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How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness : A Step-by-Step Guide
22 février 2024, par ErinAre you struggling to prove that your marketing efforts are having a measurable impact on your company’s performance? We get it.
You would think that digital marketing would make it easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But in many ways, it’s harder than ever. With so many channels and strategies competing against each other, it can feel impossible to pin down the campaign that caused a conversion.
That leaves you in a tricky spot as a marketing manager. It can be hard to know which campaigns to persevere with and harder still to prove your worth to stakeholders.
Thankfully, there are several strategies you can use to measure the success of your campaigns and put a value on your efforts. So, if you want to learn how you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing, improve the ROI of your efforts and prove your value as an employee, read on.
What is marketing effectiveness?
Marketing effectiveness measures how successful a marketing strategy or campaign is and the extent to which it achieves goals and business objectives.
It’s a growing concern for brands, with research showing that 61.2% say measuring marketing effectiveness has become a more prominent factor in decision-making over the last three years. In other words, it’s becoming critical for marketers to know how to measure their effectiveness.
But it’s getting harder to do so. A combination of factors, including channel fragmentation, increasingly convoluted customer journeys, and the deprecation of third-party cookies, makes it hard for marketing teams to measure marketing performance.
Why you need to measure marketing effectiveness
Imagine ploughing thousands of dollars into a campaign and not being confident that your efforts bore fruit. It’s unthinkable, right? If you care about optimising campaigns and improving your worth as a marketer, measuring marketing effectiveness is necessary.
Optimise marketing campaigns
Do you know how effectively each campaign generates conversions and drives revenue? No? Then, you need to measure marketing effectiveness.
Doing so could also shine a light on ways to improve your campaigns. One paid ad campaign may suffer from a poor return on ad spend caused by high CPCs. Targeting less competitive keywords could dramatically reduce your costs.
Improve ROI
Today, marketing budgets make up almost 10% of a company’s total revenue, up from 6.4% in 2021. With so much revenue at stake, you’ve got to deliver a return on that investment.
Measuring marketing effectiveness can help you identify the campaigns or strategies delivering the highest ROI so you can invest more heavily into them. On the other side of the same coin, you can use the data to strike off any campaigns that aren’t pulling their weight — increasing your ROI even further.
Demonstrate value
Let’s get selfish for a second. Whether you’re an in-house marketing manager or work for an agency, the security of your paycheck depends on your ability to deliver high-ROI campaigns.
Measuring your marketing effectiveness lets you showcase your value to your company and clients. It helps you build stronger relationships that can lead to bigger and better opportunities in the future.
We should take this opportunity to point out that a good tool for measuring marketing effectiveness is equally important. You probably think Google Analytics will do the job, right? But when you start implementing the strategies we discuss below, there’s a good chance you’ll have data quality issues.
That was the case for full-service marketing agency MHP/Team SI, which found Google Analytics’ data sampling severely limited the quantity and quality of insights they could collect. It was only by switching to Matomo, a platform that doesn’t use data sampling, that the agency could deliver the insights its clients needed to grow.
Further reading:
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How to measure marketing effectiveness
Measuring marketing effectiveness is not always easy, especially if you have long buying cycles and a lack of good-quality data. Make things as easy as possible by following the steps below:
Know what success looks like
You can’t tell whether your campaigns are effective if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve. That’s why the first step in measuring marketing effectiveness is to set a clear goal.
So, ask yourself what success looks like for each campaign you launch.
Remember, a campaign doesn’t have to drive leads to be considered effective. If all you wanted to do was raise brand awareness or increase organic traffic, you could achieve both goals without recording a single conversion.
We’d wager that’s probably not true for most marketing managers. It’s much more likely you want to achieve something like the following:
- Generating 100 new customers
- Increasing revenue by 20%
- Selling $5,000 of your new product line
- Reducing customer churn by 50%
- Achieving a return on ad spend of 150%
Conventional goal-setting wisdom applies here. So, ensure your goals are measurable, timely, relevant and achievable.
Track conversions
Setting up conversion tracking in your web analytics platform is vital to measuring marketing effectiveness accurately.
What you count as a conversion event will depend on the goals you’ve set above. It doesn’t have to be a sale, mind you. Downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar are worthy conversion goals, especially if you know they increase the chances of a customer converting.
Whichever platform you choose, ensure it can meet your current and future needs. This is one of the reasons open-source content management system Concrete CMS opted for Matomo when choosing a new website analytics platform. The flexibility of the Matomo platform gave Concrete CMS the adaptability it needed for future growth.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Decide on an attribution model
Marketing attribution is a way of measuring the impact of different channels and touchpoints across the customer journey. If you can assign a value to each conversion, you can use a marketing attribution model to quantify the value of your channels and campaigns.
While most web analytics platforms simply credit the last touchpoint, marketing attribution offers a more comprehensive view by considering all interactions along the customer journey. This distinction is important because relying solely on the last touchpoint can lead to skewed insights and misallocation of resources and budget.
By adopting a marketing attribution approach, you can make more informed decisions, optimizing your campaigns and maximizing your return on investment.
There are several different attribution models you can use to give credit to your various campaigns. These include:
- First interaction: Gives all the credit to the first channel in the customer journey.
- Last interaction: Gives all the credit to the last channel in the customer journey.
- Last non-direct attribution: Gives all credit to the final touchpoint in the customer journey, except for direct interactions. In those cases, credit is given to the touchpoint just before the direct one.
- Linear attribution: Distributes credit equally across all touchpoints.
