What Should I Be Testing?

What Should I Be Testing?

Dennis van der Heijden
November 14, 2014
A/B testing call-to-action buttons

In this webinar hosted by Convert Academy, we have Carlos Del Rio, the former Director of Conversion, Analysis and Data Strategy at Unbounce, cover several topics on how you can create awesome landing pages and the various factors you need to consider. You can watch the full webinar here.

Carlos Del Rio is the co-author of User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want and A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media. He believes that proper use of traffic analysis and breaking down barriers between web-involved departments is fundamental for businesses to succeed in a web driven economy.

In the webinar, Del Rio discussed three landing page tests used by Unbounce to determine which landing page converts best. One of the things they tested was their secondary call to action. In all their test versions, they included a button that would take the site visitor to a level he would want to come in and choose their package.

Testing Secondary CTAs

It was later determined that no button works best despite the fact that the purpose of the secondary call to action was to take the user to the primary call to action. It also ended up being too distracting. One of the main things you should consider with respect to using a call to action is ensuring that your page is devoid of things that a visitor might interact with that will not do you any justice in closing or realizing your call to action.

Keep in mind, there are practices you must consider when choosing secondary call to actions. According to Pamela Vaughan’s Everything Marketers Should Know About Secondary CTAs, when choosing a secondary CTA you should:

  1. Determine your Goals
  2. Don’t Compete With Your Primary CTA — Complement It
  3. Take the Person’s Lifecycle Stage Into Consideration
  4. Take the Visitor’s Interests into Consideration
  5. Don’t Overdo It, and
  6. Avoid Using Secondary CTAs on Landing Pages

A secondary CTA is a call-to-action that provides an alternative conversion opportunity or action to the primary action you ideally want visitors, prospects, or leads to take. – Pamela Vaughan

Landing Page Goals

Del Rio went on to highlight the version that emerged as the best in the tests in terms of conversion. The shortest version was determined to be the best out of the three and some of the reasons identified included a combination of a clear benefit-driven and simple presentation complete with visual elements that describe what services are needed for the best conversion rate.

[Tweet “A landing page should have a clear benefit-driven and simple presentation complete with visual elements”]

Thus, based on the best version Unbounce had, your goal should be to have a (1) Clear headline, with a (2) Call to action, plus a (3) Demo of the service or product you deal in (benefits included). The demonstration in question could be a lot of things: it could be an image, or a video, or it could be audio. You have a lot of things you can do here, but the first thing on your mind should be to communicate the value of your product to your customer. Otherwise realizing conversion will be difficult. Visitors are not going to engage if they don’t have anything to gain from your demonstration.

How to make her say YES

Armed with that information, your support element should try to answer the question, ‘How can I scale back and make it easier for the person to say yes?’. Additionally, what you can do is include slides explaining something about you and your product/service. As you embark through the process of optimizing conversion, make sure that you take care of all these major points. Having done that, you should be making some good progress by the time you get through one or two cycles if you tested all these steps, which could also mean you have a significantly better page. You can view the presentation in its entirety here.

What Should I Be A/B Testing?

Originally published November 14, 2014 - Updated April 15, 2019
Dennis van der Heijden
Co-founder and CEO of Convert.com, Dennis is a passionate community builder and out of the box thinker. He spends his time innovating to make Convert Experiences better. Learn about his journey as an entrepreneur and leader on the SaaS Club podcast.
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