This sparked a transformation in Dell’s approach, incorporating customer feedback to improve.

Today, Dell utilizes surveys extensively, soliciting feedback on innovation and content relevance. This has solidified Dell’s position as one of the top computer brands driven by customer feedback.

Surveys aren’t merely checkboxes; they’re essential tools for growth-focused brands. 

With VWO Insights – Web,  you can harness surveys to understand customer needs. 

This blog explores how to create surveys efficiently to drive innovation and customer-centric improvements. 

Keep reading to learn more.

So, what exactly are on-page surveys?

Surveys are excellent for gathering customer feedback across industries and formats. 

On-page surveys are those that are shown on a website. They are qualitative research tools for collecting feedback from visitors while they browse websites. They come in various formats, such as pop-ups or embedded forms, and use different question types like multiple-choice or rating scales to gather insights and improve visitor experience.

What are some benefits of using on-page surveys?

Some argue that surveys can be intrusive, and it’s tough to sift through responses. With VWO’s help, you can tackle these challenges and enjoy numerous benefits. Let’s explore the benefits of using on-page surveys.

Get to know your visitors

By understanding who your visitors are, where they come from, and what brought them to your website, you can tailor your content and offerings to better meet their needs. Analyzing visitor demographics, such as age, location, and interests, helps you create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized experiences.

Discover what they love (and what they don’t)

You learn what visitors love and where you can improve your website through survey responses. Understanding why visitors like or dislike something enables you to make informed decisions about website design, content strategy, promotional offers, and more. 

Watch how you can use website surveys to gather insights, address challenges, and meet customer satisfaction.

Spot the problem areas

Survey responses offer insights into product or page performance.  You can inquire if visitors are satisfied with their experience on a particular page or if they have benefited from any recent product updates. Alongside tracking metrics like bounce rate and session duration,  survey responses add depth and clarity, guiding your next steps effectively.

Enhance customer engagement

Understanding your visitors’ preferences allows you to create personalized experiences that enhance engagement, foster loyalty, and build trust. Ultimately, this solidifies their long-term relationship with your brand, turning them into your brand advocates.

Improve upon customer experience

Net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys show how customers feel about your brand, helping you stay focused on their satisfaction. Use this feedback to fix issues and keep customers happy and loyal. Sometimes, it’s not just about marketing. You might need to improve customer service, streamline operations, or create better feedback mechanisms.

How to conduct a successful on-page survey quickly (Yes, it’s possible with VWO)

Setting up a survey might seem like a daunting task – you have to decide on the questions and time it just right. But with VWO, it’s simpler than you think. Let us guide you on how to smoothly conduct your on-page survey while leveraging all the advanced features in our survey capability.

1. Target questions to specific visitor segments

Tailoring surveys to specific segments ensures that the feedback obtained is more accurate and reflective of the needs and expectations of a particular segment.

With VWO, you can target surveys using predefined visitor segments like landing page URLs, new vs. returning visitors, browsers, and more. Further, you can create custom segments by adding attributes.

Let’s say, as an eCommerce conversion expert, you notice most of the traffic comes from mobile users, and you’d want to enhance the mobile experience on the website. You can customize surveys for mobile users, asking questions like ‘Was it easy to find what you wanted?’ to address issues and enhance mobile browsing.

Pro-tip – How do you decide which page to run your survey on? Prioritize pages with underperforming metrics by leveraging web analytics tools. For example, if your SaaS pricing page shows high bounce rates, you can consider setting up a survey to understand visitor feedback and reasons for drop-offs. 

2. Trigger surveys at the right time for maximum impact

Timing surveys ensures they don’t interrupt what visitors are doing, making it more likely for them to actually answer. For instance, if a visitor has spent more than two minutes on a product page, it may be an opportune moment to trigger a survey to gather feedback on their browsing experience or purchase intent. 

Or if a user scrolls to at least 75% of an article, it could be a suitable time to prompt a survey to gauge their interest in the topic or gather opinions on the content quality. 

VWO lets you choose triggers and show on-page surveys at the precise moment. See some standard triggers it offers in the image below. 

See how Bodyguardz, a retail company, gathered qualitative insights through surveys. Achieving a near 54% revenue increase in one year proves the impact of adding surveys to their CRO program.

