Month: September 2017

this is an blog post on How to Get E-Commerce Customers Coming Back After Their First Purchase.

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Getting prospects to convert to customers is one thing. But how do you get customers to buy again and again after the first purchase? This is where attentive, customer-focused emails come on. Despite some heralding the “death of email” over more modern platforms like texting and social media, good, old-fashioned email remains one of the best ways to seal the deal, engage customers and encourage repeat purchases.

So what kinds of emails should you send? How often should you send them, and what should they contain? Here are a few of the best examples of e-commerce follow-up emails and why they work so well.

The Repurchase Reminder

Oftentimes, when you make a purchase on a website, they email you immediately after encouraging you to buy again. This marketing strategy is rooted in the idea that customers are likely to come back and purchase while your brand is still fresh in their mind. But oftentimes, companies send emails out immediately and when the customer (naturally) doesn’t respond, they no longer follow up.

If your repeat purchase numbers are flat-lining and your emails are stale, why not wait until more time has passed (depending on how often the customer uses the product) to remind them? Here’s a great example from Sephora, which reminds the customer to restock based on how much time has passed since their first purchase:

Sephora reminds the user to restock based on their past purchase. (Image Source)

Another creative spin on the restock email comes from Clinique. Since their data likely shows that women tend to shop online for beauty products more than men, they wouldn’t have as much luck sending a shaving gel refill reminder to men — so they advertised a refill reminder for him, to her. See how they did it:

An advertisement for men’s shaving gel — targeted to women, who are likely the ones shopping for beauty products. (Image Source)

We Miss You!

One alternative on the restock/repurchase follow-up email is tailored to the bargain hunter, like this email from Starbucks. There’s no better way to stay top-of-mind than with a coupon, and many customers actively wait to purchase until they get a deal. Knowing this, why not reach out with a discount?

This reminder from the Starbucks Store gets right to the point with a discount for customers that haven’t shopped in awhile. (Image Source)

Bodybuilding.com sends customers an email if they haven’t repurchased after about 3 months:

Another common tactic is to follow up with customers asking them to review their recent purchase. Again, this is extremely common and almost expected — but customers don’t always have the time at that very moment to write up a lengthy review. So how do you get them clicking? Here are some creative ideas that take feedback to a new level.

Going Beyond “How Did We Do?”

For the customer who doesn’t have time to write up a huge review, but the company still needs their feedback data to work with, I present to you the Amazon 1-click review:

Amazon encourages busy customers to simply click to review the size of garments they’ve purchased online. (Image Source)

Of course, you’ve likely received plenty of emails asking for your feedback, and even some that go the extra mile by giving you a discount coupon, entering you into a contest and much more. But this one is noted for its pure simplicity plus its unobtrusive style. It doesn’t get in the way — one click and you’re done.

And speaking of Amazon, you already know that they’re the e-commerce leader simply because of how much they test, monitor, tweak and track everything about their site. One of the more famous changes was adding in the “Customers who bought X, also bought Y” feature. Now much more commonplace on e-commerce sites, this “Frequently purchased together” option often encourages greater purchase volume per customer.

But what happens when they don’t purchase all of the items together? Is emailing them about it a lost cause? Not exactly…

Frequently Purchased Together (But It’s Not What You Think!)

Not all “Frequently Purchased Together” emails have to be a sales pitch. And if the customer didn’t buy them when they were originally presented, there must have been a reason.

Of course, the reasons why customers choose not to buy could be a whole other blog post in itself, but knowing what you know, why not steer the customer more toward educating them about the product add-ons or accessories rather than simply presenting them?

An example of a Thank You follow-up email from BabyFirst. (Image Source)

Since, in the example above, the customer is shopping for baby-friendly TV shows, the company naturally recommends a couple of DVDs that a baby or toddler might like, as well as a coupon and directions on how to get it for free.

The Warranty Expiration Notice

This type of email normally applies in cases where you sell parts or electronics that are under warranty. When making a purchase, customers sometimes don’t opt for the extended warranty, preferring to rather stick with the original manufacturer’s timeframe. But reminding them that the original manufacturer’s warranty has almost expired, and inviting them to extend the protection on their purchase might be just the thing they need to keep their original purchase in good working order:

An official-looking email regarding a car warranty.

