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TOOLS, TIPS AND GETTING READY FOR TESTING
A Quick-Start Guide To CRO
Tools, Tips and Getting Ready For Testing: A Quick-Start Guide To CRO
Page 2 crazyegg.com
Contents
3 Introduction
5 What is CRO?
9 Why You Should Make CRO A Priority
12 A Recipe For CRO Success
18 Setting Time Aside For CRO
20 Avoiding Common Pitfalls
22 Conclusion: Whatever You Do, Start Now
Tools, Tips and Getting Ready For Testing: A Quick-Start Guide To CRO
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W hen you hear the words conversion rate optimization (CRO), what comes to mind?
Does it sound too expensive? Too time-consuming?
Too complex? Too boring?
Well, that’s what your competitors want you to think.
They don’t want you to improve the user experience
on your website, and they certainly don’t want you to
reach your business goals faster!
In the simplest terms, CRO is all about leveling up. It gives you an
opportunity to really get to know your audience, understand their pain
points, and get them to the goal line more effectively.
As you make changes to influence website visitor behavior, you get to
see a real lift in your conversions, and you have hard data to back up best
practices you want to put into place.
It’s actually one of the best strategies out there for seeing higher
revenue over time.
Introduction
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And it shouldn’t take a lot of your time, either. We’re talking a mere 15
minutes a week dedicated to analyzing visitor behavior and making UX
adjustments accordingly (more about that later).
The benefits are enormous, not just in terms of increased customer
insights and a positive lift in revenue. Simply put, CRO helps you make
the most of the marketing activities you’re already investing in. If you’re
sending email, writing content, or running ads, CRO improves the
performance of all those existing channels.
In this ebook, we’ll explore:
• What CRO is and why it’s so valuable
• How to start your own conversion optimization strategy
• Some tools and resources to help you at every step
• How to avoid common CRO pitfalls
We’ll also offer some case studies and real-world examples along the way,
to show you how brands have applied a CRO framework and gotten great
results.
The goal of this guide is to get you observing and analyzing behavior on
your website so you can make changes confidently, and set your A/B tests
up for success.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started!
Introduction
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F irst, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about what conversion rate optimization is.
Despite what you may think, it’s actually pretty simple.
There are three basic steps to performing an effective CRO strategy:
Observing User BehaviorPopular CRO tools like scrollmap and heat map reports can help you
see and understand what your visitors are doing when they’re on your
website.
For example, they may be getting stuck in certain places, clicking on
elements that aren’t clickable. They may not be clicking on CTAs or
purchase buttons because it’s not clear what their next action should be.
Basically, you’re trying to understand whether your visitors are actually
achieving the goals that you want them to, and if they’re not, figuring out
what you can do to fix that.
What is CRO?
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Concepts to really consider when thinking about the user experience are:
• Decision Paralysis: Is there just too much choice for visitors when they arrive on the page?
• Navigation: Is the desired customer journey clearly signposted?
• Copy: Is your copy generic, and what could you do to drive sense of urgency or tap into visitors’ emotions?
• Images: Does your hero image tell a story? Or is it just there for the sake of being there? With visitor attention at a premium, a poorly chosen Hero image can make or break conversions.
A lot of marketers get mired in data overload, collecting information
without framing it first.
If you approach your analysis with questions like the ones above in mind,
you’ll be in a much better position to take action on the user behavior that
you observe.
What is CRO?
WEBSITE DESIGN CASE STUDY:
How Crazy Egg’s Minimalist Homepage Came to Be
As we mentioned above, decision paralysis -- or offering an overwhelming amount of information
to your customers upfront -- can be a major factor in deterring your website visitors from
continuing down the path to your ultimate business goal.
We’ve taken this to heart as we’ve spent the last 10+ years honing our homepage to strike the
right balance of “Hey, sign up for our free trial!” and “Need to learn more? Here are just a few
features and benefits before you sign up.”
Our friend Wes Bush at TrafficIsCurrency.com was curious about what designs we’d tested over
the years, and what the outcome was on signups. You can take a gander here.
Tools, Tips and Getting Ready For Testing: A Quick-Start Guide To CRO
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What is CRO?
Making Adjustments Based on Your ObservationsOnce you understand what the problems are, it’s time to build an action
plan for improving the user experience. For example:
• If your goal is to decrease your bounce rate and you see that people aren’t engaging with the content on a certain page, your action might be moving your “how to” video above the fold, or updating your hero image.
• If your goal is to get people from your homepage to your product pages, and you see that people are interacting with a dropdown menu but not clicking on any of the links, you might be giving them too many options. As an action item, you might want to consolidate your categories - or get rid of the dropdown altogether.
