Thank you. My name is Neil Patel and I help companies generate more revenue through digital marketing. Entrepreneur Magazine said I was the number one marketer in the world and they also said I created one of the hundred most brilliant companies. I started my first website at the age of 16. I took all the money that I earned from working at an amusement park and I paid a marketing firm.
The marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone. Out of my frustration and from being broke, I had no choice but to to learn marketing. My first client was a power supply manufacturer. I helped him generate another $25 million in sales, and from that point, I realized the power of marketing.
I helped everyone that I could, and I built my reputation by being honest and over-delivering. I've helped companies like Google, NBC, Viacom, General Motors, eBay, but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed. I found a four multimillion dollar company and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid. I've written about them on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Fast Company, and even on my own blogs.
It's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom. Over the years, I've received awards from the President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the United Nations. People believe marketing is expensive and difficult.
Fortunately, that's not true. There is a formula. Even if you don't have a technical bone in your body, you can get results. And my mission is to share this formula with you.
Hello everyone, thank you for coming today. Today's webinar is on one of my favorite topics, conversion rate optimization. We're going to be talking about going from average to amazing, lessons learned from optimizing 3,000 plus landing pages.
So let's dive right in. My name is Neil Patel. I'm the co-founder of NP Digital.
We're a global ad agency. Along with me today, I have Aubrey and Kyle. Aubrey, do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and then Kyle, you can do the same?
Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Aubrey Maloney.
I'm the UX lead for the NP Excel SMB division of NP Digital. Happy to be here. Hi, everyone. I'm Kyle. I'm a senior CRO manager at NP Digital.
I've been doing agency CRO for around 13 years. So lots of landing page testing, and I'm excited to talk about landing page optimization today. Awesome. So let's dive right in.
So we're NP Digital, over a thousand employees, 60 plus clients, 20 plus countries, a lot of awards. Just keep in mind, we do a ton of CRO, so we wouldn't be getting a lot of the results, these clients, if the strategies didn't work. So what's really the secret to increasing your conversions? That's the million dollar question, right? And that's what we're going to break down today.
We may go a little bit quickly through some of the slides because that's because we have 76, 77 slides or so, but let's dive in. Well, before we dive into the secret to improving your conversions, you need to first figure out, are your landing pages letting you down? Are they doing well? And this will help you with that.
The average conversion rate for a B2B landing page is 1.8%. The average conversion rate for a B2C landing page is 2.1%. Your goal is to be higher than that.
Now, of course, if your product's really expensive, like your son's living for a million dollars, you're not going to convert at 2% or even 1.8%. But you guys get the point. And depending on the industry you're in, these are roughly the average conversion rates.
Now, keep in mind, A conversion for different industries means different things. For example, for professional services, it could be a lead. On the flip side, for a toy company, it could be actually selling a toy and shipping it to your house, right?
So you have to keep that in mind. Conversion points are very different per industry as well. And the secret to more sales when it comes to CRO, well, there's a lot that goes into it. It's not just one thing.
people believe it's all you make one change your conversion just go through the roof that's not necessarily the case it's a lot of little things that add up well what you really need to first do with marketing is not just focus on how do I spend more money you need to think about how can you get more out of your current traffic because that allows you to scale your campaigns a lot of people struggle scaling up their ads their SEO and a lot of different social media campaigns because They're like, wait, it breaks as they scale. A lot of times the reason it breaks is because the conversions aren't there. If your conversion rate was higher, you can then end up scaling up your campaigns more and in a much more profitable way.
Now, example of a conversion rate. If you have a hundred visitors, 10 put in their email address, that's 10 conversions, 10%. If you have a thousand visitors and you're selling your product in 30 buy, That's a 3% conversion rate. These are all examples of how conversion rates work.
If you want to increase your conversion rate, as I mentioned earlier, it's not just about tweaking your website. It's really understanding them, figuring out their objections and issues that they have and solving those. When you do that, you're much more likely to grow your conversions versus just be like, oh, let me just change the color of this button. It's going to drastically increase my conversions.
Typically, if a color increases your conversions by a lot, there's something else that's wrong with the page that's causing that. Color change usually doesn't have a 20% impact in conversion. Sometimes it can, but it's very rare.
It's usually there's something else bigger on the page that's the issue. Sorry for the kids crying in the background if you guys can hear that. So what's the difference between CRO and UX design? Well, Conversion rate optimization and UX do go hand in hand.
User experience involves a lot of the elements that improve conversions, such as increasing or reducing site load time, right? So the faster your website loads, the better off you are. A lot of user experience elements can increase conversions, but there are differences. A lot of times with conversion rate optimization, it's about figuring out what issues people have, solving them, and then...
optimizing and fixing those. And here are some UX elements with the highest impact on conversions from page load to mobile optimization. Although websites these days are responsive, having clear value propositions, answering people's objections above the fold, all these things can really help boost your conversion rate.
