You probably have many ideas on how to improve your website so that it generates more sales. But how do you know what will work best for converting more visitors into website sales?

Based on my 15 years experience optimizing conversion rates for hundreds of websites, here are 10 of the highest-impact CRO tasks that you should begin now to get the best results for increasing your online revenue.

1: Setup a short visitor survey to gain feedback

One of the best ways to improve conversion rates for any website is to discover what is causing your visitors to leave your website without purchasing, in particular their most common issues and problems.

Knowing this helps you understand what needs improving or explaining better to ensure they purchase more often, and forms high impact website improvement ideas.

To discover this setup a short visitor survey using Hotjar. It should popup after 2 mins on a product page, and include these essential questions:

- Do you have any doubts or hesitations about this website?
- Is anything missing or stopping you from purchasing?

Check out my detailed guide on the best user feedback questions.

To increase your response rate offer your visitors the chance to win a gift card if they take the survey. See image below for an offer that I found to work well for getting many useful responses.

2: Improve your shipping offers and promote them better

Shipping costs are one of the biggest influencers on checkout abandonment according to research, but many online businesses don’t take advantage of this. You not only need to ideally offer free shipping, but you need promote it clearly all your product pages right by the add-to-cart button so visitors can’t miss it. See image below for one of my clients who promote this well — Unboundmerino.com.

And remember that often Amazon will be one of your competitors and they offer free next delivery! To save on your shipping costs, you can always increase your prices slightly so that you can afford to offer free shipping.

3: Check if your website breaks on smaller devices

It’s important to always check your content on the most common desktop and mobile devices. But don’t forget about the smaller less common sizes.

Why? Because your website layout can often break on small devices like iPhone SE 2019 which only has a 320 width. Common things that break are overlapping or squashed content, CTAs and navigation elements you can’t click or use properly, or sticky content like live chat blocking key content.

Up to 5% of your visitors can be using these older smaller devices, meaning many lost sales if you don’t check and fix any issues. To check your website for potental issues you can use the mobile view in Chrome and at the top change the mobile size to be 320 width.

4: Add unique value proposition to the headlines in your ads

Optimizing your ads is an important part of increasing your website conversion rates, but you need to do more than getting the targeting right.

You really need to focus on adding your unique value proposition to your Google Ads and Facebook Ads headlines and copy, as these will get higher click rates and convert much better when they arrive on your website. Why? Because you need to make your ads stand out and explain why you are the best option for them, and why you are better than competitors.

Here is a good example of a client doing it well in their Facebook Ads:

5: Gain feedback from your customer support team

Ask your customer support team what the most common problems or issues they get regarding your website are.

Discovering this is often a real goldmine for great website improvement ideas and quick fixes, particularly for adding missing information that seems to be stopping visitors from purchasing.

If you have access to their live chat tool you can also do a more detailed analysis yourself by searching for words like ‘can’t find’, ‘issue’, ‘not working’, ‘problem’ or ‘confusing’ and see what issues you can discover.

6: Improve your filters on category and search results pages

Make it easier for visitors to find the product they want by improving your filters on category pages and search result pages. In particular make your filters sticky on mobile so they can’t miss them.

REI.com do this very well by offering filters by ‘best use’ to help give visitors a way of self-selecting what they need it for. They also offer a great option to search for brands which is particularly useful if you sell many brands.

7: Add UGC video content to your product pages and ads

Add user generated video content to your product pages and ads to help engage your visitors and convert them better. These work extremely well for showing your product in use and the benefits of them. Tools like Billo.app are ideal for helping you quickly create video UGC.

Here is an example of one of my clients that have created this UGC video content and used it well on their website.

8: Use proactive live chat popups to engage potential buyers

Start using proactive live chat popups after 90 seconds on a product pages to ask if visitors need any help. These convert much better than hoping they start a live chat or contact you to ask their question.

Another one of my clients does this well on their pricing page by popping up a live chat that asks if they have any questions.

9: Stop annoying visitors with entry popups

I’ve done 100’s of user tests and one of the most common things that I see that annoy users are showing newsletter or discount popups as soon as they arrive. This is a huge wasted opportunity because they will just close them. Instead you should wait at least a few minutes before popping up to get better signup rates.

10: Add more tool tips instead of relying on FAQs

Add contextual tool tips on product pages and forms to explain common questions visitors might have — don’t just rely on your visitors going to your FAQs page and hoping they find the answer. Many of them won’t do that and will just leave your website, meaning many lost sales for you.

This is very important to do if you are selling any product or service that isn’t easy to understand, and works particularly for explaining what to enter for potentially confusing form fields. One of my clients does this well by using ‘?’ tool tips that give helpful information — Filenow.com.

So go ahead and start these 10 CRO tasks, particularly the visitor survey and live chat analysis ones as these conversion research ones work particular well. All these tasks give you much better results for improving your website conversion rate and sales compared to guessing or listening to your HiPPO!

Thinking of doing a redesign of your website to try to increase your sales? Or maybe you are not happy with your current design and want to a better one? Or perhaps you just want a fresh new look or a rebrand?

I’ve got some disappointing news for you. 😞

Unfortunately, most website redesigns don’t work as well as planned and have barely any impact on sales, and some even have negative effects!

So how can you ensure much better results from your next website redesign?

In this article I reveal the most common reasons why website redesigns fail, and then what to do instead to ensure greatest success for improving sales.

1: Too much is changed at the same time in the website redesign

When doing a redesign the whole website is often changed. This causes problems because some of your website redesign changes will be positive, but unfortunately some will be negative. So the impact of the better changes are outweighed by your poor changes. And you won’t know easily the exact changes that caused a positive or negative impact on sales. For example, your new product page might do much better, but your new homepage headline might not be engaging visitors as well as before.

Instead of launching a full website redesign with all the changes together, if you launch many smaller incremental improvements over a few months it will help you measure the impact of each improvement much better.

2: Too little feedback gathered from your visitors and customers

This is one of the major reasons for redesign failure. Your most influential and important audience are your visitors and customers, and if you haven’t got considerable feedback from them on your existing website and proposed designs, this will frustrate many of them when you launch.

This is what happened with a poor redesign of MarksAndSpencer.com — while the website looked fantastic, it was too modern and many visitors didn’t understand how to use it properly, causing an 8% drop in online sales.

