3 Painfully Obvious Reasons Why Your Website Visitors Don’t Convert.
Three common and very preventable UX fails to watch out for.
You’re ready to launch your latest and greatest ad campaign. Your landing pages are set up, click-through links ready, analytics prepared.
What could go wrong?
We all know high bounce rates are standard “breakage” in online advertising. But, many campaigns don’t fail because of high bounce rates. Often it’s because audiences never even reach the content!
This is where smart UX comes to the rescue. You see, user experience isn’t only what happens on your page — where to place a key visual or what color your button is. UX begins the moment someone sees your glorious advertisement enticing them to click through.
This is where someone will say, “but that’s IT, or SEO, or some other role’s job because blah blah blah,” and then I’ll say “hush! I’m not talking about a role or title, I’m talking about solving customer problems before they become business problems”. Then I’ll straighten my imaginary tie and continue…
Here are three troublesome conversion barriers I see much too often.
Reason One: “We don’t trust you.”
Hey marketers, imagine spending your media budget to drive your customers to landing pages that look like this.
I had a client who had a 0% conversion rate for their ad campaign.
Zero percent.
They wanted help in optimizing their site for conversion. But when visiting their landing pages I was faced with the screens above. It turned out that their agency claimed they could do “digital” and instead blew through 80% of the client’s marketing budget to deliver cheap solutions.
You would be surprised at how often pages like this appear ahead of a lot of brand landing pages — more often than you think.
Why it happens.
The agency hosted the client’s landing pages on a staging server using a free tier DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection service rather than paying for it.
All at the expense of the customers’ experience. And my client’s media budget.
Bearing in mind that visitors decide whether to stay on a site within the first second, you can guess why the client’s conversion rate was a big fat goose egg.
The point.
A basic understanding of the implications of technology choices is crucial for marketers today.
Don’t let technology become more important than your customers’ experience.
Reason Two: “You can’t trust us.”
When your website doesn’t consider your customers’ need for security and privacy.
You’ve seen this before.
It’s meant to scare the eff out of people because, in simple terms, the site doesn’t secure privacy or encrypt data transfers for people visiting the site.
Why it happens.
All major browsers now alert people when visiting unencrypted websites.
The server in question doesn’t have a legit, registered SSL certificate set up for the website domain or subdomain.
It’s intended to be a scary sign post for visitors.
It takes no time and costs very little to set up, so I’m confused why I still see this @*&$! warning page on company sites. Don’t let it happen to your website or ad campaign.
The point.
Big Browser is forcing us all to ensure transactions and personal data are encrypted. That’s a very good thing. Make sure your server is set up with a legitimate SSL certificate for your marketing landing pages.
It’s the difference between http:// and https://
Reason Three: “Wait for it…”
When plugins and tracking tags get in the way of a good customer experience.
The following Lighthouse reports show the negative impact that just a single HubSpot plugin can have on your landing page’s performance.
Why it happens.
Setting up tracking tags and plugins increases the number of times your conversion page has to load stuff from other servers. CMS platforms like WordPress and HubSpot are notoriously slow, particularly when adding plugins and add-ons.
Google and other major search engines actively downgrade slow and underperforming websites in search results.
More requests to external services and servers mean more time required to load your wonderful landing pages.
The point.
It’s a business requirement to track visitors and conversions, but don’t overdo it with the plugins and add-ons. Remember, those plugins are developed by strangers in strange ways. You don’t know how they will perform.
Test the plugins you install. And, if you’re using WordPress, HubSpot, etc., ensure your application server is updated to the latest versions.
Or, better yet, choose a faster, modern, and flexible solution for your campaign landing pages.
The commercial Internet is over 30 years old. Today, faster, better, cheaper really is an option.
From a UX perspective, choose the best solution for your customers — not your business. You’ll find this approach benefits your business too!
Here’s a bonus tip.
Don’t ReCaptcha.
I hope we can all agree (Re)Captchas are a barrier to conversions. Yet, I still see them show up on registration and contact forms.
Don’t do it. There are smarter, more human-friendly methods to minimize spam & scam registrations.
In closing.
A good user experience starts at first touch.
From the moment you identify your audience to when they click your advertisements and beyond.
Important note.
You may not see these issues when you visit your site because your browser may have it cached.
However, new visitors will see it! Make sure you’re squeezing out every penny of your advertising budget by testing on different computers and devices. And it doesn’t hurt to ask colleagues and friends to test your landing pages.
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This was originally published a while back as a Usability Insights content piece on LinkedIn.
