Back to Basics: What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of improving your website to drive visitors towards desired actions — actions such as buying a product, filling out a lead generation form, or signing up for a mailing list. Conversion centered design not only helps you increase conversion rates, but it also plays a massive role in improving the user experience of your page which can transform visitors into customers.

Conversion Optimisation through A/B Testing

One of the most effective ways of optimising conversion rates is through A/B testing. This is the process of splitting visitors between two variations of a web page and comparing the conversion rate of each variation. This can be used to test very different versions of pages, or for smaller design components such as the design of a form, placement of a call to action, a sign up to a newsletter or something as simple as a colour scheme or headings. A/B testing is a great tool for designers and web developers as it enables them to remove personal opinion and instead, base design decisions on real data from the site visitors.

Let’s look at an example. We could create an A/B test that tests the placement of an email call to action button on our ‘Contact Us’ page. On one version the call to action could be below the fold and on the other the call to action could be above the fold. The call to action above the fold may increase conversions by 45%. But that does not mean that we can expect to see similar results for all other pages. If you apply the same positioning to another landing page, say, for training seminars, the call to action below the fold could create a higher conversion rate. This might be because visitors need more information before they will pay to attend a seminar than they do to simply send an email.

Starting the Test Process:

The single most important thing to consider when designing a landing page is to establish the primary objective of the page. Is this page driving online sales, donations, enquiries? Identify what it is that you want visitors to do when they arrive on your site. This is the action that we will test.
After the objective of the page has been established list out all of the elements the page will require in order to achieve this goal. Listing the different elements will allow you to create the hierarchy of your elements, but it will also help you to remove any unnecessary elements from the page that don’t support the pages primary objective. Once you have a list of all the elements for the page it is important to match these with clear and concise content. If the content is short, easy to digest and relevant to the page objective, in most cases, this will help improve the engagement levels of your visitors, the more engaged visitors are with your page will increase your chances of creating a conversion. It is important to note that this is not always the case, sometime more content works better. It is always important to test!

The placement of elements on your page should be done in a way that helps direct your visitors to the most important elements. Key elements of your message should be given prime position, this means they should generally be placed above the fold to ensure maximum visibility and attract attention from your visitors. Testing the placement of key elements on a page is a great way to see what works best for you customers but also for individual pages within your site.

Keep on Testing!

It is important to note that conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process. You should always be testing to ensure you maintain a high conversion rate for all of your pages. Just because a page has been performing well, doesnt mean in 6 months or even a year that the page will still be performing well.

Tips & Tricks

1. Establish the primary objective of your page.
2. Apply design principles (colour, layout, size etc) to create a visual hierarchy to attract attention to the key elements of your message.
3. Ensure your copy and content is relevant to you page objective, remove any unnecessary elements.
4. A/B testing is an ongoing process, never stop testing!

Upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns: A Step-by-Step Guide

Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns which were announced in early March have now rolled out to all advertisers. Google AdWords users have until mid-2013 to upgrade to the new Enhanced Campaigns. If you haven’t upgraded before mid-year, Google will automatically upgrade your campaigns. We recommend doing it yourself so that you have control over the changes.

Depending on your campaigns, upgrading can be a bit time consuming. So, follow this step-by-step guide to save you some time:

Step 1: Select the primary campaign

We will establish one primary campaign into which we will merge ad groups, keywords, ads and all other settings from our other campaigns. In order to make best use of historical data, we recommend choosing your most important campaign. For example, you may have a campaign that contains the majority of your ads, which is targeted at desktop PCs only, and a second campaign targeted at mobiles. In this case your desktop campaign would be your primary campaign, and the mobile campaign would be a secondary campaign. Make your selection based on historical data such as:

• Budget
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Number of ad groups
• Size of keyword list

Your other campaigns are secondary. Once we have merged them into the primary campaigns, they can be paused.