3. Get AI-generated questions based on your goal

Every survey you implement has a specific goal to achieve, whether it’s to improve customer experience, reduce bounce rate, measure satisfaction, or address pain points. 

With VWO, you can not only choose a goal for your survey but also get AI-generated questions based on that goal. If your survey goal is not listed, you can enter a custom goal to receive tailored questions.

This feature helps you overcome any sort of mental block when creating relevant survey questions. 

Let’s say you’re running a SaaS website and you’re curious about how your customers are feeling about your latest feature update. Instead of spending hours brainstorming survey questions, you can rely on AI in VWO Surveys.

You can just enter your goal, for example, experience evaluation, and the AI generates a bunch of questions tailored specifically for your goal. If you’re not happy with the questions, you can keep regenerating them until they’re right.

4. Ask questions in various formats

Based on the questions you select, you can choose the format for displaying them. 

Use single-line text boxes for open-ended questions, allowing respondents to provide detailed feedback in their own words. Opt for formats like radio buttons for single-choice responses and checkboxes for selecting multiple-choice options. With VWO, you can choose from a variety of formats to suit your survey needs.

In one of the VWO webinars, Ali Good, Global Head of Strategy & Product Marketing at Quiziz, suggested adding a variety of question types to prevent ‘survey fatigue’. By mixing open-ended and closed-ended questions, you can gather both detailed feedback and specific data without overwhelming participants.

Find out how Britannica surveyed visitors to understand their interests, then developed accordion features containing top Q&A for each article. Over 23% of visitors clicked to view answers and delve into additional content. Take a free trial and see how you can get started with our surveys to meet your goals. 

5. Organize the flow of your survey questions

Open-ended questions reveal detailed visitor feedback, while follow-up questions are even more effective for clarifying their responses. When executed tactfully, this approach helps unearth valuable insights without overwhelming visitors.

VWO Surveys’ survey logic feature helps you set up follow-up questions systematically, choosing sequential or conditional displays based on earlier responses.

Let’s understand with an example. As a product manager at a travel company, imagine implementing a survey with a question like: ‘Are you planning your first international trip?’ You may want to ask about the expectations only to visitors who responded ‘YES’ to the question. 

If respondents mention that they are looking for cheap deals and easy booking, show them specific questions related to their answers. Something like: ‘Have you checked our latest discount offers?’ However, if their concern revolves around something your company can’t address, like discounted flight fare, you can conclude the survey.

Such a feature certainly gives you better control over how you want to ask questions to your website visitors and in what order. 

Check out more about survey logic in our article. 

6. Decide the appearance of your survey

To appear more authentic and trustworthy, design your survey according to your brand guidelines. 

Choose from prebuilt themes in VWO or create a custom theme to match your website. Additionally, decide where to display the survey—lower left-hand or right-hand corner of your landing page—to maximize responses.

Additionally, you can show your survey in any preferred language.

Consider a global health organization wanting to understand healthcare access in Latin American countries like Brazil. By creating a survey in Portuguese, they can better connect with the Portuguese-speaking population, uncovering their unique healthcare needs.

This way, multilingual surveys ensure that respondents who speak different languages can participate, making the survey more inclusive. 

7. Streamline survey analysis with AI-generated summaries

Sorting through hundreds of survey responses to identify patterns or gain a unified understanding of visitor behavior is taxing and time-consuming. Simplifying response analysis would undoubtedly save time. 

That’s why we’ve incorporated AI to provide summarized survey insights, helping you make informed decisions. With just a click, you can get summaries, key insights, and actionable steps. 

Let’s say you surveyed visitors on your OTT platform. The AI-generated summary shows key insights like viewers expressing a desire to download their favorite shows. Further, the summary reveals that only 10-15% of viewers would recommend shows. And the majority haven’t even noticed the share button.

Based on these findings, you would also be shown actionable steps to take, such as displaying a download option to meet viewer preferences. To encourage viewers to share shows with friends and family, they could be offered a free 30-day top-up on their current subscription. Moreover, making the share option more prominent could improve user engagement with the feature.