- Position-based attribution: Attributes 40% credit to the first and last touchpoints and distributes the remaining 20% evenly across all other touchpoints.
Consider carefully which attribution model to use, as this can significantly impact your marketing effectiveness calculation by giving certain campaigns too much credit.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Analyse KPIs
Tracking KPIs is essential if you want to quantify the impact of your marketing campaigns. But which metrics should you track?
To improve brand awareness or traffic, so-called vanity metrics like sessions, returning visitors, and organic traffic may suffice as KPIs.
However, that’s not going to be the case for most marketers, whose performance is tied to revenue and ROI. If that’s you, put vanity metrics to one side and focus on the following conversion metrics instead:
- Conversion rate: the percentage of users who complete a desired action.
- Return on ad spend: the revenue earned for every dollar spent on a campaign.
- Return on investment: a broader calculation than ROAS, typically calculated across all your marketing efforts.
- Customer lifetime value: the total amount a customer will spend throughout their relationship with your company.
- Customer acquisition cost: the cost to acquire each customer on average.
Your analytics platform and advertising tools should track most of these KPIs by default. Matomo, for instance, automatically calculates your conversion rate in the Goals report.
How to present your marketing effectiveness
Calculating your marketing effectiveness is one thing, but it’s important to share this information with stakeholders — whether those are executives in your company or your agency’s clients.
Follow the steps below to create an insightful and compelling marketing report:
- Set the scene. There’s no guarantee that the people reading your report will know your goals. So, add context at the start of the reporting by spelling out what you are trying to achieve and why.
- Select the right data. You don’t want to overwhelm the reader with facts and figures, but you do need to provide hard evidence of your success. Include the KPIs you used to measure your success and show how these have changed over time. You can also support your report with audience insights such as heatmaps or customer surveys.
- Tell a story with your presentation. Give your presentation a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Start with what you want to achieve, describe how you plan to achieve it and end with the results. Support your story with graphs and other visual aids that hold your reader’s attention.
- Provide a concise summary. Not everyone will read your presentation cover to cover. With that in mind, provide a summary of your report at the start or end that shows what you achieved and quantifies your marketing effectiveness.
How to improve marketing effectiveness
Don’t settle for simply measuring your marketing effectiveness. Use the following strategies to make future campaigns as effective as possible.
Understand customer behaviour
More effective marketing campaigns start by deeply understanding your customers, who they are, and how they behave. This allows you to take an audience-first approach to your marketing efforts and design campaigns around the unique needs of your customers.
Gather as much first-party data as you can. Surveys, focus groups, and other market research techniques can help you learn more about who your customers are, but don’t disregard the quantitative data you can gather from your web analytics platform.
Using Heatmaps, Session Recordings and behavioural analytics tools, you can learn exactly how customers behave when they land on your site, where they focus their attention and which pages they look at first.
These insights can help you turn an average campaign into an exceptional one. For example, a heatmap may highlight the need to move CTA buttons above the fold to increase conversions. A session recording could pinpoint the problems users have when filling out your website’s forms.
Further reading:
Optimise landing pages
Developing a culture of testing and experimentation is a great way to improve your marketing effectiveness. Let’s dive into A/B testing.
By tweaking various elements of your landing pages, you can squeeze every last conversion from your campaigns.
We have a guide on conversion funnel optimisation, which we recommend you check out, but I’ll briefly list some of the optimisations you could test:
- Making your CTAs actionable and compelling
- Integrating images and videos
- Adding testimonials and other forms of social proof
- Reducing form fields
Use a different attribution model
It might be that some campaigns, strategies or traffic sources aren’t getting the love they deserve. By changing your attribution model, you can significantly change the perceived effectiveness of certain campaigns.
Let’s say you use a last-touch attribution model, for instance. Only the last channel customers will get credit for each conversion, meaning top-of-the-funnel campaigns like SEO may be deemed less effective than they are.
It’s why you must continually test, tweak and validate your chosen model — and why changing it can be so powerful.
Measure your marketing effectiveness with Matomo
Measuring your marketing effectiveness is hard work. But it’s vital to optimise campaigns, improve your ROI and demonstrate your value.
The good news is that Matomo makes things a lot easier thanks to its comprehensive conversion tracking, attribution modelling capabilities and behavioural insight features like Heatmaps, A/B Testing and Session Recordings.
Take steps today to start measuring (and improving) the effectiveness of your marketing with our 21-day free trial. No credit card required.
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21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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Linear Attribution Model : What Is It and How Does It Work ?
16 février 2024, par ErinWant a more in-depth way to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns? Then, the linear attribution model could be the answer.
Although you can choose from several different attribution models, a linear model is ideal for giving value to every touchpoint along the customer journey. It can help you identify your most effective marketing channels and optimise your campaigns.
So, without further ado, let’s explore what a linear attribution model is, when you should use it and how you can get started.
What is a linear attribution model?
A linear attribution model is a multi-touch method of marketing attribution where equal credit is given to each touchpoint. Every marketing channel used across the entire customer journey gets credit, and each is considered equally important.
So, if a potential customer has four interactions before converting, each channel gets 25% of the credit.
Let’s look at how linear attribution works in practice using a hypothetical example of a marketing manager, Sally, who is looking for an alternative to Google Analytics.
Sally starts her conversion path by reading a Matomo article comparing Matomo to Google Analytics she finds when searching on Google. A few days later she signs up for a webinar she saw on Matomo’s LinkedIn page. Two weeks later, Sally gets a sign-off from her boss and decides to go ahead with Matomo. She visits the website and starts a free trial by clicking on one of the paid Google Ads.
