Theresa Baiocco will be speaking on CRO at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I run Conversion Max out of Bend with my husband, Richard Farr. We’ve been providing consulting for mid-sized businesses since 2008. I specialize in CRO and have a Master’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Colorado, as well as a Master Certification in CRO from Market Motive. I’m a repeat speaker at well-known conferences such as Pubcon and Conversion Conference. I have a 3-year old son named Oliver, who got my red hair. We go through a lot of sunscreen at our house.
2) What are the aspects of landing page testing tend to have the greatest impact on ROI?
First, it’s important to understand the difference between Landing Page Optimization (LPO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
LPO entails dissecting individual pages to make sure they match the ad (or other traffic source), gathering data on user interaction with the page, creating a hypothesis of what you think will get more people to take a desired action, then testing that. It’s just one aspect of the bigger field of CRO.
The aspects of testing that have the biggest impact on ROI usually fall under CRO rather than LPO, because CRO requires gathering qualitative and quantitative data on the entire site and the user’s journey through it. The biggest problems aren’t always on the initial landing page; sometimes they’re on a page halfway down the funnel. Furthermore, increasing conversion rate and conversion value isn’t always solved with testing; sometimes the answer is bigger and more complex than a simple test.
There’s no quick, one-size-fits-all magic answer. Instead of merely following a checklist of landing page best practices, you’ll get the best ROI if you take the time to:
1. Get a deep understanding of the wants, needs and psychographics of your target market
2. Know your industry: do a SWOT analysis, study your competitors
3. Gather qualitative and quantitative data from several different sources to see a more complete picture of what’s hurting conversions
4. Prioritize all those problems based on expected impact + resources needed to test/fix each one
5. Create your hypothesis of what you think will fix each problem
6. Run your test
7. Document what you learned from the test, regardless of whether it won
8. Repeat. You’ll never convert 100% of your site’s visitors but your goal should be continual improvement. The Web is fluid; if you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind.
3) Does one need a platform like Optimizely to do effect landing page testing or can it be done effectively without a platform?
To do it right, you should definitely invest in a platform like Optimizely, VWO, Convert, etc. Even with a platform, the skills you need for effective CRO include HTML/CSS, Javascript, UX, design, psychology, copywriting, and statistics. Without a platform, you’d be like the people who spend all their time and money trying to get “free” traffic. A better use of time and money is to make traffic worth more, and just buy more of it (don’t get me started on that!). Your time is valuable. Don’t limit your business’s growth by wasting it on something you could just buy. Not only do the platforms make it faster and easier to run tests, they also decrease the probability of making dangerous mistakes by trying to “homebake” CRO.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.