8. Efficiently filter and analyze survey responses

Sometimes, you may want to dive into responses by specific segments instead of just an overview of all responses. As we mentioned earlier, responses from a specific segment can provide personalization opportunities, and interesting insights may emerge during the process.

Yes, it’s possible with VWO Insights for Web!

Let’s continue with the OTT example. Imagine you discover that viewers from the UK have shared the most positive reviews and are most likely to recommend shows within their network. Now, you can tailor your marketing strategies like partnering with UK influencers for promotions, extended free trials, and exclusive content access to engage this segment. 

In VWO, you will have various segments such as traffic source, device, browser, visitor type, location, and language to filter your responses. If you don’t find a specific segment you want to filter responses for, you can create your filters using custom attributes.

Pro-tip: Combining surveys with tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and form analytics helps understand what visitors don’t share but end up doing anyway. Observing what they don’t say is vital. Read our article on visitor behavior analytics for collecting deeper insights.

Watch Arjun Kunnath talk about how you can convert visitor insights into effective results for your website. 

Way forward

So, are you impressed with all that on-page surveys can do for you? 

But remember, surveys are only as effective as the effort you invest in them. If you craft a subpar survey without proper planning, it will fail to deliver the desired results.

With VWO, you will never create a shoddy survey. And when your surveys hit the mark, you’ll never doubt their effectiveness again.  From effortless setup to cutting-edge AI features, we’ve got you covered. 

Now that you’ve read about them in this blog, are you ready to see them in action? Sign up for a free trial today!

Leader: Taciana Serafim Noqueli de Oliveira

Role: Product Management Analyst at Serasa Experian

Location: Brazil 

Speaks about: Conversion optimization • eCommerce • User experience (UX) • Product management • Business Strategy

Why should you read this interview?

Taciania is a seasoned professional boasting extensive experience in sales, marketing, and growth. She thrives on challenges, injecting fresh ideas into business strategies with her strategic acumen and collaborative approach. Her journey includes exposure to diverse business models, and fostering continuous learning. Notably, she founded CRO Brazil, a thriving community with 500+ professionals focused on experimentation. As a partner at Kamelus Academy, an ed-tech specializing in CRO, Taciana, along with her partners, contributes significantly to Brazil’s experimentation landscape. In this interview, we delve into Taciana’s commitment to professional development, community building, and innovation, shaping Brazil’s experimentation landscape.

Professional journey and passion in CRO

Taciana: About 15 years ago, I began my career in the digital world, initially working in a commercial area involving a lot of interaction with digital marketing. This initial experience sparked my interest in exploring the scientific method applied to marketing more deeply. Motivated by this interest, I decided to make a career change.

To dive into this new path, I joined an agency in Brazil. This environment provided a valuable experience, allowing me to work with methodologies and techniques that were fundamental for my professional development. However, I felt that something was still missing.

Driven by this feeling, I founded a community, CRO Brazil, which currently gathers more than 500 professionals specialized in experimentation. My mission became to help these professionals to improve themselves. In addition to the community, I am a partner at Kamelus Academy, an edtech focused on CRO, which I founded with my partners Gabriele Lavreca and Pedro Andrade. We have knowledge about experimentation in Brazil.

At Kamelus Academy, our work goes beyond teaching. We strive to connect professionals and celebrate innovation in experimentation fields. Through the community I created and the school, I can contribute to preparing experimentation professionals in Brazil, equipping them with knowledge and skills to face market challenges.

Memorable A/B tests and their impacts

Taciana: Once I conducted a test following our in-depth behavioral studies to enhance the number of subscriptions for a particular service. I chose to explore various formats for presenting subscription options to users. Horizontal options, which I believed could simplify users’ quick comparison of plans, and the vertical slider format, which I thought could be effective in providing more detailed insights into each plan.

We ran the test for 4 weeks, and it became evident that the horizontally formatted plan stood out as the grand winner. When compared to the vertical slider format, the horizontal table layout resulted in approximately a 15% growth in subscriptions.

Definition of CRO success and metrics to measure

Taciana: In measuring the success of our Conversion Rate Optimization efforts, I place significant emphasis on a set of metrics that not only quantify the direct outcomes of our tests but also reflect how the culture of experimentation is taking root within our organization.

