This is both a Case Study and a Love Story
Reflecting on that headline, I think to myself – and not for the first time – “wow, I’m such a geek”
Why is this a love story? Well I love Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), and I think all my clients should love CRO too.
To this end I often enthusiastically share the merits of CRO with my clients (or prospective clients).
However a discussion on CRO generally comes towards the tail end of 1 or 2 hours of discussion on marketing strategy, and by that stage I can see people are getting towards the end of their threshold for marketing concepts for one day.
In my mind it’s a 100% mandatory item for any media schedule, and has been long on my todo list to put together a super simple case study to really illustrate the potential of CRO, and here it is.
The most important line on the media schedule
At iCreate, we have the holy trinity of web development, media, and creative specialists under one roof. We believe you need equal measures of strategy, creative talent, and technical know how to really get a lead capture page (LCP) setup correctly and humming. Especially considering the complexity involved in aggregating performance tracking data across a number of media channels.
We are often providing a holistic service for clients that starts right from the initial strategy and branding, through the creation of collateral, through launch and rolling campaigns to sell out.
Because we are involved not just in the creation of a lead capture page (LCP) but are also often running the media – we are extremely aware of just how pivotal the LCP is to success.
While the key takeaways of this article are unlikely to be new information to you, the sad fact is that in most cases a lead capture page is created at the start of a project, tons of money is used to pump traffic towards it, and it is never measured or thought of again. It’s a line item on a creative list to tick off like a brochure and once completed, it’s only updated if a price changes.
No, no no!
If you are spending good money to send traffic to a Lead Capture Page, then it’s of prime importance that this is tested and optimised (CRO). Often this occurs via a series of traditional A/B split tests, but multi-variance tests can often save time. While testing is a big part of CRO, we often encounter situations where it makes a lot of sense to duplicate and vary the lead capture page to suit different buyer profiles or product types. It can make a very big difference tailoring your message to suit different situations.
Let’s just go ahead and show an example. I’ve blurred out some details to anonymise the project.
The Case Study
This quite vanilla A/B split test, ran for about 3 weeks to get sufficient data for the software (Google Optimize) to have statistical certainty of the results.
The reason I chose this split test specifically to take screenshots of, is the number of conversions on the winning LCP was exactly double. I won’t go into all the detail of showing the alternate versions, what the difference was, and hypothesising on why the change made people so much more likely to act. Just know we weren’t satisfied with the conversion rate of a new LP, and we wanted to see if a different approach to some key copy might help, so we setup a split test and this is what happened.
The below screenshot shows the
- New version received 18 conversions at a rate of 4.1%,
- vs 9 conversions with the original version, at a paltry 1.8%.
In Google Analytics we can see the significant improvement of conversion rate since this split test, and further CRO will seek to get more value from the LCP.
In money terms, this has resulted in a decrease of about $60 per conversion (averaged across all media channels) for this client.
… and that’s why I love CRO.
This is just one example of many. This one had a particularly obvious effect. Often each improvement is smaller in scale, but after a few rounds of CRO the gains quickly add up.
The Takeaway
iCreate often works with property developers, but we perform CRO for all industries where lead generation is the objective. The take away for you is threefold.
- CRO is cheap, and the ROI potential is high. Usually it’s only a few hours a month to setup rolling tests and measure the results.
- It increases the effectiveness of your advertising dollar, bringing down your cost per lead.
- The more leads through to your sales team generally equal more sales and a faster sellout.