Here’s another example offering an enhanced warranty on a lamination machine:

A warranty announcement included on new products. (Image Source)

The “Just Looking” Reminder

With all of the email examples showcased so far, you’d need the appropriate data based on what the customer bought previously. But what if they haven’t bought yet, and are only looking? Are you out of luck? Not at all. Provided you have the prospect’s email address, you can still send them reminders, even if they haven’t added a product to their cart:

Recommendations on shirts and a reminder based on shirts and slacks previously looked at, from Calvin Klein. (Image Source)

Here’s another example that reminds the user of the products they browsed in case they want to take another look and don’t want to have to sift through their browser history:

An email reminding the user of the products they looked at. (Image Source)

Use Demographics to Sell

As opposed to many of our other example, these emails do not rely on previous purchases. They start fresh with new product recommendations based on the demographics.

For example – has it been raining in Minnesota for the past few days? Find all your prospects located in Minnesota and send them an email showcasing your umbrellas.

Many of your prospects are likely either searching for one because a) they don’t have one or b) the one they have is old, has holes, etc.

This can go beyond weather. Many political radio broadcasts will have “doomsday” meals when the inevitable apocalypse comes. When Barack Obama was president, Glenn Beck and many other conservative pundits advertised “4-week emergency food supplies”:

Image Source

Does this profit off irrational fears? Yes.

But it also means understanding your audience. If they’re afraid, what are they willing to buy? Sell it to them. If it’s snowing, what are they willing to buy? Offer it up for sale.

Marketing is all about targeting the right people, when they are most receptive to your product. What better products to advertise to those that fear end times are near?

New Product Recommendations Based on Past Purchases

Finally, we have the “new product recommendations” email. Rather than always notifying customers every time you have new items in stock (and hoping they might like some of them), why not segment the new product announcement emails based on what the customer has purchased previously? They’re much more likely to buy, and they’ll welcome the added personalized attention!

Despite the different products and industries, all of these emails have one major thing in common — and that is a dedicated — almost fanatical attention to customer orders, browsing habits and preferences. And although you may be doing a great deal of e-commerce by email, there are still, as these emails demonstrate, new ideas and approaches that can be capitalized on.

Do it all with Kissmetrics Campaigns

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this is a note on 8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement.

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93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

• Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.
• Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

• Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.
• Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.
• Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.
• Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.
• JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

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Here is an blog post on How Linkody Hacked Customer Retention.

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Retention, huh?

It’s like interviewing for a job and getting to the last stage of the interviews — just to realize it’s not going to happen.

We spend money on getting people to our website, visitors spend eight seconds on the page and 98% will never return.

Boy, that hurts

It is especially painful for SaaS businesses because of their lengthy sales funnels and high acquisition costs.

A while ago we decided to gather data on how to attract visitors, move them down the marketing funnel and make sure they love using our tool.

But before we get into the details, let’s go through what retention rate optimization is and how data can be helpful in improving it.

What is Retention Rate Optimization?

Retention rate optimization is the process of improving the rate of customers returning to use your services.

It sounds like something you should be doing, right?

In numbers it looks like this:

1. If 100 people land on your site, on average 2-3% percent will “convert” — i.e., do whatever you want them to do.
1. In our case, it’s 8% of everyone who takes the free trial.
2. So, if we want eight people to try our free trial we have to get 100 to land on our page.
3. The retention rates of different industries are hard to predict, but, in our case, we are generally able to keep these eight people for a month. Afterward this will happen:
1. 4 to 5 people will unsubscribe.
2. But 3 to 4 will try our paid plans, from which only 1 to 2 subscribers will keep paying for more than a month.

This means that only one or two people out of 100 will keep paying to use our services. So naturally, improving this number became a big priority for us.

This is where retention rate optimization comes in, trying to boost your profit on every potential customer who lands on your page.

Now it’s time to explain the path we took.

Behavior Analysis

First of all, you have to try to understand your customer’s behavior:

1. Why did they leave after trying the free trial?
2. Why did they leave after trying the paid plans?

The best way to test your assumptions is by simply by talking to your customers via emails, calls, live chats or Skype calls. Anything will do.

One low-key method we tend to use is Hotjar’s Poll. To set it up you simply implement a small code snippet — similar to setting up Google Analytics — and set up the question sequence.

It looks like this: the question is triggered few seconds after you visit a page.

Ask simple, open-ended questions and soon you will have a lot more insight into why your customers do what they do.

Let’s get Ready to Monitor Data

Have you ever heard the statement, ‘Numbers don’t lie’?

Trust numbers more than you trust anyone. Period.

Google Analytics won’t cut it in delivering the insights into customer behavior you need. You will need funnel and event data monitoring software to help to visualize your events.

In this case, Kissmetrics is the perfect tool for this job.