Now, the other thing that I want you guys to keep in mind is, you know, when you're trying to boost your conversions, a small increase in conversions can have a massive impact in profit. For example, if you're spending money to acquire a customer, but you get a 10% lift in conversions, a lot of times you've now just saved money on acquiring a customer from an ad perspective. And a lot of that money drives to the bottom line. And look, the way you need to think about it is more conversions equal better ROI, right?
So there's a lot of fixed costs and variable costs. If your fixed costs are staying the same, which they do, but your variable costs start going down because you optimize your conversions, you know, what you'll find is you can end up generating a lot more revenue. All right, so let's talk about some of the fundamentals of CRO.
So I think it all starts with understanding your audience. So knowing which ads and keywords are actually driving traffic to that landing page can help inform. the content of that landing page, right? So you want the headline to be hyper relevant to the ad that they came from and the content to kind of support their motivation or intent.
But I've seen a lot of tests where just changing the headline to kind of be continuous with the ad that they came from can have a huge impact. Another key element of conversion is calls to action. So in this particular slide, we're talking about a single call to action, which is critical.
If you have several different objectives, sometimes that can distract visitors and they're not sure where to actually continue. So in this case, an overall increased potential of 371 percent. So this is a test that a client that I actually had where we not only.
Had a very clear CTA, which is that next step button, but we had a line of copy underneath the CTA, which was another chance to kind of communicate additional value and clarify kind of the objective from there and saw a 6.5% increase. And we've actually run similar tests with this client on a variety of pages and continue to see impacts. So mobile optimization is kind of a hot topic.
It may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many clients, you know, certain pages get neglected and they don't necessarily lay out correctly on mobile, any number of issues. And as, you know, as time goes on, the share of visitors definitely is trending more mobile. According to Forbes, that's 96.5% at this stage. And one thing to keep in mind, too, is.
Some people are still using AMP for mobile, and what you'll find is AMP will take away a lot of your call to actions as well. So you've got to figure out how to put them back in so you can get the mobile conversions. Yep, and here's an example. I believe this was actually Aubrey's team that ran this test, so I'll kind of let her run through this.
But that's an example of the layout issues. Can you guys hear me? Yeah.
Okay, sorry about that. By improving the scaling for Keir's product listing page for mobile devices, we just enhanced the visibility of that view detail CTAs and really streamlined user focus towards product pages. And then this adjustment led to a 21% increase in conversion rates, just really demonstrating the impact of mobile optimization on site usage and conversion metrics. Yeah, that's a substantial lift there with what you know could be considered kind of a smaller change i mean there's a lot changing but it you know it's not like a whole page change yeah um so here's kind of some of the kind of the hot mobile issues that we see a lot uh visual misalignment which we talked about um sometimes you know navigation or even functionality tabs things like that don't necessarily lay out correctly on mobile which can actually prevent them from progressing through the funnel broken ctas where you know for example the the button's actually too small on mobile a lot of times i see this a lot where images and icons get stretched out they don't scale correctly which just you know display issues actually detract from credibility at that point and then font sizes too is kind of a tricky one to make sure that everything is legible on smaller screens And then mobile, obviously, potentially a different intent to where you may not need as much content or need certain content that you don't need on desktop. So kind of one of the key elements of testing is the ability to iterate and kind of home in on certain elements.
So, for example, you can kind of test your way into figuring out which. value props and kind of messaging resonates or even which kind of imagery your prospects like to see. So it's absolutely critical for, you know, taking an existing design and really kind of fine tuning it.
The concept of A-B testing is relatively simple. You're usually using a testing platform, which what that does is randomly samples traffic between the two variants, the control. and the variant that includes the change or the independent variable. And because they're randomly sampled, you can control for seasonality and other external factors and kind of get a good signal as far as whether that change actually caused the impact or not. So if there is a statistically significant difference, then you can say that the independent variable actually caused that.
And on your end, if you have a lot of conversions and generate a ton of revenue and you don't want to test all your traffic, you don't have to. You can do a test with 10% of your traffic, 100%, 50%, 3%, you can literally pick. If you don't have tons of conversions, you're going to have to use 100% of your traffic.
But again, if you have a lot, you can start smaller and it starts working out. Just let it rip to 100% of your traffic. Yep. See that a lot. It's a good way to reduce risk for, you know, if it's a pretty wild.
idea you might want to reduce the traffic allocation. So at this point, 70% of marketers are invested or believe in A-B testing. And I think this is an interesting one because it's still continuing to grow. I feel like there's still room to kind of get A-B testing baked into the normal process of product managers. you know, website managers and things like that.