Using a linear attribution model, we credit each of the channels Sally uses (organic traffic, organic social, and paid ads), ensuring no channel is overlooked in our marketing analysis.
Are there other types of attribution models?
Absolutely. There are several common types of attribution models marketing managers can use to measure the impact of channels in different ways.
- First interaction: Also called a first-touch attribution model, this method gives all the credit to the first channel in the customer journey. This model is great for optimising the top of your sales funnel.
- Last interaction: Also called a last-touch attribution model, this approach gives all the credit to the last channel the customer interacts with. It’s a great model for optimising the bottom of your marketing funnel.
- Last non-direct interaction: This attribution model excludes direct traffic and credits the previous touchpoint. This is a fantastic alternative to a last-touch attribution model, especially if most customers visit your website before converting.
- Time decay attribution model: This model adjusts credit according to the order of the touchpoints. Those nearest the conversion get weighted the highest.
- Position-based attribution model: This model allocates 40% of the credit to the first and last touchpoints and splits the remaining 20% evenly between every other interaction.
Why use a linear attribution model?
Marketing attribution is vital if you want to understand which parts of your marketing strategy are working. All of the attribution models described above can help you achieve this to some degree, but there are several reasons to choose a linear attribution model in particular.
It uses multi-touch attribution
Unlike single-touch attribution models like first and last interaction, linear attribution is a multi-touch attribution model that considers every touchpoint. This is vital to get a complete picture of the modern customer journey, where customers interact with companies between 20 and 500 times.
Single-touch attribution models can be misleading by giving conversion credit to a single channel, especially if it was the customer’s last use. In our example above, Sally’s last interaction with our brand was through a paid ad, but it was hardly the most important.
It’s easy to understand
Attribution models can be complicated, but linear attribution is easy to understand. Every touchpoint gets the same credit, allowing you to see how your entire marketing function works. This simplicity also makes it easy for marketers to take action.
It’s great for identifying effective marketing channels
Because linear attribution is one of the few models that provides a complete view of the customer journey, it’s easy to identify your most common and influential touchpoints.
It accounts for the top and bottom of your funnel, so you can also categorise your marketing channels more effectively and make more informed decisions. For example, PPC ads may be a more common bottom-of-the-full touchpoint and should, therefore, not be used to target broad, top-of-funnel search terms.
Are there any reasons not to use linear attribution?
Linear attribution isn’t perfect. Like all attribution models, it has its weaknesses. Specifically, linear attribution can be too simple, dilute conversion credit and unsuitable for long sales cycles.
It can be too simple
Linear attribution lacks nuance. It only considers touchpoints while ignoring other factors like brand image and your competitors. This is true for most attribution models, but it’s still important to point it out.
It can dilute conversion credit
In reality, not every touchpoint impacts conversions to the same extent. In the example above, the social media post promoting the webinar may have been the most effective touchpoint, but we have no way of measuring this.
The risk with using a linear model is that credit can be underestimated and overestimated — especially if you have a long sales cycle.
It’s unsuitable for very long sales cycles
Speaking of long sales cycles, linear attribution models won’t add much value if your customer journey contains dozens of different touchpoints. Credit will get diluted to the point where analysis becomes impossible, and the model will also struggle to measure the precise ways certain touchpoints impact conversions.
Should you use a linear attribution model?
A linear attribution model is a great choice for any company with shorter sales cycles or a reasonably straightforward customer journey that uses multiple marketing channels. In these cases, it helps you understand the contribution of each touchpoint and find your best channels.
It’s also a practical choice for small businesses and startups that don’t have a team of data scientists on staff or the budget to hire outside help. Because it’s so easy to set up and understand, anyone can start generating insights using this model.
How to set up a linear attribution model
Are you sold on the idea of using a linear attribution model? Then follow the steps below to get started:
Choose a marketing attribution tool
Given the market is worth $3.1 billion, you won’t be surprised to learn there are plenty of tools to choose from. But choose carefully. The tool you pick can significantly impact your success with attribution modelling.
Take Google Analytics, for instance. While GA4 offers several marketing attribution models for free, including linear attribution, it lacks accuracy due to cookie consent rejection and data sampling.
Accurate marketing attribution is included as a feature in Matomo Cloud and is available as a plugin for Matomo On-Premise users. We support a full range of attribution models that use 100% accurate data because we don’t use data sampling, and cookie consent isn’t an issue (with the exception of Germany and the UK). That means you can trust our insights.
Matomo’s marketing attribution is available out of the box, and we also provide access to raw data, allowing you to develop your custom attribution model.
Collect data
The quality of your marketing attribution also depends on the quality and quantity of your data. It’s why you need to avoid a platform that uses data sampling.
This should include:
- General data from your analytics platform, like pages visited and forms filled
- Goals and conversions, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next step
- Campaign tracking data so you can monitor the behaviour of traffic from different referral channels
- Behavioural data from features like Heatmaps or Session Recordings
Set up goals and conversions
You can’t assign conversion values to customer journey touchpoints if you don’t have conversion goals in place. That’s why the next step of the process is to set up conversion tracking in your web analytics platform.
Depending on your type of business and the product you sell, conversions could take one of the following forms:
- A product purchase
- Signing up for a webinar
- Downloading an ebook
- Filling in a form
- Starting a free trial
Setting up these kinds of goals is easy if you use Matomo.
Just head to the Goals section of the dashboard, click Manage Goals and then click the green Add A New Goal button.
