An intuitive website architecture, value proposition, and clear CTAs are crucial to keep site visitors engaged. From an eye-catching hero section to a well laid out mobile site, watch Amsive experts discuss how to you can enhance the user experience to boost sales.
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Ruben Quinones (00:00):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you’re, wherever you’re watching this. My name is Ruben Quinones. I’m the SVP Client Strategy here at Amsive, and we’ve got a special topic this session. We’ve been doing sessions for the last few months around eCommerce. Today is going to be about conversion rate optimization. We’re actually, we’ve been allowed to actually use two websites that we’re going to go through and be able to, on the fly, talk about how we would optimize it. So pretty cool. And I appreciate those two individuals allowing us to do it. And I’m going to bring in Tom and Ben. I’ll bring in Tom first. He’s been on with us before. Tom D, you do something here, I forget.
Tom Di Domenico (00:54):
Yeah, EVP of stuff. EVP of Digital Strategy and Technology here at Amsive. So I work with a number of teams, most applicable to today’s conversation, of course being eCommerce, which is where I have most of my career. And enjoy being so excited to be here and geek out with you and Ben.
Ruben Quinones (01:15):
Yeah, and Ben Moore. I like to say Benjamin Moore, right? Because of the painting company. Do you get that a lot, Ben?
Ben Moore (01:23):
Oh, all the time. All the time.
Tom Di Domenico (01:26):
He’s the heir to the paint fortune. You didn’t know Ruben.
Ben Moore (01:29):
I wish I had that, Mike.
Ruben Quinones (01:32):
So Ben, what do you do here for us?
Ben Moore (01:35):
So I’m the CRO manager here at Amsive. I, so my job is basically optimizing customer journeys from when they land to get them to the actual conversion point. And I do that through lots of user behavior analysis, testing, and heat maps.
What is CRO?
Ruben Quinones (01:51):
Very good. So I think we’ll dive right into it. And I have to say for years I was waiting for you and team, because we all are on these platforms. We’re bidding strategies and the Amazon store and concentrating our efforts there. But we never looked at, hey, D2C or B2B company, just what are we doing for incremental conversion rates? We’re paying for all this traffic or organically we’re getting all this traffic. But then there was always that missing element. How do you optimize that experience for conversion rates? So I should probably start off with a very rudimentary question. When we say CRO health, what does that mean and what does that entail?
Ben Moore (02:38):
Yeah, let’s start with the basics. So CRO is conversion rate optimization, obviously. Think of it like a bucket, right? So there’s a very common analogy in CRO. So the water is all your marketing efforts, so all your spend, and it also, it basically incorporates your traffic as well. CRO fixes leaks within that bucket. It stops any abandonments, any exits, any bounce rates. It optimizes the website to ensure that the intent is clear and they stay on the website as long as they can.
Ruben Quinones (03:13):
Very cool. Yeah. So the bucket analogy always works. They use that as well.
Ben Moore (03:19):
Yeah, it’s one of my favorites.
Ruben Quinones (03:21):
So with that said, what are some of the common things that either we see in the industry or just even in general at answered here?
Ben Moore (03:29):
So this is a really interesting, I love, I love talking about this and me and Tom, no, you get excited about this all the time. I do.
Ruben Quinones (03:38):
I try to tell you about what I’m going to do this week and totally not interested, but yeah, I’m sorry. Optimization. You’re there.
Ben Moore (03:45):
For sure, for sure. So let’s say we have a new website to look at. The first things I look at are key best practices. So when a visitor lands on the page, the first thing that they see is the hero. So they’re looking for what is this website’s intent, what is this website trying to do that’s different to another competitor, for example? So you need a very clear value proposition. And many times when I look at websites, it’s often just a big image with some cryptic headline or it’s not clear exactly why a customer would want to be there. So anything above the fold is critical, absolutely critical. So it’s function over style for the most part. In terms of CRO.
Ruben Quinones (04:29):
And then I would just maybe interject jacked above the fold typically would be for desktop. I assume what you would see on desktop pretty much takes, would you differentiate at all above the fold, mobile and desktop? Because would there be a difference?
Ben Moore (04:46):
So technically, technically no. But theoretically yes. So on mobile you’re far more common to scroll because it’s far easier with your finger. So it’s less prioritized on mobile, but for desktop specifically above the fold is completely critical.
Ruben Quinones (05:02):
Yeah. Got it. And what are some other elements, I guess, besides above the fold?
