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CRO Audit : Increase Your Conversions in 10 Simple Steps
25 mars 2024, par ErinYou have two options if you’re unhappy with your website’s conversion rates.
The first is to implement a couple of random tactics you heard on that marketing podcast, which worked for a business completely unrelated to yours.
The other is to take a more systematic, measured approach. An approach that finds specific problems with the pages on your site and fixes them one by one.
You’re choosing the second option, right?
Good, then let’s explain what a conversion rate optimisation audit is and how you can complete one using our step-by-step process.
What is a CRO audit?
A conversion rate optimisation audit (CRO audit) systematically evaluates your website. It identifies opportunities to enhance your website’s performance and improve conversion rates.
During the audit, you’ll analyse your website’s entire customer journey, collect valuable user behaviour data and cross reference that with web analytics to find site elements (forms, calls-to-actions, etc.) that you can optimise.
It’s one (and usually the first) part of a wider CRO strategy.
For example, an online retailer might run a CRO audit to discover why cart abandonment rates are high. The audit may throw up several potential problems (like a confusing checkout form and poor navigation), which the retailer can then spend time optimising using A/B tests.
Why run a CRO audit?
A CRO audit can be a lot of work, but it’s well worth the effort. Here are the benefits you can expect from running one.
Generate targeted and relevant insights
You’ve probably already tested some “best practice” conversion rate optimisations, like changing the colour of your CTA button, adding social proof or highlighting benefits to your headlines.
These are great, but they aren’t tailored to your audience. Running a CRO audit will ensure you find (and rectify) the conversion bottlenecks and barriers that impact your users, not someone else’s.
Improve conversion rates
Ultimately, CRO audits are about improving conversion rates and increasing revenue. Finding and eliminating barriers to conversion makes it much more likely that users will convert.
But that’s not all. CRO audits also improve the user experience and customer satisfaction. The audit process will help you understand how users behave on your website, allowing you to create a more user-friendly customer experience.
A 10-step process for running your first CRO audit
Want to conduct your first CRO audit? Follow the ten-step process we outline below:
1. Define your goals
Start your CRO audit by setting conversion goals that marry with the wider goals of your business. The more clearly you define your goals, the easier it will be to evaluate your website for opportunities.
Your goals could include:
- Booking more trials
- Getting more email subscribers
- Reducing cart abandonments
You should also define the specific actions users need to take for you to achieve these goals. For example, users will have to click on your call-to-action and complete a form to book more trials. On the other hand, reducing cart abandonments requires users to add items to their cart and click through all of the forms during the checkout process.
If you’re unsure where to start, we recommend reading our CRO statistics roundup to see how your site compares to industry averages for metrics like conversion and click-through rates.
You’ll also want to ensure you track these conversion goals in your web analytics software. In Matomo, it only takes a few minutes to set up a new conversion goal, and the goals dashboard makes it easy to see your performance at a glance.
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2. Review your analytics
With your goals in mind, the next step is to dive into your website analytics and identify pages that need improvement.
Consider the following conversion metrics when analysing pages:
- Conversion rate
- Average time on page
- Average order value
- Click-through rate
Ensure you’re analysing metrics aligning with the goals you set in step one. Average order value could be a great metric to track if you want to reduce cart abandonments, for example, but it’s unsuitable to get more email subscribers.
3. Research the user experience
Next, you’ll want to gather user experience data to better understand how potential customers use your website and why they aren’t converting as often as you’d like.
You can use several tools for user behaviour analysis, but we recommend heatmaps and session recordings.
Heatmaps visually represent how users click, move and scroll your website. It will show where visitors place their attention and which page elements are ignored.
Take a look at this example below from our website. As you can see, the navigation, headline and CTA get the most attention. If we weren’t seeing as many conversions as we liked and our CTAs were getting ignored, that might be a sign to change their colour or placement.
Session recordings capture the actions users take as they browse your website. They let you watch a video playback of how visitors behave, capturing clicks and scrolls so you can see each visitor’s steps in order.
Session recordings will show you how users navigate and where they drop off.
4. Analyse your forms
Whether your forms are too confusing or too long, there are plenty of reasons for users to abandon your forms.
But how many forms are they abandoning exactly and which forms are there?
That’s what form analysis is for.
Running a form analysis will highlight which forms need work and reveal whether forms could be contributing to a page’s poor conversion rate. It’s how Concrete CMS tripled its leads in just a few days.
Matomo’s Form Analytics feature makes running form analysis easy.
Just open up the forms dashboard to get a snapshot of your forms’ key metrics, including average hesitation time, starter rate and submission rates.
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5. Analyse your conversion funnel
Next, analyse the conversion funnel to see if there’s an obvious bottleneck or several pages where visitors abandon your desired action. Common conversion abandonment points are shopping carts and forms.
For example, you could find there is a drop-off in conversions between checking out and making a purchase or between booking a demo and signing up for a subscription. Understanding where these drop-offs occur lets you dig deeper and make targeted improvements.
Don’t worry if you’ve got a very long funnel. Start at the bottom and work backward. Problems with the pages at the very end of your funnel tasked with converting customers (landing pages, checkout pages, etc.) will have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. So, it makes sense to start there.
6. Analyse campaigns and traffic sources (marketing attribution)
It’s now time to analyse traffic quality to ensure you’re powering your conversion optimisation efforts with the best traffic possible.
This can also help you find your best customers so you can focus on acquiring more of them and tailoring your optimisation efforts to their preferences.
Run a marketing attribution report to see which traffic sources generate the most conversions and have the highest conversion rates.
Using marketing attribution is crucial here because it gives a fuller picture of how customers move through their journey, recognising the impact of various touchpoints in making a decision, unlike last-click attribution, which only credits the final touchpoint before a conversion.
7. Use surveys and other qualitative data sources
Increase the amount of qualitative data you have access to by speaking directly to customers. Surveys, interviews and other user feedback methods add depth and context to your user behaviour research.
