.
5. Look at your analytics package and see where people drop off in the conversion path – super simple, again.  But, again, it’s amazing how much the simple things are overlooked (that’s where the money is these days, between knowing and not knowing…no matter how trivial it is once you get a subject and realize how trivial).  Setup conversion funnels in your analytics package and watch the bounce rate along each step (page) of the process.  If users bounce at a 96% clip at the second to last page, the page where you bombard them with upsells, then cut them out.  Make the upsells more apparent at the start of the funnel, perhaps.  Don’t annoy users!  Annoying users makes them think; don’t make them think.