Therefore you need to gain in-depth feedback on your current website from your visitors and customers. Doing surveying using a tool like Hotjar and user testing with a tool like Userfeel.com is one the best ways of gaining this essential feedback. A key part of this is determining their most common issues, doubts, frustrations, needs, as once you know those you can ensure your redesign solves their issues and needs.

Here is an example of some good questions to ask your customers in a survey:

Then after you created your new designs based on their feedback, do surveying and user testing again to make sure your users can easily complete common tasks, and ask if anything seems confusing. Then make further changes based on that feedback.

3: Poor use of web analytics to gain insights, and too reliant on best guess for ideas

Many redesigns don’t use insights from web analytics, and instead are often reliant on hoping that ideas will be successful based on best guesses or demands from HiPPOs. Without web analytics insights, you are essentially blinded by not knowing what pages or elements are performing badly, and not knowing what is currently working well that you should keep for the redesign.

Therefore you need to first do a complete analysis of your current website performance, including ecommerce conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, and bounce rates and conversion rates for your key pages.

This will also form a benchmark is essential for determining the success of any pages you are redesigning, and for future post-redesign launch improvements.

4: Website designers aren’t experts in conversion

Website designers are visual experts can create great looking websites, with stylish page designs. But unfortunately very few of them know how to design a website that ensures highest conversion rates using CRO best practices.

Therefore while its really important to have a good designer to create a more compelling website design, you need to also involve CRO experts to gain high impact website improvement ideas — either internally if you are lucky enough to have them, or hire a CRO expert like myself.

Use incremental, CRO-based website improvements instead of full website redesigns

Now you know the main reasons why website redesigns don’t work well. But what’s the solution? You need to use an incremental, CRO (conversion rate optimization) based website improvements instead of full website redesigns.

This means that instead of lauching full website redesigns once every few years, you need to launch frequent but smaller highly-performing changes (like 2–5 changes per month).

These incremental changes are based on your visitor and customer issues and needs, analytics insights and CRO best practices, and will give you much better results for improving your conversion and sales.

For ecommerce stores its nearly the most exciting time of year, with huge potential to increase your revenue during the holidays.

You have probably already lined up your offers and marketing campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.

But is your website good enough to convert much of this increased amount of traffic into the most sales possible?

You could be easily converting even more of these visitors with some quick CRO improvements to your website. Meaning higher revenues for you.

How? By fixing your conversion barriers that are confusing or annoying your visitors and causing them to leave without purchasing.

Luckily there is still time to make these CRO quick wins before the holidays. So let’s get started…

Clearly show your UVP on all entry pages

UVP = unique value proposition. In other words, why visitors should buy from your website instead of competitors.

Many ecommerce websites don’t explain this well, meaning that visitors will more likely go to a competitor website that explains it better.

The biggest problem is actually hiding it away on your website — don’t presume your visitors know your UVP!

That is why it’s essential to show your UVP on your entry pages to ensure visitors always see it, no matter what page they arrive on.

One of the best ways to do this is by adding a UVP bar below your navigation menu with some key benefits/risk reducers, with engaging icons. AO.com do this very well.

Always mention your UVP on your homepage above the page fold, either in the form of a headline or bullet points with icons. Satya.ca do this well.

And if you aren’t sure what your top entry pages are, you can check this in your ‘Landing Pages’ report in Google Analytics.

Don’t forget to promote UVP in your Google Ads and Facebook Ads too, as that will increase click through rates, and improve message continuation.

And lastly, don’t be satisified with your current UVP. You should always try to improve it to beat your competitors, for example by offering a 110% price match guarantee or a longer warranty.

Improve your filters on categories/search results

Category pages and search results are very important for visitors to help them browse, particularly if they don’t know exactly what they want.

And having poor filters on them often mean 100’s of products for visitors to scroll through and check, paradox of choice, and much higher exit rates.

That is why its essential to improve your filters on category pages and search results so visitors can easily drill down and find exactly what they need.

This is what you need to do before the holidays:

• Don’t hide them away — make them always present at side or top
• Ensure you can choose multiple filters at the same time
• Check that your filters are easy to use on mobile
• Add more filter types — not just brand, price, but also use types, etc.

JohnLewis.com understand how important this is in particular, and they have excellent filters, with many different useful ways of filtering.

There are many good Shopify Apps that will improve your filtering in time for the holidays. One of the better ones that I have used with clients is this one: https://apps.shopify.com/product-filter-search

Promote your shipping and returns incentives

Not only does free or low cost shipping really help increase your converison rates, but many of your competitors are offering it.

And now many smarter ecommerce stores are also offering free returns to make it easier for visitors to try products with lower risk.

But don’t just improve your shipping and returns incentives…

Many ecommerce stores make the mistake of hiding their shipping and returns promotions or not making them clear enough.

Therefore this is what you need to do as soon as possible:

• Promote them better by showing near your add-to- cart buttons, on your homepage and in your UVP bar. This ensures they get noticed.
• Simplify long and confusing shipping and returns policy pages.
• Always include links for shipping and returns in the footer.

Everlane.com do this very well by promoting their free shipping and returns promotions among their product photos so its hard to not see them.

Improve your product imagery and include videos

It’s obviously essential to show photos of your products. But the bar for quality and number of product photos is now very high.

If you only have 1or 2 pictures, or they are low quality, you are going to lose sales to competitors who have more.

Before the holidays arrive its essential you do this:

• Get more photos taken of your most popular products — at least 3 per product, and include photos of them being used or worn.
• Increase the quality and resolution of your photos — this also means that your zoom will work better. Consider getting 360 photos created too.
• Create short videos of your most popular products in use — a video is worth 1000 photos! These should be under 1 minute and highlight your product being used and the features and benefits of it.
• Get customers to include photos with their reviews. To get this quicker you should email your customers and give anyone a gift that submits a photo.
• Ensure your image carousel works well on mobile, including swiping. Very important with such a high percentage of users now on mobile

Vashi.com does a particularly well for showing many images from different angles and being worn by different people, and also include video.

Use urgency and scarcity for your holiday sales

People don’t like to miss out lower prices or products due to the fear of missing out — FOMO

You can take use this priciniple by letting visitors know that your holiday offers are ending soon, and to let them know when stock is running low.

