In this episode Greg shares with you an interview he had with the very successful, very smart Mr Neil Patel. Below is a shortened transcript of the interview. Also check out the links below to the resources mentioned in this episode, they are not to be missed.
Crazyegg is an amazing tool that does Heatmaps, Scrollmaps etc. What are any key learning’s you can share with us about how site visitors navigate around websites?
Neil: Some general usability tweaks and tips for people. One that most people don’t realize is when you’re on checkout pages remove all forms of navigation and you’ll typically boost conversion rates.
The other thing I’ve found is two step checkout processes usually have a 10% higher conversion rate than a one step checkout process. Think of it like dating. Think about marriage. You can’t just ask someone “Hey, will you marry me?” It never happens, unless you’re in Vegas and you’re trashed. But, what end up happening is something like, “wow you’re awesome, let’s go out for coffee.” You do coffee. Then, you may end up kissing them. You end up meeting their parents. You get to know them. You date for a while. You live together. Then, you may end up getting married. It’s this whole process. Psychologically speaking, the web is the same way. If I convince you to give me your email address and password or your name and email address, you’re already like “Well, I already gave Neil my email and password so I might as well just finish the purchase.”
But, when you give someone a daunting page that has all these fields they’re just like ‘wow, this is so much to do, I’m just going to leave’. When you’ve already got someone to commit with micro-commitments, they are much more likely to convert into a customer. What about sliders, or they’re sometimes called carousels. Is one or many better for conversion?
Neil: I’ve done a ton of A/B testing and all my data shows that carousels decrease conversions. Carousels are just distracting. The biggest thing that actually impacts a website’s usability and conversions is typically text. That’s the number one thing that people should be focusing on from instead of images and carousels and all these bells and whistles. You don’t need fancy websites. You need to tell people what they’re going to get, show it to them, convince them to buy it with testimonials, case studies etc, and then let them buy.
How about scrolling? What percentage of people are scrolling to the bottom of sites?
Neil: I actually see less than 20% of the people go to the bottom of a website. Very few people scroll. If your whole website fits above the fold within the monitor resolution, you’re fine as
100% of people are going to see it. Once you start getting quite long in which you’re four or five folds make up your website, you’re typically looking at around 20% are going to go all the way to the bottom.
KISSMetrics takes the learning’s of the site visitors and their actions to a much deeper level. Can you explain how it works and how best to use it to make an online business more profitable?
Neil: With KISSmetrics what we ended up finding is there are multiple devices that people use from mobile phones to laptops to desktop computers. Some people even have multiple computers within their home. What ends up happening is you can visit the website ten times from different devices.
What we do is we track people, so instead of it showing up as ten visitors it shows up as one. In addition to that, we’ll cross pollinate every interaction you’ve made with the website, and map out your actual user flow so that way you can figure out things like ‘Greg here is a converting user. He is our ideal customer. He’s engaged. He logs in. He buys from us many times.’
Let’s say you’re Amazon, and let’s say hypothetically Amazon’s using us. You may want info like “Ok, here are all the customers like Greg who buy on a regular basis from us. What are the specific user flows and patterns that Greg goes through to purchase?
