Epic Conversion Rate Optimisation Results (Real World Examples)

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for yet another episode. We're deep in the hundreds now. You've got me, Michael, you've got Arthur, and you've got friend of the show, returning guest, the all time, most frequent visitor, superstar of SEO and CRO, Rob. How you going Rob?

ROB: Hey, I'm back. What an intro that was. Wow. I get like an extra line every episode.

MICHAEL: Yes. Just like your nickname list is ever growing, so is your intro.

ARTHUR: Next episode will be even longer.

MICHAEL: Baby Reindeer. I don't get it. For some reason, Rob's nickname is Baby Reindeer. We won't ask.

ARTHUR: Well, he's wearing the coat from the show.

MICHAEL: You can't see that on audio, but we're not here to talk Rob's nicknames as fun as they are. We are here to talk something a little different. And by a little different, we've spoken about it twice on the SEO show in the past. It's conversion. Episode 102 we spoke about mastering conversion design and 45 we spoke about forget SEO Do you have a conversion problem? But what we want to do today is go really deep into conversion rate optimization because Rob has been running some really good CRO projects for clients where the results have been sensational. And with SEO, it's a great way to get traffic to a website, but your job's not done once the traffic is coming. You want to try and get the most out of that traffic. So you're going to do that by improving your conversion rate. So that's what we're here to talk about with Rob today. So let's start with Rob. Rob, as you see it, what is conversion rate optimization? What are you up to when you're improving conversion rates for clients?

ROB: I guess the first thing is identifying what the opportunities are. Basically, as you said, maximizing the traffic coming through. There's a lot of things that can be tested on a website. It could range from small things like just changing the messaging on call to action buttons, change or to range to changing the entire page structure and page layout or a brand new page. Basically trying to see where users are dropping off, what the pain points are, how we can address those pain points, make the journey more seamless for users. Basically users are extremely fickle and impatient, they'll likely have many of your competitors open on the side and if they can't find what they're looking for, then they'll just go to a competitor instead. So the ultimate aim of CRO is to eliminate all the friction points and to get them to convert with your business rather than your competitors.

MICHAEL: When I'm searching for a service near me, plumber near me, I'll go Right click a whole bunch of ads, a whole bunch of organic results, open them all in new tabs, click through them all, look at the ones that look like they're actually legit businesses and get in touch with them. That's how quick it happens for people out there. And a lot of people get it wrong. A lot of people will just throw up a website that doesn't do any of the stuff you're talking about. So, um, we have some case studies to walk through today where Rob's been able to improve certain things on a site for dramatic impact, but maybe we can talk about first, um, tracking. Cause I know in CRO you can't improve what you're not measuring. So, um, what sort of a foundation do people have need to have in place before they even start thinking about going out and trying to improve conversions?

ROB: So there's multiple things. Firstly, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager. You'd also want to have some supplementary tools such as either Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. What those two allow you to do is you basically can see what people are doing on the site. So you'll gather heat maps, session recordings, and you just want to have at least a few months worth of data that I guess you can refer back to as a sort of benchmark. And yeah, then from there, Google Tag Manager would help with tracking elements that would then feed into software like VWO, optimising the conversion rate testing platforms that allow you to do split tests, because there are things that are quick wins in the CRS space, but there will be a lot of things that you want to test before placing them live. So you just want to make sure that we're tracking those elements before making any live changes to the site.

ARTHUR: What was Google's split testing software again?

ROB: Google Optimize.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that was really good. Yeah. So good. And yet another Google product that they just go, well, we're done with that now we'll get rid of it.

ARTHUR: From memory it was free as well, wasn't it? Yeah. So now you have to pay for it. Oh, so you can, it's not available?

ROB: Oh no, it's not available.

MICHAEL: Oh, right. Yeah.

ROB: Honestly, you always have to pay for it.

MICHAEL: So you're, um, tracking things like sales leads, all that stuff, get a couple of months worth of data from that, as well as tracking how users are using your site. So then, um, what are you doing with all this data?