To convert more visitors for your holiday offers you should do these:

• Use sale-ending countdown timer in sticky header, and on product pages
• Mention this urgency in your Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Send email reminders the week before and day before sale ends
• When less than 10 products, prominently show the number remaining

Nectarsleep.com prominently highlight that their offer is ending soon, and indicate low stock.

Fix your hidden ‘broken shit’

It doesn’t matter how well you improve your website if it has ‘broken shit’ on it that you haven’t noticed before.

And I’m not talking about 404 issues/broken links — its less visible things impacting user experience that you may not have checked very well.

Like your Shopify App breaking your filters on some devices or not showing correct search results. Or your cookie banners blocking CTA buttons.

Here are some of the other most common ecommerce broken shit:

• Broken layout on small width devices like iPhone SE 2019
• Broken or not understandable field error validation in checkout
• Mega menus that cover important content and CTA buttons
• Very slow loading images on mobile product pages

See more examples of common ‘broken shit’ to fix

The best way to discover this hidden broken shit is by using a tool like BrowserStack.com to check your website in the most common browsers and devices. You should also be doing regular user testing with a tool like Userfeel.

Fixing these has a huge positive impact on your conversion rate and sales.

Capture more visitor emails with a good incentive

Around 98% of your visitors won’t buy, even during the holidays. And new visitors will buy even less.

Therefore you also need to improve your website so that it captures more emails of your holiday visitors and converts them in the future.

The best way of doing this is by offering your visitors a more compelling email capture incentive, and promote it better.

• Don’t use entry popups — they often annoy visitors who often close them. Exit-intent popups or ones after 60 seconds usually convert better.
• A/B test different incentives, like a new customer discount, a related buying guide, or a contest or giveaway. You should also test the imagery and wording you are using in them to engage visitors better.
• Optimize your follow-up emails too — as they are just as important as your website. In particular you should set up email automations to give your subscribers useful content and guides, not just offers and discounts.

Bonobos.com have an great email capture incentive that offers 15% off discount for the first order.

So what are you waiting for? You don’t have long to make these improvements before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You will certainly increase your conversion rate and generate much greater revenue from your holiday traffic!

These fixes and improvements also act as a great CRO foundation for you to continue building on after the holidays are over.

But not anymore. Why?

Because Amazon.com has become Amazon.cn!

1000’s of Chinese low quality rip-off products from unheard of brands have now inundated Amazon and search results pages. Many of them even fake.

All these products are now getting in the way when you want to browse for trusted brand products, and they are all screaming for your attention.

This makes it very hard to research and find products you are looking for.

Amazon’s search results and category pages are now too hard to use

I have been doing CRO and UX for 15 years now.

And I can honestly say that Amazon.com search results and category pages are some of the worst in ecommerce now.

They are filled with sponsored products from Chinese brands you don’t know or trust, and that often don’t relate well to what you are looking for.

And worthless ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badges, which seem like sellers can just ‘purchase’ to trick people into clicking them. And in this case below, Amazon’s Choice is often sponsored! Not great for building trust.

And poor quality ‘recommended articles’ (written by affiliates) show up in search results, which are often promoting these Chinese low-quality products from unheard of brands. These are really quite unhelpful, and get in the way.

Their filtering options are also often not useful, inconsistent across category and search results pages, and are often sluggish to use. The types of filters being offered are often not very good.

And there is certainly no point in sorting by highest rated, as I just don’t believe the reviews anymore.

A much better example of category page with excellent user experience is AO.com. Their product listings are much more helpful and more detailed, their filtering is much better and more useful (like they offer a ‘features’ filter which is very helpful), and they don’t have sponsored results that get in the way like at Amazon.

Amazon’s product pages are spammy and fake

The product pages of these low quality Chinese products are mainly filled with spammy titles (optimized for search results — not humans), poorly translated English descriptions, spelling mistakes, superimposed fake images, and 1000’s of fake reviews. And many of them are of course ‘Amazon’s Choice’ like this interesting product…

Is there no quality control on Amazon now, let alone proper checks for fake rip-off products? It’s often hard to tell if a product is actually genuine or not.

And the fake reviews issue is huge,and has been talked about for years, yet nothing really seems to change. It’s still simple to buy fake reviews.

Amazon has slowly become a truly terrible user experience over the last few years, and has also resulted in much lower trust levels.

It also really devalues Amazon Prime next day delivery — who cares about that when you can’t find what you want to buy? And there many complaints that service isn’t as good as it used to be either, and often isn’t next day.

One of the only positive things about Amazon is their customer service which is still often excellent, which was one of the four pillars of success of Amazon that Jeff Bezos ingrained in the company.

And of course their low prices, but those often put other smaller ecommerce websites out of business, giving more power to Amazon.

I use Amazon much less now, and I also trust them much less. This is very disappointing because I’ve been a big fan since I started using them in 1995.

What to do instead of using Amazon

Now I use websites like AO.com and JohnLewis.com that have exceptional user experiences, and make it very easy to research and find exactly what you are looking for — and I trust them too. And they don’t have low quality Chinese products from unheard of brands getting in the way!

Or I research products on websites like consumer review websites like Which, and then find the product I want on a small business ecommerce website and support them instead. I suggest that you do too!

Who else feels this way? I’m sure I’m not the only one.

There is an excellent new technique for helping to quickly improve revenue and conversion rates for any website.

It’s called ‘Fix Broken Shit First’ Optimization — FBSFO.

And it works very well — fixing the most common ‘shit’ on your website will lead to very high impact on your conversion rates and revenue. And it often has more impact than doing any A/B testing, or guessing what to improve.

This technique of fixing broken shit was first introduced by Craig Sullivan, Arnout Hellemans and Tim Stewart, who proved how effective this can be. So a big shout to these CRO and business optimization gurus.

Your website has broken shit which is hiding 😲

It doesn’t matter how good the UX, design and copy of your website are if visitors can’t easily complete common use cases due to ‘broken shit’.

And your website probably has a lot of hidden broken shit that needs fixing. I have found that the majority of websites do, no matter how good they look. And I’m not talking about broken links or 404 errors either.

You probably don’t even realize you have hidden broken shit, and worse still, you often won’t realize the big negative impact it’s likely having on your user experience and website revenue.

I think it's so important that it should be the first step of doing effective CRO (conversion rate optimization) for any kind of website.