Ben Moore (05:07):
So oftentimes, of course, landing pages are really important. So whenever you buy something, what are the two things you always look for? You always look for the price, you always look for the reviews or any kind of testimonials. A lot of the websites that Tom and our team look at, they have them, but they’re often buried far down the page. So the key of CRO is thinking of the landing page itself as a journey. So you have the hero image and the hero banner itself. Does that do the job enough to convince user to stay? If not, then the next section needs to be more compelling. It needs to answer questions that the hero didn’t answer. So we usually put reviews relatively high but not too high. But some websites don’t even have reviews or testimonials at all. And it’s not just reviews and testimonials, it’s also awards. If your company has awards, you definitely want to showcase them, but it’s more about how you prioritize and how you show them. That’s important.
Common Issues with CRO
Ruben Quinones (06:11):
Yeah, know it makes sense. I guess maybe before we dive into those sites, looking forward to doing that. I guess some red flag. What are the top things that we typically see are issues that we look to address?
Ben Moore (06:28):
So CRO is all about CTAs. CTAs are obviously buttons that link to key conversion elements of the website. Most times they’re inconsistent, they have bad verbiage, so they’ll be very simple like explore things like that. CRO is all about emphasizing action orientated terms. So things like buy now, explore, now, buy today. Anything that’s immediate is psychologically more impactful than just explore or buy. Those just minor changes like that can have a massive impact on actually converting. And on the same subject, CTAs Color matters as well and how clear the CTA is. So if you have a very busy website, which is one of the examples we’ll be looking at soon, you need to make that CTA stand out still. So that’s the major red flag, Tom, if you have any.
Tom Di Domenico (07:34):
That’s a lot of what we see. And I think the why we see is most sites are responsive now, meaning they resize appropriately for desktop and mobile and everything in between. But we still see a lot of people just taking that desktop version and collapsing it into a more vertical format without really looking at it on mobile first and saying, does this make sense? Now, Ben made a great point about how that landing page becomes sort of the journey you’re taking the user through. So hierarchy of messaging, USP, stuff like that. And when you start to collapse it, you might’ve had two key messages in the header, but now you have one below the fold. And that’s what we see. I think a lot of is desktop, even though it works appropriately and it looks nice, it’s an afterthought and a lot of times it’s all just the same content. And we make the point on mobile, you should really reevaluate the content. Do you need all of the content? Should the content be different? Do mobile users use the site differently? Are they looking for different information? And I think that’s a common PIP policy.
Ruben Quinones (08:42):
Yeah, I think Ben, for years, my approach has always been not even eCommerce, just in journal, it’s like who are you, what do you do and what do you want me to do next? Is what I always told clients or prospects is if you hit those three Ws, even on slides and presentations, is that an easy way or is that applicable to eComm? Who are you? What do you do and what do you want me to do next? Or what is this? If it’s a product, is that a good way of distilling it? Because again, there’s so many elements and I think you’re hitting on well what is this? When someone lands on, what’s the story and is it concise? Is it clear? Otherwise they’re not going to know what to do if that story is not succinct. Is that fair to say?
Ben Moore (09:35):
That’s completely fair. I think a stat that definitely solidifies what you just said is I believe it’s around a user takes around 10 seconds, let’s say, to actually make their mind up when they land on a website if they intend to stay there. So you need the website to actually have those things clear immediately. And that particular stat has stayed relatively consistent for about 10 years now. So that just clarifies how important that is.
Tom Di Domenico (10:07):
Yeah, I think our really intelligent brand strategy team always says it really well. People aren’t interested in you, they’re interested in themselves. And I think as a brand, you have to remember that, right? Sometimes you’re talking to yourself about certain benefits of a product or something. It might not be the ones that people actually care about. What’s the benefit to the consumer? And again, I think that’s what Ben does, he helps brands test these things and let the data decide what actually matters to people.
CRO Testing Tools
Ruben Quinones (10:37):
And before we get into these sites, so some quick tools, what do we use and why do we use it for CRO testing?
Ben Moore (10:44):
Okay, so we’re going to get a little bit nerdy here. So we’ll start really simple. So heat maps are essentially maps that overlay the website and showcase where users are spending the most time. So you’ll have red moments where users are interacting with menu items usually or CTAs and obviously as you scroll down it’ll get cooler and cooler because most people don’t scroll at all. And if they do engagement drops significantly as they do. Heatmaps are number one. And then we use software itself. We specifically use a software called VWO, which allows us to A/B test. So really concisely, A/B testing is two different landing pages. One is the original obviously, and one is a variant. And in the variant we will adjust a single thing. So for example, a color of a button, the text within a button or maybe even shuffle sections around. And we’ll run this for about two weeks on average and we’ll see which one works best and if the variant wins, great, we’ll implement it. And even if it doesn’t win, we still get an insight from that so we can build another test that builds upon that. So A/B testing is a very significant part of my job. So those two are the major things.