Sure, you aren’t getting feedback from hundreds of customers like you do with heatmaps or session recordings, but the information can sometimes be much richer. Users will often tell you outright why they didn’t take a specific action in a survey response (or what convinced them to convert).
Running surveys is now even easier in Matomo, thanks to the Matomo Surveys third-party plugin. This lets you add a customisable survey popup to your site, the data from which is automatically added to Matomo and can be combined with Matomo segments.
8. Develop a conversion hypothesis
Using all of the insights you’ve gathered up to this point, you can now hypothesise what’s wrong and how you can fix it.
Here’s a template you can use:
This could end up looking something like the following:
Based on evidence gathered from web analytics and heatmaps, moving our signup form above the fold will fix our lack of free trial signups, improving signups by 50%.
Make sure you write your hypothesis down somewhere. Matomo lets you document your hypothesis when creating an A/B test, so it’s easy to reflect on when the test finishes.
9. Run A/B tests
Now, it’s time to put your theory into practice by running an A/B test.
Create an experiment using a platform like Matomo that creates two different versions of your page: the original and one with the change you mentioned in your hypothesis.
There’s no set time for you to run an A/B test. Just keep running it until the outcome is statistically significant. This is something your A/B testing platform should do automatically.
A statistically significant result means it would be very unlikely the outcome doesn’t happen in the long term.
As you can see in the image above, the wide header variation has significantly outperformed both the original and the other variation. So we can be pretty confident about making the change permanent.
If the outcome of your A/B test also validates your conversion hypothesis, you can implement the change. If not, analyse the data, brainstorm another hypothesis and run another A/B test.
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10. Monitor and iterate
You need to develop a culture of continuous improvement to succeed with conversion rate optimisation. That means constantly monitoring your conversion goals and running tests to improve your metrics.
While you don’t need to run a conversion audit every month, you should run audits regularly throughout the year.
How often should you conduct a CRO audit?
You should conduct a CRO audit fairly regularly.
We recommend creating a CRO schedule that sees you run a CRO audit every six to 12 months. That will ensure you continue identifying problem pages and keeping your conversion rates competitive.
Regular CRO audits will also account for evolving consumer behaviours, changes in your industry and your own business goals, all of which can impact your approach conversion rate optimisation.
Run your CRO audit with Matomo
A CRO audit process is the only way you can identify conversion optimisation methods that will work for your site and your target audience. It’s a methodical, data-backed strategy for making targeted improvements to send conversion rates soaring.
There are a lot of steps to complete, but you don’t need dozens of tools to run a CRO audit process.
Just one: Matomo.
Unlike other web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, Matomo has the built-in tools and plugins to help with every step of the CRO audit process, from web analytics to conversion funnel analysis and A/B testing. With its accurate, unsampled data and privacy-friendly tracking, Matomo is the ideal choice for optimising conversions.
Learn how to increase your conversions with Matomo, and start a free 21-day trial today. No credit card required.
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Top 5 Customer Segmentation Software in 2024
12 mars 2024, par ErinIn marketing, we all know the importance of reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. That’s how you cut through the noise.
For that, you need data on your customers — even though gathering the data is not enough. You can have all the data worldwide, but that raises an ethical responsibility and the need to make sense of it.
Enter customer segmentation software — the answer to delivering personalised customer experiences at scale.
This article lists some of the best customer segmentation tools currently in the market.
We’ll also go over the benefits of using such tools and how you can choose the best one for your business.
Let’s get started!
What is customer segmentation software?
Customer segmentation software is a tool that helps businesses analyse customer data and group them based on common characteristics like age, income, and buying habits.
The main goal of customer segmentation is to gain deeper insights into customer behaviours and preferences. This helps create targeted marketing and product strategies that fit each group and makes it easier to predict how customers will behave in the future.
Benefits of a customer segmentation software
Understanding your customers is the cornerstone of effective marketing, and customer segmentation software plays a pivotal role in this endeavour.
You can deliver more targeted and relevant marketing campaigns by dividing your audience into distinct groups based on shared characteristics.
Specifically, here are the main benefits of using customer segmentation tools:
- Understand your audience better: The software helps businesses group customers with common traits to better understand their preferences and behaviour.
- Make data-driven decisions: Base your business and marketing decisions on data analytics.
- Aid product development: Insights from segmentation analytics can guide the creation of products that meet specific customer group needs.
- Allocate your resources efficiently: Focusing on the customer segments that generate the most revenue leads to more effective and strategic use of your marketing resources.
Best customer segmentation software in 2024
In this section, we go over the top customer segmentation tools in 2024.
We’ll look at these tools’ key features and pros and cons.
1. Matomo
Matomo is a comprehensive web analytics tool that merges traditional web analytics, such as tracking pageviews and visitor bounce rates, with more advanced web analytics features for tracking user behaviour.
With robust segmentation features, users can filter website traffic based on criteria such as location and device type, enabling them to analyse specific visitor groups and their behaviour. Users can create custom segments to analyse specific groups of visitors and their behaviour.
Presenting as the ethical alternative to Google Analytics, Matomo emphasises transparency, 100% accurate data, and compliance with privacy laws.
Key features
- Heatmaps and Session Recordings: Matomo provides tools that allow businesses to understand website user interactions visually. This insight is crucial for optimising user experience and increasing conversions.
- Form Analytics: This feature in Matomo tracks how users interact with website forms, helping businesses understand user behaviour in detail and improve form design and functionality.
- User Flow Analysis: The tool tracks the journey of a website’s visitors, highlighting the paths taken and where users drop off. This is key for optimising website structure for better user experience and more conversions.
- A/B Testing: Businesses can use Matomo to test different versions of web pages, determining which is more effective in driving conversions.
- Conversion Funnels: This feature allows businesses to visualise and optimise the steps customers take toward conversion, identifying areas for improvement.