Fill in the screen below, and add a Goal Revenue at the bottom of the page. Doing so will mean Matomo can automatically calculate the value of each touchpoint when using your attribution model.
If your analytics platform allows it, make sure you also set up Event Tracking, which will allow you to analyse how many users start to take a desired action (like filling in a form) but never complete the task.
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Test and validate
As we’ve explained, linear attribution is a great model in some scenarios, but it can fall short if you have a long or complex sales funnel. Even if you’re sure it’s the right model for your company, testing and validating is important.
Ideally, your chosen attribution tool should make this process pretty straightforward. For example, Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature makes comparing and contrasting three different attribution models easy.
Here we compare the performance of three attribution models—linear, first-touch, and last-non-direct—in Matomo’s Marketing Attribution dashboard, providing straightforward analysis.
If you think linear attribution accurately reflects the value of your channels, you can start to analyse the insights it generates. If not, then consider using another attribution model.
Don’t forget to take action from your marketing efforts, either. Linear attribution helps you spot the channels that contribute most to conversions, so allocate more resources to those channels and see if you can improve your conversion rate or boost your ROI.
Make the most of marketing attribution with Matomo
A linear attribution model lets you measure every touchpoint in your customer journey. It’s an easy attribution model to start with and lets you identify and optimise your most effective marketing channels.
However, accurate data is essential if you want to benefit the most from marketing attribution data. If your web analytics solution doesn’t play nicely with cookies or uses sampled data, then your linear model isn’t going to tell you the whole story.
That’s why over 1 million sites trust Matomo’s privacy-focused web analytics, ensuring accurate data for a comprehensive understanding of customer journeys.
Now you know what linear attribution modelling is, start employing the model today by signing up for a free 21-day trial, no credit card required.
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21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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9 Form Optimisation Tips to Convert More Visitors
15 février 2024, par ErinForms might seem boring — that is, until you realise how powerful they are.
No forms mean no leads.
No leads mean no sales.
No sales means you’ll run out of business.
So, what do you do?
Optimise forms to land more leads.
They’re a critical part of the sales funnel.
Forms have many different purposes and can be used to:
- Contact a company
- Sign up for a newsletter
- Request a demo
- Start a free trial
- And more
If you want to get more leads (and ultimately more sales), then you need to optimise your forms.
This guide will show you exactly how to do that (so you can start getting more conversions today).
What is form optimisation?
Before we dive into form optimisation, let’s back up a bit.
Form conversion is our primary focus.
Your form conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who submit a form divided by the total number of visitors who started the form times one hundred.
For example, if 5,000 people started filling out your form this month and 350 submitted the form, the conversion rate would be:
350 / 5,000 x 100 = 7%
So, what’s form optimisation?
It’s simply improving your forms to increase conversion rates.
For most people, form conversion is all about increasing leads.
Before you begin optimising your forms, it’s important you understand what’s good (and what’s not good) when it comes to form conversions.
The average form conversion rate across all industries is 2.9%.
This means you should expect about 3 out of every 100 visitors who start your form to submit it.
If your form conversion is lower — or hovering around this number — then it’s important to start optimising now.
With Matomo, you can track your form conversions with Matomo Form Analytics. Gain powerful insights into how your visitors interact with your forms with our intuitive dashboard.
Why it’s important to optimise your forms
Most people hear the word “forms” and think it’s boring.
But forms are the doorway to leads.
If you want to generate more sales, then you need to generate great forms.
Here are five reasons you need to optimise your forms today:
1. Improve conversions
Form optimisation is really just conversion optimisation.
But, instead of optimising and improving your site to directly improve sales conversions, you’re increasing lead conversions.
Every smart website owner uses forms to draw people in further.
The reality is that most of your website visitors will never return to your site.
This means you need to do everything you can to grab their contact information so you can continue marketing to them day in and day out.
Otherwise, you’ll lose them forever.
When you know how to optimise your forms, you’ll be able to get a higher percentage of form viewers to fill it out.
Higher conversions mean you get more leads, more customers, and ultimately more revenue.
2. Capture more leads
When you can increase your form conversion rate from 1% to 2%, it may seem insignificant.
What’s a measly percentage point in conversions?
It’s a lot.
When you’re dealing with traffic in the tens or hundreds of thousands each month, an increase in conversion rate by a whole percentile is massive.
Let’s say you take your conversion rate from 2% to 3% on your form, and you have 70,000 visitors view the form each month.
Well, if 1,400 people used to sign up to your email list each month at a 2% conversion rate, then at a 3% conversion rate, you’d get 2,100 new email signups every month.
That’s a major difference.
When you can improve your signup forms, you improve your lead generation (which is conversion rate optimisation). And the more leads you have, the more sales you’ll make in the long run.
3. Get the most out of your traffic
If your forms don’t perform well, then you’re wasting your time (and your traffic).
By analysing your form data, you can quickly see what’s working and what’s not so you can optimise and improve the user experience (and your forms).
For most people, this means getting more form viewers to fill out the form with their email and name.
If 50,000 people visit your site each month, but only 1% of them fill out your form, you’re only getting 500 email signups per month.
Rather than paying money to generate more traffic, why not just work on improving your website by implementing a better form?
If you can increase your form conversion rate to 2%, you will immediately go from 500 new subscribers per month to 1,000 per month.
4. Spend less on acquisition
If you’re able to get more form signups without having to generate more traffic, you just solved a pricey problem: acquisition costs.
If you can now get 1,000 of your 50,000 visitors to sign up to your email list through a better form, then you doubled your signups.
But that’s not all. You just cut your acquisition costs in half.