ROB: Then comes the audit. So then we'd have a look through, for example, Microsoft Clarity, which is one that we use across basically all of our clients. Have a look through the heat maps. It helps you to quickly identify the most clicked elements on particular pages. So if we look at our homepage, you can see, okay, a lot of people are clicking on these navigation items. A lot of people are clicking on, you know, you hear about now, and then you can see where people scroll up to and where they fall off. And you can make hypothesis. For example, you might see there's a social proof at the bottom that is actually getting a lot of interaction, but it's very low on the page. So you could test putting that higher on the page and seeing the improvement to the interaction with that element and how that can how that translates to conversions. You also have session recordings where you can actually just sit through and watch people interact with the site in a stalker-ish manner. But yeah, so there will be, it's a lot to go through, especially the session recordings. They range from minutes to hours per recording. But they're very valuable in terms of insights you can get because you can essentially see where people are dropping off. Um, and you can also see, um, at times in recordings, it actually pauses. Um, and oftentimes that means that they're on another tab, so they'll likely look at your competitors as well. So interesting.

ARTHUR: Yeah. How do you kind of filter through the session recordings? Cause I imagine on a big e-com website, they might have, you know, thousands of sessions a day. Is there a specific like filters that you use to kind of identify what sessions you want to watch?

ROB: Yeah, so you can do it by country, you can also sort by most clicked. So throughout each session, throughout each recording, it counts the number of clicks. So basically, you'd have a look at the most clicked and then work your way down and see, I guess duration as well. So you'd want to get a mixture of all these different types of recordings. and try to form a sort of average to see how people are interacting. But still time-consuming. Still very time-consuming, yeah.

MICHAEL: You've got to put in the effort, the work. You can't avoid doing the work. Yeah. So you're looking through all this stuff, you say an audit, are you basically just compiling a big list of pain points, ideas, hunches, you know, this element could be a test and you know, just get bucketing all that and then prioritizing it and do you just do some of it because you sort of know in your heart of hearts it will improve conversion or are you always testing where you split test, you know, 50% see one version, 50% see the new version. What's your sort of approach there?

ROB: a mixture. So yeah, so first, after the audit, there will be like a list of hundreds of items that we'll bucket and prioritize. So we'll score each item. And then we'll know what to work on first. So high priority items that don't cost too much to implement and too much resource to implement. So we'll try to go for those first. There will be some like quick wins that we can implement, like if they don't have a call to action button in the navigation, and they're a late gen business, we know just that it will help. So those ones don't necessarily require spit testing. But then you will spit test the messaging afterwards. So yeah, it's a mixture. A lot of times, the initial part or these quick wins, you can just implement, but then there'll be a portion of it afterwards that you'll want to spit test for part of that element.

MICHAEL: And do you see common mistakes popping up time and time again with sites where they just need to be done? You're not even bothering to test because you know they're must-haves?

ROB: Yeah, a hundred percent, heaps. A lot of it, so one of the most recent ones we did for a client in the IT space and it was moving the, we worked with brands from basically the bottom of the page to the top. We didn't necessarily split test that, we moved it up and then gathered about multitudes worth of data and we could already see an improvement in the amount of leads and interaction with the site. We could see a lot more people after moving that that were scrolling through the brands that they worked with and also clicking on the About Us page. So they're actually interacting with the website a lot more. So just things like that, we just know that, yeah, it will help.

MICHAEL: Yeah, there's certain things as a business that are not even nice to have, they're must-haves. So it's like copy that speaks to the end user rather than speaking about yourself as a business. And clear, prominent call to actions and the button color standing out and putting social proof, testimonials, reviews, before and afters, all that sort of stuff. So we're just assuming that you as a business owner know that and you have it on your site because The ones doing well all have that, you have to have it. But where CRO really makes a difference is what Rob was talking about, going in, testing, finding pain points and testing them out and not relying on your own hunch, but letting the data decide what the best version is. So I believe we've got a few examples here of clients that you've worked on in the wild where we've got really good results. So maybe we can just sort of run through them all, you know, what you did and some of the hypotheses that you had and the tools that you used, how you did it, so that people can get a feel for how a CRO campaign works in reality out there in the wild.