Pros
- Affordability: With plans starting at $19 per month, Matomo is a cost-effective solution for CRO.
- Free support: Matomo provides free email support to all Matomo Cloud users.
- Open-source benefits: Being open-source, Matomo offers enhanced security, privacy, customisation options, and a supportive community.
- Hosting options: Matomo is available either as a self-hosted solution or cloud-hosted.
Cons
- Cost for advanced features: Access to advanced features may incur additional costs for Matomo On-Premise users, although the On-Premise solution itself is free.
- Technical knowledge required: The self-hosted version of Matomo requires technical knowledge for effective management.
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2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) comprehensively understands website and app performance. It focuses on event-based data collection, allowing businesses to understand user interactions across platforms.
Similarly to Matomo, GA4 provides features that allow businesses to segment their audience based on various criteria such as demographics, behaviours, events, and more.
Key features
- Event-based tracking: GA4’s shift to an event-based model allows for a flexible and predictive analysis of user behaviour. This includes a detailed view of user interactions on websites and apps.
- Machine Learning and Smarter Insights: GA4 uses machine learning to automatically detect trends, estimate purchase probabilities and provide marketing insights.
- Google Ads integration: The integration with Google Ads in GA4 enables tracking customer interactions from first ad engagement, providing a holistic view of the customer experience across various platforms.
- Customer-centric measurements: GA4 collects data as events, covering a wide range of user interactions and offering a comprehensive view of customer behaviour.
- Pathing reports: GA4 introduces new pathing reports, allowing detailed user flow analysis through websites and apps.
- Audiences and filters: GA4 allows the creation of audiences based on specific criteria and the application of filters to segment and refine data analysis.
Pros
- Integration with various platforms, including Google Ads, enhances cross-platform user journey analysis.
- GA4 has a clean reporting interface, making it easier for marketers to identify key trends and data irregularities.
- Google Analytics has an active community with an abundance of educational resources available for users.
Cons
- Complexity for beginners: The wide range of features and new event-based model might overwhelm users new to analytics tools.
- Dependence on machine learning: Reliance on machine learning for insights and predictions may require trust in the tool’s data processing and large volumes of traffic for accuracy.
- Transition from UA to GA4: Users familiar with Universal Analytics (UA) might find the transition to GA4 challenging due to differences in features and data models.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing and sales software that helps businesses attract visitors and turn them into paying customers.
It supports various business processes, from social media posts to email marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot organises and tracks user interactions across different channels, providing a unified and efficient approach to customer relationship management (CRM) and customer segmentation.
Businesses can leverage HubSpot’s customer segmentation through lists, workflows, and smart content.
Key features
- Integration capabilities: HubSpot offers over 1,000 integrations in its ecosystem, ensuring seamless connectivity across various marketing, sales, and service tools, which helps maintain data consistency and reduces manual efforts.
- Segmentation and personalisation: HubSpot allows businesses to deliver personalised content and interactions based on customer behaviour and preferences, using its robust CRM features and advanced automation capabilities.
Pros
- Comprehensive support: HubSpot offers a range of support options, including a knowledge base, real-time chat, and more.
- User-friendly interface: The platform is designed for ease of use, ensuring a smooth experience even for less tech-savvy users.
- Personalisation capabilities: HubSpot provides personalised marketing, sales and service experiences, leveraging customer data effectively.
Cons
- High price point: HubSpot can be expensive, especially as you scale up and require more advanced features.
- Steep learning curve: For businesses new to such comprehensive platforms, there might be an initial learning curve to utilise its features effectively.
4. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a marketing automation software primarily focused on email and SMS messaging for e-commerce businesses. It’s designed to personalise and optimise customer communication.
Klaviyo integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, making it a go-to solution for online stores. Its strength lies in its ability to use customer data to deliver targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Key features
- Email marketing automation: Klaviyo allows users to send automated and personalised emails based on customer behaviour and preferences. This feature is crucial for e-commerce businesses in nurturing leads and maintaining customer engagement.
- SMS marketing: It includes SMS messaging capabilities, enabling businesses to engage customers directly through text messages.
- Segmentation and personalisation: Klaviyo offers advanced segmentation tools that enable businesses to categorise customers based on their behaviour, preferences and purchase history, facilitating highly targeted marketing efforts.
- Integration with e-commerce platforms: Klaviyo integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, allowing easy data synchronisation and campaign management.
Pros
- Enhanced e-commerce integration: Klaviyo’s deep integration with e-commerce platforms greatly benefits online retailers regarding ease of use and campaign effectiveness.
- Advanced segmentation and personalisation: The platform’s strong segmentation capabilities enable businesses to tailor their marketing messages more effectively.
- Robust automation features: Klaviyo’s automation tools are powerful and user-friendly, saving time and improving marketing efficiency.
Cons
- Cost: Klaviyo can be more expensive than other options in this list, particularly as you scale up and add more contacts.
- Complexity for beginners: The platform’s wide range of features and advanced capabilities might overwhelm beginners or small businesses with simpler needs.
5. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets businesses create in-app user walkthroughs, guides, and checklists to onboard, engage, and retain users.
UserGuiding facilitates customer segmentation by enabling businesses to create segmented onboarding flows, analyse behavioural insights, deliver personalised guidance, and collect feedback tailored to different user segments.
Key features
- In-app walkthroughs, guides and checklists: UserGuiding has multiple features that can promote product adoption early in the user journey.
- In-app messaging: UserGuiding offers in-app messaging to help users learn more about the product and various ways to get value.
- User feedback: UserGuiding allows businesses to gather qualitative feedback to streamline the adoption journey for users.
Pros
- User-friendly interface
- Customisable onboarding checklists
- Retention analytics
Cons
- Need for technical expertise to maximise all features
- Limited customisation options for less tech-savvy users
What to look for in a customer segmentation software
When choosing a customer segmentation software, choosing the right one for your specific business needs is important.
