Adding “calls to action” to move visitors along to a Conversion Point

Improving Conversions: Case Study Part 1 – Adding “calls to action”

We’re working on a web site for a software company. The goal of the web site is to attract potential end users and get leads over to their resellers. A secondary goal is to attract new resellers.

We working on both improving search engine results and improving the ability of the web site to turn those visitors into leads (i.e. improve conversion rates).

I’ll post articles on some of the results as we work on this site to show you specific examples of how to improve conversion rates on a web site and how we use an analytics system to detect problems and measure the results of the changes we make.

This company has one key software product along with a number of software “modules” that work with that key product. The vast majority of site visitors from search engines and referral sites either land directly on the opening page about this software product or they land on the home page of the site and then visit this page.

The product web page had very few “calls to action” to lead people along to some logical next step where they take some action, a Conversion Point. There was one “How to Purchase” text link listed first in a section of bookmarks near the top of the page. The list of bookmarks also included links to additional information about the product etc (See Google’s Search advertising glossary for a definition of “call to action”)

Using Click Tracks web analytics we could see that a number of people were clicking on the “how to purchase” link. This link leads to a form that visitors must fill out. They are then contacted by the company or a reseller. Although a fairly large percentage of people we’re clicking on the “how to purchase” link, a very small percentage of people were submitting that form. We suspect that most people are not willing to fill out a form with their contact information in order to find out how to purchase the product, at least at this stage.

There are a few “schools of thought” on how to move site visitors along to a next step on a web site. One method is to remove most or almost all options and focus on just one action you’d like visitors to take. Instead we decided to test presenting the visitor with multiple “calls to action” as they moved down the page.

First we moved the section of bookmarks at the top of the page down to the bottom. We really don’t want people leaving the page before they’ve had a chance to look at least some of the information on it.

About halfway down the page, after the first two paragraphs of text we added a “call to action”, a “narrated videos” text link leading to an online video demonstration of the product. Here’s how the link looked:

A little over a week later we examined the results. 4.9% of the visitors to this page were clicking on this link.

This was great. However I thought we could improve on this by making this “call to action” stand out more. So we centered the text link and made a bold heading. Here’s a picture of the “call to action”:

This simple change had pretty dramatic results. The number of visitors who clicked on the narrated demonstrations link rose from 4.9% to 9.5%. That’s an almost a 200% improvement just from highlighting the link better.

Again, great results. However we quickly discovered an issue after these people clicked on the link to view the online videos. I’ll discuss this issue and what we’re doing to fix it in a future post.

Further down the page, at the bottom of the main body of content, we added another “call to action”. This one, a graphic image link that said the following:

“For a Free Demonstration…Click Here”

Unfortunately, I didn’t save a picture of this image link to show it to you, but it is exactly like the image link displayed further down in this post. The only difference is the text on the link.

About a week after we added this “call to action” we saw disappointing results. Only 1.4% of all visitors to this page were clicking on this link and only 2.0% of visitors from search engines clicked on it.

We decided that these poor results were probably because most people just are not ready to commit to a demonstration at this point.So we changed the call to action to offer either a free demonstration or more information. Here’s the new link:

This change resulted in even more dramatic results. Now 5.5% all visitors and 7.5% of visitors from search engines are clicking on this “call to action”!

In future posts we’ll follow the people who click on these two “call to action” and show you what we’re doing to improve the results of these conversion processes. We’ll also discuss the results of additional changes we made to this key product page.

For more information:

Information on Web Analytics and Click Tracks

Improving Conversion Rates with Conversion Point Architecture