If you spend $2,000 per month on acquisition but you’re able to get twice as many leads, then your acquisition costs are at 50% of what they used to be.
This means you can pay the same amount but get twice as many leads.
Or, you can pour even more money into acquisition since it’s now twice as effective so you can fuel growth even more.
5. Grow revenue
Forms generate revenue. It may not be direct (although, in some cases, it is).
But, forms will lead to sales.
By placing optimised forms throughout your website at the right places, you will be able to capture a percentage of your visitors as leads, which means you’ll eventually make more sales.
13 tips to optimise your forms for more conversions
Now that you know what forms can do and why they’re important to grow your business, it’s time to dive into the best practices.
Follow these 13 tips to ensure you’re getting the most out of your forms:
1. Set form goals
Your forms are hopeless without a goal.
Before you set up a form on your website, ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish with this form?”
It could be:
- Encouraging customers to reach out through a contact form
- To get visitors to leave feedback on your product/service
- Convert visitors into leads by giving you their email
No matter what your goal is, make sure you’re clear on it; otherwise, you won’t be as targeted and specific with your forms.
Matomo Goals helps you set specific objectives for your marketing campaigns so you’re able to easily track conversions. Whether you’re looking to capture feedback or generate leads, you can leverage Matomo to see what’s working and what’s not in seconds.
2. Remove or improve fields with high average time spent and high drop-off rates
Delving into your Form Analytics provides invaluable insights into individual field performance. A crucial metric to focus on is the Average Time Spent.
If a field stands out with a significantly higher average time spent and experiences a high drop-off rate compared to others in the form, it’s a clear indicator that it’s causing frustration or confusion for your visitors.
To address this, consider improving the field by converting it into a dropdown menu for easier completion or providing helpful text prompts. Alternatively, if the field isn’t essential, you might opt to remove it altogether.
When you cut down on time spent and drop-offs, you’ll see your conversion rates go up.
Here’s a standout example from Matomo’s Form Analytics feature: the “Overview of your needs” field is taking on average 1 minute and 37 seconds to complete.
To streamline this, we might want to consider a simple fix like converting it into a dropdown menu. This change would offer visitors a clearer and quicker way to select from options.
Likewise, we observe that the “Overview of your needs” field experiences the highest drop-off rate, totaling 1,732 drop-offs.
With Form Analytics, it becomes clear what is needed to optimise forms and increase conversions.
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3. Start with the CTA
When crafting and optimising your forms, you need to start with the end in mind. That’s why you need to start with your business goals.
What are you trying to do with this form? If you want to capture more emails, then make sure that’s very clear with the call to action (CTA).
Start building your form by beginning with the CTA.
For example: “Sign Up Now.”
Once you have the action you want your potential customers to take, place it on the form. Then, you can work towards crafting the rest of the form.
4. Put it above the fold
If your visitors can’t find your form, they won’t fill it out. It’s plain and simple.
You need to make sure your form is visible above the fold. This is the part of the screen that’s visible to your visitors once they land on your site (without needing to scroll down).
Always remember to test this out on both desktop and mobile to ensure anyone (using laptops or a mobile device) will see your form upon landing on your site or page.
Don’t forget about your mobile users. More people view mobile forms than desktop forms.
5. Put a CTA in the headline
Your form needs to be clear.
You have 1-3 seconds to communicate with your site visitors what your form is all about.
For example, if you’re trying to get email signups with a lead magnet, then tell them the benefit quickly and concisely with a CTA in the headline, like this one:
“Subscribe to Save 10% On Your Next Order”
This is a great example of a headline-CTA combo that tells the visitor what to do and what they get out of it.
Matomo’s behaviour analytics features like Session Recordings let you see where visitors are clicking and spending time. For example, if people are reading the headline, but not scrolling down to read the form, it’s probably a sign you need to test a different headline.
6. Ensure you have the right fields
Your form fields matter.
What information are you trying to capture from your audience?
One beginner mistake people make is requiring too much information and including many fields in a form.
You want to get as much data on your audience as possible, right? Wrong.
If you ask for too much information, people won’t fill it out, and it will harm the user experience. You need to make it super easy.
If you want more emails to grow your list, then stick with someone’s email (and possibly their name as well). One line for a name. One line for an email address. Keep it simple.
If you’re after SMS as well, don’t include it on the form. Instead, create a two-step form that pops up an SMS form after someone fills out the email form.
Multi-step forms enable you to capture those emails easily (and still get a percentage to fill out the second form) without making it seem like too much work for your audience.
Another path is to include optional fields (that users don’t have to fill out to click submit).
Just keep in mind that shorter forms perform better than longer ones.
If you make them too long, it feels like work for the user and will lead to lower completion rates.
7. Always capture email address
If you’re unsure of what information to capture (i.e. name, number, email, occupation, age, etc.), always stick to email.
Email is used by over 4 billion people every single day, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
When determining which fields to include, start with email.
8. Test different buttons and copy
You need to track your form performance if you want to get the best conversions.
One of the best form elements to start testing is your button copy.
In most cases, form completion buttons will have the word “submit” on them.
But you don’t have to stick with this word.
You can (and should) experiment with different submit button copy.
Here are a few examples of replacement words for your action button:
- Complete
- Sign Up
- Join now
- Get started
Remember to experiment with your action button. Try a different copy. Just keep it short.
You can also try A/B testing your form by experimenting with different colours, copy, and more.
In the example above from Matomo’s A/B testing feature, we found that changing the wording of our call to action made a big difference. The new “Apply Now” button performed much better, with a 3.6% conversion rate compared to just 1.7% for the original one.