Tom Di Domenico (12:15):
And Tom, do you want to ask? I think a common misconception about that, Ben that we hear right, is a client needs to have their development team involved. Or if it’s not our development team that’s doing the work where it’s going to be a lot of work to test a new layout or to change an element on the page, the tool is great. What the tool really allows us to do is we put one very small snippet of code on the site and you could do it through Google tag manager and then that allows Ben and his team to remotely through our software manipulate components on the website. So the developer intervention is usually zero, right? So I think a lot of people think there’s a lot of tech heaviness here and there’s none.
Ruben Quinones (12:56):
Yeah, and that’s the most simple way I think to kind of just dive into CRO testing. It is just that split A/B one. Does it make sense to get more complex and do multivariate?
Ben Moore (13:08):
So multivariate is actually something we did very recently for one of our clients. It’s usually good for image variance. So imagine that you have a website and you have a list of categories and within those categories you have images. Obviously you want to find out which image resonates best with your visitors, which gets the most clicks. So if a multi vert testing, we’ll have maybe 10, 20 images and evenly distribute the traffic to each one to see which gets the most engagement, but not just the most engagement. Obviously we want the most sales, we want the most conversions and we’ll use our software to determine the best one. And the best part about that is if we do find one that is significantly stronger, it doesn’t just have to change on the site, you can use that within a larger scope. So you can use that in marketing going forward knowing that you have data to back it up.
Ruben Quinones (14:03):
Yeah, so I guess it’s just an easy way to accelerate learnings I guess, if you have.
Ben Moore (14:08):
Exactly. Yeah.
Site Audit #1: Larissa’s Kitchen
Ruben Quinones (14:09):
Philosophy sense. So yeah, let’s just dive into this first one, which personally I like because like the colors, I might even order a product smaller site. It’s called Larissa’s Kitchen and I forget who gave it to us, but I appreciate you allowing us to use this. So this is the, I meant to bring up the homepage first, right? So let’s go to the home.
Ben Moore (14:37):
Yeah, let’s start with the home page.
Ruben Quinones (14:39):
First thing. So what are things that stand out here besides the ticker, I guess? Right. Go ahead.
Ben Moore (14:45):
I want to start with the good things first. First of all, I actually genuinely love much character this page has in terms of grabbing the visitor, it impacts perfectly, it’s exactly what it should be doing. It clearly gives you the value of the product. It has a unique selling point, certified free from top allergens. That’s fantastic. That’s exactly what a selling point should be in terms of perhaps areas for improvement. Because the website is so vibrant, it detracts slightly from the actual CTA itself. And what the website has done is actually pretty impressive. They’ve made the button the simplest part of the above the fold, it’s just a clean white button. So it does actually work. The only thing that I would suggest for this is padding, because there’s so much stuff in one confined space, the CTA, even though it is rather distinct, it could be more distinct by just padding or maybe reducing the size of the icons below it. Anything that helps draw the user’s eye straight towards it.
Ruben Quinones (15:52):
Right? And I mean, I wonder what you guys think. The first thing honestly I look at is the ticker, right? And it almost, and maybe this a good segue into, hey, where do the opportunities are? Is will we see more click depth? I guess maybe if we remove the ticker at all. I see the benefit of it and I get it, but it almost, I’m curious if you guys, that’s where your eye goes as well, is that ticker?
Ben Moore (16:21):
So I have an opinion, but I want…
Tom Di Domenico (16:24):
Yeah, go ahead man. You’re the expert. I’ve got my own thoughts. Let’s hear.
Ben Moore (16:29):
I actually think I might have an opposing opinion for you guys how we test. I actually like it a lot. And the reason I like, it’s not only because it gives you information, it draws your eye there. And often with websites, especially with large heroes like this, people forget, they could even scroll. This brings their eyes straight to the bottom and it makes them think, okay, well what else’s can I see? So they scroll down, it draws their attention essentially, which is fantastic.
Tom Di Domenico (16:59):
I actually, I agree actually that what I don’t about it is most of this hero, including the ticker, is not clickable, right? So I can’t click on the product image. I can’t click on. So to your point, my eye goes to the ticker, but it’s not a CTA and I can’t, it’s a little bit of a dead end from that perspective.
