A client we met with earlier this year came to us because his marketing guy had just run the stats reports for a new website analytics package their hosting company had installed. It revealed that 70% of visitors arriving at their homepage were leaving the site within 30 seconds, never visiting another page.
This was bad news for the company; 60% of the traffic to their page was coming from Pay Per Click sources so he may as well have been putting 70% of his budget down the drain as those users weren't interacting with his site at all.
The truly worrying thing is that a 70% 'abandon rate' isn't actually that rare. Check out your stats and if you can't view the number of visitors who never click further than the homepage then come and talk to us as our testing can measure this metric as part of the process.
For this particular client, we worked with them to create new variations on their homepage designs ready for multivariate testing. In designing the variations we followed these 3 rules:
1. Make the variations of the homepage to be tested very relevant to what you're advertising. If your PPC campaigns advertise Widgets, make sure you can read about or buy Widgets on the frontpage. Without that, your potential buyers will just hit the back button and go to a competitor.
2. Make each content variant distinct. The bigger the difference in variants for multivariate testing the more likely a difference in conversion rates will be seen and the greater the difference in conversions will be. Using this approach clients also learn a lot more about what affects customers decisions and what keep their attention. Finer testing can take place after these initial learning to refine variants and further increase conversions.
3. Make one of your content variations very "text light". Your company has a lot to shout about but by covering the homepage with text you're likely to confuse visitors and they'll leave because they can't see what they want straight away.
By working closely with the client in setting up their test and during the initial phase, we were able to decrease their abandonment rate four fold and have subsequently delivered an increase in their conversion rate of 63%. That's 63% more revenue through the web compared to what they got just three months ago.
The client is presently undergoing more tests on landing pages, segmenting traffic dependant on referrer (google adword, different banner ads, etc) and optimising accordingly, taking them from one landing page to multiple optimised pages in one easy step. Next stage will be to look at product and checkout pages.
It just goes to show that there's a lot of extra revenue to be generated just by using the traffic you already have more cleverly. Our client could still be incrementally increasing his PPC budgets to bring more traffic but for a similar amount of investment, he now has Maxymiser continuous optimisation making the most of current traffic lowering CPA and providing more money for traffic driving activities.
Please post your comments below, what have you found can help to reduce abandon rates?