Here are a few factors to consider when choosing your customer segmentation tool:
- Ease of use: Select a tool with an intuitive interface that simplifies navigation. This enhances the user experience, making complex tasks more manageable. Additionally, responsive customer support is crucial. It ensures that issues are promptly resolved, contributing to a smoother operation.
- Scalability and flexibility: Your chosen tool should adjust to your needs. A flexible tool like Matomo can adjust to your growing requirements, offering capabilities that evolve as your business expands.
- Integration capabilities: The software should seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, such as CRM, marketing, and automation platforms.
- Advanced analytics and reporting: Assess the software’s capability to analyse and interpret complex data sets, without relying on machine learning to fill data gaps. A robust tool should provide accurate insights and detailed reports, enabling you to make informed decisions based on real data.
- Privacy and security considerations: Data security is paramount in today’s digital landscape. Look for features like data encryption, security storage, and adherence to privacy standards like GDPR and CCPA compliance.
- Reviews and recommendations: Before making a decision, consider the reputation of the software providers. Look for reviews and recommendations from other users, especially those in similar industries. This can provide real-world insights into the software’s performance and reliability.
Leverage Matomo’s segmentation capabilities to deliver personalised experiences
Segmentation is the best place to start if you want to deliver personalised customer experiences. There are several customer segmentation software in the market. But they’re not all the same.
In this article, we reviewed the top segmentation tools — based on factors like their user base, features, and ethical data privacy considerations.
Ideally, you want a tool to support your evolving business and segmentation needs. Not to mention one that cares about your customers’ privacy and ensures you stay compliant.
Enter Matomo at the top of the list. You can leverage Matomo’s accurate insights and comprehensive segmentation capabilities without compromising on privacy. Try it free for 21-days. No credit card required.
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Marketing Touchpoints : Examples, KPIs, and Best Practices
11 mars 2024, par ErinThe customer journey is rarely straightforward. Rather, each stage comprises numerous points of contact with your brand, known as marketing touchpoints. And each touchpoint is equally important to the customer experience.
This article will explore marketing touchpoints in detail, including how to analyse them with attribution models and which KPIs to track. It will also share tips on incorporating these touchpoints into your marketing strategy.
What are marketing touchpoints?
Marketing touchpoints are the interactions that take place between brands and customers throughout the latter’s journey, either online or in person.
By understanding how customers interact with your brand before, during and after a purchase, you can identify the channels that contribute to starting, driving and closing buyer journeys. Not only that, but you’ll also learn how to optimise the customer experience. This can also help you:
- Promote customer loyalty through increased customer satisfaction
- Improve your brand reputation and foster a more positive perception of your brand, supported by social proof
- Build brand awareness among prospective customers
- Reconnect with current customers to drive repeat business
According to a 2023 survey, social media and video-sharing platforms are the leading digital touchpoints among US consumers.
With the customer journey divided into three stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — we can group these interactions into three touchpoint segments, depending on whether they occur before, during or after a purchase.
Touchpoints before a purchase
Touchpoints before a purchase are those initial interactions between potential customers and brands that occur during the awareness stage — before they’ve made a purchase decision.
Here are some key touchpoints at the pre-purchase stage:
- Customer reviews, forums, and testimonials
- Social media posts
- Online ads
- Company events and product demos
- Other digital touchpoints, like video content, blog posts, or infographics
- Peer referral
In PwC’s 2024 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey, 54% of consumers listed search engines as their primary source of pre-purchase information, followed by Amazon (35%) and retailer websites (33%).
Here are the survey’s findings in Western Europe, specifically:
Social channels are another major pre-purchase touchpoint; 25% of social media users aged 18 to 44 have made a purchase through a social media app over the past three months.
Touchpoints during a purchase
Touchpoints during a purchase occur when the prospective customer has made their purchase decision. It’s the beginning of a (hopefully) lasting relationship with them.
It’s important to involve both marketing and sales teams here — and to keep track of conversion metrics.
Here are the main touchpoints at this stage:
- Company website pages
- Product pages and catalogues
- Communication between customers and sales reps
- Product packaging and labelling
- Point-of-sale (POS) — the final touchpoint the prospective customer will reach before making the final purchasing decision
Touchpoints after a purchase
You can use touchpoints after a purchase to maintain a positive relationship and keep current customers engaged. Examples of touchpoints that contribute to a good post-purchase experience for the customer include the following:
- Thank-you emails
- Email newsletters
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Cross-selling emails
- Renewal options
- Customer loyalty programs
Email marketing remains significant across all touchpoint segments, with 44% of CMOs agreeing that it’s essential to their marketing strategy — and it also plays a particularly important role in the post-purchase experience. For 61.1% of marketing teams, email open rates are higher than 20%.
Sixty-nine percent of consumers say they’ve stopped doing business with a brand following a bad experience, so the importance of customer service touchpoints shouldn’t be overlooked. Live chat, chatbots, self-service resources, and customer service teams are integral to the post-purchase experience.
Attribution models: Assigning value to marketing touchpoints
Determining the most effective touchpoints — those that directly contribute to conversions — is a process known as marketing attribution. The goal here is to identify the specific channels and points of contact with prospective customers that result in revenue for the company.
You can use these insights to understand — and maximise — marketing return on investment (ROI). Otherwise, you risk allocating your budget to the wrong channels.
It’s possible to group attribution models into two categories — single-touch and multi-touch — depending on whether you assign value to one or more contributing touchpoints.
Single-touch attribution models, where you’re giving credit for the conversion to a single touchpoint, include the following:
- First-touch attribution: This assigns credit for the conversion to the first interaction a customer had with a brand; however, it fails to consider lower-funnel touchpoints.
- Last-click attribution: This focuses only on bottom-of-funnel marketing and credits the last interaction the customer had with a brand before completing a purchase.
- Last non-direct: Credits the touchpoint immediately preceding a direct touchpoint with all the credit.
