Enter the Owl

We don’t spend a lot on retargeting (it costs very little to target our audience), but it is a major area of opportunity. And I hate lost opportunities. I decided to use some humor and found the image of a small, inquisitive-looking owl, wearing a straw hat. To that, I added a few lines that a used car salesman would throw out, provided by fellow BFMers David Dweck, Matthew Smith, and Bill Ryan. In the end, the ads appeared to work, increasing average CTRs to over 0.3%, a relatively good number for our campaign. Here are the ads that I created, which got us immediately more responses, and ultimately, more conversions.

We created a number of ads that peaked the curiosity of our audience. Many clients called in saying how entertaining it was to be followed around by an owl. That was the first time we’d received such praise for ads.

There were multiple sizes created so that we could have two different messages sometimes show up on the same page.

The free leather upgrade really got people clicking.

We made light of the fact that we were “following” people around. The “I am not following you” banner had the highest click-through-rate.

We marked current events with the ads: after the earthquake on the East Coast, we created an ad referring to it, as well as during hurricane Irene.

All of these ads sent users to this landing page. Notice the continuity in the usage of the owl.

The results

As a result of our “owl” campaign, click-through rates increased dramatically, while conversion rates remained surprisingly steady. I was sure they would drop. What did drop were the percentage of view-through conversions. This could be attributed to audience saturation or the lack of strong branding on the owl ads.

As with our previous campaign, I’ll soon need to update our current owl campaign to feature more diversity. I will test something else out and write about it here. Last time I mentioned how I was able to increase form fills on our Request a Quote page.

If you have any suggestions about what I could test out in retargeting or elsewhere on the Blue Fountain Media website, please let me know via Twitter (@alhankeser).

What is often overlooked is its wording. In many cases, the call to action is two steps ahead of the visitor. Instead of clicking it, visitors will look around for the next best option on your Web page. This is not necessarily a terrible thing, but you are missing out on the main benefit of having an effective call to action: visitors don’t have to think very hard about what to do next.

Common Mistake

You are a professional services company and have determined that you want your website visitors to come to your website and request a consultation through your online form.  Without a second thought, you make your primary call to action on your home page “Request a Consultation”. You do some click-tracking analysis and find that no one appears to be clicking on your beautifully designed call to action.

Diagnosis

You are failing to realize that most first-time visitors to your website need to know more about your services, your case studies, and be able to trust you in the first-place before starting up a conversation with you. In other words, you are jumping the gun. Before writing your call to action, do a little thinking. Consider what it is about your business that visitors need to know before being able to make a decision on whether or not to request a consultation. What is question #1, #2, and possibly, #3 in their minds?

Use your website analytics to find out what pages people visit just before requesting a consultation. Your visitors will implicitly tell you what information they’d like to see before they are ready to fill-out your form by visiting specific pages. Another great source of this information are the qualifiers on your sales team. They surely have a list of questions that callers have when they contact your company, as well as the best responses.

Solution #1

Once you know what questions you need to answer, direct your visitors to a page that answers one or all of those questions. In a case like this, your home page call to action should be something along the lines of “See our Case Studies & Clients”, “Browse our Services”, or “See our Portfolio”. On the subsequent page, you can feature your call to action that says “Request a Consultation”. Hopefully you will have answered your visitor’s questions by then and they are ready to contact you.

Solution #2

Another option you can consider is to place whatever content your customers are looking for right on your home page. After all, there is no rule about making your home page a certain size or having to feature only little bits of information. The purpose of your website is to sell, no? If you can provide your visitors with the goods they need before contacting you, then why not do it in the most efficient way possible? Rather than having them go to another page for the information, provide it to them on a platter, as soon as they visit your website. This method would permit you to feature your call to action that says “Request a Consultation” right off-the-bat, since you are providing all the information necessary for making that decision on the page the visitor is landing on.