Here are examples of common ‘shit’ to fix first on websites:

• Poor or not understandable field error validation in checkout
• Broken/squashed layout on smaller devices with 375 width
• Mega menus that cover important content and CTA buttons
• Layout broken on tablet due to stretched buttons or too large images
• Product image gallery not working properly on mobile
• Site search not working well or giving bad results
• Live chat widgets covering and blocking CTA buttons on mobile
• Pop-ups that can’t be easily closed because the X is too small or hidden
• Tool tips that don’t work on mobile or their content is cut-off
• Underlined text that visitors think are links and try to click on
• Elements that look like CTA buttons but aren’t
• Cookie banners covering and blocking CTAs buttons on mobile
• Deleting signup field details when clicking back to them
• Drop-down selectors for products not working as expected
• Very slow loading images on mobile product pages
• Zoom function not working on product images
• Category page filters that don’t work or show wrong results

How to discover your hidden broken shit

Cross browser testing tools like browserstack.com are important for finding broken shit whenever you launch something new.

But developers who use those tools only check if functionality is broken — they often don’t understand if parts of user experience is broken, which often is the hidden broken shit you need to fix.

That is why you also need tools that give you insights from your users while they are using your website, as this will reveal some of the more hidden broken shit on their journeys. You need two tools in particular:

• User testing tools
  To find the most common and obvious broken shit, I suggest getting at least 5 user tests done on mobile and 5 done on desktop. The tasks and questions you set up should get them to review the most common journey on your website. This will increase the chances of them finding broken shit on the key parts of your website. I recommend using Userfeel for doing these user tests, as you don’t need an expensive subscription to use it.
• Session recording tools
  You need to review 100's of recordings of your users on your website to find hidden broken shit, on most common desktop and mobile browsers. In particular, you need to check for ‘rage clicks’ as they often indicate user frustration with broken or confusing parts of your website. This will often reveal some great hidden broken shit to fix. Good tools that include session recordings are Hotjar and MouseFlow.

It’s not just tools. You need experts too.

You also need someone who understands UX or CRO to analyze the tool results to discover the hidden broken shit (the broken shit your developers have missed). If they are good, they will have a great eye for small broken shit that negatively impacts user experience.

In addition to having someone who knows CRO or UX review the tool results, I also recommend getting a CRO website review from an expert like myself, as this will quickly uncover a lot of hidden broken shit for you.

How to prioritize and fix your broken shit

Using these tools you are likely going to find lots of broken shit to fix which will increase your website revenue. So how do you know what to fix first?

• First fix anything in your checkout or signup flow.
• Then fix anything on your top entry pages, like your homepage or your category pages.
• Then fix any elements that are essential to users being able to easily use your website like navigation, filters, search and forms.
• Then fix the small things that impact less common groups of users, like users who use the less common smallest width phones.

Double-check the broken shit is fixed and hasn’t broken something else

Every time you launch fixes for broken shit you need to check it’s really fixed. Sometimes developers don’t fix it properly, or worst still, their fix breaks something else. So once you have launched the fixes, do another round of session recording analysis to see if anything related has now broken.

Regularly review for hidden broken shit

I suggest you also do this hidden broken shit review every 3 months to check if anything has broken without you knowing it. This is because things can break without launching anything, particularly due to things like auto-updating plugins, or developers updating part of the website code without realizing it has slightly broken a less commonly used part of your website.

So spend some time today using those tools checking for hidden broken shit and then fixing it. It is the first most effective step of doing effective CRO. Then after that you can do further conversion research like doing surveys for your visitors and customers to discover doubts, issues and frustrations.

One of the highest impact ways of improving any website is to get feedback from your target audience. In particular understanding their main issues, doubts, hesitations and pain points.

The insights you gain from this feedback will give you very high impact ideas for increasing conversion rates and revenue on your website. And one of the best ways to gather this important feedback is through user testing.

There are now many user testing tools to choose from though, so how do you which is best? To help you choose I have created a comparison of 3 of the most popular options — UserTesting, UserFeel and UserBrain

Pricing
Let’s start with pricing as that is often one of the biggest things to consider when deciding what user testing tool to use.

UserTesting is one of the best tools with the most features, it but has become very expensive and unfortunately only offers an annual subscription plan costing over $20K (you have to contact their sales team for exact pricing). This also does not include unlimited user tests.

UserFeel is much more reasonable and costs just $60 per 20 minute user test with testers from their panel, with a very good amount of features. You can also get 10% off with this exclusive link and discount code: 10FromRich

UserBrain is even cheaper at $39 per test, but has the fewest features when choosing their pay as you go option, like no transcripts and no ability to create video clips.

But let’s continue because as you will see there are many other things to consider when choosing a user testing tool.

Types of user test
All of these tools offer unmoderated user tests which are the most common type. These are where you create the questions and tasks in advance for the user to complete on their own. You get a video and audio recording of them using your website or app while they answer the tasks and questions.

Moderated user tests are longer and provide you more detailed insights, as they are done live and allow the moderator to ask any questions or tasks. UserFeel.com charges more for these ($120 per 60 minute moderated test), whereas they are included as standard on UserTesting. UserBrain does not offer this type of moderated user test.

All of these tools also let you choose the device you wanted user tested, so you can get feedback on desktop websites and mobile websites. UserFeel and UserTesting also allow app testing, but UserBrain does not offer this.

User testers pool
All of these tools have an extensive amount of user testers available across many countries including the USA and UK. UserTesting has the most because the tool has been around for the longest. UserFeel have 1 million and UserBrain have the fewest at only 100K+.

Unless you have very specific or unusual demographics of your target audience, then both UserTesting and Userfeel should ensure you get enough targeted user tests, and possibly UserBrain too. They all offer you the option of using your own user testers too.

Use your own user testers
On UserTesting and Userfeel you can also do user tests with your own testers, which can be recruited from any source like an external panel, or your own customers. This is included as standard on UserTesting, and on Userfeel it costs $30 (a 50% discount), and gives you 60 mins instead of 20 min. You can’t do this at Userbrain unless you choose a monthly plan.

Length of user tests
The longer the time the user test has the better, as this allows you to ask them more detailed questions and tasks, which gives you more feedback.

UserTesting is the best because it has no limits. UserFeel offers 20 mins for $60 which is enough for detailed user feedback. They also offer 40 and 60 minute tests. UserBrain only includes 20 mins which limits the amount of feedback you can get.