Ben Moore (17:15):
Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, for sure.
Tom Di Domenico (17:17):
That’s interesting. I didn’t realize. I just love the bold branding.
Ben Moore (17:23):
It’s rare nowadays, honestly.
Ruben Quinones (17:25):
So yeah, it’s funny, that’s intuitive that if you click on this, you go to the PD DP. So that’s actually another, although I do like how it peels this open here.
Ben Moore (17:34):
Yeah, me too. Personality is right.
Ruben Quinones (17:36):
Animation. It’s cool. But yeah, I think behaviorally we’re almost, you expect that you’re clicking on a product, it takes you there. That actually might be another opportunity, right?
Ben Moore (17:47):
Yeah, for sure.
Ruben Quinones (17:48):
Should we scroll or go to a PDP? I’m sorry to.
Tom Di Domenico (17:51):
Before we do, I just want to call out a couple other things. So when I looked at it on mobile, exactly what we were just talking about in terms of the messaging, right? The its stacks and all of, so the allergen thing seems to be the USP here, right? The key value prop that goes sort of below the fault. The other thing that I didn’t love is the SMS bump, the little or whatever they’re calling it these days, the unlock 15% off the little…
Tom Di Domenico (18:22):
Actually covers the hero CTA.
Ben Moore (18:24):
It does.
Tom Di Domenico (18:25):
So you have to scroll up to be able to click the primary CTA, which obviously…
Ruben Quinones (18:31):
Oh, interesting. So we’re not seeing the benefit of that here. It probably should have used the tool, but on mobile, this is covering up the main…
Tom Di Domenico (18:38):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ruben Quinones (18:40):
Got it. Shall I scroll down or should we go to a PDP?
Ben Moore (18:44):
Let’s go to a PDP. There’s definitely some interesting things there as well.
Ruben Quinones (18:50):
Which one do you want? I love these names. Do you Smoke shell, the heat seeker, the chicken…
Ben Moore (18:56):
The heat seeker.
Ruben Quinones (18:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Moore (18:58):
I like hot.
Ben Moore (19:02):
So this is actually a perfect one. So I want to talk about reviews real quick because reviews are both very strong for CRO and they’re also like an Achilles heel as well. And it depends basically on the quantity of reviews and the quality of the reviews. Usually when I audit a website, I look for the reviews and see how many reviews there are. If there are, let’s say less than a hundred reviews or not enough to really justify the score.
A common technique for me is simply just hide the reviews. You don’t always need to have reviews if there’s few, but obviously as you get more reviews, you have to be a little more strategic with how you display it. So instead of maybe showing the star ratings, you just have reviews perhaps a little lower, and consumers aren’t stupid. They realize that you’re going to highlight the best reviews, but maybe prioritize the best reviews and have negative reviews still there, but make the user work to see the negative reviews.
Tom Di Domenico (20:17):
So it looks like this is using YoPo or one of those review tools like YoPo and they’ve got great moderation tools. So it’s not necessarily hiding anything. It’s about maybe holding those reviews until you have enough that it’s a accurate reflection of your whole customer base, right?
Because what happens a lot of times is people are more likely to write a negative review and they’ve had a bad experience and that could be exactly UPS broke the box store in shipping and they’re mad, so they write a negative review. You don’t want that to be your only review. You want to have enough reviews where it’s an accurate reflection of your customer base still being authentic of course, which is sort of the purpose of the reviews. But it is okay to hold those until you have enough, even if you have the other products, have them and maybe one doesn’t, right?
Ruben Quinones (21:08):
Yeah, no, that’s an important note. And obviously there’s obviously importance in reviews, especially with Google search, but it’s a balancing act, right? Between the velocity of reviews, number one, getting to a certain level of what you would want to show and then moderating what would show up as well…
Tom Di Domenico (21:30):
To aggregate reviews from other sources, right? If you’re on Amazon as well, you can aggregate reviews with a lot of platforms and that’s another way to gain critical mass on your D2C site reviews.
Ruben Quinones (21:43):
Ben, anything else on this?
Ben Moore (21:45):
Yeah, actually it’s a very minor thing and it’s slightly relevant to this, but on a more broader term, if you look at under the pricing, there’s 12 and 24, you might notice that the pricing is you actually save if you buy a larger amount. Now, obviously it’s kind of clear that you do, but there’s no mention that you do.