Step 2: Merge campaign settings

Check the settings of the primary campaign to make sure these are the ones you want to keep. Make sure you check:

• Status
• Location
• Language
• Networks
• Ad Schedule
• Bid Type
• Delivery Method
• Ad rotation
• Campaign Start and End Dates

Step 3: Upgrade the primary campaign

Select the primary campaign and update this one to Enhanced.

Step 4: Set your mobile bid adjustment

All Enhanced Campaigns run across all devices (desktops, mobiles and tablets). You can adjust your mobile bid on a campaign basis, so that your mobile bids will be up to 90% lower, or 300% higher than your desktop bids (tablet bids will be aligned with your desktop bids). To work out how you should be adjusting your bid, segment your data by device and compare the conversion rate of your mobile results with your normal desktop results.

As we'll see in Step 6, we can also make bid adjustments for locations, days, times, and any ad group-level targeting methods. These can be set from -90% to +900%. For mobile devices, you can set bid adjustments for -100%, or in the range between -90% and +300%.

Step 5: Merge your campaigns

You will now need to make sure that everything that you've set up in your secondary campaigns is merged into the primary campaign. You will need to do this for each of the following:

1. Ad groups
   Copy all ad groups from the secondary campaigns into primary campaign.
2. Keywords
   Copy all keywords from the secondary campaigns into the primary campaign.
3. Placements and audiences (for Display Network ads)
   Copy all placements and audiences from the secondary campaigns into the primary campaign.
   This is only applicable for campaigns targeting the Google Display Network.
4. Merge ads
   Copy all ads from the secondary campaigns into the primary campaign. This is a good opportunity to review the data for each ad and select only the best scoring ads of each campaign to merge.
5. Merge extensions
   Copy all the extensions from the secondary campaigns into the primary campaign.
   Make sure you check:
   
   • Location Extensions
   • Call Extensions
   • Sitelinks Extensions
   • Product Extensions
   • Social Extensions
   • Dynamic Search Ad Extensions
   • Mobile App Extensions
6. Merge conversion tracking
   
   • If your primary and secondary campaigns are in the same account, you don’t have to make any changes as the conversion tracking will continue to work as it did.
   • If your primary and secondary campaigns are in different accounts you have to make a new conversion tag for the secondary campaigns within the account of your primary campaign. You can then use this tag to replace the current one at your website.
   If you haven’t had a mobile campaign running before, you might want to set up extra conversion tracking for mobile as well (eg. call tracking).
7. Merge campaign budgets
   The final step of merging your campaigns is to multiply the budgets of all of them and use this to set a new budget for your primary campaign.

Step 6: Set other bid adjustments

Now, as in a similar way to what we did for mobile bid adjustments in Step 4, you can use historical data from your previous campaigns to set a bid adjustment between -90% and +900% for:

• Days & Times
  You can set a bid adjustment for every hour of every day (eg. during business hours or meal times)
• Locations
  There’s no longer any need to set up separate campaigns for different locations, as you can now adjust your bids on a location basis.
• Display Network
  You can adjust your bid by ad group when targeting the display network. You can set a bid adjustment for:
  • Topics
  • Placements
  • Keywords
  • Remarketing

Step 7: Pause the secondary campaign

Now that you've merged all campaigns into your primary Enhanced Campaign, you can pause your secondary campaigns.

5 Easy Steps to Creating Data-driven Marketing Campaigns

The great Avinash Kaushik, Google's own analytics evangelist, says he spends most of his time attempting to understand and clearly define a problem before trying to solve it. Applying this logic to your marketing efforts, the more you can pre-plan, the easier it is to successfully execute campaigns.



Follow these steps to ensure your next campaign is informed by data.

1. Define the purpose of your campaign.

Marketing campaigns should be working to advance the business strategy, to improve or answer a consumer need or for another purpose that makes sense to your brand.

Before you begin to brainstorm, define the purpose of the campaign and how it relates back to your marketing objectives. For instance, are you running a campaign with the aim of generating new business leads, nurturing existing leads or increasing reach on social media?

Answer the 'who, what, where, when and why'. Make sure your purpose relates to your target audience and leverage your marketing channels to reach this segment.