Monitoring the ResultsDid your design change lead to the desired behavior, or better yet, an
increase in conversions? We’ll talk about what you should do if you got
an unexpected result -- and what to do if you hit your goal -- later in the
ebook.
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Case Study: TSheets by Quickbooks
Tracking and scheduling software TSheets, by Quickbooks saw amazing
engagement with their content, but in the end, only half their traffic converted.
They used heatmaps and session recording videos to watch how visitors were
interacting with their pricing page.
What they found was that people were
scrolling back up to the nav bar and
clicking away from the page.
Once they understood what was
happening, they began testing a pricing
page without a nav bar and with more
information about their products.
Mike Loveridge is the Head of Conversion
Rate Optimization at TSheets, and he is leaning into regular testing to improve
their plan subscription signup rates.
In the case of the pricing page, he says “We wouldn’t have known that if we
hadn’t watched the video.”
What is CRO?
Rinse and Repeat1. Observing a problem
2. Implementing a change
3. Checking whether you achieved the desired outcome
Repeating these three simple steps will get you incremental growth and
improvements in your conversion rates that compound over time.
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B efore we get into CRO strategy, let’s look at why you should be excited to dive in:
1. You’re Dodging the Best Practices TrapA lot of marketers listen to what thought leaders say. They’ll say “try this
one cool trick and then you’ll see this crazy result.”
Maybe it will work for you, but maybe it won’t.
CRO is about the behavior of your customers and making your decisions
based on that, not on a one-size-fits-all approach.
2. You’re Avoiding Opinions And AssumptionsA lot of marketing decisions, unfortunately, are based on the opinions of
various stakeholders — “I think this subject line is going to perform better”
or “I think this CTA button should be red instead of blue.”
Sometimes it’s your team members that have different opinions, other
times it’s other teams within your company that are weighing in.
That’s not to say they’re pulling those opinions out of thin air. Often,
they’re based on years of experience in their field.
But with CRO, you’re basing all of your decisions on fact. So you can say
“Actually, this subject line isn’t better” or “this CTA button is performing
Why You Should Make CRO A Priority
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better now that I made this adjustment,” and it’s all based on hard
evidence.
3. You’re Making the Most Out of What You Already HaveA lot of marketers invest money in new strategies, whether they be ads,
video, social media, or some other technique to get more leads and
prospects to their websites.
Why You Should Make CRO A Priority
Case Study: Radio Free Europe
News site Radio Free Europe assumed that their most recent news articles
would be the most popular, and naturally should appear toward the top of their
homepage.
They checked that assumption using heatmaps and scroll maps to see where
people were paying attention and where they were dropping off.
As stories became less timely and, therefore, less relevant, they expected to
see a gradual change in color from red to blue in their scroll map, indicating that
people weren’t engaging with the content anymore.
But they found that this wasn’t always the case.
Now, they use heatmaps and scroll maps to make sure their content is in the
optimal place to get readers to click. And they can move more popular stories
further up the page to get even more eyeballs on them.
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Why You Should Make CRO A Priority
And many marketers will say things like, “I’m too busy driving traffic to my
site to focus on site optimization.”
Think about that for a minute, and then consider this stat:
According to AdRoll, 98% of your first-time site visitors won’t convert on
your homepage.
Before you spend another dollar trying to get more traffic, it’s worth
exploring why your current traffic isn’t converting. That way every dollar
goes farther.
4. You’re Working With An Audience That’s Expressed Intent
The reason CRO works so well is that people are already on your site,
looking at what you do. They are the most qualified audience you’ll ever
have. Which is why it’s so easy to tie CRO to ROI (return on investment).
You’re acting on your highest qualified audience, at a point where they’re
closest to your most important digital goal.
The moral of this chapter: If you have people visiting your website, your
app, and/or your product, you’re ready for CRO.
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A s we mentioned in Chapter One, the cornerstone of CRO is observing visitor behavior. To do that, you’ll need a
few tools.
The most common ones used by UX designers, growth marketers, and
small business owners alike are heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recordings.
If you’re not quite sure where to get started connecting the dots between
what you see your visitors doing on your site and what that means you
should change or test design-wise, here’s a brief, step-by-step guide.
Step One: Pick Your Most Important Pages For AnalysisHeatmaps, scrollmaps and user session recordings will help you answer
the following questions:
Where are people leaving quickly? Where are they not engaging with
you?
But first, you have to know which pages on your site to run them on.
A Recipe For CRO Success
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If there is overlap between your most popular pages and the pages with
the highest bounce and exit rates, then you’ve got the perfect place to
start your conversion optimization.