So I think there's still growth here, but it's, it's more common than it's ever been, which is good. If you do find a winning variation, you know, you should really strive to get that implemented as soon as possible, because you don't, you know, you don't want to leave revenue on the table. So if you can hard code the changes that the winning variant, that's ideal. If not, a little tip is that using the testing platform, a lot of times you can push 100% of traffic to that winning variant if there's limited dev resources or something of the like. But in general, you don't want to necessarily leave money on the table, so to speak.
So this is actually something we run into quite a bit with clients is trying to figure out how to get these things implemented. All right, let's identify some core CRO strategies, as well as some factors that can contribute to harming your conversion rates. First, poor form design. It leads to user fatigue and frustration, causes mistakes or abandonment.
But in contrast, good design principles make forms easier to use to complete by avoiding unnecessary details and confusion, helping users stay engaged and complete the form efficiently. So form field reduction is really ground zero for bottom of funnel conversion optimization. One key principle is less is more. Reducing form fields is a fundamental tactic for boosting conversions.
This approach really requires just minimal effort and resources while offering significant potential gains. When optimizing forms, just questions of the necessity of each field is phone, fax, or address information truly needed. and focus on asking only what's relevant to really streamline that user experience and enhance those conversions.
Household name, David Ogilvie once said, on average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. So when you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar. This just really underscores the crucial role of a compelling headline in capturing attention and driving engagement.
Obvious changes to headlines and imagery are effective, but small tweaks can also make a big impact. Adding the word now in this example to a blog title boosted conversion rates by 120%. And again, it just highlights how subtle, even subtle changes like creating a sense of urgency and intent in the language you're using can significantly enhance that effectiveness of your headlines. Creating a sense of urgency on product pages can really drive action and boost conversions as well. Highlighting key offers such as free shipping, limited stock, and buy when get one can significantly increase the likelihood that visitors are going to perform an action such as add to cart or complete their purchase.
So emphasizing these elements effectively prompts customers to act more quickly. Another method for building a sense of urgency is highlighting limited availability of an offering or product. In this example, adding a site-wide banner highlighting limited availability and a call to action to join now really impacted and boosted engagement.
This simple change led to a 32% increase in consultation requests and improved average session duration by 10%, just demonstrating again that power of urgency in driving user action and enhancing those site metrics. Adding a countdown can also really build a sense of urgency on landing pages, also in the cart or checkout or on contact and signup pages. Countdown timers prompt that quick action by highlighting this limited time opportunity and really kind of boosts motivation through that sense of FOMO, that fear of missing out, encouraging again just swift decision making and kind of instinctive choices.
In this example, the musician's guide increased sales by 332% by adding that countdown. Now, color psychology plays a role in conversions. For instance, you know, red is often associated with urgency in Western cultures.
And there is about 62 to 90% of product assessment is being based on color alone. So using color effectively, such as for... button styling can impact users'decisions.
Now, while there isn't a one-size-fits-all perfect color, thoughtful color choices ensure primary buttons are going to stand out and drive conversions. Now, in this example, HubSpot pretty infamously tested a red CTA instead of a green CTA and did see a 21% uplift in CTA engagement. So like Neil said at the top of the webinar, it's possible to have an impact. It's just usually a signal that there are other things that could be improved as well.
So I just wanted to add, I've seen the red button test a few times and it goes against every grade of my assumption that that would win, but I have seen it happen in other instances too, which is kind of interesting. Now, personalization or targeted marketing involves tailoring experiences based on individual customer attributes. According to Ad Age, one third of marketers view personalization as one of the most crucial capabilities for the future, highlighting that it's growing in importance and enhancing customer engagement and driving conversions. So as you can see, you know, 73 percent of consumers prefer brands that offer personalized shopping experiences. 83% of users are willing to share data for more personalized experiences, which is, you know, really important and growing more important as we move into AI and things like that.
And 91% of consumers will shop brands that give relevant offers and recommendations. In this example, you can see a personalized pop-up message welcoming return users back. On average, 94% of companies experienced a rise in conversion rates after personalizing their websites. All right, with the basics of CRO covered, let's dive into how these strategies really come to life. So as you know, we analyzed 3,000 landing pages with conversion tracking, focusing on actual purchases or leads rather than softer goals such as email signups, and we categorized them into two groups.
pages with a conversion rate of 2% or less, and those with over 2% to pinpoint really key elements that are driving high conversions. So those key elements include first choosing your hero design wisely. A hero section is the foundation of a landing page, the first section that really meets the visitor's eye.
So a poorly designed hero section could impact site usage and conversion rate metrics. And since users form opinions in just 50 milliseconds and focus 80% of their attention above the fold, a well-designed hero section is really essential for optimizing site usage and conversions. Based on an analysis of numerous websites, we have categorized hero images into seven distinct types.