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9. Test static vs. popup
There are various types of online forms.
The most common is the static form that just sits in one place and is always there.
Another popular form type is the popup.
This is where a form will appear based on a certain trigger like:
- A certain amount of time on page
- A certain distance scrolling down the page
- If someone is a new or returning visitor
Depending on the form software you use, you may be able to add conditional logic.
Start tracking your form conversions
Form optimisation is all about conversion rate optimisation.
If you want to increase your conversions and generate more revenue, then you need to test out different forms and know how to optimise them.
With Matomo, you can easily track, manage, and A/B test your forms so you can improve your conversions.
Try Matomo free for 21 days. No credit card required.
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21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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11 of the Most Effective Conversion Rate Optimisation Best Practices
14 février 2024, par ErinDriving more traffic to your website is hard work, but it’s still only half the battle.
You don’t just need to acquire new users; you need to make sure as many convert as possible to make your digital marketing efforts worthwhile.
That’s why improving your site’s conversion rate is so important. It will also help you get more value from your existing traffic source and keep you in line with your competitors. It’s also probably a lot easier than you think — especially if you adopt optimisation strategies that have been proven to be profitable time and time again.
In this article, we’ll show some of the most powerful, innovative and tried-and-tested conversion rate optimisation strategies you can implement immediately.
What is conversion rate optimisation?
First, let’s look at what conversion rate optimisation means. Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of improving elements of your website to increase the number of users who take a desired action and turn visitors into customers.
Common conversion goals include:
- Making a purchase
- Adding an item to a shopping cart
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Registering for a free trial
- Downloading an ebook
- Watching a video
It doesn’t matter what your goal is. Using one of the following conversion rate optimisation best practices can send your conversions soaring.
11 conversion rate optimisation best practices
Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work? Then use one or more of the following best practices to improve your return on investment.
Set a clear goals and hypothesis
When running an A/B or multivariate test, you need a clear idea of what you are testing and why.
A goal (a statement about what you want to achieve) and a hypothesis (a statement about what you expect to happen) clarify the problem you are trying to solve and give you a definitive way to judge the experiment’s results.
Confused? Just use this template:
We aim to [insert goal] by testing [insert test] on [insert page]. We expect that [insert test] will increase [insert metric] because [insert reason].
Make sure your goals are directly related to the experiment. If you are testing your CTA button, the goal should be getting more users to click the button. It shouldn’t be a goal further down the conversion funnel, like making a purchase.
Start with A/B tests
A/B testing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to run experiments to improve your current conversion rate. So, it’s no wonder that the A/B testing software market was expected to be worth $1.2 billion in 2023 and hit $3.6 billion by 2033.
Also known as split testing, A/B testing allows you to directly compare the conversion performance of two elements on your page, like the colour of your CTA button or your headline copy.
You can go even further with multivariate testing, which lets you test two or more changes against a single control.
For example, the screenshot above shows the results of a multivariate test between a standard header, a wide header and a small header using Matomo’s A/B testing tool. As you can see, the wider header has a much higher conversion, and the increase was statistically significant.
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Tweak your CTAs
Calls to action (CTAs) are page elements that prompt users to respond immediately. They are usually buttons but can also be images or plain text links.
What your CTAs say, how they look, and where they are placed can greatly impact your site’s conversion rates. As such, this is one of the elements you’ll want to optimise first.
There are several tweaks you can test, including your CTA’s:
- Colour
- Length
- Copy
- Placement
You can even test the impact of removing CTA banners and using text-based CTAs on your conversion rates.
You should test out personalising CTAs, too. Research shows that personalised CTAs perform 202% better than standard calls to action.
Revise your web copy
You can use several strategies to improve your website’s copy and generate more conversions.
Optimising copy for search engines can increase traffic and generate more conversions, for example. But that shouldn’t make your copy any less impactful. Bear search engines in mind, by all means, but make sure you are speaking to the needs and desires of your potential customers. Your copy needs to convince users that your product can solve their problems.
Nowhere is this more important than your headlines. These will be the first thing users read, so make sure they sell your USP and highlight pain points.
Don’t just guess at the kind of messaging that will move the needle, however. Constantly test new headlines and continue doing so even after you’ve started seeing success. The results may surprise you. TruckersReport, a site that helps people become truck drivers, boosted opt-ins by 21.7% by revising its landing page headline, among other changes.
Make sure there are no spelling mistakes in your copy, either. Misspelt words, poor grammar and bad formatting make your website look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Even if the rest of your copy is incredibly enticing, these rookie errors can be enough to turn customers off.
Simplify your site’s navigation
A website’s navigation is an often overlooked factor in conversion rate optimisation, but simplifying it can make it much easier for users to take action.
If you’ve ever used a poorly designed e-commerce store, you know how confusing and overwhelming bad navigation can be. Research shows that a whopping 82% of stores don’t divide their navigation into manageable chunks.
The trick is to simplify your navigation as much as possible. As you can see in the screenshot below, our navigation only has five headers and a call to action. It’s easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you can’t miss the big green CTA button.
Alternatively, you can test what happens when you completely remove your navigation. Brands usually do this on landing pages where the only action they want the user to take is to make a purchase.
It’s exactly the strategy we’ve used on our free trial landing page.
Leverage heatmaps
Analytics tools — and heatmaps in particular — can help you understand user behaviour and optimise accordingly.
Heatmaps are a visual representation of user interaction on your page. Red and yellow represent high levels of user interaction, and blue and green represent low levels of interaction.