UserTesting and UserFeel also include the option to ask written post-test questions, and gives you transcripts of the user test so you can analyze them in depth. UserBrain doesn’t offer these features.

Demographics
Setting demographics of your user testers is essential for finding user testers that are a similar audience to your website visitors, and will result in better and more relevant feedback.

UserTesting and UserFeel have the most demographics options including age, gender, location, language, and level of web experience.

Screener questions
These are very important to ensure you find your exact target audience, and allow you to exclude user tests who don’t fit custom criteria that you need. For example, you could ask a screener question for if they have bought shoes online previously, and if they haven’t then the tool would reject them.

UserTesting and UserFeel both offer unlimited screener questions to fine tune your user testers, but UserBrain only offers one screener question.

Video clips
All of these tools allow you to create video clips so you can note interesting observations and insights. These can be shared and reviewed with team members or even uploaded to YouTube. UserTesting and UserFeel offer this important feature, but UserBrain doesn’t.

So which user testing tool is the best?
If you have a big budget then certainly UserTesting is the best tool, with the most features and biggest pool of user testers. Unfortunately the very high annual cost puts it out reach of most businesses.

That is why I highly recommend UserFeel as it offers nearly the same amount of features as UserTesting, but at a much lower cost, and allows you to pay as you go. Their support is also outstanding and they reply very quickly.

UserBrain is quite basic but getting better. Although the cheapest it doesn’t offer screener questions which are very important, and doesn’t have highlight reels. It’s worth checking out if you have a very limited budget.

The questions and tasks for your user tests are just as important!
It’s not just about choosing the tool though. You also need to ensure you ask the best questions and tasks that will maximize the feedback and insights you get from your user tests. That is why I also created this guide that you should also read before create your user tests:
The best visitor feedback questions to ask for improving any website.

There are two major problems with A/B testing for improving websites:

• It doesn’t tell you why your visitors preferred the winning version or give you any feedback. It only tells you which version won (if any).
• The majority of websites don’t even have enough traffic for A/B testing.

So I decided to create a user focused A/B testing technique to help you discover ‘why’ they prefer different page versions, not just ‘what’ they prefer. And it doesn’t require lots of traffic like traditional A/B testing does.

And more importantly, it gives you great feedback and insights for creating high-impact website improvements, meaning you will have a much better chance of increasing your website conversion rate and sales.

Create a variation of the page you want to improve

First you need to create the variation of the page that you want to improve. Ideally the improvements come from insights gathered from doing conversion research (web analytics, expert reviews, user testing, visitor recordings, surveys and polls), as this ensures better improvement results.

Begin the 5 steps of user focused A/B testing

Here are the elements of user focused A/B testing that you need for determining which page your users prefer — the original or improved page.

1: Do a ‘Preference Test’ at Usability Hub with 100 users.

UsabilityHub offer this great alternative to traditional A/B testing, and it allows you to gather user feedback on which version they prefer and most importantly, why they prefer it.

To create a ‘Preference Test’ simply take a screenshot of both pages and upload them to the tool, and then ask a question about which page version (or page element) they prefer, and then a follow-up question asking for the reasons why. This can be for a whole page, or for a specific thing like a headline.

To give you enough responses to analyze and gain insights from, I suggest testing 100 users. You will need 200 credits for this, which costs $200.

Exclusive deal:
I’ve partnered with UsabilityHub to offer this exclusive deal for 20 free credits.
Claim these free credits on this page using the RICH-PAGE-20 credit code.

It will be one of the best $200 you will ever spend for learning about your website user’s preferences!

To make sure the users match your target audience, you need to also set the demographics that you want them to be. You can target by age, gender, country, household income, education status, employment status, plus more.

You can also recruit users by sharing a link to your preference test, which you could do either via email to your customers or by showing it to your website visitors in a popup.

2: Record your visitors interacting with the new and exisiting page.
Next you need to launch both versions of your page so you can watch recordings of your visitors interacting with both of them to see if there any differences in how they use them.

To launch them both you will need to use Google Optimize do a split test, so 50% of users will see each version. It doesn’t matter that you won’t have enough traffic to get a A/B test result, you are just using it as a tool to launch both versions at the same time.

You can use Hotjar to do this visitor recording of the pages. To give you enough insights you will need to watch at least 100 recordings of the 2 pages. To find recordings of those pages you can just setup a filter in the tool to match the URL of them both. If you are using the free version and have a lot of traffic, you will need to limit the recordings to only work on those pages.

In the recordings look for variances of where they are moving their mouse, where they seem to be hovering over more, what they click on, and what they seem to ignore. Also look for any elements of each page they seem to have difficulties using, as the new page should try to improve on this.

3: Create a user test with 5 users for your target audience.
User testing helps you gain indepth qualitative feedback from visitors about your new page varation, and is delivered in the form of a screen recording of them using your website and audio of them answering your questions.

Use a tool like Userfeel to setup a user test with 5 users that match your target audience — it’s important to add prescreener questions for this, e.g. the users should be familar with what you are offering or have purchased previously.

When creating the user test you need to add a task for them to compare the two pages, and then ask them the following questions to get better insights:

• Which version is more engaging?
• What are your favorite elements on both page versions?
• Is there anything confusing on either of the pages?
• Is anything missing that you would like to see added to each version?
• Which version would be more likely to make your purchase?

Then add a few questions that relate to the elements that you are improving, for example, what do you think of the page filters on both versions?

This is the most important part of user focused A/B testing, and will give you the most detailed insights when comparing two pages. It is the most expensive part though — Userfeel charges $60 per user, so testing 5 users will cost $300. You can get this for 10% off by using this exclusive Userfeel discount link.

4: Send a survey to existing customers asking for preferences.
Getting feedback from visitors who have already purchased is essential, as they will have already experienced the current version of your website and will often have great feedback. You can use a tool like Hotjar to create this important survey.

To gain the best insights you will need to give them links to the current page and improved page, and ask the following questions in particular:

• Was there anything about the current page that nearly stopped you from purchasing?
• What are your first impressions of both pages?
• Which page version would have made it easier for you to purchase?
• Is there anything missing on either page that would have helped you?

You should also ask specific questions regarding what you improved.

