How to Capture Your Customers at the Top of the Funnel
Website metrics, like purchases and form submissions, are top of mind for marketers—but how can you impact those key metrics if users leave as soon as they land on your website?
Join Optimizely’s lead strategy consultant, Alek Toumert, to learn how to engage visitors the moment they arrive at your site through experimentation.
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Housekeeping ● Customize the widgets on your page
to your preference
● This webinar is recorded and you will
receive the link with the slides in the
next few days
● We will have time for questions!
Please submit them in the Q&A box
on the left side of the screen
● A short survey will pop up once the
webinar has ended—We’d love to
receive your feedback.
3. Alek contributes to Optimizely’s strategic
practices on A/B testing and personalization.
Since joining Optimizely, Alek has worked with
the largest experimentation organizations to
improve their program practices, up-level their
methodologies, and build cultures of
experimentation.
Program Maturity and Scaling
Led transitions from a centralized model to a
federated, Center of Excellence model.
Improved team testing velocity by 10x in six
months.
Opticon Education Day Leader
Led courses at both 2017, 2018, and 2019
Opticon on Full Stack Testing and Scaling
Experimentation.
Selected experience
Alek Toumert
Lead Strategy Consultant
Education & Certification
Miami University
Bachelor of Arts, Business Legal Studies
Areas of expertise & industry
Lead Strategy Consultant, Optimizely
Advise enterprise customers on best
experimentation practices and scaling their
program.
Adjunct Professor, Digital Optimization, SFSU
Leads course on best practices and industry trends in
digital optimization in college of extended learning.
Digital Analytics & Optimization Manager,
American Medical Association
Developed and led digital analytics and
optimization program implementation and
practices.
Experimentation Methodology
Instills experimentation best practices with
teams to ensure strong hypothesis creation
and analysis.
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Today we’ll cover how to:
• identify which metrics to influence
• use your data to define top of the funnel problems
• structure strong hypotheses
• create successful top-of-the-funnel strategies
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What do we mean when we say
“top of the funnel”?
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Landing page - a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or
advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email,
or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or similar places
on the web.
Entry page - is the point where users arrive on your website – it is the first page
someone views on your site.
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Time Spent
Listening to
Music
Bring users
back more
often
Increase time
spent per visit
Output Metric
Input Metrics
New Artist
Notification
Recommend
ations
Create
Playlists
Discover
Weekly Views
Input Metrics
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What metrics should we focus on to improve our initial engagement?
● Bounce rate
● CTA clicks
● Scroll depth
● Avg. time on page
● Pageviews / visit
● Interaction clicks
● Mouse over hover
● All by new / return visitors
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If I had only one hour to save the world,
I would spend fifty-five minutes defining
the problem, and only five minutes
finding the solution.
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What qualifies a good customer problem?
If you mention your product, service, or solution in the customer problem statement,
then it’s probably not a customer problem.
Customers on their phone want to be able to talk to a service rep right away.
All mobile banking customers want the ability to provide information on their issue
upon first-page visit. We see a 80% bounce rate for landing pages where the
‘Contact’ link is not visible in the navigation.
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Isolate Pain Points
● What is distracting users from the primary action(s)
we want them to take?
○ Do we want primary focus to be on our
promotional banners (not clickable)?
● Is attention correctly distributed to the points that
would help user take that action?
○ Does time spent looking at promotional
banners first correlate to adding to cart?
● What is our user’s expectation from us at this
point?
○ Are we providing a seamless experience
from where the user arrived into our site?
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What are our top entry channels?
What are our top exit pages?
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Which of these actions correlates to conversion?
Clicking on our navigation
Clicking on the category links
Interacting or hovering over promotional message
Clicking on the image tiles
Scroll depth to certain content blocks
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Category Affinity
Product Affinity
Offer Affinity
Signed-In
Abandoned Cart
Device
Browser
Referral Source
Time of Day
New/Return
KnownContextual Behavioral
What do we already know?What is unique about them? What is their intent?