As you can see in the screenshot above, our CTA button has some of the highest levels of engagement on the page, telling us that it’s well-positioned. Given the focus on the site’s navigation, we can also assume we are correct to have a CTA button in there — something we can confirm using our web analytics to see how many users click on it.
Reduce load time
Speed matters when it comes to conversions. Fact.
Research shows a huge difference in conversion rates between quick and slow sites. For example, a site that loads in one second converts three times better than a site that loads in five seconds.
That’s why using a web analytics tool is vital to understand page load times and act accordingly if you think slow speeds are hampering your conversions.
Identifying your slowest pages is easy with Matomo. Just sort your pages by the Avg. Use the page load time metric on the page performance report to identify the pages you want to drive conversions.
Next, take steps to improve your page’s load time by:
- Compressing images
- Compressing code files or using a more lightweight theme
- Removing unnecessary plugins
- Using a content delivery network
- Improving your hosting
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Add more trust signals
Trust is essential when you’re trying to convince customers to make a purchase. In fact, consumers rate trust as one of the top three buying factors, far above a brand’s reputation and whether they love the brand.
Adding trust signals to your landing pages, such as customer testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, and other forms of social proof, can transform your conversion rates. If consumers see real people and businesses buy from you, they’ll feel reassured to do the same.
It’s a strategy we use ourselves. Just look at the screenshot from our homepage above. Immediately after our free trial CTA, we display the logos of well-known brands that use our product.
Security-focused trust signals are also powerful if you are an online store. Installing an SSL certificate, showing logos of trusted payment providers (like PayPal and Mastercard) can convince people they are spending money at a legitimate store.
Improve your site’s mobile experience
More and more people are accessing the internet via their smartphones. In 2022, for instance, there were five billion unique mobile Internet users, meaning more than 60% of the internet population used a smartphone to browse online.
Moreover, 76% of U.S. adults make purchases using their smartphones.
That means you need to ensure your site’s mobile experience is on-point to increase conversions.
Your site should use a mobile-first design, meaning it works perfectly on smartphones and then scales up for desktop users.
Trust the data
Opinions are a fantastic form of inspiration for new A/B tests. But they should never be trusted over cold, hard data. If your test shows the opposite of what you and your team thought would happen, then trust the data and not yourself.
With that in mind, ensure you collect qualitative and quantitative data during your experiments. Web analytics should always form the backbone of conversion tests, but don’t forget to also use heatmaps, screen recordings, and customer surveys.
Keep testing
There’s no such word as “finished” in the world of A/B testing. Continual testing is key if you want to convert more website visitors.
Make sure you aren’t stopping tests prematurely, either. Make sure every A/B and multivariate test reaches a sample size that makes the test statistically significant.
Understand your users better with Matomo
Whether you run an e-commerce store, a SaaS company, or a service-based business, implementing these conversion rate optimisation best practices could be an easy way to lower your bounce rate and boost your conversion rates.
But remember, best practices aren’t clear-cut rules. What works for one website may not work for yours. That’s why running your own tests and understanding your visitors’ behaviour is important.
Matomo’s web analytics platform is the perfect tool for doing just that. Not only does it come with the tools you need to optimise your conversion rate (like an A/B testing tool, heatmaps and session recordings), but you can also trust the data. Unlike Google Analytics 4 and other tools, Matomo doesn’t use data sampling meaning you have 100% accurate data from which to make better decisions. It’s GDPR compliant and can run cookieless, so no need for cookie consent banners (excluding in the UK and Germany).
Discover how you can improve your website’s conversions with Matomo by starting a free 21-day trial, no credit card required.
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What is White Label Analytics ? Everything You Need to Know
6 février 2024, par ErinReports are a core part of a marketing agency’s offering. It’s how you build trust with clients by highlighting your efforts and demonstrating your results.
But all too often, those reports deliver a jarring and incohesive experience. The culprit? The logos, colours and names of third-party brands your agency uses to deliver work and create the reports.
Luckily, there’s a way to make sure your reports elevate your agency’s stature; not undermine it.
By white labelling your tools, you can deliver a clear and cohesive brand experience — one that strengthens the client relationship rather than diminishing it.
In this article, we explain what white label analytics tools are, why it’s important to white label your analytics solution and how you can do it using Matomo.
What is white label analytics?
White labelling is the process of redesigning a product or service using your company’s brand. The term comes from the act of putting a white label on a product that covers the original branding and allows the reseller to personalise the product.
White label analytics, then, is a way to customise your analytics software with your agency’s logo and colours. When you white label your analytics, you ensure your reports, dashboards and interface provide a consistent and familiar user experience.
The alternative is to provide your clients with an analytics report containing the logo and branding of your analytics software provider — whether that’s Google Analytics, Matomo, or another tool.
For some clients, it can create a confusing experience that takes attention away from your agency’s results.
Why white label analytics is important
There are plenty of reasons to white label your analytics tool, from improving your client’s experience to generating additional revenue. Here are four of the most important benefits to know:
Improve the client experience
You want your clients to have a seamless user experience with your agency’s brand, whether they visit your website, log into their client portal, or read one of your reports.
By white labelling your analytics platform, you can give your clients a visually appealing experience that stays in line with the rest of your branding and doesn’t leave them confused about who they are interacting with or which company is providing the service they pay for.
This is especially important if your agency uses other third-party tools like a client portal or productivity platform that also allows for custom branding.
Strengthen client relationships
When you use white labelling to remove solution providers’ logos, you ensure your brand gets all of the credit for the hard work you’ve been doing. This can strengthen the agency-client relationship and reaffirm the importance of your agency.