Tom Di Domenico (22:11):
I don’t think it’s clear, Ben, I didn’t even notice that.
Ben Moore (22:14):
You didn’t work for that.
Tom Di Domenico (22:17):
You save that straight through the price with.
Ben Moore (22:20):
So you save like 4%.
Tom Di Domenico (22:21):
Buy more and save.
Ben Moore (22:23):
I didn’t know.
Ruben Quinones (22:23):
Either, Ben, only you would know that with your…
Ben Moore (22:29):
It’s a good way to increase a OV, right? So just mention it anywhere. It can be, like Tom said, you just cross it out and say save 4% or whatever. You’re right. Emphasize.
Ruben Quinones (22:40):
It’s such a simple thing.
Ben Moore (22:41):
Exactly.
Ruben Quinones (22:42):
But already two of the folks on this call didn’t even realize you do save. I mean maybe we should have noticed that, but when you’re so bombarded with websites and a whole bunch, those little things do matter.
Ben Moore (22:56):
And when you look at your own website all the time, when you look at your own website all the time, you don’t, you’re blind by it. Exactly, yes. So just tiny things like that are very crucial.
Tom Di Domenico (23:07):
The other thing that I feel like this site would really benefit would be more expedited payment methods for mobile. So this feels like a huge mobile. I would think 70% or more of sales on a site. This would come from mobile almost impulse purchases through meta ads or something like that. Having Apple Pay are actually the one I think we see the most traction with our clients with our eComm clients is Amazon Pay as a payment option on here would be great. This looks like it’s a Magento site Greene, so that should be doable. Technically speaking, it should be doable. So that would be really, I think that makes this a quick impulse purchase. There’s not much to think about. There’s PayPal on the checkout, but you can have an Apple Pay button right on the PDP and right from here I can check out without leaving a Facebook app and all that.
Ruben Quinones (23:58):
Yeah, and we talked about the homepage to PDP, but critical piece is even that checkout experience and then figuring out, I’m actually not able to add to car. I’m not sure if there’s an issue or because sharing my screen…
Ben Moore (24:15):
I actually had that issue too.
Ruben Quinones (24:16):
Yeah, okay. So that’s a huge opportunity, a huge problem.
Ben Moore (24:19):
That would be something to be fixed.
Ruben Quinones (24:21):
Is there with those little things like that. And by the way, I want—love that someone, a few folks just volunteer so that we can use this as a use case there tools that can notify, I know there are Tom, but off the top of my head, what can notify us if there’s something wrong like that add to cart in a particular PDP? Is there a go-to for that?
Tom Di Domenico (24:51):
Yeah, I mean it really varies. So in particular, this site looks like it’s on Magento. With Magento we tend to use New Relic, which is the Magento or the Adobe now as it’s not been Adobe now the Adobe cloud sort of preferred monitoring tool. But you could do it pretty simply with something like a ping gumm where you just create, set up a recurring test and every day, every hour, whatever you want, it’ll go through the site, add to cart, click checkout, and alert you if there’s any issues.
Ruben Quinones (25:22):
Because I was saying just for allowing us to do this, I’d love to buy a few. So if we can figure that out, and again, this is very normal that this stuff happens is so it’s like using a Pingdom to kind of notify you if something’s down. So big opportunity there. But I was mentioning that because even the checkout process, there’s this opportunity to even test with messaging and or imagery within that checkout process.
Ben Moore (25:58):
Exactly. So the checkout process is a very strong step. Obviously it shows that the user has intent and intent is exactly what we want. So at that point you want to emphasize brand trust, customer reviews, testimonials, ease of actually getting through the checkout. So simplified fields like Thomas was suggesting, simplified payment methods, but that is the moment where you want to push them over the edge with key messaging for sure.
Ruben Quinones (26:29):
I just noticed an interesting thing, the shopping cart is up here, so I just noticed this. So it was just adding items to it. I dunno if this is a Magento buggy thing.
Tom Di Domenico (26:42):
Yeah, it’s a design issue. So that’s a standard message that comes from Magento. And because of the way the logo is, it covers it. There is the cart icon in the top, but if you’re not seeing that, then that’s part of the issue too, right? But yeah, someone just said something about minicar functionality in the chat, so sometimes the little mini cart slides down and that’s kind of default Magento functionality. And on mobile, I actually noticed that same issue earlier on mobile, the logo is centered and covers the message well on mobile.