The metrics these kind of tools offer is what one might need to investigate customers’ behavior.

Setting it up is a bit more technical than with Google Analytics because you have to assign tracking to every event you want to monitor. This will take some time if you don’t have developers at your disposal.

What’s great about behavior analytics’ tools is that they offer easy-to-schedule demo calls, in case there is something you struggle to understand.

Once everything is set, let’s see how we can use this data to improve your retention.

Improving the Onboarding Process

In general, users who have tested different features of your tools can be retained for longer than those people who haven’t tried such tasks.

Designing user onboarding shouldn’t be left to gut feeling. Instead, make sure to tailor it to the features your users find the most useful.

Once you can track events and see the impact your onboarding has on user retention, you can then form a set of assumptions. These assumptions should then be tested to see if iterating your onboarding could improve your retention rate.

Retention rate analysis

We discovered that people who used a key feature of our tool have a retention rate of 20.1%.

This key feature was also the first step of our onboarding.

The second step was to connect our tool to Google Analytics. As it turned out, people who did add Analytics stayed for an average of 12 days, with a retention rate of 7.69%. Compare this to the 1.69% retention rate for people who skipped this step.

We kept exploring the actions people took using our tool. Interestingly, people who used the disavow feature were much more likely to return — this cohort’s retention rate for 12 days was stunning 10.2%.

We had a 24% retention rate increase just by suggesting a few spammy backlinks to disavow.

Once you spot opportunities like this, your assumptions must be tested to see if seemingly useful changes actually deliver the expected outcome.

Imagine the impact if all of your customers would have the same experience as your “star” customers who make the most of your handy features.

From Free Trial to Paid Plan

Once you know the precise likelihood of people sticking around after performing action X, you can assign a value to this activity.

For example, ProdPad gamified their 7-day free trial by giving extra “free days” for each action people performed on the page.

This makes a lot of sense. Any free days you give to your customers are useless if they don’t use them to do things that will make them stick around.

You can even take this one step further. Investigate which actions increase the chance of people switching from free trials to paid plans.

Have a look at the data on activities that improve conversion rates between steps in your funnel. In this case, it’s customers moving from free plans to paid plans.

We discovered that people who linked Google Analytics to our service were 32.5% more likely to use paid plans, compared to those who didn’t link.

This is what we found using the same correlation for the cohort that used our disavow tool:

The disavow tool is seemingly so crucial to our retention rate that it more than doubles the conversion rate from free to paid plans.

Once you start seeing this kind of data, it’s then time to test to approve or disapprove your assumptions.

Improve Your Marketing Funnel

There are different ways to test your assumptions. Here are two:

1. Involving your software team to adjust your onboarding and gamify your free trial
2. Using Facebook ads

Obviously, the second option sounds a lot easier, right?

Easier means faster to test and that’s what we like.

After each interaction with a business, we internet users usually get bombarded with upgrade or discount offers. Indeed, it’s a shame not to help your users find their way back to you — and take the action they for some reason avoided.

Setting up Facebook for retargeting ads

Facebook offers amazing retargeting capabilities, allowing you to target any specific action that a specific group of people took.

First, clearly lay out the actions people can take on your site. Once you know the impact these actions have on retention you can make sure people use your tool to its full capability.

What’s more, I will show you how to display ads after almost any event-taking place while people use your tool.

First, let’s start by setting up the tracking. We will need to implement two things:

1. A Facebook pixel — here’s the guide that will walk you through it.
2. Event tracking — here are the codes to implement for facilitating event tracking.

Creating Audiences

Once that’s done, we need to define the specific cohorts (audiences) that we wish to guide further down the funnel.

Every event that occurs on your site is tracked by Facebook’s pixel and people who fall into specific categories can be shown specific ads.

We know our highest retention rate came from people who had used the disavow tool. Moreover, we know there were quite a few people who didn’t do that.

To start, head over to Facebook’s business manager, (1) then to Ads Manager (2), and finally, click on Audiences (3).

There you will be able to create cohorts or “custom audiences” (1). Next, create a custom audience based on “website traffic”.

Then you will have to define the event. In this case, we want to target people (1) who visited in the last 30 days (2) visited Linkody’s “dashboard” (3). Specifically, the ones who didn’t use (4) the “disavow” tool (5) in this period of time.

Make sure to exclude the other groups of people. There is no need to show ads to people who have already done what you will be asking them to do.

Showing Ads for the Right Audience

Now you can reach out to this cohort.

Show your customers the benefits of performing a particular action. Teach them what this feature can do for their business.

