February 28 2018

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Part 3: The Importance of an Integrated Approach

Last month, we asked a few of our team members to share their predictions on the digital trends to look for in 2018. In the first post of our 3-Part Series, we discussed how businesses should evolve their PPC strategies to remain competitive in today’s Age of Assistance.

In Part 2, we discussed the importance of empowering your website’s visitors through purposeful & engaging content, and a great website experience on all devices.

In the final post of our 3-Part Series, we will be tying it all together with three case studies that show how using an integrated approach can guide your online strategies in the right direction by focusing on convenience, personalization and experience.

What it all boils down to is that users are expecting three things: convenience, personalization & a great experience. After all, it’s what you expect when you are the prospective buyer, isn’t it? If you visit a website and it takes a while to load, how likely are you to leave the website and start your search over again? If you land on a page that doesn’t answer the questions you were asking in your search or presents you with an overwhelming amount of information, how does that impact the chances of you doing business with that company?

Convenience

Who doesn’t like convenience? These days, businesses that make things easier for us are those that we choose in the end. Take the U.S. online grocery market for example, which is estimated to generate sales worth nearly 14.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2017. While we can’t all start our own online grocery delivery service, we can learn from our patterns as consumers that we gravitate towards convenience. The same can be applied to your website.

In the case study below, the TopSpot team used heatmapping software to make a website’s forms more convenient for its users.

Pollution Systems, a leader in the design, manufacturing, installation and service of high-quality air pollution control equipment, had an RFQ form with an option to click a checkbox and expose additional form fields should the user want to include more information when submitting a quote request.

After installing heatmapping analytics onto the page, their Customer Relationship Team (CRT for short) found that users were clicking the checkbox to expand the form, viewing the additional fields, and then unchecking the box to hide the fields again.

Expanding Form Prior to Changes

By clicking on the checkbox above, the form expanded, revealing the additional fields shown in the image on the right.

Updated FormThe team concluded that users were seeing the 10 optional form fields and choosing either not to enter the additional information or abandoning the form altogether.

TopSpot modified the form by shortening the number of fields and making them all visible when viewing the page.

Since consolidating the form and removing the checkbox option altogether (as shown), the form’s abandonment rate has decreased by nearly 4%.

More importantly, Quote Request form completions have increased by 42% and have generated nearly 100 additional leads in the 9 months since the change was made.

Personalization

By looking through your paid search data, you will find information that you can use to improve your website content and create a more personalized experience on the pages that your users are landing on. Not only can PPC data guide your content strategy, it can also bring about new opportunities for your business.

In our 2nd case study, the TopSpot team identified a new area of opportunity for a current client that drastically grew the number of leads the company was receiving on a monthly basis.

Aluma Photo Plate is a manufacturer of nameplates, decals & more for industrial and commercial industries. During the recent oil & gas decline,  Aluma was struggling to find new business leads and needed to diversify their offerings and expand their online presence for industries outside of oil & gas.

When reviewing Aluma’s PPC search queries, their team found that they were getting traffic for searches related to replacement VIN tags and hull plates for over-the-road vehicles. While this was not something they had made before, they had the capabilities & knowledge to do so.

While potential customers were already finding the site when looking for these products, the current landing page did not speak to their needs, resulting in zero inquiries. To create a more personalized experience for these users, content that spoke to the industry requirements needed to compete in the VIN tag replacement space online was written. A custom form was added to the landing page to guide users through the VIN tag request process and PPC ads were optimized for VIN tags and hull plates.

The landing page now ranks in the top positions for VIN tag replacement, hull identification number plate, and VIN plate replacement searches, while also driving 69% of the website’s total organic traffic (shown below).

Organic traffic per landing page The graph above shows the percentage of organic traffic per landing page.

More importantly, the custom form has driven 250 additional leads since it was added to the landing page in May 2017. This averages out to be nearly 28 additional leads each month.

Experience

No matter how much traffic your online efforts are driving, users must have a good experience on your site to ultimately choose your business. When visiting a website, how much attention do you pay to the website’s content and the Calls to Action (or button text) you are presented with? Have you tested your user experiences against the current verbiage on your own website?

In the example below, our team used an A/B test to determine what action driving verbiage worked best for a client, ultimately improving the user experience and driving more leads through the site.  

The digital team working with D&K Engineering, a provider of product design and contract manufacturing services, recommended an A/B Test focused on the main Call to Action verbiage that was used throughout the website.

With the goal of increasing the company’s online leads, they proposed testing the original verbiage, Project Inquiry with more conversational text, Schedule a Conversation. (shown below)

variations a and b

After gathering results for only 21 days, the results were clear. Not only was the more conversational button, Schedule a Conversation, garnering more clicks, but those clicks also generated 5 form submissions, while the original text, Project Inquiry, generated zero. Five forms within 21 days is significant considering the value typically associated with their projects.

AB Test Results

The new conversational calls to action were implemented throughout the site shortly after the experiment ended. Since the new conversational calls to action were implemented throughout the site, form submissions have gone from averaging 20 per month to 32.5. This is a 62.5% increase in online form submissions for the business.

Conclusion

When it comes to the search engine world, there will always be changes and updates, most of which are out of our control. And while approaching your online strategies is not a one size fits all type of thing, the principles we used in the case studies above can be applied to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

By keeping convenience, personalization & a great experience in mind, you can stay relevant no matter the update. And by looking at your website through the eyes of your users, utilizing your analytics data, and always looking for new opportunities to test, you are setting yourself up for success in today’s Age of Assistance.


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