Additional Considerations

Here are a few other factors to consider when reviewing your website’s call to action:

• Microcopy: Is there a common, yet crucial question that might come up before a visitor clicks on “Request a Consultation”? A couple examples might be “How long will I have to wait until I get a response?” or “What does that entail?” Microcopy can be used to answer these crucial questions. It is text that is placed just below or right next to your call to action and provides that last bit of info to ease the mind of your visitor.
• Traffic Segmentation: Not all of your website visitors are the same. Some are coming to your website for the first time while others have been there already and have come back to contact you. There are those visitors who typed in your name or your service to find you on Google, others came from Facebook, while others saw your banner advertisement. Each of these traffic sources must be looked at independently before coming to any conclusions on what your website visitors do and don’t like about your call to action. For starters, you should be filtering out your own IP address at work and at home, as well as those of your colleagues. Then, as an example, look at traffic coming from just search engines, with keywords that do not contain your brand name. Typically, these are visitors who do not know about you yet, but who are looking for your services/products. Pay special attention to these visitors since they are essentially the equivalent of new prospects walking in and out of your office. (Ideally, you should create landing pages for each of your services and service categories as well as for various sources of traffic. That way, you can easily segment your traffic by visitor role and customize your calls-to-action for each of them.)
• Branding Initiatives: Say you’ve been running a ton of TV commercials as well as subway ads. Don’t be surprised if your over-ambitious call to action, the one sending people straight to your Web form is working perfectly fine. That’s because most of your visitors have already decided that they wish to contact your company because your advertising has been effective at answering their questions. Once again, this is an example of the need to segment your traffic. You should be sending your advertising traffic to a separate page or URL so as to customize their experience.
• Testing: Don’t simply rewrite your call to action and launch it. Find out if your hypothesis about whether or not your call to action wording should be changed by conducting A/B testing. You can do this for free using Google Website Optimizer. It requires very little work and can give you clear answers. I recommend doing this for any changes you make to your website.

A good user interface and design is going to make your call to action be very prominent on your page. But without proper planning and consideration for your users, it will be ineffective at accomplishing your business goals.

For more on conversion optimization, take a look at this quick video I made about some tools to help you:

1. Unclear call to action.

Focus your visitors on one thing. What it is that you want people to do on each of your pages? 1-800 Flowers is one of the big companies that was messing this up (on their product detail page).

Use Attention Wizard heatmap to find where people are looking on your page.

2. Too many options – steps.

Reduce the friction between the user and the product they are seeking. Show main categories that are most popular on your page – not every subcategory and product on each page.

3. Asking for too much information.

Require less information in your forms to increase conversions. Do not ask questions that are not absolutely unnecessary, or inappropriate. Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing.

4. Too much text.

Do not make your visitors to suffer. Do not write in paragraph form. Instead use headlines and bullet points.

5. Not keeping your promises.

Intent is the number one factor in conversion. If a user clicks on a pay-per-click ad that says “Best Digital Camera” then they expect to come across the best digital camera. If they land on a page that does not match that query and the promise of seeing reviews of the best digital cameras, then they will promptly leave.

6. Too many visual distractions.

Use visual hierarchy to organize information, just like in an outline. Only important things should be bright and bold. Use other colors/sizes to organize information. Do not make everything equally important or unimportant.

7. Lack of trust.

Provide trust symbols in visible places (top 2/3 of the area visible through a monitor). This can be a “McCaffee Secure” symbol, brands that you work with, mentions in the press – whatever will increase trust by association.

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Your website is getting traffic, but these visitors aren’t taking action. Is it time for a redesign? Before you scrap the whole design and start from scratch, consider if it’s only a few elements on the page that are hindering your success. And thanks to Google Website Optimizer, there’s an easy way to find out using real user behavior.

It’s a little ironic to talk about best practices when the whole point of testing is that websites are not one-size-fits-all; best practices for page layout, calls-to-action, and information architecture might not apply to your specific niche of users. Nevertheless, here are some tips for setting up experiments that should apply most of the time:

1. Don’t test too many things at once.

If you’re trying out different colored “buy” buttons, don’t try to test headline, text and product image variations at the same time. Unless your landing pages get an extremely high quantity of traffic, pick one or two variables at a time to avoid having your testing go on interminably to get a decent sample size, and then having to spend just as much time interpreting your mountains of data.

2. Get a decent sample size.

Don’t overanalyze in the first few days of testing. I’ve had variable combinations that looked like a sure bet in the first 48 hours, with a sample size of a few hundred, only to be left in the dust a few weeks later.

3. Be consistent.

While you want to do everything you can to improve your website, don’t scare users away by making changes on a landing page that will make them wonder how many designers you had working on your website if they decide to click through to the rest of your site.

If you’re already doing SEO or pay-per-click, provided it’s done correctly, you should have a steady stream of qualified visitors. You’ve already distilled an audience that is interested in what you have to offer; don’t squander this willingness to transact by leaving them to fend for themselves once they’re on your site.