These people have most probably not grasped exactly how useful your tool or service is — the exact reason why others love it so much.

A great way to educate people about this is with video guides or blog posts. Film a walk-through or write a how-to guide describing the benefits of taking this action.

Then head over (1) to the Ads Manager (2) and create an ad of your choosing.

Next, select the ad’s objective: I suggest choosing between traffic (1), engagement (2), or conversions (3).

Then, all you have to do is select the custom audience you created before.

Done!

Now all you have to do is check if your retention rates are improving.

This will help you to quickly prove or disprove the assumptions you made before.

Go Ahead and Optimize your Retention

This guide can help you to get the best return out of the money you’ve already put down. So why not go ahead and test it to see if you, too, can boost your profits.

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this is an blog post on 6 Metrics You Might Think are Important But Really Aren’t (And What to Track Instead).

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You know all of those metrics you track?

They’re probably worthless.

I’m not saying they have absolutely no value, of course. I’m just saying they’re doing nothing for your bottom line most of the time.

These are the things that you think matter, but don’t.

In other words, you can track them, but don’t rely on them for real dollar value.

The trick is knowing which ones are valuable and which aren’t.

Here’s why some of those “important” metrics don’t really matter. Along with a few actionable ones you should worry about instead.

1. Clicks + Pageviews

We’ve heard it all before. The questions, the egos, the bragging.

How do I drive 100,000 visitors in a month? I need traffic fast!

Here’s how I drove 4,000 visitors a day, you can too with these simple tricks!

*sigh*

It sounds too good to be true, because it is.

Unless you’re getting paid for the pageview, and you want people to bounce instantly and never return, then go for it. Spam your link on Pinterest, forums and Reddit.

But, if you want to be realistic with yourself, clicks on your ads and page views on your content mean nothing if people aren’t either:

1. Sticking around and reading more on your site
2. Converting / buying a product or service / signing up for something
3. Fulfilling the goal you have set on that page for visitors

So, if your clicks went through the roof yesterday like this:

But, your conversions were like this:

And your pageviews were like this:

But your goal completions were like this:

Then what.is.the.point?

Clicks and pageviews are worthless if they don’t lead to conversions.

2. CTR

CTR. The glorified metric that drives everyone from PPC to SERP “growth hackers” crazy.

Look at me, I’ve got a 66% CTR!

Oh cool, how many conversions did that get you? Two out of 4,000 clicks? Make it rain baby!

Ok, on a more serious note, here’s why CTR don’t mean $#!* in the real world:

Take a look at that AdWords table.

The highest converting, highest traffic keyword/ad group has the lowest CTR (by far).

YET… also the highest conversions (by far).

Paying a low bid on the keyword and spending less money = lower positions = more competition = lower CTR.

But, conversions are still sky-high.

The whole account has an average total CTR of 3.49%. That’s “not good.”

Except, the average Cost per Conversion is 5x lower than the average sale revenue.

I’ll take that deal any day of the week.

CTR ain’t the gold standard. I don’t care what your CTR is if it doesn’t bring in conversions.

3. Impressions

Let’s say you own a brick and mortar store. You sell shoes.

It’s launch day and you get 40,000 people to walk in and out of your store that day.

Those ads must be working!

You’re checking ‘the books’ and you see the following sales numbers: $500. Total.

Now do you get it?

Impressions are cool and all.

“Hey, (insertbossesname), our product was seen by 100,000 people today!”

But at the end of the day, they don’t matter if (can you guess what’s next?) they don’t lead to sales, conversions, or goal completions.

4. Total Backlinks

Backlinks are good. They help with ranking metrics and credibility.

But total backlink quantity is over-emphasized.

Constantly we see people worrying about how many links they can get, however they can.

*Queue Oprah Gif: You get a link! You get a link! And you get a link!

If your backlink profile is spammy:

… then those links don’t mean anything.

URL’s with low DA’s that are known for spamming or giving links like it’s candy on Halloween aren’t going to get you to the top of Google (anymore).

Ideally, you want a nice backlink profile from relevant, editorially-based sources that don’t just hand over easy links willy nilly.

5. Rankings

Rankings can be awesome. Who doesn’t love being #1 on Google?

We’ve all seen this graph before:

Image Source

Sounds peachy, doesn’t it?

We simply grind our content to the top ten positions and get the lion’s share of clicks.

But, it’s BS. Just ask Wil Reynolds.

Google is constantly changing. Personalizing their methods, learning about real people, and real human interaction with their service.