There's no single best category. The choice depends on your business. For example, you can see here Apple uses product focused hero images to highlight its design strengths. While honors, that health hero images emphasizes care and compassion, reflecting their service in home care for parents. Yeah, this would be a great test right here as far as different types of imagery in the hero.
Absolutely. And I'll say it's a very popular test that we frequently run is targeting immediately that hero section. Hero design can shift conversions from minor to massive.
In this example, toe grips saw a 3.9% boost by just simply changing the type of dog they were using in the hero image. I'm a dog lover, so they probably both work on me, but still, still makes a difference. Feel bad for the guy on the left there. I know.
Now, while Universal Technical Institute skyrocketed with a 21.4% increase after updating their hero image. When designing your hero section, just steer clear of certain things. So outdated techniques like carousels and excessive animation.
I will say carousels are declining in popularity. I know they were a hot thing for a little bit there, but really only 28% of top e-commerce sites are using them, which is down from 52% in 2013, according to a recent UX benchmark by Baymart Institute. They often underperform and they just require a meticulous setup to be deployed correctly.
And similarly, unnecessary animations can sometimes overshadow your hero image or messaging. So and also impact, you know, your site speeds and page performance without offering a ton of value. So just use animations only if they're really enhancing your message. The big issue with carousels is it becomes overwhelming. It's like a kid in a candy shop.
You're giving them too much messaging, too many options. If you can't figure out. What's the best way to get them in with one image, one video, whatever it may be?
You know, you're doing something wrong. There are, of course, instances where you should use a carousel, but they're very rare. And we usually see not using one performs better than using one. Again, there's always edge cases, but it's like a kid in a candy shop.
Show them 10 different things or five different things. They don't know what to do. And a lot of times they don't purchase anything versus just focusing on one thing. yeah if you do have a carousel so that's another potential test idea right is running each slide as a separate variant potentially and just to add to that we call that that paradox of choice we don't want to overburden users with too many options because then they don't really even know where to start or what they wanted to to accomplish on your site in the first place yep so thinking about using video on the landing page A lot of times it's very effective for kind of communicating the value, especially with complex products like SaaS or software. So it can be a very effective way to communicate a lot of value with minimal friction.
Right. So they don't have to read anything. They can kind of just sit back and comprehend the value coming from the video. 30 percent of the top landing pages incorporate video.
I think that number will probably continue to grow. as well and can have impacts you know as high as or maybe even higher than 80 per six 86 percent increases in conversion um so it is kind of a tricky one you know depending on the product or the offer um you know you may not want to use video but some things to consider if you are thinking about employing video on your landing pages definitely want to take load speed into account, especially if it loads automatically, because that can dramatically, you know, increase the time to load the actual page, which is not good for SEO or any other number of factors. Another thing is that is the video going to be distracting from the objective, right, especially if you have an older audience and an autoplay video, that may actually be more disorienting than helpful in that case. And then another thing to consider is the video length, right?
So really the length of the video should be proportional to the complexity of the product or the USP at that point. So a long video could actually increase friction. So it's something to keep in mind. So this is an example of where, you know, you don't necessarily need video.
for every experience. So, you know, for the mobile site, for example, if you have a background hero video, you may not want to run that on mobile, but on desktop, it may make more sense because they're probably somewhere with a potentially a better connection. There's, you can see it, you can see the whole video. So something to consider is that you don't, you know, have to use video across every device or experience.
A detailed list of benefits on your landing page is also really key for impacting conversions. Not everybody landing on your site is going to immediately want to perform a contact action or make a purchase. So by clearly outlining the value propositions and addressing user needs, you build trust and enhance that user experience, and then you're guiding potential customers towards a purchase decision.
This approach is... particularly effective for these less informed visitors, these less aware and intent-driven visitors, and provides them with necessary information to make a more informed choice. Also, showing it in this nice clean layout, again, is going to not impact that user paradox of choice and make it easy to view these additional details. By detailing what customers could expect and using these kind of more eye-catching icons on the form landing page for asset preservation, wealth, and tax, we saw a significant boost in both page views and conversion rates.
So just by highlighting this is exactly what you're going to get out of filling out this form at the end really drew user attention and encouraged them to commit to the form, go through the different phases of the form, and submit it. To decide which benefit to showcase, evaluate the most valuable attributes to your users, such as functionality, emotional benefits, financial benefits, environmental benefits, and just tailor your list to what is going to resonate most with your audience to drive the best results. Social proof, showing that other people use and trust your site is a really important factor in establishing trust as it's deeply rooted in human beings need to look at how others behave and then mimic it. With 88% of customers trusting user reviews as much as personal recommendations and 97% saying reviews influence their buying decisions, showcasing testimonials can really boost conversions on sales pages by up to 34%.