2. Set realistic goals and timelines.

Your goals should go hand-in-hand with the purpose of your campaign, but they are NOT one and the same. Goals need to be measurable. Identify the metrics that you'll use as a benchmark by comparing past campaigns.

You might set a goal as a number of downloads for your white paper, a percentage of likes to the impressions of Facebook posts or a percentage of unique visits to your landing page.

Also set realistic timelines so you're ready to simultaneously launch across channels for maximum exposure.

3. Set clear parameters.

Does the audience understand the rules and know what the prize is? Make sure your landing page includes all the information visitors need, including clear terms and conditions.

Don't overcomplicate steps. Make the desired engagement simple enough for your audience to follow through.

Choose a clearly-defined call-to-action. You might ask people to 'download a white-paper' to generate new leads or ask that your current customers to 'share a post' on Facebook to increase social reach. Whatever it is, make the primary call-to-action clear and prominent.

4. Tag campaigns URLs.

We cannot stress enough the importance of tagging campaign links so you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Tagging lets you see where someone found the link and how they interacted with your site.

Your primary concern should be tagging URLs that point to the landing page of your site. Otherwise, as a good practice, you should only tag links from social media if they are paid advertisements.

Try our free URL builder tool if you need assistance with tagging your campaign links. Then, have the analytics team test to ensure you've tagged correctly and consistently. Otherwise, a simple error here and you won't see your hard work in Google Analytics!

5. Analyse the data.

After you've run your campaign, compare the metrics to your original objectives. How did you go?

You can look at Google Analytics data for your landing page to see where visitors came from and how they interacted with your page. See if you can identify which channels contributed to its success and which channels under-performed.

It's equally important to understand your marketing efforts in context, comparing them to similar marketing campaigns you've run. If you've run a split test, are the results statistically significant to go with the winning option?

Finally, don't forget to apply the lessons you've learned when you plan your next marketing campaign.

YouTube video tracking into Google Analytics

If you have a website with embedded YouTube videos you can track how your visitors interact with the player inside Google Analytics.

This will provide you with an understanding of how people have interacted with your videos, whether they clicked on play, and whether they actually watched it through to the end. We can use this information to gain richer insights into how each of our videos are being used, which videos users actually watch, and which ones they turn off.

In this blog post we will focus on the required setup for new asynchronously loaded YouTube Player API: the IFrame API. This is the latest version of the YouTube embed code. If you're using an earlier version of the YouTube embed code, the below steps won't work. You'll need to either upgrade your embed method, or find an alternative approach.

Required Setup Steps

Below we will run through the steps required to implement YouTube video tracking on your website:

1. Create a <div> element in the body that will hold the YouTube video:
   

   <div id="player"></div>

2. We follow this with the beginning of our script block which loads the YouTube iFrame API:
   

   <script>
   var tag = document.createElement('script');
   tag.src = "http://www.youtube.com/player_api";
   var firstScriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
   firstScriptTag.parentNode.insertBefore(tag, firstScriptTag);
     

3. Once the API for the player is loaded it calls the onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() function. The next part of our script block listens for this call. You'll need to add the below code beneath the code you added in step 2. When you do this, you'll need to change the videoID as well as the video height and width.

   var player;
   var lastAction = '';
       function onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() {
           player = new YT.Player('player', {
               height: '390',
               width: '640',
               videoId: 'u1zgFlCw8Aw',
               events: {
                   'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange
               }
           });
       }
     

4. For every video player status change, the function onPlayerStateChange() is called by the YouTube iFrame API. What we do is the below code block is to trigger a Google Analytics event triggered depending on the current status which is included in the data property of the event parameter (event.data). Add the following code beneath the code from step 3 and that will finish up our script block.

   function onPlayerStateChange(event) {
       switch (event.data){
           case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING:
               _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Playing', player.getVideoUrl()]);
               break;
           case YT.PlayerState.ENDED:
               _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Completed', player.getVideoUrl()]);
               break;
           case YT.PlayerState.PAUSED:
           if (lastAction != 'paused'){
               _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Paused', player.getVideoUrl()]);
           lastAction = 'paused';
           }
               break;
               }
           }
   </script>
     

The Complete Code

To save you the trouble of pasting all the code together, we've got the complete code below. Be sure to follow the instructions and change all the highlighted values!