SEO rankings are more related to user search history now.

There’s more importance being placed on things like first impressions and brand loyalty in today’s world than there is on keywords and content.

So doing all those little SEO tricks to get you to the #1 spot isn’t going to be as helpful as you think.

AND, #1 on the SERPs doesn’t translate into conversions.

You need a funnel. Not a ranking.

6. A/B Test Results

Most A/B tests fail to provide meaningful insights.

Why?

Because you’re testing your own opinions and assumptions, allowing that pesky biases to ravage your results.

That’s not the only problem, though.

Peep Laja from CXL tested tons of data and experiments and found that A/B testing is worthless if you have less than 1000 conversions. Per month. Minimum.

Welp, that’s disheartening. Unless you’re getting over 1k (minimum) conversions per month, forget A/B testing and the results you got.

They don’t mean anything.

They might look nice at first. But most likely, they’ll regress back to the mean eventually.

Here’s what you should be tracking, instead

Don’t drown in all this negativity just yet. There’s good news, too.

Here are a few metrics to focus on to help make the cash register ring.

1. Funnel Report Data

We just talked about how A/B testing was a waste of time unless you have 1,000 minimum conversions per month.

BUT, you can figure out your conversion trouble spots much faster using funnel report data (courtesy of Kissmetrics).

Funnel reports show you how users actually move through your website.

You can see who performed certain actions, who didn’t perform a desired action, and who skipped certain steps in your funnel (for good or for ill).

You can also track certain steps in your funnel:

So if someone visited, then signed up for a newsletter, then viewed a video, you’d know.

You can then use this data to do things like:

1. Identify conversion bottlenecks preventing people from joining, signing up, opting-in, or signing on the dotted line
2. Segment your audience into cohorts to further analyze your funnel
3. Zoom in on your acquisition funnel to see exactly where and when customers activate

Basically, you can determine how to increase conversions. Reliably. Consistently. Without running a single A/B test.

2. Backlink Quality

High quality backlinks can be hard to get.

You can’t fake ‘em.

They’re a leading indicator, sure. But the best kind.

It’s a measure of performance, telling you (1) how efficient those promotional activities are and (2) if you can expect to see increased traffic in the near future as a result.

For example, here’s what a good backlink profile should look like:

#humblebrag

It’s diverse.

We aren’t getting hundreds of links from the same site over and over, as the link quality wouldn’t be as strong or meaningful.

And there are links from other high-quality sites in our industry. Relevance for the win!

But building high-quality backlinks takes an investment.

One survey by Moz found that roughly 37% of business owners spend between $10,000 and $50,000 per month on external link building.

That’s a lot.

We’re not saying you have to invest that much. There is a lot you can do to get better backlinks without dropping that kind of dough.

The point isn’t to just build links. That poor-house mindset is how you end up with the junk.

The point is to look at how you’re getting those links. The campaigns and activities and efforts bringing them in.

Change the strategy, change the end result.

3. ROI

Good old ROI. The gold standard metric.

That no one ever talks about online.

You see all the other stuff here. You might see revenue numbers and customer counts.

However, rarely do you see blog posts diving into the bottom-line numbers that actually count.

Let’s say you get four impressions and one click (and one pageview), with a 0.25%CTR and 0.25% conversion rate.

BUT, you only spend $5 and the buyer converts for 10x your cost per acquisition.

See what I mean? Who gives a crap about any other metric in the end besides ROI.

Now, I’m not saying you should completely ignore optimizing for conversions. Definitely not. Those are extremely important.

Just keep in mind that data lies. High conversion rates aren’t always as promising as they look.

Look at historical data, pinpoint trends, figure out what ROI means for you.

Ask: How does this specific measurement help our company’s growth?

And by growth, we don’t mean impressions, rankings, etc.

Knowing the number of leads each ad campaign is driving is fine. But it’s not good. You can’t stop until you see how much revenue each attributes.

Conclusion

Some metrics matter more than others.

Traffic, clicks, page views, CTR, and… don’t matter as much in the long run. Vanity metrics like these sound amazing on press releases and blog posts and webinars and Growth Hackers and weekly stand-up meetings.

But they don’t help so much when it comes time to run the annual numbers.

You want to think big picture.

Look at your overall funnel. Where are people coming in? What are they doing? Where are they going?

Look at your backlinks to see which drive signups. Links, by themselves, are fine. But the important part is to first identify the ones driving real business actions. And then reverse-engineer which activities are driving the ‘winners’ vs. the ‘losers.’

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