I would just add that. Oh, go ahead, Neil. I just want to also add, uh, if you're going to use testimonials don't use the ones that are like great product amazing results like it needs to be thorough detailed um very specific and when you yeah no sorry to interrupt go ahead now go for it i would say but also not too long and not too verbose we want to have them these kind of concise not too short not too long communicates just those those best you know product or service factors yep and perfect uh Kind of to pigtail off of that, Aubrey, there's such a thing as too much social proof. And there's also different types of social proof. And that's where testing comes back in.
Yeah, and Aubrey's right. No one wants to read three paragraphs of a testimonial. Even some of the paragraphs get a little bit too long, depending, because a lot of it is just fluff.
But the key that I've seen to testimonials that work really well is when they're detailed. But yes, no one wants to read, you know, two cell phone screens worth of testimonials from the same person. It's just overwhelming.
And if you do have that type of content in abundance, then maybe consider having a dedicated landing page for it or, you know, some type of way to give users access to it if they are really interested in engaging with these long form testimonials potentially. All right, so as Kyle said, social proof comes in various forms, including testimonials, case studies, user-generated content, celebrity endorsements. In this example, United Water Restoration displayed their Google rating in the hero section with star iconography, and that led to a 17% increase in phone calls and a 27% boost in average session duration and a 1.5% decrease in bounce rate, meaning users saw that, maybe felt a little more trust. We know that this is a Google business. There's people who have reviewed them that are on Google.
I'm going to stay here, explore a little more, and maybe potentially place a call for their services. And then in this example, Teddy Lane added social proof in the form of an exit intent pop-up to encourage hesitant visitors to take action. improving their conversion rate by 10%. So again, social proof plays off of our insecurities and desire to do the right thing. So highlighting your expertise and how you've helped others, especially at an important point in that user journey, like they're about to leave the site potentially, can really make all the difference in encouraging a user to commit and to convert.
All right, so back to CTAs. The idea here is that you want your calls to action to be very specific and really to kind of support the value exchange, the offer. So, you know, this first point about customized CTAs convert 42% higher than generic or vague CTAs.
So if you think about, you know, it's a lead gen form and the button says submit versus, you know, learn how to optimize landing pages would be more specific. More appealing than what would be kind of the default. form CTA. And then, you know, we also have opportunities to personalize those CTAs. So this kind of goes back to the idea of segments.
You know, if it's a returning customer, you could potentially change the CTA to be more relevant to them versus a new customer, for example. And then also CTAs should be action oriented. You know, we want to excite them about the next step in order to... encourage them to continue.
So here's a good example. Which CTA sounds more appealing, register now versus teach me how to get 195,000 visitors? I think that the answer is probably obvious there, but that's a pretty good example of kind of reiterating the value exchange in the CTA.
So again, kind of... words matter here. In this case, we have on the left a list of college programs and kind of the call to action associated with each of those is request info, which sounds like zero fun.
You know, obviously there's going to be a long form that requires quite a bit of information versus kind of, you know, being clear as far as the next step. So that link probably just takes them to the school site, right? So if we're clear and we change those buttons to say, visit school's website that's going to better set expectations and ultimately it did improve engagement 22 click-through rate increase there so this kind of goes back to the post cta idea where you can around the actual call to action button you know you have opportunities to communicate additional value above or below in this example it's actually above where you can kind of reiterate value and clarify subsequent steps and better prepare them to take that next step which in this case was a 26 percent increase for the portfolio reviews another kind of aspect to this test was including this secondary text link right so in that case we're kind of appeasing less motivated prospects.
So we give them a way to stay in the funnel if they still aren't ready to actually commit to the primary objective. Yeah. And I would just add to that briefly, Kyle, that copy at the beginning above the CTA kind of just informed users, like when you click this button, you're going to be submitting, you're going to be in a form.
This form is going to take, you know, X amount of time. So it really just contextualized exactly what they could expect when they engaged with that. button.
And then, like you said, provided a pathway for users who maybe weren't that intent driven, weren't ready to engage in a five to 10 minute survey or form, but still wanted to contact. So it really was a two pronged approach to speak to both of those different audiences and different intent levels. All right. So looking at high quality imagery and clear, compelling language in the hero section are also very crucial for capturing attention. and just conveying your page's value.
Using sharp, relevant images with text overlays to effectively communicate the benefits and solutions you offer and ensuring visitors understand why your product or service is the best choice is going to just really help, again, clarify who you are and what you're offering immediately upon users coming to your site. And you can still use high quality images without it crushing your load time, right? So of course, You know, you can find amazing high quality images that aren't too big in file size either. Absolutely. So best practices when selecting a hero image, including using those large, crisp images, showing maybe normal people that reflect your user audiences, using potentially in-house original images, keeping text overlays focused and concise, and ensuring your page and hero have those fast load times.