Multi-touch attribution models are more complex and distribute the credit for conversion across multiple relevant touchpoints throughout the customer journey:
- Linear attribution: The simplest multi-touch attribution model assigns equal values to all contributing touchpoints.
- Position-based or U-shaped attribution: This assigns the greatest value to the first and last touchpoint — with 40% of the conversion credit each — and then divides the remaining 20% across all the other touchpoints.
- Time-decay attribution: This model assigns the most credit to the customer’s most recent interactions with a brand, assuming that the touchpoints that occur later in the journey have a bigger impact on the conversion.
Consider the following when choosing the most appropriate attribution model for your business:
- The length of your typical sales cycle
- Your marketing goals: increasing awareness, lead generation, driving revenue, etc.
- How many stages and touchpoints make up your sales funnel
Sometimes, it even makes sense to measure marketing performance using more than one attribution model.
With the sheer volume of data that’s constantly generated across numerous online touchpoints, from your website to social media channels, it’s practically impossible to collect and analyse it manually.
You’ll need an advanced web analytics platform to identify key touchpoints and assign value to them.
Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature can accurately measure the performance of different touchpoints to ensure that you’re allocating resources to the right channels. This is done in a compliant manner, without the need of data sampling or requiring cookie consent screens (excluding in Germany and the UK), ensuring both accuracy and privacy compliance.
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Customer journey KPIs for measuring marketing campaign performance
Measuring the impact of different touchpoints on marketing campaign performance can help you understand how customer interactions drive conversions — and how to optimise your future efforts.
Clearly, this is not a one-time effort. You should continuously reevaluate the crucial touchpoints that drive the most engagement at different stages of the customer journey.
Web analytics platforms can provide valuable insights into ever-changing consumer behaviours and trends and help you make informed decisions.
At the moment, Google is the most popular solution in the web analytics industry, with a combined market share of more than 70%.
However, if privacy, data accuracy, and GDPR compliance are a priority for you, Matomo is an alternative worth considering.
Try Matomo for Free
Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
KPIs to track before a purchase
During the pre-purchase stage, focus on the KPIs that measure the effectiveness of marketing activities across various online touchpoints — landing pages, email campaigns, social channels and ad placement on SERPs, for instance.
KPIs to track during the consideration stage include the following:
- Cost-per-click (CPC): The CPC, the total cost of paid online advertising divided by the number of clicks those ads get, indicates whether you’re getting a good ROI. In the UK, the average CPC for search advertising is $1.22. Globally, it averages $0.62.
- Engagement rate: The engagement rate, which is the total number of interactions divided by the number of followers, is useful for measuring the performance of social media touchpoints. Customer engagement also applies to other channels, like tracking average time on-page, form conversions, bounce rates, and other website interactions.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The CTR — or the number of clicks your ads receive compared to the number of times they’re shown — helps you measure the performance of CTAs, email newsletters and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
KPIs to track during a purchase
As a potential customer moves further down the sales funnel and reaches the decision stage, where they’re ready to make the choice to purchase, you should be tracking the following:
- Conversion rate: This is the percentage of leads that convert into customers by completing the desired action relative to the total number of website visitors. It shows you whether you’re targeting the right people and providing a frictionless checkout experience.
- Sales revenue: This refers to the quantity of products sold multiplied by the product’s price. It helps you track the company’s ability to generate profit.
- Cost per conversion: This KPI is the total cost of online advertising in relation to the number of conversions. It measures the effectiveness of different marketing channels and the costs of converting prospective customers into buyers. It also forecasts future ad spend.
KPIs to track after purchase
At the post-purchase stage, your priority should be gathering feedback:
Customer feedback surveys are great for collecting insights into customers’ post-purchase experience, opinions about your brand, products and services, and needs and expectations.
In addition to measuring customer satisfaction, these insights can help you identify points of friction, forecast future growth and revenue and spot customers at risk of churning.
Focus on the following customer satisfaction and retention metrics:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This metric, which is gathered through customer satisfaction surveys, helps you gauge satisfaction levels. After all, 77% of consumers consider great customer service an important driver of brand loyalty.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Based on single-question customer surveys, NPS indicates how likely a customer is to recommend your business.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The CLV is the profit you can expect to generate from one customer throughout their relationship with your company.
- Customer Health Score (CHS): This score can assess how “healthy” the customer’s relationship with your brand is and identify at-risk customers.
Marketing touchpoints: Tips and best practices
Customer experience is more important today than ever.
Salesforce’s 2022 State of the Connected Consumer report indicated that, for 88% of customers, the experience the brand provides is just as important as the product itself.
Here’s how you can build your customer touchpoint strategy and use effective touchpoints to improve customer satisfaction, build a loyal customer base, deliver better digital experiences and drive growth:
Understand the customer’s end-to-end experience
The typical customer’s journey follows a non-linear path of individual experiences that shape their awareness and brand preference.
Seventy-three percent of customers expect brands to understand their needs. So, personalising each interaction and delivering targeted content at different touchpoint segments — supported by customer segmentation and tools like Matomo — should be a priority.
Try to put yourself in the prospective customer’s shoes and understand their motivation and needs, focusing on their end-to-end experience rather than individual interactions.
Create a customer journey map
Once you understand how prospective customers interact with your brand, it becomes easier to map their journey from the pre-purchase stage to the actual purchase and beyond.
By creating these visual “roadmaps,” you make sure that you’re delivering the right content on the right channels at the right times and to the right audience — the key to successful marketing.
Identify best-performing digital touchpoints
You can use insights from marketing attribution to pinpoint areas that are performing well.
By analysing the data provided by Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature, you can determine which digital touchpoints are driving the most conversions or engagement, allowing you to focus your resources on optimising these channels for even greater success.
This targeted approach helps maximise the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and ensures a higher return on investment.
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Discover key marketing touchpoints with Matomo
The customer’s journey rarely follows a direct route. If you hope to reach more customers and improve their experience, you’ll need to identify and manage individual marketing touchpoints every step of the way.