ROB: Yeah, easy. Um, yeah, the first one is a client that we have in the SMS marketing space. Yeah. So for these guys, this is one of the first tests that we ran for them. And it was on the homepage, they had a call to action button in the hero banner. So the first thing you saw, Master Hero banner, and the call to action, which literally just said get started. So not very compelling, but even still the click through rate and conversion rate from there was still 19.4% of users landing on the homepage actually click through. So we tested a few different variants. So they actually offer a free trial that they show on other pages and at the bottom of the homepage, but yeah, at the very top. where people actually look, you don't really see it. So we changed the messaging to start a free trial today. And another variant, which was start a free trial with 10 credits included. And yeah, at the end of the test, we saw the conversion rate increased from 19.4% to 24.23%. So a massive, massive improvement there. Beautiful.

MICHAEL: So with that, that sounds like, so they've gone from one in five people that land on it getting in touch to one in four, which is amazing, just by changing text. And you've got three different versions running. So just to sort of clarify for people, how is this sort of working? Like three versions, how many people are seeing each and how long do you need to run it to sort of get enough data to decide which one's going to work?

ROB: So 33% of users each would see one of these variants. So 33% would see the control and 33% for the other two. We run it until, it depends on the amount of traffic coming through to the site. So that's probably the first one. They didn't have a massive amount of traffic. So we ran it for about a month and a half. So you generally want to run it until you see a statistically significant result. And oftentimes in a lot of the CRO tools, it'll actually just show you like, okay, this is 99% likely to beat the control. And we just highlighted that, you know. So yeah, we ran until I think there was roughly like a thousand or so sessions for each variation. And then we saw like a very, very clear winner.

MICHAEL: So I guess the point to take from that is CRO works when you have traffic, but if you are a local business with a couple of hundred visitors a month, you have a traffic problem, not a conversion problem at that point. So probably focus on the obvious stuff. Don't worry about testing until you have enough traffic to make it worth doing. Yep.

ROB: Do your SEO first.

ARTHUR: Just say there's a cutoff in traffic that. you'd like to see before you start doing CRO on a client?

ROB: I'd like to see ideally for at least a few thousand monthly visitors. Okay. So that should be ideal.

ARTHUR: Yeah, otherwise you said the tools will tell you if something's statistically significant.

MICHAEL: Yeah, you just have to run it for longer. And the more variants you have in there, the longer. So this one was a three, you know, control and two variants. That's going to take much longer than just an A-B test. So there was a lot of nuance that goes into this, of course. That's cool. What else have you been getting up to in the CRO world?

ROB: I'm excited now. So for that same client, after updating that CTA button, I think like two months later we decided that, because they were in the midst of sort of updating their branding and design messaging. So some pages have like this new design style. So we took the opportunity to rework the entire homepage because we saw that there were a lot of different pain points. We saw that they have this very clear messaging about their pricing. They have like the lowest, basically the lowest pricing across every competitor. It's advertised on the homepage, but people still click on their pricing page. And the pricing page essentially tells them the same thing. So we rebuilt the homepage and we made the… Basically, when you first see the page, there's like an interactive element with the pricing, and it's much more dynamic. We made it much more clear that this is the pricing. you don't need to know, like there's no hidden terms and conditions. Social proofing, we moved it above the fold. And yeah, we just overall made the design language to fit their style as well. And that increased the conversion rate from 21.67 to 33.71. Wow. So what that meant in the amount of leads as well was it went from 163 to 257.

ARTHUR: In one month?

ROB: Yep. Wow. So basically a hundred.

ARTHUR: That's insane. From the same amount of traffic.

MICHAEL: That's the epic thing. Like you're spending money on Google ads or social ads or SEO campaign as a business and you want more leads, you can go out and donate more money to Google and Facebook by buying ads or you can improve your conversion rate and make the most out of the traffic you do have. In an ideal world, you're doing both, you know, but, um, I think this CRO gets slept on a lot by businesses out there. And, um, these are huge wins that can be had for, you know, you got to do the work as Rob's, you know, saying, trawling through recordings and preparing plans and all the rest of it. But the outcome when done right is pretty sensational. Absolutely.