Ruben Quinones (27:17):
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. It might have just beat me, I don’t know, but I might be your average consumer. I didn’t even know it was in the cart, but actually I’ll pause for a quick question that came in around effective ways to optimize PDPs for search engines and user experience without compromising either That’s a bigger one. It might be a whole ‘nother.
Tom Di Domenico (27:39):
I mean there’s probably a few. I think the one that’s gaining a ton of popularity right now in the SEO community, thank you SEO team is the q and a feature. So that really helps people answer people’s questions about what they’re buying. And Google is love and Q and A’SE’s these days from what I hear from our SEO eComm experts.
Ruben Quinones (28:02):
And we will be doing another SEL session on PDP optimization next time is actually Amazon. But that is obviously a core area and always a little bit of a balancing act. Well, I will say I was doing a class night last night, I was explaining how product pages have a different bar of indexing and crawling from Google versus your more comprehensive articles. So your competition is your competition. Look at those products and try to understand why they’re there, but there’s so much more that goes into it. IC, equity, et cetera. A great topic for another one. And we mentioned we were using VWL as a tool for us. Why VWL? Ben? Just curious.
Ben Moore (28:53):
Purely out of experience. It’s a very advanced tool. It allows me to, I’m just basically used to it. I used to use it.
Tom Di Domenico (29:02):
We have clients who bring their own and in those cases we work with other tools as well for doing it at scale for us. VW has been a great partner for us too, flexible for us in terms of pricing for clients, getting clients a good rate on that tech stack.
Ruben Quinones (29:19):
I may check the speed on this too, right, because I’m noticing. So we could just use page speed insights from Google to understand.
Ben Moore (29:27):
Absolutely.
Site Audit #2: Clampco
Ruben Quinones (29:28):
Some things that we can do there. So let’s go on to another website before I get hungry. And again, thank you for whoever submitted this and totally different. We’re on, I think on the B2B spectrum, I guess this is, sorry, we literally are doing this live. We haven’t looked at this and that was intended so that we would have a first look at it and look at what pops up to us. But when you go on this homepage, Ben, we’ve got all the cookies, so I’ll allow all cookies.
Ben Moore (30:04):
So the cookies are fine. So the first thing I see is the hair banner, right? It’s really large and the content within it doesn’t really justify its size and it kind of hides the sections below, which are the key sections? Can you hover over the menus? Okay, so there’s also the issue that none of them have dropdowns.
Tom Di Domenico (30:40):
Is it on click?
Ruben Quinones (30:41):
The dropdown?
Ben Moore (30:42):
Maybe?
Ruben Quinones (30:44):
No. Interesting.
Ben Moore (30:46):
So yeah, that’s definitely something that would save a user a page and clear a step from the actual customer journey itself. So that’s an important thing. The search bar being rather large is really important as well because that’s obviously a very key feature. But the hero is the thing that keeps grabbing me here because the image is so big and there’s so much empty space there, there’s so much.
Tom Di Domenico (31:13):
That navigation then to me just doesn’t feel very product centric or shopping centric. Even just having home in the menu feels like a waste of…
Ben Moore (31:23):
A, it feels legacy.
Tom Di Domenico (31:25):
You can click the logo and even if not, is the homepage really where you’re trying to get people back to that’s a step back and user your journey, right? Yeah, for sure.
Ruben Quinones (31:35):
I want to make sure I’m hearing you correctly. You’re saying you would not have home in the…?
Tom Di Domenico (31:39):
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And just that buys you some real estate to work with too, right? Clear some clutter. I mean maybe there’s a reason you do want to drive people to the homepage, but usually you’re trying to get them further down the funnel than that, not backwards. And even the products, one link for products generally on a site like this, you probably have shop by product, type by industry, maybe multiple shop by product types. Again, just making it more product centric.
Ben Moore (32:14):
I like the shop by industry and shop by category. The sections down here, which split it up. That’s a really interesting and convenient thing to do. Reuben, let’s try something, try to get to a product page of anything. Let’s see how many steps it takes. So that’s one
Ruben Quinones (32:36):
Standard clamps.
Ben Moore (32:38):
Two.
Ruben Quinones (32:39):
And then I guess I have to click on one of these.
Ben Moore (32:42):
Three. Is there anywhere to buy it here yet?
Ruben Quinones (32:46):
No. And I wonder if this is a B2B, B2B quote. You go to…
Ben Moore (32:51):
Ah, okay. Yeah, that’s definitely it. But what happens when you click those names? So this is a PDP, right?
Tom Di Domenico (33:01):
Yeah.