But, white labelling allows you to tell a better story through your reports and increases the perceived value you offer. There are no other brands, logos, or names to confuse the narrative or detract from your key points — or to stop the client from understanding just how much value you provide.
Save time and increase productivity
White labelling your analytics platform can save your team a significant amount of time when creating client reports.
There’s no need to carefully screenshot graphs to add them to your own branded report. You can simply email clients a report using your white labelled analytics platform, assuring them of a seamlessly branded experience.
The upshot is that your team can spend more time on billable work, improving the value they deliver to existing clients or opening up capacity to take on even more work.
Increase monetisation opportunities
Whether you are an agency or consultant, white labelling an analytics solution gives you the opportunity to package and sell analytics as part of your own services. This can open up new revenue streams, help you to diversify your income, and reach a wider audience.
The beauty of a white label offering is that there is no allusion to the company providing the underlying service.
The most important elements of an analytics platform to white label
A white label analytics solution should offer a broad range of customisation options that range from surface-level branding to functional elements like tracking codes.
Below we take a look at the top components you should be able to customise with your chosen platform.
Logo and Favicon
The logo is the first thing clients will see when they open up their analytics platform or look at your reports. It should make your services instantly recognisable, which is why it’s so jarring when clients read a report with another company’s brand slapped on every chart.
This should be the very first thing you change since it will be on almost every page and report your client views. Don’t stop there, however. If you send clients web-based reports, you’ll also want to change the platform’s favicon — the small logo you see next to your website in a browser.
Customising both your logo and favicon is easy with Matomo.
Just head to Administration, then General Settings and click Use a custom Logo under Brand settings.
Upload your brand, click Save, and it will automatically populate your brand in place of the Matomo logo across the platform, just like in the image above.
Brand name
Most analytics platforms will mention their brand names repeatedly across the site, so it’s important to change these, too.
Otherwise, you risk clients reading your analytics reports in detail or playing around with your platform’s settings and getting confused when another seemingly unrelated name keeps popping up.
Again, this is easily done with Matomo’s White Label plugin.
Head to Administration, then General Settings. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find WhiteLabel settings.
Enter your brand or product name in the first box and click Save.
Just like your logo, this will replace every instance of Matomo’s brand name with your own.
Brand colours
Changing your analytics platform’s colours to match your own is almost as important as swapping out the logo.
Failure to do so could mean the charts and graphs you add to your client reports could cause confusion.
You can also use Matomo’s WhiteLabel settings to change the platform’s background and font colours.
Just enter a new header background and font colour using hexadecimal values.
This change will also apply to automated email reports.
Custom tracking
Tracking requests and links are an overlooked element of analytics when it comes to white labelling. Most people wouldn’t think twice about them, but they are an easy way for someone in the know to identify which platform you are using.
With Matomo’s White Label plugin, it’s possible to customise every request Matomo makes to your clients’ websites.
If left unbranded, tracking requests contain the following references: matomo.js and matomo.php.
By clicking the Whitelabel tracking endpoint box on the WhiteLabel settings page, those references will be replaced with js/tracker.js and js/tracker.php
You’ll need to update your tracking code to reflect these changes, otherwise, requests will still contain Matomo branding.
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Links
Finally, you’ll want to remove any links to any additional content offered by the analytics company. These are usually included to improve the user experience, but they are best removed if you are letting clients access your platform.
With Matomo, you can remove all links by clicking the relevant box in WhiteLabel settings.
You can also use the Show Marketplace only to Super Users checkbox to limit the visibility of Matomo’s Marketplace to everyone bar Super Users.
Can you white label Google Analytics?
In a word: no.
Google Analytics might be the most popular analytics platform, but it comes up short if you want to customise its appearance.
This can be a particular problem for agencies that need to stand out from competitors offering the same generic reports. You can add more context, detail and graphs to your analytics reports, of course. But you’ll never be able to create completely custom, brand-cohesive reports using Google Analytics.
3 analytics platforms you can white label
While you can’t white label Google Analytics, there are several web analytics providers that do offer a white labelling service. Here are three of the best:
Matomo
As you’ve already seen, Matomo is the ideal web analytics platform if you want to let your own brand shine through. Matomo lets you personalise the entire dashboard and all of your reports. That includes:
- Adding your brand logo and favicon
- Changing the font and background colours
- Removing third-party links
- Tracking using custom URLs
- Develop your own custom theme
Matomo offers a 21-day free trial (no credit card required). If you want to get remove the Matomo branding, you need the White Label plugin, which starts at just $179 per year after a free trial.
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Clicky
Clicky is a simple, privacy-focused web analytics platform with a white label offering. Like Matomo, you can add your logo and change the platform’s colours.
Clicky offers a seven-day free trial and charges a $99 setup fee, with prices starting from $49 and rising to $399.
Plausible
Plausible is another privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative that offers white labelling. The difference here is that it’s pretty complex to set up.
Rather than customising Plausible’s platform, for instance, you need to embed its dashboard into your own user interface. If you want to create your own custom dashboard, you’ll need to use an API.
Plausible offers a 30-day free trial.
Leverage white label analytics today with Matomo
Don’t put up with confusing unbranded clients a moment longer. White label your analytics platform so the next time you sit down to share insights with your clients, they’ll only see one brand: yours.
Matomo makes it quick and easy to customise the look of your analytics platform and all of the reports you generate. If you already use Matomo, try the White Label plugin free for 30 days.
If not, try Matomo with a free 21-day trial. No credit card required.
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