You should ideally get at least 50 responses from customers to analyze. To get higher response rates you should offer a gift certificate or discount for anyone who completes the survey.

5: Setup a visitor survey to gain feedback on both page versions.
This short survey enables you to gather insights from people who are currently using your website — who are essential users to gain feedback from.

You can use Hotjar to create this survey and popup an invitation to start it (don’t show it too soon after visitors arrive though, as it will often annoy them, so I suggest after a minute or two).

In the survey you need to show them both page versions and ask them the following questions in particular:

• What are your first impressions of both pages?
• Which page version would increase the chances of you purchasing?
• Do you think there anything missing on either page?
• Is there anything confusing or hard to understand on either page?

You also need to ask questions relating to exactly what you have improved.

You should get at least 50 responses to analyze, and to increase your respose rate offer a chance to win a gift certificate or discount as an incentive.

Analyze the insights and declare a winning version

Next you need to spend a few hours reviewing the results to see which page version your users seem to prefer, and the reasons why.

To help you determine the winning page version, you should create a simple document that highlights the positives and negatives for each page.

This analysis will also give you great insights and ideas for improving the winning page even further. This is a good opportunity to make additional improvements, particularly ones that improve usability or clarity on the page.

Launch the winning version and monitor impact on sales

You should feel pretty confident now that you have discovered which page your users like better — hopefully the improved page you created. If users prefer that page to the current page, you need to launch it.

To ensure it does have a good impact you need to monitor the impact of it on your conversion rate and sales in Google Analytics over the next few weeks.

If you are lucky enough to have enough traffic, ideally you should run an A/B test on this winning page to determine that it has a positive impact on your conversion rate and sales.

If the new page doesn’t get very good feedback, you need to gather more conversion research (web analytics, expert reviews, user testing, visitor recordings, and surveys) to create better improvement ideas for it, and then do another round of user focused A/B testing.

Do this user focused A/B testing on all of your key pages

Don’t just stop after you have done this for one of your pages.

To get the best results from this, you should do this user focused A/B testing on each of your key pages to improve them too, particularly your top entry pages and conversion funnels like your checkout or signup flow.

Go ahead and try this for your next website improvement. I’m sure you will love the great results you quickly get on your conversion rate and sales.

The bad news is your online business could be destined to fail in 2019… unless you do something truly different than what you have been doing so far.

Over the last 15 years increasing conversions and sales for 100’s of websites, I’ve witnessed and learned the difference that makes online businesses become major players, and left others disappearing in their shadows.

To help make sure you don’t make these same mistakes too, here are the three biggest reasons causing websites to fail to meet their true potential:

Reason #1: An Unhealthy Obsession Wasting Money Driving Traffic to a Sub-Optimal Website

Failing online businesses waste huge amounts of marketing budget on driving traffic to their website to boost sales, instead of fixing holes in their poorly performing website causing high bounce rates, high shopping cart abandonment rates, low conversion rates and low repeat visit rates.

Instead of paying attention to improving their website so that it engages and converts their visitors better, they are addicted to the next biggest online marketing trend, like social media — always hoping the next new cool advertising method or trend will finally bring them success.

The fix? Spend just 10% of your marketing budget on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to improve your leaking website, and start converting many more visitors into sales or leads. Many of your competing websites aren’t doing this either, so it will give you a great advantage. Here are some great CRO resources for you to get started:

• Discover 25 Signs That Your Website Has Conversion Problems
• Learn from The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
• Benefit from the great tools in my free conversion optimization toolbox

Reason #2: An Egotistical Company-Centric Website Focus Instead of a Visitor-Centric One

Failing online businesses are not focused on their website visitors, solving for their major needs and having an engaging easy to use website. Instead, the business owners think they know what is best for their visitors and their business — often alienating visitors and perpetuating their sub-optimal, poorly converting and selling website.

They usually don’t do website usability testing to get feedback from visitors, they rarely run visitor surveys to find ways of improving their business, and don’t gain insights from watching visitor recordings.

A highly visitor-centric ensures high satisfaction and engagement from your visitors, increasing the chances of them purchasing, returning in the future, and spreading the good word about your fantastic website.

The fix? Start placing major focus on making your website much more visitor-centric. Here are some great articles and tools to help you get started:

• Use usability feedback tools like UserFeel.com to discover your visitor’s challenges and issues with your website.
• Use a great tool like Hotjar to gain insights from visitor click maps, visitor session recordings and visitor surveys.

Reason #3: A Dependence on Their Website to Convert Visitors First Time, with No Follow-Up

Failing online businesses are too focused on converting their website visitors the first time they arrive, and don’t take advantage of key ways to follow up with them to bring them back to their website to convert in the future.

They often throw the kitchen sink at their website visitors when they arrive, overwhelming them with information and choices, hoping they see something that engages them before they leave — yet often failing, frustrating visitors and causing a low chance of them returning.

This destructive habit then feeds the expensive need to keep buying traffic to replenish their leaking bucket of a website (feeding back to reason #1).

Frustrating, right?

The fix? After improving your website using conversion optimization best practices, start focusing on getting visitors to return by re-marketing to them using auto-responder emails and re-targeting ads.

• Create an awesome lead magnet that dramatically increases the amount of visitor emails you capture, for example a first time purchase discount or a useful guide relating to what you sell.
• Learn best practices for using email marketing tools like GetResponse to continually follow-up with your visitors and increase the chances of them coming back to purchase.
• Start learning how to run re-targeting ads to engage previous visitors while they are browsing other websites and get them to return to your website.

It’s much more cost effective to convert someone using these methods who have previously been to your website, than to drive more new visitors.

Wrapping Up

Some online businesses don’t suffer from all of these three costly mistakes, but rarely do they avoid all of them. How well does your online business measure up? Please comment below with your thoughts, reactions and confessions.

There are now 100's of elements to consider when improving your website conversion rate and sales. But what works best?

What page elements should you improve first to get higher impact? And it’s not just about A/B testing anymore, there are many newer conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques to use like persuasion and personalization.

All these different CRO elements make it hard to understand what will have the biggest impact on your website. And many articles show how individual CRO techniques perform, but without any context or comparisons.

So what actually works best for improving website conversion rates?

To help you understand this, I have created a list of what elements and techniques will likely have the most, and least, positive impact on your website conversion rate. And some of them you might be surprised at!