While this process looks different for every business, it’s important to remember that your customers’ experience begins long before they interact with your brand for the first time — and carries on long after they complete the purchase.
In order to find these touchpoints and measure their effectiveness across multiple marketing channels, you’ll have to rely on accurate data — and a powerful web analytics tool like Matomo can provide those valuable marketing insights.
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What is last click attribution ? A beginner’s guide
10 mars 2024, par ErinImagine you just finished a successful marketing campaign. You reached new highs in campaign revenue. Your conversion was higher than ever. And you did it without dramatically increasing your marketing budget.
So, you start planning your next campaign with a bigger budget.
But what do you do? Where do you invest the extra money?
You used several marketing tactics and channels in the last campaign. To solve this problem, you need to track marketing attribution — where you give conversion credit to a channel (or channels) that acted as a touchpoint along the buyer’s journey.
One of the most popular attribution models is last click attribution.
In this article, we’ll break down what last click attribution is, its advantages and disadvantages, and examples of how you can use it to gain insights into the marketing strategies driving your growth.
What is last click attribution?
Last click, or last interaction, is a marketing attribution model that seeks to give all credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. It assumes the customer’s last interaction with your brand (before the sale) was the most influential marketing channel for the conversion decision.
Example of last click attribution
Let’s say a woman named Jill stumbles across a fitness equipment website through an Instagram ad. She explores the website, looking at a few fitness bands and equipment, but she doesn’t buy anything.
A few days later, Jill was doing a workout but wished she had equipment to use.
So, she Googles the name of the company she checked out earlier to take a look at the fitness bands it offers. She’s not sure which one to get, but she signs up for a 10% discount by entering her email.
A few days later, she sees an ad on Facebook and visits the site but exits before purchasing.
The next day, Jill gets an email from the store stating that her discount code is expiring. She clicks on the link, plugs in the discount code, and buys a fitness band for $49.99.
Under the last click attribution model, the fitness company would attribute full credit for the sale to their email campaign while ignoring all other touchpoints (the Instagram ad, Jill’s organic Google search, and the Facebook ad).
3 advantages of last click attribution
Last click attribution is one of the most popular methods to credit a conversion. Here are the primary advantages of using it to measure your marketing efforts:
1. Easiest attribution method for beginners
If something’s too complicated, many people simply won’t touch it.
So, when you start diving into attribution, you might want to keep it simple. Fortunately, last click attribution is a wonderful method for beginner marketers to try out. And when you first begin tracking your marketing efforts, it’s one of the easiest methods to grasp.
2. It can have more impact on revenue
Attribution and conversions go hand in hand. But conversions aren’t just about making a sale or generating more revenue. We often need to track the conversions that take place before a sale.
This could include gaining a new follower on Instagram or capturing an email subscriber with a new lead magnet.
If you’re trying to attribute why someone converted into a follower or lead, you may want to ditch last click for something else.
But when you’re looking strictly at revenue-generating conversions, last click can be one of the most impactful methods for giving credit to a conversion.
3. It helps you understand bottom-of-funnel conversions
If SEO is your focus, chances are pretty good that you aren’t looking for a direct sale right out of the gate. You likely want to build your authority, inform and educate your audience, and then maybe turn them into a lead.
However, when your primary focus isn’t generating traffic or leads but turning your leads into customers, then you’re focused on the bottom of your sales funnel.
Last click can be helpful to use in bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) conversions since it often means following a paid ad or sales email that allows you to convert your warm audience member.
If you’re strictly after revenue, you may not need to pay as much attention to the person who reads your latest blog post. After they read the article, they may have seen a social media post. And then, maybe they saw your email with a discount to buy now — which converted them into a paying customer.
3 challenges of last click attribution
Last click attribution is a simple way to start analysing the channels that impact your conversions. But it’s not perfect.
Here are a few challenges of last click attribution you should keep in mind:
1. It ignores all other touchpoints
Last click attribution is a single-touch attribution model. This type of model declares that a single channel gets 100% of the credit for a sale.
But this can overlook impactful contributions from other channels.
Multi-touch attribution seeks to give credit to multiple channels for each conversion. This is a more holistic approach.
2. It fragments the customer journey
Most customers need a few touchpoints before they’ll make a purchase.
Maybe it’s reading a blog post via Google, checking out a social media post on Instagram, and receiving a nurture email.
If you look only at the last touchpoint before a sale, then you ignore the impact of the other channels. This leads to a fragmented customer journey.
Imagine this: You tell your marketing leaders that Facebook ads are responsible for your success because they were the last touch for 65% of conversions. So, you pour your entire budget into Facebook ads.
What happens?
Your sales drop by 60% in one month. This happens because you ignored the traffic you were generating from SEO blog posts that led to that conversion — the nurturing that took place in email marketing.
3. Say goodbye to brand awareness marketing
Without a brand, you can’t have a sustainable business.
Some marketing activities, like brand awareness campaigns, are meant to fuel brand awareness to build a business that lasts for years.
But if you’re going to use last click attribution to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, then you’re going to diminish the impact of brand awareness.
Your brand, as a whole, has the ability to generate multiples of your current revenue by simply reaching more people and creating unique brand experiences with new audiences.
Last click attribution can’t easily measure brand awareness activities, which means their importance is often ignored.
Last click attribution vs. other attribution models
Last click attribution is just one type of attribution model. Here are five other common marketing attribution models you might want to consider:
First interaction
We’ve already touched on last click interaction as a marketing attribution model. But one of the most common models does the opposite.
First interaction, or first touch, gives full credit to the first channel that brought a lead in.
First interaction is best used for top-of-funnel (ToFU) conversions, like user acquisition.
Last non-direct interaction
A similar model to last click attribution is one called last non-direct interaction. But one major difference is that it excludes all direct traffic from the calculation. Instead, it assigns full conversion credit to the channel that precedes it.