NEW VISITORS RETURNING
VISITORS
KNOWN
VISITORS
Location
Gender
Purchase Frequency
Past Purchases / Stores
Payment Type
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Bounce rate has increased by 5%
over the last six months.
Is this driven by a segment?
● Return visitors?
● Mobile visitors?
● Ad campaign visitors?
● Past purchasers?
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Metric
Strategies
Tactics
Bounce Rate
Wording /
messaging
Location / size
Design / color
/ iconography
Establish a
visual
hierarchy
Remove non-
critical content
Limit number
of choices
Select/target
the right USP’s
Refine the
messaging
Communicate
visually
Recommendations
Similar
products
Purchased
with
Goes Well
Together
Market Products
Effectively
Test ideal
visuals (video,
animation,
text)
Use the right
review
systems
Find ideal
description
text / length
Build a Sense of
Urgency
Show quantity
left
Push
temporary
offers
Promote
buying before
set times
Emphasize the
Primary Call to
Action
Minimize
Distractions
Communicate
Unique Selling
Points
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Problem
(w/ goal)
Solution
(w/ rationale)
Measurable
Hypothesis
If we create a jump link from the promotional banner to the products,
then we will improve our 5% increase in bounce rate,
because it will make clear the steps needed to be able to view products.
“If (solution) solves (problem), then (goal) because (rationale).”
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● Social-validation, “you're not alone in your
financial situation”
● Build as sense of urgency; people are being
approved right now
● Lots of money borrowed, we are definitely
trusted
● Additional social-proof and credibility
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What metrics should we focus on to improve our initial engagement?
● Bounce rate
● CTA clicks
● Scroll depth
● Avg. time on page
● Pageviews / visit
● Interaction clicks
● Mouse over hover
● All by new / return visitors
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Focus on...
● Metrics first! Identify what metrics are important to influence on your primary landing pages.
○ Understand how page specific metrics contribute to down-the-funnel conversion.
● The problem statement is most important part of your hypothesis. Use multiple data sources (two
plus if you can!) to create a strong problem statements for the team to ideate on.
● Fill your backlog with all possible solutions! You never know what will work.
○ There should be opportunity for multivariate testing when focusing on a problem initially.
● Think deeply about what your user’s initial expectations of you are - what did you tell
them externally that made them want to learn more from you?
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Try out the Visual Editor!
See how easy it is to test
different element variations
on a web page - no coding
needed.
Visit
demo.optimizely.com/web to
try it out for yourself.
Before we get started there are a few of housekeeping items I’d like to run through.
First, you’re able to customize the widgets on your page so please feel free to make them bigger or smaller according to your preference
We’ll be sharing link to the recording and slides in the next couple of day so you can access it in future
Also, there will be time for questions at the end. So please submit them in the Q&A box at the top left corner of the screen.
Lastly, a short survey will pop up at the end of the webinar, and we would love your feedback
ALEK
All together now...
All together now...
On Optimizely’s own marketing site, we’ve found tremendous success in applying this strategy.
In this example, if a user searches for “split testing” in Google and lands on our landing page, the copy on the page is dynamically updated to say “split testing”, whereas they would have seen copy related to “a/b testing” or “multivariate testing” if they had instead searched for those terms on Google. By mirroring the language that the user uses to find us, we’ve been able to improve conversion rates on our landing pages by as much as 40% and we’ve also improve our Quality Score in Google ads, so we pay less for clicks on our ads because we’ve improve the experience of our landing page. Symmetric messaging is a powerful use case for personalization that helps you get the most out of your ad dollars and is a no-brainer if you are running paid ads.
Optimizely’s Visual Editor makes it easy to launch experiments and test web page improvement ideas. You can try out the visual editor for yourself by visiting demo.optimizely.com/web. You’ll receive a link via email to try the demo out after the webinar.