This is not another post about conversion rates tips or beautiful landing pages. This post describes our accurate, step-by-step method for conversion rate optimization that got our B2B SaaS landing page a 33% conversion rate, and anyone can follow.
Getting many website visitors is nice, but an absolute waste if you are not able to convert a good portion of them into actual users.
Here at Oribi, we take our conversion rate optimization very seriously and give it a lot of attention and much effort. We optimize our website and landing pages in a very strict, planned and data-driven way.
Our goal and strategy
Our goal was straightforward – Getting people who have never heard of Oribi to sign up for our analytics tool, and install our tracking code on their website.
Our strategy was not only about the creatives and messaging. Our main focus was to run A/B tests, accurately measure our results and be completely data-driven.
We never stop testing. Each text, image, call to action, and every other element on the page is being tested to make sure we reach a higher conversion rate over time.
Is 33% conversion rate high?
The answer to that is absolutely yes! Not only is 33% considered very high for any industry, geo or purpose, but two factors make this number even more astonishing:
1. We’re marketing a B2B SaaS product
Oribi is a B2B SaaS product and, as such, is not easy to advertise or to make people sign up.
2. We’re targeting a cold audience with Facebook ads
We used Facebook ads to target people who might be interested in Oribi (we’ll not get into the details of our targeting since that’s an issue for a post of its own).
Now, let us show you how we did it:
Step 1 – We created a matching ad and landing page
This was our Facebook ad:
The ad’s message is “what’s in it for you”.
Next, we created the landing page leading off the ad:
We always ensure that our ads and landing pages match, by using the same messaging, colors and general “look and feel”.
As you can see, the text and colors in the ad and landing page match, giving the users the same “look and feel” once they’re out of Facebook and on our landing page.
The page header text is actually exactly the same as in the ad. In this way, our users get what they expected when clicking on our ad.
It’s very common for marketers to focus on optimizing one part of the funnel at a time (ads, emails, landing page) and forget the user’s experience when moving through the different stages of the funnel. The user has already “invested” time reading the ad, and we need to make sure our page is clear through the use of the same messaging. In this way, we won’t make him “work” again, trying to understand what this page is about.
If your ad says one thing and your landing page says another, most likely your landing page will not convert well.
Step 2 – We created our first A/B test
Before starting our campaign, we created our first A/B test with another variation of the landing page.
We use Optimizely for A/B testing, which allows us to make changes to our website and landing pages, and create different variations to test and measure, without having our dev teams constantly develop different pages.
After having our original “Variation-1”, we now created “Variation-2”, testing the header description text.
“Variation-1” had a 20% conversion rate, compared with 24% in “Variation-2”.
A 24% conversion rate equates to a sign up of 24 out of every 100 people who visited “Variation-2”.
Of course, we waited long enough and tested both variations until we got conclusive results that determine which variation is the winner.
One crucial rule we keep – We test only one element at a time
By doing so, we know exactly what made the difference with no variables affecting the results.
Making multiple changes at the same time makes it impossible to understand what’s really affecting the results. For example, if you have two variations with different calls to action and different headlines, you wouldn’t know which of the calls to action or headline made the difference.
Step 3 – We eliminated the losing variation and kept testing
After the competition between “Variation-1” & “Variation #2”, we moved forward by pulling the losing “Variation-1”. We then created a third variation to compete against the winning “Variation-2”
This time we moved the word “Free” from the description and tested it in the call to action button which is now “TRY IT FREE”, as oppose to the original “CREATE AN ACCOUNT”.
When testing different variations, you will always end up creating a losing variation which taints the results. This is exactly what happened:
“Variation-3” had a 17% conversions rate.
17% conversion rate is considered good, but it’s a big drop from the 24% we already had.
Again, we waited until we were certain that this variation was losing to “Variation-2”. Once it was conclusive, we pulled “Variation-3” and moved on to the next one.
Step 4 – We kept searching for the best Call To Action
By now, you likely understand that we did not stop and settle for the 24% conversion rate we had in “Variation-2”, but kept on testing (as you should always do).
We created “Variation-4” to keep testing the call to action button which now reads “CREATE A FREE ACCOUNT”.
“Variation-4” generated the highest conversion rate so far – 25.1%.
We now had two variations that were working well, with close results – “Variation-2” with a 24% conversion rate, and “variation-4” with 25.1%.
Step 5 – We created a completely new landing page
We now had “Variation #4” getting us an amazing 25.1% conversion rate, but we did not stop there!
By now, our Facebook ad kept appearing to the same audience (which often happens with Facebook ads) which started generating fewer conversions per day. This was the perfect time to refresh our Facebook ad creative, and we launched a new video campaign targeting the same audience.
We kept the exact text from the ad.
In addition to the new ad, it was time to create a whole new landing page.
Why we created a new landing page
Our black and orange landing page was excellent but limited our creative flexibility. Actually, whenever we tried an ad with a different color, it did not perform well because it had a low conversion rate.
We decided to completely change the design of the landing page to make it more neutral and allow us to be much more diverse in our ads creative, keeping a match between ad and landing page.
We achieved this by adding a large customizable image to the page header, which could be easily changed to match the ad regardless of the ad’s appearance. We also changed the lower part of the page to white, to fit any color in the header.
The video ad landing page looks like this:
Now we are free to be more diverse and creative with our ads and landing page variations.
For example, if our ad is orange, we can quickly transform our page to match with Optimizely:
How we tested a completely new landing page
We now had two completely different landing pages to test against each other. We didn’t just assume that our new landing page would perform well; we had to test it directly against the old landing page.
To do so, we created a split test, redirecting half of our visitors to the winning “Variation-4” of the old page, and the other half to the new landing page, which contains exactly the same text and call to action as “Variation-4”.
We tested both pages on those users who clicked on the new video ad only, to ensure that the test results were “clean” and exclude outer effects, such as the fact that we changed the ad.
We let the two pages compete against each other for a while, and waited for conclusive results. We were amazed by what we saw:
The new landing page design got an amazing 33% conversion rate, which equates to a 26% improvement!
Every 100 visitors now gets us 7 more conversions than before (“Variation #4 went up to 26% with the video ad).
Step 6 – We keep on testing
We now have an astonishing 33% conversion rate (at the time of writing this post), but we will not stop there. We keep testing different variations to see how we can get our conversion rate even higher.
We’re currently testing a lowercase call to action button text, and waiting on results.
FInal words
This process took a few weeks and entailed a large number of visitors, to ensure conclusive results.
We were surprised from the very beginning when the first variation got a 20% conversion rate, which is considered very high, and was absolutely amazed by our current 33% conversion rate.
The most important conclusion is – Never Stop Testing!
Had we settled for (the great) 24% conversion rate achieved on the second variation, we wouldn’t have dared continue testing to get a potentially higher conversion rate.