For instance, let’s say you see someone comes to your website via a Facebook ad but doesn’t purchase. Then one week later, they go directly to your website through a bookmark they saved and they complete a purchase. Instead of giving attribution to the direct traffic touchpoint (entering your site through a saved bookmark), you attribute the conversion to the previous channel.
In this case, the Facebook ad gets the credit.
Last non-direct attribution is best used for BoFu conversions.
Linear
Another common attribution model is called linear attribution. Here, you split the credit for a conversion equally across every single touchpoint.
This means if someone clicks on your blog post in Google, TikTok post, email, and a Facebook ad, then the credit for the conversion is equally split between each of these channels.
This model is helpful for looking at both BoFu and ToFu activities.
Time decay
Time decay is an attribution model that more accurately credits conversions across different touchpoints. This means the closer a channel is to a conversion, the more weight is given to it.
The time decay model assumes that the closer a channel is to a conversion, the greater that channel’s impact is on a sale.
Position based
Position-based, also called U-shaped attribution, is an interesting model that gives multiple channels credit for a conversion.
But it doesn’t give equal credit to channels or weighted credit to the channels closest to the conversion.
Instead, it gives the most credit to the first and last interactions.
In other words, it emphasises the conversion of someone to a lead and, eventually, a customer.
It gives the first and last interaction 40% of the credit for a conversion and then splits the remaining 20% across the other touchpoints in the customer journey.
If you’re ever unsure about which attribution model to use, with Matomo, you can compare them to determine the one that best aligns with your goals and accurately reflects conversion paths.
In the above screenshot from Matomo, you can see how last-click compares to first-click and linear models to understand their respective impacts on conversions.
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Use Matomo to track last click attribution
If you want to improve your marketing, you need to start tracking your efforts. Without marketing attribution, you will never be certain which marketing activities are pushing your business forward.
Last click attribution is one of the most popular ways to get started with attribution since it, very simply, gives full credit to the last interaction for a conversion.
If you want to start tracking last click attribution (or any other previously mentioned attribution model), sign up for Matomo’s 21-day free trial today. No credit card required.
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CRO Testing : The 6-Steps for Maximising Conversion Rates
10 mars 2024, par ErinIt’s a nightmare every marketing manager faces. Traffic is soaring after you’ve launched new digital marketing campaigns, but conversions have barely moved.
Sound familiar?
The good news is you’re not alone — loads of marketing managers struggle to get potential customers to purchase. The better news is that you can test dozens of strategies to turn around your site’s fortunes.
Conversion rate optimisation testing (CRO testing for short) is the name for this kind of experimentation — and it can send conversion rates and revenue soaring.
In this article, we’ll explain CRO testing and how you can start doing it today using Matomo.
What is CRO Testing?
CRO testing is optimising your site’s conversion funnel using a series of experiments designed to improve conversion rates.
A CRO test can take several forms, but it usually involves changing one or more elements of your landing page. It looks something like this:
- You hypothesise what you expect to happen.
- You then run an A/B test using a dedicated CRO platform or tool.
- This tool will divide your site’s traffic, sending one segment to one variation and the other segment to another.
- The CRO tool will measure conversions, track statistical significance, and declare one variation the winner.
A CRO tool isn’t the only software you can use to gather data when running tests. There are several other valuable data sources, including:
- A web analytics platform: to identify issues with your website
- User surveys: to find out what your target audience thinks about your site
- Heatmaps: to learn where users focus their attention
- Session recordings: to discover how visitors browse your site
Use as many of these features, tools, and methods as you can when brainstorming hypotheses and measuring results. After all, your CRO test is only as good as your data.
On that note, we need to mention the importance of data accuracy when researching issues with your website and running CRO tests. If you trust a platform like Google Analytics that uses data sampling (where only a subset of data is analysed), then there’s a risk you make business decisions based on inaccurate reports.
In practice, that could see you overestimate the effectiveness of a landing page, potentially wasting thousands in ad spend on poorly converting pages.
That’s why over a million websites rely on Matomo as their web analytics solution—it doesn’t sample data, providing 100% accurate website traffic insights you can trust to make informed decisions.
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Types of CRO Testing
There are three core types of CRO tests:
A/B testing
A/B testing, or split testing, is when you test two versions of the same page against each other. Usually, the two pages have only one difference, such as a new headline or a different CTA.
In the test above, for example, we test what happens if we remove one of the affiliate links from a page. We hypothesise that conversions won’t change because these links aren’t effective.
A/B/n testing
A/B/n testing is when you test multiple variations of the same element on the same page.
Rather than just testing one headline against another, for example, you test multiple different headlines at once.
In the test above in Matomo, we’re testing a website’s original header against a wider and smaller version. It turns out the wider header converts significantly better.
Multivariate testing
In a multivariate CRO test, you test multiple different elements at the same time. That could mean testing combining a different headline, CTA button, and image.
Multivariate testing can save time because you test multiple elements at once and find the best combination of elements. But you’ll usually need a lot of traffic to find a statistically significant result.
Why is CRO testing important?
Who doesn’t want more conversions, right? Improving your conversion rate is the core benefit of running a CRO test, but there are a couple of other reasons you should do it, too:
Improve conversion rates
How well does your website convert visitors? The average conversion rate of a typical website is 2.35%, but better-performing websites have significantly higher conversion rates. The top 25% of websites across all industries convert at a rate of 5.31% or higher.
CRO testing is the best way to improve your site’s conversion rate by tweaking elements of your website and implementing the best results. And because it’s based on data, not your intuition, you’re likely to identify changes that move the needle.
Optimise the user experience
CRO tests are also a great way to improve your site’s user experience. The process of CRO testing forces you to understand how users navigate your website using heatmaps and session recordings and fix the issues they face.
You could simplify your form fields to make them easier to fill in, for example, or make your pages easier to navigate. In both cases, your actions will also increase conversion rates.