This is based on my learnings from15 years experience of improving 100's of websites, including Disney.com, UnboundMerino.com and FileNow.com

Let’s get started, with rankings from least important to most important:

Low Importance

A/B testing the colour of your CTA buttons
Different CTA button colours will often only have a very limited impact on conversion rate, unless it matches other elements on your page and doesn’t stand out. Ideally they need to stand out from the rest of your page, but there are many other higher impact elements to improve first.

Improving your webpage load times
A controversial one here, as this is often mentioned as important. The truth is that unless your pages are noticeably slow at loading (over 5 seconds) and you are in a very competitive market that visitors can easily go elsewhere to buy what you offer, then improving load times likely won’t have much impact on your conversion rates.

Personalizing your website to improve engagement
This newer trend has many tools specializing in this. While this helps to show more relevant content to your visitors and can work well, you should only start personalization efforts after you have improved your website to a good CRO standard first. It doesn’t matter how much you personalize your website if it has poor usability and isn’t very engaging — it still won’t convert very well.

Improving things that your HiPPO wants done
Your HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) may often want something changed or improved on the website based on their opinion or what they like. It is often quite different from what visitors want, and is the opposite of using good insights from conversion research to improve your website.

Medium Importance

Improving your navigation menu, filtering and search
These elements are often one of the first things used on your website, so need to be highly usable. The better they are, the more likely that visitors will find what they are looking for faster and easier, and convert. It’s particularly important on mobile category pages to make your filters more prominent and easy to use, ideally using sticky elements so they are always visible.

Improving usability of your forms
Your forms play an important part in how well your website converts. Doing essential things like removing unnecessary form fields and improving error validation will often increase your conversion rates, particularly on your signup or checkout pages.

Using website persuasion techniques like scarcity or urgency
This technique can work well to influence visitors to purchase or signup for something, for example having limited availability of what you offer. Not as important as other persuasion techniques like social proof though.

Improving your mobile website further — not just responsive
Don’t just settle for a basic responsive website that changes the layout and sizes. You need to make more adaptations to meet their needs better, for example making links fat finger friendly and using sticky navigation elements. You also need to check your layout doesn’t break on smaller devices that have only 320 width, like the 2019 version of iPhone SE.

Improving your shopping cart and checkout
In particular you should improve it by reducing friction (remove header navigation for example), increase the perception of security, and reduce the risk by prominently showing risk reducers like guarantees and free shipping. But don’t just focus on this — you need to optimize the whole visitor journey up to this point.

High Importance

Prominently showing unique value proposition on key entry pages
It doesn’t matter how engaging your website looks if you don’t clearly show your unique value proposition — these are the reasons that someone should purchase from your website instead of your competitors (low price guarantee, biggest selection, highest rated etc). And don’t presume that your visitors know it already, on the contrary, they will often be doing comparison shopping. Therefore you need to add key elements of your unique value proposition prominently on your key entry pages, like in a benefits bar under your navigation, and on your homepage.

A/B testing the wording and location of CTA buttons
This is much more important than A/B testing the color of CTA buttons. It is essential to use action-orientated, benefit driven words on them (like ‘Start Free Trial Now’), and to always make sure they are above the fold on desktop version of your website, and then repeated at the end of long pages.

Improving social proof to get more visitors buying
This should be done in many ways depending on your type of website, and should be prominently displayed on your homepage and product pages. Good examples of social proof are adding testimonials, reviews, ratings, media mentions, awards, and logos of well known clients.

Optimizing paid search ads to increase relevance
Paid search is often a key source of traffic, so it is essential to improve the relevancy of your ads, in particular by improving the message continuation from your ad to when they land on your website. Driving paid search to specific keyword-focused landing pages rather than your homepage will ensure higher conversion rates.

Very High Importance

Doing conversion research to gain better insights
Conversion research is often overlooked and is an essential way of gaining better ideas to improve your website conversion rates and sales. This helps you discover what your visitor’s main problems, doubts and hesitations are so you can improve your website to meet their needs better. User tests on your target audience, visitor surveys, customer surveys, and visitor recordings are the highest impact ways of doing conversion research. Using tools like Hotjar.com and Userfeel.com are highly recommended for this.

A/B testing headlines and copy above the page fold
Copywriting is one of the biggest influencers on conversion rates, particularly for elements like headlines seen above the page fold. Using benefit driven wording works well, as does using wording that solves visitors pain points. A/B test different variations on your key pages in particular.

Capturing visitors emails to do follow-up email marketing
Don’t presume your visitors will convert first time — over 95% of them will leave. Capturing email addresses by offering a good incentive (like discounts or related guides) is essential — when using a good series of automated emails, email will often become your highest converting source of traffic.

Hopefully that helps clear up any confusion as to what will have the biggest impact on your website conversion rates and sales!

Discover essential questions to get better feedback from your visitors and create high-impact ideas for improving your website

(Newly updated for 2023 based on my most recent experiences)

One of the best ways to improve any website is becoming much more visitor and customer focused, and discover their main issues, pain points, doubts, hesitations and needs.

Insights from their feedback helps you create higher-impact website improvement ideas, and this form of conversion research is an essential part of effective conversion rate optimization (CRO). And gives much higher impact than simply guessing or going off gut feeling what to improve, or worse still, listening to what your HiPPO wants to do.

There are many great tools like UserFeel and Hotjar that enable you to easily gather this essential feedback, but they are often setup quickly without knowing how to maximize insights gained from them.

As with many website tools, if you put junk in, you will get junk out. In this case, if you use questions or tasks that are poor, you won’t get good insights.

In this article I reveal the key questions and tasks you should use to gain the best feedback from your visitors and target audience.

The best questions and tasks for user testing

There are many excellent user testing tools that enable you to ask your website visitors and target audience key tasks and questions, and watch them try to complete them on your website, and hear their answers.

I recommend UserFeel because they offer similar features to UserTesting, but at a much lower cost. You can also get an exclusive 10% off.