Ben Moore (33:02):
So that’s four clicks to get to a PD DP. Interesting. There’s definitely room for, go ahead, Tom.
Tom Di Domenico (33:09):
And the message, the language around the fact that this is a B2B site, where’s sort of the lead gen along the way to get you to request an account or create an account to get pricing? It says pricing on request or something, right? It should be about getting value pricing B2B discounted pricing or something more of an incentive than saying you’re just not sharing the price with you. I mean, I would think I agree. And that’s a lot of clicks and that’s because the category structure in the menu. So a site like this that I would think is heavy on search, right?
Ben Moore (33:49):
Yeah, exactly. I was going to say the same thing.
Tom Di Domenico (33:50):
This is a clamp. Ruben, can you search for clamps in the menu?
Ben Moore (33:55):
Tom? I did the exact same thing. I was thinking the exact same thing in my head.
Tom Di Domenico (34:00):
So this is a site, I mean a no-brainer, benefits from a third party search tool, search spring Algolia, work with one of them, build out a first class search experience because I agree then we need to fix that category structure and that menu. But I bet 90% of people are coming to this site searching for exactly what they’re looking for anyway, right?
Ruben Quinones (34:27):
Oh, it’s funny though. If you do non plural, you’ll get it. Okay.
Tom Di Domenico (34:31):
So research, no search, no auto complete stuff that for a site like this you’re going to want, but…
Ben Moore (34:43):
I mean mobile must be even more complicated or cumbersome. So that’s something else to think about as well.
Ruben Quinones (34:50):
So it looks like there’s two big areas of opportunity, or at least that I’m kind of taking away as number one. I guess the logic should be more, I guess broad. I’m thinking Google ads here, broad match of whatever that product is, which is not just clamp.
Tom Di Domenico (35:09):
Such a Google guy, broad match.
Ruben Quinones (35:12):
Yeah, I know clamp we don’t get if we put clamps, so it’s something to kind of check on. And then in the PDP again, and we don’t have the business context here, so keep that in mind.
Ben Moore (35:26):
Yeah, exactly.
Ruben Quinones (35:26):
The assumption could be, I know obviously you contact sales, but hey, I’ll take their email address.
Tom Di Domenico (35:34):
Yeah, we then worked in, right, most of the time with these B2B sites. Yeah, there’s the eCommerce component, but it’s really about increasing the number of accounts, having a rep follow up with them or helping them find the rep for their area or their business size. So that’s, I think just missing from all the messaging here on the site. When you come here, if you’re not familiar with.
Ruben Quinones (35:55):
Yeah, you’re almost making it a little bit more, it’s harder for the decision maker or the buyer. Alright, contact sales. Actually, I don’t even know what number I’m supposed to call another. Great. So I think the, again, and you don’t know the Salesforce behind it, so maybe it’s minimal, but intuitively I would think I’ll take their email address and phone number so that sales can reach out to them, make it easier for them. So that looks like an opportunity, but also you build a database of those who were interested prospects. That to me might be a big change. I don’t even know that you need to test that by the way. But I think we would happen.
Ben Moore (36:42):
I do want to mention one thing, and this is something that we’ve been utilizing a little bit. I’m continuing to grow in, this would be a key website to use VWO on. And it wouldn’t be specifically for AB testing, it would be for session recording. I’d love to see how users actually navigate this website. We could determine how long they spend on particular pages to find the pain points in the actual journey and try to adjust it based on that. Heatmaps would also be fantastic for this site as well, I think.
Tom Di Domenico (37:18):
And maybe explain a little bit what session recording is, what that means for.
Ben Moore (37:21):
So it is a little creepy. It’s a little creepy. So basically what it means is when a user lands on the website, our software immediately starts recording ’em. It monitors their mouse movements, the pages they go to, how long they spend on those pages, what they do on those pages and maps out the journey. And when they actually exited or made a conversion and we collect them randomly, obviously we can’t collect them all. It would be illegal of course, but the VW uses a particular algorithms to pick specific users and it allows us to really see how users navigate websites. It’s fantastic.
Tom Di Domenico (38:02):
And I think we’ve seen, we’ve learned, we’ve gained insights from that that you would never get from just looking.
Ben Moore (38:10):
Oh, absolutely.
Tom Di Domenico (38:11):
Google Analytics. I always use the example, we had a client that had a email signup form in the top right corner of their header and we would never have known, but we looked at the session recordings and realized everyone thought it was a search box, right? Search into an email signup form. You’re just not going to get that insight from Google Analytics.