ROB: Yeah, another one. So this is a client in the market research space. So we also did a similar CTA messaging split test for the button in the main navigation. So this is an example where we ran into a little bit of a hiccup in the beginning of the test. We said their main messaging in the beginning was get a proposal. We wanted to split test that with other variations, including submit your brief and submit a proposal. Because the pain point that we saw, and we discussed this with a client as well, was that the messaging is very vague. Like what does get a proposal possibly mean? After running it for about two weeks or so, we saw the conversion numbers across all variations and the control basically stayed the same. So we thought that there must be a problem here. So we had to go in and reorder the test. And we actually found that on mobile, so when you expand the mobile menu, all their services and sectors and information, all the menu items were all laid out, like it's all expanded. So you'd have to scroll down for at least like three seconds to see the CTA button. That ain't good. So that's not good. So what we did was we redesigned the entire menu. We made it so that it's collapsible, so that when you open the menu, all these categories are collapsed by default. so that you can see the CTA button right away. And we also made the CTA button a different color to make it stand out. So now, when people click on a mobile, they can actually see the CTA button, they know it exists. And after implementing that, then we saw the They improved conversion rate from 0.18% to 0.47%. So this increased from 3 leads to 8. Nice. I see. It's funny like market research business conversion rate sub 1% is realistic and then this SMS business, they're up around 25-30% because it's a different proposition.

MICHAEL: People often ask, you know, clients ask, what's the best practice conversion or benchmark conversion rate? And there really is none because it varies so much from business to business, industry to industry.

ROB: Yeah, there's so much. So yeah, from business to business, industry to industry and also from page to page. Yeah, so there's no real benchmark.

MICHAEL: Another takeaway from that is mobile can often be forgotten. Well, not forgotten, but you know, designers might do designs on desktop and you're in the office, you're looking at it on desktop and you might not pick up that you're hitting a button on mobile and it's not working. And you're like, where are my leads? Where's all my sales? And you know, there's mobile problems there that you're not picking up on. And that can often be an area to start when you're working on a CRM.

ARTHUR: We kind of spoke about it last, not last episode, but a few episodes ago, that people tend to neglect mobile when everything is mobile first these days.

ROB: It's weird, isn't it? Especially for, Market research.

ARTHUR: I think just designers in general, like even when we work with designers now, they often start with desktop before they start with mobile. And I think it's just part of it is just kind of ingrained in them because that's how they've kind of operated. But I guess it could be easier to go from desktop to mobile than the other way around. But yeah, it's just interesting because people don't think about it as much as they should.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's pretty consistent that they don't as well. Everyone tuning in, do a little deep dive into your analytics, watch some session recordings on mobile and you might unlock some little nuggets to improve. We'll get in touch and we'll put Rob on the case for you.

ROB: I was very lucky that like 60% of your traffic is actually from mobile.

ARTHUR: I was going to ask, what color did the button change?

ROB: We changed it to the reddish orange. We actually did another split test after that, changing the colors of that particular button, but we didn't see too much of a result.

ARTHUR: I just kind of remember back in the day when Sierra was new and fresh, and the old agency worked out the way it was sold. We'll change your button colors from green to red, and that will improve the conversion rate by 10%. Do you remember?

MICHAEL: Oh, I remember that works on a site like Amazon, you know, where you have all like Google testing slightly different layouts for their search results. But for most businesses, you don't have the traffic to be able to decide for sure whether one shade of magenta is better than another.

ROB: Um, and yeah, the last, um, the one I want to go through was an e-commerce site. Um, these guys basically sell

ARTHUR: Bedroom furniture.

ROB: They sell, um, what do you call it?

MICHAEL: Bedroom furniture. Electronics and stuff. Electronics. Oh, sorry.

ROB: Electronics. Bedroom furniture. Yeah. So electronics, you know, fridges, air cons, TVs. You think you're, think you're like Bingley, JPI, that sort of situation. But yeah, so there was a massive opportunity to improve this size conversion. There were a lot of quick wins, as well as a lot of errors that we identified. One included a menu, so they didn't have like a sticky navigation menu. We also reworked the category pages because it was quite messy, the layout, and the information was all over the place. You couldn't really see which item, which brand a particular product was. So if you're seeing like 50 fridges, you really couldn't see which brand it was unless you had to go through and read the product title. And we also reworked the site search functionality, so we saw that the majority of the users actually were interacting with their search, but they're on WooCommerce, and the search functionality is just not that great.