Here are some really important tasks and questions you should ask to ensure you get the most actionable and high-impact feedback and insights:

• Go to website ‘X’. What are your first impressions of this website?
  This is important to find out because visitors can often judge your whole website within just 5 seconds.
• Do you feel there is anything unique about what this website offers?
  This is essential for seeing if you are highlighting your unique value proposition well enough.
• Try to find information about ‘X’.
  Mention finding a product, service or information important for your visitors to find or know about- essential for seeing how easy they find this.
• Please use the navigation or internal search to find something you are interested in. How useful were these options? This helps you understand how good your navigation is, because you need to ensure both of these help visitors find exactly what they want as quickly as possible.
• Add a product to your cart and start the checkout process. How easy does the checkout process seem? How trustworthy does it seem?
  This is essential for learning about issues regarding your all-important checkout process — it is vital to fix these quickly.
• What are the key factors that influence your purchase decision?
  Maybe you aren’t showing enough prominent information about one of the key factors that influence their purchase. Don’t just presume you know.
• What are your biggest doubts or hesitations about this website? This is one of the most important questions as knowing this will help you understand what content or risk reducers need adding to reduce their concerns and get them purchasing more often.
• Would you have purchased from this website? If not, why not?
  This is a good summary question to use towards the end of the user test, and often helps user testers to summarize their main issues.
• What would increase the chances of you purchasing, other than reducing price or using discounts?
  This is a good open ended question to see what else visitors would like to see on your website that would help them decide to purchase.
• Please try to find a similar website in Google, visit it and describe what (if anything) you prefer on that website.
  This is a great question to ask at the end and helps you understand what other websites they might use, and what they like about them. Great for finding website improvement ideas.

To get the best results it is also very important to always select your target audience demographics and pre-screener questions for your testers. For example, must be between 25–45, female, based in the USA, and must have previously purchased luxury clothing online. If you don’t do this, you will not get very good and actionable insights to use for improving your website.

You should get 5 user tests on desktop and 5 user tests on mobile, as both of devices have their own problems and issues that you will need to improve. Studies have shown this amount will reveal the most common issues.

To encourage good feedback and reduce the chances of user testers being too positive or eager to please, you also need to write a good introduction (scenario) that asks for suggestions and honest feedback, something like this:
‘Please be honest with your feedback and give suggestions for improvement’.

The best questions to use for visitor surveys

To gain more high-impact feedback you need to survey your website visitors. This will help you understand what their most common feedback and issues which you can use to create high-impact website improvement ideas.

To ensure the highest level of insight ask these questions in particular:

• What are your first impressions of this page?
  This simple question is important to ask because visitors often judge whole websites very quickly based on what they first see.
• Do you have any doubts or hesitations about our website or products?
  Asking this is good for understanding if there are any trust or credibility issues in particular.
• Is there anything stopping you from purchasing right now?
  This is one of the most important questions to gain insights from, and is good for using on pricing, product or service pages.
• What would increase the chances of you purchasing, other than reducing price or using discounts?
  Asking this will help you understand if there is anything you could be offering or improving, and is very important for ecommerce sites.
• What are the key factors that influence your purchase decision?
  When you find out what these key factors are you can improve your website and offerings to better influence your visitors.

This is a really good multiple choice question that will help you quickly understand what their most common types of issues are:

• Do any of these apply to you?

- I can’t find what I’m looking for (if so, what can’t you find?)
- I don’t understand something (if so, what don’t you understand?)
- I have a problem (if, so what problem do you have?)
- Products are out of my price range
- I’m not ready to buy yet
- None of the above

The first 3 options should show a comment box that allows them to answer.

When to best show survey popups

When showing a visitor survey popup on your website, it is best to wait several minutes before asking for feedback, and not asking them immediately. You will annoy visitors if you pop it up too soon — you need them to have used your website first for them to be able to give good feedback. The best way to do it is making the popup only trigger after they have at least seen a product or services page.

Incentive responses to get more results

To get more resultsNone of the above by giving visitors a chance to a win a gift certificate if they respond. I recommend offering a chance to win a $50 gift certificate either for your website or for Amazon.com. Offering the chance to win a higher incentive amount gets much better response rates than offering a small amount to everyone who responds.

You should also limit this visitor survey to 5 questions or you will get a much lower response completion rate. Ideally you need 100 responses from this survey to get enough insights.

Maximium the quality of your feedback

To get feedback that gives you better ideas and insights you need to give the prize to the person who gives the most useful feedback — not just give it away at random. Otherwise you will get people giving minimal feedback as they only really care about winning the prize This messaging has increased the quality of responses significantly every time I have used it:

“You could win a $50 Amazon gift card if you give us the best or most useful feedback.”

The best questions to use for customer surveys

Customers are extremely important to survey as they have been through the whole visitor journey and purchased, so will have the most useful feedback. In particular they will know what nearly stopped them purchasing.

Instead of just using them to ask questions about your product or customer survey experience you need to ask them questions about their website experience. To ensure greater insights from your customer surveys, here are some good questions to get high-impact feedback:

• Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing?
  This is one of the most revealing questions you can ask, and the answers will help you improve your website to fix issues for potential customers.
• What did you think of your experience on our website?
  A good open ended question that can reveal insights about many things.
• Was it easy to order our product (or service)? How easy was the checkout (or signup) process?
  This question is essential for finding insights about improving your checkout or signup pages — and quickly fixing these.
• Was there any missing information that would have been helpful to know before you purchased?
  Maybe you aren’t making key things very clear or prominent on your website. This question helps you discover what information needs adding.
• What were the key factors that influenced your purchase decision for this type of product (or service)?
  This question will help you understand what details your potential customers will want to see most prominently on your website.
• Did you consider using any other websites before purchasing from us? Did you prefer anything about them?
  This is question is great for gaining insights from competitor websites.

You would need to setup this survey and then email it to your customers with an engaging subject line to increase the chances of them opening it.

You should also encourage customers to respond by offering gift cards. I suggest offering a $20 gift certificate (either for your website or for Amazon.com) for anyone who responds to the survey. As with visitor surveys, offering the chance to win a higher incentive amount for the best feedback gets a much better response than offering a small amount to all respondents.

Ideally you need at least 50 responses to gain enough insights, but that will depend on how large your customer list is. And if customers don’t respond to your email, you can resend to the people who didn’t open the email with a increased incentive.

Wrapping up

The next time you create a user test or survey for your website, use some of these questions and tasks, in addition to the ones you have planned. You will gain much better insights that you can use to create higher impact website improvement ideas or A/B tests.

Hopefully you find these visitor feedback questions very useful. Comments, applause and shares for this article would be highly appreciated!

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