Things to avoid include using small or grainy blurry images, just showing unrealistic or picture perfect models, using cheesy or just really low quality stock imagery, or overloading your hero section and imagery with too much copy and having a busy hero section that just impacts load times and is overburdening the user with too much information. All right, so whether you personally love it or hate it, sticking a pop-up in a user's face can be one of the most effective ways to jolt their attention and grab their email for a return visit. This practice of interruption is particularly effective when it proposes to solve a problem that the user has tuned into or been programmed to expect, given the nature of the service.
I'm guessing a lot of you kind of expect to get a 10 to 20% off discount when you go to an e-commerce site, because that is what we see now. And when you're kind of tuned to expect that, you may be more likely to engage with it also. These pop-ups, they account for over 66% of email capture forms.
And despite a lower conversion rate of 3% compared to maybe landing pages, they generate 10 times more email capture opportunities. And this strategy just really helps nurture return users and turn them into... customers over time. Now, creating a welcoming pop-up experience is important for maximizing the effectiveness of these pop-ups.
The best performing pop-ups are visitor-focused. They offer a clear value in a non-intrusive and engaging way. So in our example, the test variant effectively highlighted that 10% discount and provided a clear CTA.
And by simplifying the form to only request an email, Smarty had a party, saw a 194% increase in conversions. And again, just really demonstrates how thoughtful design and presentation can significantly boost up that performance. Yeah, that's a good example there and a huge lift.
Absolutely, yeah. So crafting a captivating email capture form is also essential for users actually engaging with it. So key best practices just include keeping the form concise, ideally four fields or fewer, ensuring it stands out with an eye-catching design or an imagery that aligns with your website, and incorporating compelling CTAs that offer clear values such as discounts, free shipping, quality content, and just making it.
the effort the user has to, you know, put out to fill out that pop-up worthwhile for them and enhancing that overall conversion rate. All right. So here's a big one. So this is the idea of using multiple payment options aside from what might be your default e-commerce checkout process. For example, Google Pay, PayPal, et cetera.
can improve conversion rates as much as 30 percent and uh i think part of the reason there is that some of these you know uh payment processing systems kind of are continuously invested in by paypal or google right and they're optimized and tested continuously so if there's any anxiety about using the default e-commerce checkout on your site sometimes you can get around some of that by using these in fact if we look at a baymard study, we see that, you know, several of these top reasons for abandonment can be addressed by using a third party payment processing system. So for example, don't trust the site with my credit card, the, you know, there weren't enough payment options, the checkout process itself had a lot of friction, a lot of those challenges can be overcome by providing multiple payment options, especially with like, PayPal, we're seeing like 16 to 18% conversion lifts on average. It really depends per industry, but like even in B2B adding PayPal as a payment option, we're seeing massive listing conversion, especially for SaaS. Yeah.
I would say if you're going to test that kind of thing, really the only, you can run a test, just make sure you have a thank you page that it ultimately lands back on just for tracking purposes. Just a little side tip there. Okay, so let's talk about USPs. This is absolutely critical to conversion optimization.
So knowing what your unique selling proposition is probably the hardest part. But if you have an idea of what it is, you know, you can then kind of test and hone in on it and figure out exactly how to express it or communicate it. This Venn diagram does a good job of showing kind of what it is and how it. relates to the customer.
So the, you know, that top circle and the left circle, that region between the two, what your brand does well and what the consumer wants, that's the kind of the key area, right? But a USP by nature implies some level of competitive. exclusivity that we have to kind of figure out. But at the same time, we don't necessarily want to be totally explicit. You know, we do this better than X company because then you kind of end up closer to this who cares zone because ultimately the consumer knows what they want.
And we just want to show them that we are experts or we have a superior product in some way. So I think as far as understanding your USP, I think then it comes to how do we kind of home in on certain aspects of that USP that are particularly resonant. So if one element of your USP is the speed at which you...
So if you're sending money online, send money fast online, for example. So the speed is an aspect of your USP. But there's other potential elements of that USP that we want to figure out, what is the lever? So you can kind of test your way into those things and figure out exactly how to express your USP.
But you would need to do that in a location on the page that is very obvious and very clear in order to get a good signal from testing. So that's your H1s, H2s, and really just kind of above the fold content. And as long as you aren't running any other tests at that time, you can get a pretty good idea of what resonates with your customers. Yeah. In this example, Kyle, on the Dr. Kamiha's Supermouth landing page, we highlighted three key USPs.
So making brushing fun, providing effective oral care for all life stages, and offering scientifically backed products. So these really, we implemented these in these really... benefit-driven headers and aligned with consumer needs, clearly differentiated SuperMouth from their competitors, and kind of underscored overall what they do best throughout the page with use of these headers. You can likely tell from this presentation that statistics are also a really powerful way of communicating performance and validating these unique selling points.