Step Two: Get To Know Your CRO ToolsIn Crazy Egg terminology, a Snapshot is a digital screenshot of your page
that we use to track the click and scroll behavior of your website visitors.
Snapshots give you a bird’s eye view of how your
audience is responding to your site and whether
they’re skipping over crucial elements.
We even log information like referral source,
whether they’re new or returning visitors, what
search terms they used to find you, and much more.
There are five different kinds of snapshots:
Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Confetti reports, Overlay
reports, and List reports.
Each of the different reports and data points validate each other so
you can approach your design adjustments with confidence. Here’s an
overview of how each Snapshot can help you optimize your website:
A Recipe For CRO Success
PRO TIP:
Use Google Analytics to identify your most important pages:
• Highest traffic
• Highest Time Spent on Page
• Most Goal Conversions
• Highest Bounce Rate or Exit Rate
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A Recipe For CRO Success
Look at Hotspots With a Heatmap
A heatmap is always a good starting point when you
begin a new website optimization project.
Because the Heatmap report shows you where
people are focusing their attention, you can use its
results to identify and then remove any distractions
that might be hurting your conversions.
This makes it easier to create a web page that is
uniquely designed to focus the attention of visitors,
and drive them towards taking a specific revenue
generating action.
Identify Key Attention Points With a Scrollmap
Scrollmaps help your analysis along by showing you
the elements on your page where people are the
most engaged with your content, and the areas of
your page that are getting completely overlooked.
The most valuable real estate on any web page is
the area above the fold. The fold is the aggregated
screen size of all of your visitors; it tells you what they
see when they arrive on your page without needing to
scroll down.
The drop offs in color tell you people are no longer
interested in your page: red to green, and then green
to blue.
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Analyze Visitor Demographics With a Confetti Report
While you may have a target audience in mind when
you create landing pages, the Confetti Report tells you
about your actual visitor segments. You can sort each
of the clicks on your page by 22 different criteria.
One of the most useful aspects of this report is
helping you determine the content that should be
on the page based on whether it’s appealing to your
most valuable leads or customers.
It’s also extremely useful for helping you drill down
into the behavior of website visitors that have come in
from a paid ad campaign, or a specific email marketing
campaign.
A Recipe For CRO Success
Dig Into Desired Visitor Behavior With the Overlay Report
Each element on the Overlay Report is color
coordinated so you can easily see the most popular
elements (red) and the less popular elements (green
and blue).
The Overlay Report lets you drill down on the exact
clicks on every single element of your page. You can
see what areas are non-clickable but are still attracting
clicks (in which case you might want to add in a link),
and what Live elements are the most popular.
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Gather Action Items With the List Report
The List report is very similar to the Overlay report;
they both display visitor engagement data with all
the elements on your page in different ways. It’s
worth noting that the List report can be exported as
a CSV file for easy sharing.
The tabular view in the List report makes it easy
to see the most popular pieces of content on your
page (those with the highest percentage of clicks).
A Recipe For CRO Success
It also helps you quickly figure out where you’re falling short on your
goals. If you’re analyzing an email submission page with 1377 clicks on
the collection form but only 280 clicks on the “Submit email” CTA button,
that’s your cue to take a closer look at the reasons why that might be.
Speaking of which…
Gain Superpowers With Recordings
Recordings are videos of your visitors’ navigation and click behaviors as
they move through your entire website.
Whether you choose to track customer journeys based on multiple
pages or just a single one, you’ll be able to see exactly how visitors are
interacting with your site. The value here is a dynamic video experience
where you can take note of glitches on your site, and any factors that are
blocking or facilitating conversions.
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For example, you may have seen a dip in sales demo requests lately - it
could turn out to be a form submission error that you hadn’t known about
until you watched a few people rage clicking on the “Submit” button.
By setting up Recordings on specific pages you’ve noted have low
performance, you can look at what your visitors are doing and understand
in one afternoon why they’re struggling — and how to fix it.
A Recipe For CRO Success
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Step Three: Come Up With An Observation-Based Action PlanWhen you’re looking at your Snapshots, the first thing we suggest you
investigate is your CTAs:
• Are they a hotspot in your heatmap report?
• Where are they placed on the page in relation to where people stop paying attention in your scrollmap report?
If your CTA is below the fold or in a place on the page where traffic has
dropped off, you definitely want to move it up.
That’s an easy win and a way to get incremental growth and revenue from
one small change.
• Another place to start is looking at your Overlay and List reports together:
• Are your most-clicked elements the ones that are most important to you achieving your revenue goals?
Are people clicking on elements that aren’t clickable, or not clicking on
things that are?