<div id="player"></div>
<script>
    var tag = document.createElement('script');
    tag.src = "http://www.youtube.com/player_api";
    var firstScriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    firstScriptTag.parentNode.insertBefore(tag, firstScriptTag); 

    var player;
    var lastAction = '';
        function onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() {
            player = new YT.Player('player', {
                height: '390',
                width: '640',
                videoId: 'u1zgFlCw8Aw',
                events: {
                    'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange
                }
            });
        }

        function onPlayerStateChange(event) {
            switch (event.data){
                case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING:
                    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Playing', player.getVideoUrl()]);
                    break;
                case YT.PlayerState.ENDED:
                    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Completed', player.getVideoUrl()]);
                    break;
                case YT.PlayerState.PAUSED:
                    if (lastAction != 'paused'){
                    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Paused', player.getVideoUrl()]);
                    }else{
                        lastAction = 'paused';
                    }
                    break;
                }
            }
</script>

It is worth noting the case for YT.PlayerState.PAUSE, that is, when we pause the video. To account for this case we've saved the previous action in the variable ‘lastAction', and if our previous action was ‘paused', then we don't register an event. This is to avoid triggering countless GA events when using the scrub option (dragging the play location ball).

In the example above , we use:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','video', 'Playing', player.getVideoUrl()]);

For those who need a refresher on event parameters, this represents:

Category > video
Action > Playing
Label > Video URL (taken dynamically from the API)

If you want to customise your javascript tracking setup, you can check the player status using integer values or namespaced ones (like in our example).

The possible values returned according the status are:

Integer values	Namespaced
-1 : no started yet 0 : ended 1 : playing 2 : paused 3 : buffering 5 : video cued.	YT.PlayerState.ENDED YT.PlayerState.PLAYING YT.PlayerState.PAUSED YT.PlayerState.BUFFERING YT.PlayerState.CUED

Setting up Goals

Now that your tracking is all working, you can set up event-based goals in Google Analytics. You might want to set up the completion event as a goal, as this indicates that a user has fully engaged with your video content.

Google Analytics User Conference (GAUC)

Sydney & Melbourne 2013

Loves Data is Principal Presenting Partner for Google Analytics User Conference (GAUC) - Sydney 19 June and Melbourne 21 June 2013.

Loves Data, Search & Analytics Director, Benjamin Mangold, has confirmed Google's own Analytics Advocate, Justin Cutroni, will be the keynote speaker in Sydney and Melbourne.

Singapore-based Xoogler Vinoaj "Vinny" Vijeyakumaar will also join the line-up of Google Analytics experts sharing the latest trends and features at GAUC - Sydney & Melbourne 2013.

Topics will include using Google Analytics for remarketing campaigns, advanced attribution models, and the latest techniques for capturing and visualising data to make it easier to report on and action.

Google Analytics experts at GAUC 2013

GAUC 2013 is a unique opportunity for Google Analytics users involved in measuring and improving websites, online marketing campaigns, reporting and strategy development, to interact with each other and to engage directly with leading Google Analytics experts.

Audience members from Australia's first Google Analytics User Conference in Sydney listen closely (left) to Google Analytics certified experts such as Benjamin Mangold (featured right).

GAUC Marketing and Technical Tracks

GAUC 2013 - Sydney & Melbourne will feature marketing and technical tracks to flexibly meet the particular needs of attendees while sharing new and upcoming capabilities of Google Analytics and how to use them.

Book now!

GAUC - Sydney on Wednesday 19 June 2013
GAUC - Melbourne on Friday 21 June 2013

Want more on GAUC 2013?

Check out last year's interview with Analytics Advocate Justin Cutroni and Benjamin Mangold, Search & Analytics Director of Loves Data, on measuring social media and segmenting data in Google Analytics!