Transparently sharing success metrics can significantly impact user perceptions, engagement, and ultimately conversions by highlighting just measurable business achievements. In this example, Kenzai increased conversions by a staggering 300%, and additional users exposed to this variant viewed 32% more pages and spent 45 seconds longer on the site. So just demonstrating how impactful statistics can be. in reinforcing your unique selling propositions and enhancing user engagement is really good. And stats are something that if you're in B2B, you should definitely have.
B2C, it helps too, but for B2B, you definitely need the stats on the page, especially if it's for high ticket items. All right. So let's talk about long and detailed landing pages. So I think a lot of times, a lot of times people think of landing pages as kind of an extension. of the ad, right?
And at the same time, a lot of times they'll remove the nav. And the goal is to kind of keep them in that thought sequence in that process. But a lot of times they're too short, right?
So we want to, we want the landing page to kind of be an isolated experience that serves all of the purpose, all the purposes, as far as addressing objections, communicating value, et cetera. So, you know, you want... a landing page that's detailed enough to encourage the purchase decision or the lead but you also don't want to overwhelm them so here's an example of a test where on the left you can see the control was very short which would be kind of consistent with a typical ad landing page and then the challenger was an extremely long landing page where you know tons of different types of content and the the longer page actually outperformed this short page, which may not be too surprising, by 30%.
But at the same time, that's a lot of content, right? So then you can kind of start to test removing some of the elements, try to get to the the Goldilocks zone of length. So in step two, you can see that we slowly started kind of removing sections and found that the shortest version of that page actually performed better than the longest version of that page by 13%. Something to think about as you're crafting landing pages, long landing pages in particular, is the ADA formula.
So that's attention, interest, desire and action. So, you know, as far as attention, we want to grab their attention immediately, keep them on the page instead of hitting the back button, going back to search results or whatever, and then keeping interest. So the content itself needs to be engaging.
We need to explain how it addresses their particular pain points to kind of. keep them in the conversation. And then desire. So making sure that we are meeting their desire with communicating the appeal of the product or service. Testimonials come in here, various uses of that product, comparison matrices and things like that will kind of address what they want, basically.
And then action. Of course, we need to have a very clear action. on the landing page that, you know, especially the longer it is, the harder that might be to keep the objective singular and clear, right? So there may be several instances of a, you know, buy now button, but at least it's the same objective throughout the page. And that's where pricing info and payment options also come in.
So on a homepage template for Design for the Center for Healing Arts and Sciences, we featured multiple strategic conversion elements. So by integrating, I'm sorry, it's super small, but by integrating, you know, CTAs that are positioned throughout the page to follow the user scroll, including key unique value propositions, social proof, trust building content and detailed service listings. The template offers just multiple conversion opportunities while also effectively educating visitors on business differentiators, benefits and additional offerings like blog articles. I think a lot of people think that UX and CRO fully butt heads with SEO and, you know, having content on your site that is going to be beneficial for Google and things like that.
But really, you can be strategic and make these things work in tandem to. again, just effectively communicate, get your SEO value while improving conversion rates and that user experience. Cool.
So if you need help with your conversion rate optimization or CRO or generative engine optimization, we pretty much do it all. Scan the QR code and, you know, you can end up being taken to the landing page and you can fill out your information. What's funny is what we're doing here.
With that QR code is a form of conversion rate optimization. For example, if you scan the QR code with your phone, literally, it'll take you a website. And in a bit, what you'll see is on the screen here, a list of not or not a list, but more so a count of all the people that are starting to scan it.
So you'll start seeing big numbers like 10, 20, 50, 80, 100. And they'll come in chunks all because even. things outside of your webpage, you can optimize for conversion rate optimization. A lot of people tend to not do that.
We also have an up and coming webinar on the new SEO search everywhere optimization, where we teach you how to optimize for beyond Google, right? You have AI like Chad GPT and Gemini. You also have other platforms out there like tick tock and instagram that a lot of young people are using um feel free and attend the webinar it's free as usual scan the qr code you'll be end up taking to a landing page where uh you can end up scanning it and join as you can see here on the screen it says 41 viewers scan the qr code it's a little bit delayed but that's an example of you guys scanning and it's showing up creating social proof and it causes more people to scan right and me also Pretty much saying the call to action in the webinar, again, helps reinforce people to scan. Again, you should be doing conversion rate optimization everywhere, not just your own landing page.
So awesome. Let's get into some Q&A. Right on. Great stuff.
And like so many positive comments throughout. So congratulations, everybody. All the traffic in the world doesn't really do a whole lot if you're not converting that, so good stuff.
We've got five minutes and I've got some pretty good questions here. Multiple people asked. Apparently, a lot of the audience is running WordPress.