If people are clicking on elements that don’t tie to your objectives (like
a purchase or a signup), you may want to remove those elements to cut
down on distractions.
Recordings can also help you troubleshoot obstacles that people may be
experiencing.
A Recipe For CRO Success
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While you’re watching a recording of visitors interacting with your website,
keep these crucial factors in mind:
A Recipe For CRO Success
How did people arrive on this page?
Are there any particular triggers that cause visitors
to complete your action?Are there any broken or faulty elements on your page that are creating a negative design experience?
How are people interacting with this page? Are you noticing
any patterns?
How are people leaving your page?
Are there elements in your navigation that are acting as escape hatches for
your visitors?
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T he other thing you will need is a little bit of time every week to devote to watching what people are doing on
your site, and making adjustments based on what you think would make their experience better.
If all of the above sounds daunting, keep in mind that you don’t have to
do all the steps at once! There are several ways you can break down each
part of the process, depending on how much time you have.
Setting Time Aside For CRO
15m - Select Pages to Focus on in GA; Set up Snapshots/Recordings
15m - Look At Snapshots On Your Most Impactful Page
15m - Look at Recordings On Your Most Impactful Page
15m - Come Up With An Action Plan Based on Observations
15m - Run An A/B Test Or Edit One Element on the Page and Set Up a New Snapshot Wait for enough data to come in (generally this is when you hit 5,000 visitors)
15m - Look At The A/B Test Results or Compare Snapshots (Before and After)
Here’s what your schedule might look like if you had just 15 minutes a week to devote to CRO:
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In just 90 minutes, you’ll:
• Have a good sense of how people are interacting with your most important webpages
• Know whether your design adjustments resulted in a desired outcome
And if your A/B test is successful, you may be looking at a nice boost in
your conversion rates!
Setting Time Aside For CRO
PRO TIP
For a lot of people, CRO is not the primary focus of their job, which unfortunately makes it easy to overlook. We’ve found that the best way to add it to your schedule is to set up recurring time blocks in your work calendar.
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A s you’re getting started with conversion optimization, there are some common traps you need to look out for.
These are misconceptions and assumptions about CRO that will seriously hurt your efforts, and will make CRO seem like an overwhelming challenge.
The Fail MentalityA Crazy Egg customer reviewed her heatmaps and recordings, came up
with a new version of a landing page with a video that she thought would
better engage her customers, and launched an A/B test.
The variant didn’t beat the control, and she was disappointed.
Her instinct was to think “I failed at this. I didn’t get the desired result.” To
her, that was the end of the story.
But actually, she learned something! She learned that a video was not the
content format her customers preferred.
This was a signal to try something different, like an ebook an infographic
— not a signal to stop.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
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The One-and-Done MentalityLet’s say you are successful with an A/B test. You should still keep trying
out new variations. You shouldn’t stop and rest on your laurels. Here’s
why:
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Ecommerce Case Study: WallMonkeys Goes the Extra Mile
Ecommerce company WallMonkeys wanted to optimize their homepage.
They tested a variant on their featured image and saw a 27 percent
increase in conversion rates. Anyone would be satisfied with that
outcome, but they kept going.
That win inspired them to keep testing elements on the page. When they
did a little more digging into user behavior, they noticed their nav and
search bar could use some work, too. With a few small tweaks they saw a
550 percent increase in conversions.
Good thing they didn’t just stop at 27 percent, right?
To see the adjustments WallMonkeys made to their homepage, you can
check out the whole case study here.
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To wrap up this chapter, here’s a quote we love from content marketer Jay
Acunzo, which encapsulates both avoiding the fail mentality and the one-
and-done mentality:
Jay was talking about being a speaker and an author, but constant motion
forward is the whole point of CRO, too.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
To be great at something, you need to be bad for a while. If you focus on building a body of
work and constant improvement each time out, instead of ‘success’, you will have success.
You’re not settling for the bad work. You’re in the business of constant improvement. That’s
the goal, not just the path to the goal. The byproduct is you get more leads, bigger stages
and higher fees. There’s no finish line, just constant motion forward.
“
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C RO is something you master over time. As Jay said, you’re not going to be good at it off the bat, so be patient with
yourself.
It takes practice. It’s a learned skill.
To recap, here are the most important things to keep in mind:
• Just get started
• Focus on your most important pages and biggest opportunities
• Set aside time every week
Oh, and have fun! You now have powerful tools at your fingertips that help
you pay attention to your customers and figure out how to make their
experience with your business better. That’s pretty awesome.
Conclusion: Whatever You Do, Start Now
Make the most of every visitor with our
heatmaps, user session recordings and
A/B testing tools.
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