Decrease acquisition costs
Improving your conversion rate using CRO testing will usually mean a decrease in customer acquisition costs and other conversion metrics.
After all, if the cost of your PPC ads stays the same but you convert more traffic, then each new customer will cost less to acquire.
How to do CRO testing in 6 steps
Ready to get your hands dirty? Follow these six steps to set up your first CRO test:
Have a clear goal
Don’t jump straight into testing. You need to be clear about what you want to achieve; otherwise, you risk wasting time on irrelevant experiments.
If you’re unsure what to focus on, look back through your web analytics data and other tools like heatmaps, form analytics, and session recordings to get a feel for some of your site’s biggest conversion roadblocks.
Maybe there’s a page with a much lower conversion rate, for example — or a form that most users fail to complete.
If it’s the former, then your goal could be to increase the conversion rate of this specific landing page by 25%, bringing it in line with your site’s average.
Make sure your new conversion goal is set up properly in your website analytics platform, too. This will ensure you’re tracking conversions accurately.
Set a hypothesis
Now you’ve got a goal, it’s time to create a hypothesis. Based on your available research, a hypothesis is an assumption you make about your conversion rate optimisation test.
A heatmap of your poorly converting landing page may show that users aren’t focusing on your CTA button because it’s hidden below the fold.
You could hypothesise that by placing the CTA button directly under your headline above the fold, your conversion rate should increase.
Whatever your goal, you can use the following template to write a hypothesis:
If we [make this specific change], then [this specific outcome] will occur because [reason].
Design your test elements
Most marketing managers won’t be able to run CRO tests independently. A team of talented experts must create the assets you need for a successful experimentation. This includes designers, copywriters, and web developers.
Don’t just have them create one new element at a time. Accelerate the process by having your team create dozens of designs simultaneously. That way, you can run a new CRO test as soon as your current test has finished.
Create and launch the test
It’s time to launch your test. Use a CRO tool to automate building your test and tracking results.
With Matomo’s A/B Testing feature, it’s as easy as giving your test a name, writing a hypothesis and description, and uploading the URLs of your page variants.
Matomo handles everything else, giving you a detailed breakdown at the end of the test with the winning variant.
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Analyse the results
You can only review the results of your CRO test once it has reached statistical significance — which means the observed outcome isn’t the result of chance.
In the same way you wouldn’t say a die is unbiased after three rolls, you need thousands of visitors to see your landing pages and take action before deciding which is better.
Luckily, most CRO testing platforms, including Matomo, will highlight when a test reaches statistical significance. That means you only need to look at the result to see if your hypothesis is correct.
Implement and repeat
Was your test a success? Great, you can implement the results and test a new element.
Yep, that’s right. There’s no time to rest on your laurels. Continuous CRO testing is necessary to squeeze every conversion possible from your website. Just like fashion trends, website effectiveness changes over time. What works today might not work tomorrow, making ongoing CRO testing beneficial and necessary.
That’s why it’s a good idea to choose a CRO testing platform like Matomo with no data limits.
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CRO testing examples you can run today
There’s no shortage of CRO tests you can run. Here are some experiments to get started with:
Change your CTA design and copy
Calls to action (CTAs) are the best elements to optimise during your first CRO test. You can change many things about them; even the smallest optimisation can have a huge impact.
Just take a look at the image below to see how diverse your CTAs could be:
Changing your CTA’s copy is a great place to start, especially if you have generic instructions like “Apply Now.”
Try a more specific instruction like “Download your free trial” or “Buy now to get 30% off.” Or test benefit-led instructions like “Reduce your ad spend today” or “Take back control of your data.”
Changing the colour of your CTAs can also yield more conversions. Bright colours are always a good bet. Just make sure your button stands out from the rest of your page.
Move the CTA button placement
The placement of your CTA can be just as important as its copy or colour. If it’s down at the bottom of your page, there’s a good chance most of your visitors will miss it.
Try moving it above the fold to see if that makes a difference. Then, test multiple CTA buttons as opposed to just one.
Heatmaps and session recordings can identify whether this test is worthwhile. If users rarely focus on your CTA or just don’t scroll far enough to find it, then it’s a good bet you could see an uptick in conversions by moving it.
Try different headlines
Your website’s headlines are another great place to start CRO testing. These are usually the first (and sometimes only) things visitors read, so optimising them as much as possible makes sense.
There are entire books written about creating persuasive headlines, but start with one of the following tactics:
- Include a benefit
- “Achieve radiant skin—discover the secret!”
- Add numbers
- “3 foolproof methods for saving money on your next vacation”
- Using negative words instead of positive ones
- “Avoid these 7 mistakes to unlock your potential for personal growth”
- Shortening or lengthening your headline
- Shortened: “Crush your fitness goals: Expert tips for success”
- Lengthened: “Embark on your fitness journey: Learn from experts with proven tips to crush your wellness goals”
Add more trust signals
Adding trust signals to your website, such as brand logos, customer reviews, and security badges, can increase your conversion rate.
We use it at Matomo by adding the logos of well-known clients like the United Nations and Amnesty International underneath our CTAs.
It’s incredibly effective, too. Research by Edelman finds that trust is among the top three most important buying decision factors, above brand likeability.
Start CRO testing with Matomo
CRO testing is a data-backed method to improve your site’s conversion rate, making it more user-friendly and decreasing customer acquisition costs. Even a small improvement will be worth the cost of the tools and your time.
Fortunately, there’s no need to allocate hundreds of dollars monthly for multiple specialised testing tools. With Matomo, you get a comprehensive platform offering web analytics, user behaviour insights, and CRO testing – all conveniently bundled into one solution. Matomo’s pricing starts from just $19 per month, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Plus, rest assured knowing that you are GDPR compliant and the data provided is 100% accurate, ethically empowering you to make informed decisions with confidence.
Take the first step on your CRO testing journey by trying Matomo free for 21 days; no credit card required.
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21 day free trial. No credit card required.