Any plugins or suggestions for A-B testing plugins specific for WordPress? I know Thrive and Hotjar have been mentioned in the past on other webinars. Any thoughts there, Kyle or Aubrey?
Yeah, so there's a lot of the platforms at this point have direct integrations with WordPress. So, for example, VWO, Visual Website Optimizer, actually has a WordPress plugin, which essentially installs the script. across the site and then if you're running like WooCommerce or something like that you can kind of designate a conversion that way but there are actually some WordPress specific testing platforms and I'm trying to think of them offhand I've seen them before but um they're you know they're not external platforms they actually live inside the WordPress dashboard so that that might be an option as well And you don't really need a plugin, just being quite frank. You can just post the JavaScript into WordPress and you're good to go.
Totally. Not really much of a difference in work. I actually think it's easier to post a JavaScript than it is to install a plugin. Next question, Kyle Aubrey.
Any specific time frame that we should be using or looking at when running A-B tests? Seven days, a month, or... Is it a certain number of visits?
What's the guidance there as to how long we should be running these things before we actually move the winner over? I would say statistically, it's based on your sample size, which there are calculators that you can kind of project what that timeframe might be based on current traffic, current conversion rate, and what your expected lift might be. But as far as like a simple...
roll of thumb that usually is based on your business cycle, right? So, you know, like one full week, two full weeks, I shoot for two full weeks by default. And some, you know, if it's a fintech company, you may have like a bank, you may have a two week cycle anyways, you know, based on paychecks or whatever kind of external factors come into play there. But I would say kind of a default, good estimate would be two weeks. And there's also an A-B testing calculator at neilpatel.com.
Just click on the tool section, go to A-B testing calculator, put in your information, and it'll give you guidance. Boom. All right, Kyle, Aubrey. Avoid carousels altogether or just specifically in the hero area?
There was a couple questions about that. I think carousels are a safe thing to have on your site, especially for testimonials, imagery galleries, things like that. I do say caution against making anything auto rotate. Users like to have a sense of control, having left and right directional arrows or scroll indicator dots, some form of feature that allows the user to control the way a carousel scrolls. Again, whatever that carousel container is presenting, but avoid auto rotations.
But I don't know, Kyle, if you want to add to that. I do think generally, though, carousels for testimonials, other content on the page is fairly safe. Yeah, I think in some cases on mobile, especially, it can be effective. You know, if you're scrolling through certain features and things like that.
But I like what you said, Aubrey, as far as avoid the ones that are auto scroll in favor of the ones that make sense just for browsing content manually. Awesome. There were a couple of, I was just going to, another one that came up quite a bit here is what location on the page is the best?
We talked a lot about testimonials. Like, is there a spot on the page that's best for a testimonial? Is it above the fold, below the fold?
Any insights there? That's a good question. It's very dependent, I think, on the type of testimonials you have. If you're using Google, things like this. A common method I like to test is doing a snapshot of like, hey, we have a 4.5 rating out of 500 testimonials.
And then linking that, anchoring that anchor link to a lower position on the page where full testimonials are featured or case studies or whatever that social proof may be. But technically not usually having it within the first or second fold. i don't know kyle what would you say it's kind of unless it also depends on the person so if you're selling a beauty product and it's scarlett johansson or pick a random celebrity that's super popular like a a-list above the full testimonial from them probably will boost conversion rates right um but it really depends on the scenario there's no exact approach, but Aubrey's right. In most cases, it's not above the fold. Last one, because we're short on time and it's related.
Any data on video versus text when it comes to social proof and some of the stuff that we're talking about here? So I was going to say, so that's, I like that question. And typically what I've found when testing video is that you still want to have your key value points.
static, you know what I mean? So you kind of need both if you use video, but figuring out how much of each I think is where testing comes in. Awesome.
Cool. Awesome, everyone. Thank you very much for attending.
And if you need help with your marketing, check out npdigital.com. Take care. Thanks, everyone.
My name is Neil Patel, and I help companies generate more revenue through digital marketing. Entrepreneur Magazine said I was the number one marketer in the world and they also said I created one of the hundred most brilliant companies. I started my first website at the age of 16. I took all the money that I earned from working at an amusement park and I paid a marketing firm.
The marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone. Out of my frustration and from being broke I had no choice but to learn marketing. My first client was a power supply manufacturer. I helped him generate another 25 million dollars in sales and from that point I realized the power of marketing. I helped everyone that I could and I built my reputation by being honest and over delivering.
I've helped companies like Google, NBC, Viacom, General Motors, eBay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed. I founded four multi-million dollar companies and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid. I've written about them on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Fast Company, and even on my own blogs.
It's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom. Over the years, I've received awards from the President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the United Nations. People believe marketing is expensive and difficult. Fortunately, that's not true. There is a formula.
Even if you don't have a technical bone in your body, you can get results. And my mission is to share this formula with you.