Ruben Quinones (38:34):
So you were getting a lot of emails.
Tom Di Domenico (38:37):
Yeah, well, and it makes sense. Where is the search box typically on a site for a bite. So how it ended up there, I don’t know before our time with the client, but regardless, it’s a really great insight. So yeah, session recordings are very cool and yes, very creepy at times, Ben. But important to note anonymous and it does not show any sensitive data that people.
Ben Moore (39:00):
Not at all. Oh no. It hides all sensitive data. Yeah.
Tom Di Domenico (39:03):
It’s privacy.
Ruben Quinones (39:05):
Included.
Ben Moore (39:06):
For sure.
CRO Testing Recommendations
Ruben Quinones (39:06):
Two things that I don’t even think you need to test is obviously fix these search logic to capture plural version. Other versions, clearly they’re okay with someone reaching out because it’s on the contact us. So maybe putting that on the PDP as a field would make sense. I don’t know that it would even test that. So as far as, hey, what is the first test you would do on this site? Is there anything that kind of sticks out to you? Would it be the homepage?
Ben Moore (39:36):
Oh, for sure. It would be the homepage. It would be the homepage for sure, because obviously it’s the highest traffic. And the reason we do that pick the highest traffic page story is because it gets us data insights way faster, obviously getting way more traffic and we’re getting answers to our experiments way faster. And we usually always start small as well. So it’ll be a minor change. It will probably be like the CTA here, which change the color of the verbiage, see how it resonates with the visitors, and then we can determine future tests going forward.
Ruben Quinones (40:07):
And then I wanted to make sure, hey, if you were going to test the first thing on this first site that we saw, it would probably be the homepage. What would be the first test you’d do here?
Ben Moore (40:24):
It would probably be the padding for the CTA I think. Or reducing the size of the icon slightly to see. And we’ll be fairly slight just to see how much impact that has on the CTA. And then like I said, we can build from there. But for the most part, I actually genuinely love how this website looks.
Tom Di Domenico (40:44):
I would test different messaging in the hero on mobile. I think we all are making an assumption that the allergen thing is the thing that’s going to drive sales here. But I think we talk about a lot about guiding people through the funnel and that starts offsite. So where is the majority of traffic coming from? Are they coming from an ad that already told them about the allergen benefits and now we need to follow up with the secondary messaging in the journey of flavor. So I would test different messaging in that hero as well because that’s such a simple test to run.
Ruben Quinones (41:23):
All right and let’s support them. Let’s go and buy some. I’m going to buy a heat seeker now that I know where the ET card is so we can go ahead and support them. Thank you both, whoever submitted these. Thank you. This is a lot of fun and would love to maybe do this again in the near future is if you’re interested in us having fun with your site, kind of looking at it and letting you know.
Tom Di Domenico (41:54):
Definitely nothing. Not problems, just opportunities.
Ben Moore (42:00):
Always.
Tom Di Domenico (42:01):
Ben says all the time, right? I’m stealing your lines here Ben, but CRO is never really done. You can always optimize more. So even if you have a great site, we can,
Ben Moore (42:12):
There’s always opportunities for CRO, always.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Ruben Quinones (42:15):
Alright, so I think with that, I dunno if you guys want to leave us with anything, otherwise we’re going to wrap that up here because I think I’m good. I think it’s at the end of the people.
Tom Di Domenico (42:26):
Who sent in the sites and those who contributed in the chat.
Ruben Quinones (42:30):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then whoever’s watching the recording, a lot of views come in over the weekend, which is pretty intense weekend to be. It’s when you have downtime. I totally get it. So Ben, I want to think a big deal though.
Tom Di Domenico (42:49):
Catalina wine mixer of live streams, right? I love that, “Stepbrothers”. No one. Got it.
Ruben Quinones (42:57):
So Tom, I want to thank you again. Always great having you Ben as well. Appreciate your time and yeah, let’s do this again sometime please. And that’s it. So next session, we will be in three weeks, October 25th, and we’re going to bring in Matt Pulley from Conduit Brands who we partner with when it comes to Amazon’s storefront or PDP optimization. So he’s going to share kind of latest secrets. I don’t want secrets, but latest optimization techniques for your PDP on Amazon. So it’ll just be all Amazon if you have an Amazon store, if you know someone who has an Amazon store, we’ll get put the link probably right after the recording up, the image is ready to go and then we’ll go from there. But I want to thank you for tuning in. I appreciate your time. So I guess that’s it. So have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, whenever you watching this. And I’ll see you next time.
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