MICHAEL: So, a lot of people… Can I give, before you go on, some context on that, because I believe with this one, The SEO results, so like rankings, traffic, everything was going the right way in terms of what we could see, like non-brand was doing better. SEO is great, but revenue and sales weren't sort of corresponding. And we were sort of racking our heads, right, trying to figure this out, looking at all sorts of different things. And it took a while to discover this search problem. Yep. Cause like, again, like, and this happens with, client agency relationship sometimes like, you know, SEO, people could be looking at it through the lens of SEO and they're like, your campaign's killing it. You know, you've got all these new rankings, traffic's coming to the site and then the client's like, well, where are all my extra sales? Like I'm seeing nothing. So sort of need to go hand in hand. You can't just sort of wash your hands as an SEO and say, well, we've got you some better rankings if it's not turning into dollars on the backend for the client. And this is a case where CRO was able to really, get to the bottom of that and make a dramatic impact. So I'm sorry for interrupting, but yeah, they're on WooCommerce and the normal search was garbage, basically.

ROB: Yeah, basically, yeah, really bad. So for instance, people would search up like air conditioners, and they will use different variations to search for air conditioners, like aircon, one word, aircon, two words, and so on. And for example, when they search up aircon, it would only show up 50 results instead of the entire range, which is over 300 air conditioners. And so we basically implemented another search functionality onto their site, which allowed us to capture those search terms and it also allowed us to see what people search for the most. And if it didn't return like a category page, or the result we wanted, then we could funnel that into the correct page. And yeah, we could also like place emphasis on certain products that they were pushing. So for example, they want to push an LG air conditioner, then you could show those first. And basically what we saw was that, for example, some LG aircons massively improved. So it improved like 900% in organic revenue, just for like one product. And overall, after implementing a few of these changes, we saw the revenue increase over 100% across every channel.

MICHAEL: Wow, so double revenue without spending a cent extra. Basically, yeah. Sounds like a made-up claim that marketing agencies use. You want to double or triple your revenue without spending a dollar on ads, but it's true in this case.

ROB: Yeah, essentially. That is the highest revenue amount they've had in over a year.

MICHAEL: Massive.

ROB: Massive.

MICHAEL: Nice. Love it. Well, let's talk maybe some tools before we wrap up, because you've mentioned you sort of rapid fire at the start a few different tools, but what are you using to get the job done? Maybe you can sort of explain the name of the tool and what it does. Give us a few of them just so people can check that stuff out if they're interested.

ROB: We use, we use VWO. So VWO is a CRO platform. It has a ton of features. Just to scrape the surface, there's A-B testing, split testing. There's also, they also have their own heat mapping on it as well. But it's, the tool isn't cheap. But there's a lot of things that you can do. You can do user surveys, basically anything that you'd really want to test and do. that's the go-to. So we use that for setting up spit tests and any sort of implementations that we want to test before setting it live on the site. Microsoft Clarity, again, is something that we use across all of our clients. We also put that onto the client side for at least one or two months to gather data and that basically lets us see how users are interacting with the site. Microsoft Clarity is free, so feel free to add it to your site and then you can come see us. What else do we use?

MICHAEL: Hotjar is another sort of cheaper one.

ROB: Hotjar is another one. I think they've mostly paid now, but if you guys can afford it, then feel free to use that too. Otherwise, other things include Figma, where we're like mocking up designs and split tests. So before you go and sort of implement any split test, you need to really mock it up and see how it will work. And that's where tools such as Figma come in. That way you can hand it off to a developer and they can also implement that too. So I'd say those are the three ones alongside your Google Analytics and Tag Manager.

MICHAEL: Beautiful. Well, CRO, it's like a, it's a combination of data analysis, design, development, um, and then I guess having all the skills to get the traffic. So it's a very cool, interesting field. We've just scratched the surface on it today, but hopefully the people listening in out there have enjoyed those examples. And, um, I have to have you back Rob in the future for a little, Recap on maybe some more clients, you know, and yeah, keep spreading the gospel of CRO.

ROB: Yes. I'll see you back. Then please add another sentence to my introduction.

MICHAEL: Until next episode, happy CROing. See you later. Happy CROing.

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