These metrics go beyond traditional conversion rates to include:

1. Winner/loser/inconclusive test ratio:

This metric provides insight into the effectiveness of our testing hypotheses and the overall direction of our experimentation efforts. It helps us understand the proportion of tests that result in positive, negative, or neutral impacts on our objectives.

2. Rate of tests yielding new learnings:

One of the core values of CRO is the continuous learning and improvement it fosters. This metric tracks the percentage of tests that contribute new insights into user behavior, preferences, or website usability issues. It’s a testament to the value of even those tests that don’t directly improve conversion rates but enhance our understanding of the customer journey.

I place significant emphasis on a set of metrics that not only quantify the direct outcomes of our tests but also reflect how the culture of experimentation is taking root within our organization.

3. Rate of tests generating shared learnings across departments (recommendations):

This metric is crucial for fostering a culture of experimentation across the entire organization. It measures the extent to which the insights gained from CRO activities are shared beyond the immediate team, influencing strategies and tactics in other departments. It underscores the collaborative nature of optimization and its role in driving company-wide improvements.

In addition to these CRO-specific metrics, we closely monitor business-related metrics tailored to our company’s goals, with a particular focus on the Return on Investment (ROI) of our initiatives. These business metrics vary depending on the specific objectives we’re aiming to achieve but are essential for ensuring that our CRO efforts contribute to the overall success and growth of the business.

By balancing these two sets of metrics—those focused on the proliferation of a testing culture and learnings, and those tied to direct business outcomes—we can more holistically evaluate the impact of our CRO program. This approach allows us to refine our strategies continually, foster a culture of data-driven decision-making, and ultimately, drive meaningful improvements across the organization.

Common A/B testing mistakes to avoid

Taciana: A/B testing is crucial for conversion rate optimization, but incorrect use can lead to misleading interpretations. A common mistake is not setting clear objectives, which makes analyzing the results difficult. Testing multiple variables at once without proper design can prevent identifying the variable responsible for the results. Choosing an inadequate sample size, either too small to be significant or too large, wasting unnecessary resources, is also a frequent error. Moreover, overlooking seasonal variations can skew A/B test results, as can focusing on vanity metrics, which sound good but don’t impact business objectives. Another misconception is not repeating tests, which can lead to implementing changes based on unreliable data.

To avoid these mistakes, it’s crucial to establish a clear hypothesis and specific objectives before beginning. Simple tests, which change one variable at a time, help identify what truly impacts user behavior. It’s important to calculate the sample size in advance to ensure the statistical validity of the test. Planning tests considering seasonality and specific events prevent distortions. Prioritizing metrics that directly impact business objectives and repeating tests when necessary are recommended practices to ensure decisions are based on reliable data and effectively boost business performance.

A common mistake is not setting clear objectives, which makes analyzing the results difficult.

Building an experimentation culture for Brazil businesses

Taciana: In a landscape as dynamic and diverse as Brazil’s, embedding an ethos of continuous improvement and strategic experimentation can significantly propel business objectives forward in a meaningful and consistent manner.

Embracing a culture of optimization allows us to learn from past mistakes, ensuring they are not repeated in the future. This approach not only saves invaluable time but also streamlines the development of innovative strategies. It’s about creating a cycle of learning and growth that continually refines our methods and outcomes, making every iteration more informed and effective than the last.

By committing to such a culture, organizations can navigate the complexities of the Brazilian market with agility and insight, turning challenges into opportunities for advancement. It’s a journey that requires persistence, flexibility, and a willingness to experiment, but the rewards — enhanced efficiency, increased inclusivity, and stronger, more sustainable growth — are well worth the effort.

The future of A/B testing and CRO

Taciana: I believe that with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, A/B testing will become more autonomous, capable of identifying complex consumer behavior patterns in real-time and dynamically adjusting the test variables to maximize effectiveness. Personalization will reach new heights, allowing for unique experiences that adapt to the individual preferences of each user, almost in real-time.

The integration of technologies such as augmented and virtual reality into A/B testing will open doors to assess how consumers interact with products and services in immersive digital environments, offering deep insights into the user experience that was previously inaccessible.

Furthermore, as consumers become more aware of their data privacy, A/B testing will evolve to be more transparent and ethical, ensuring that data collection and analysis are conducted with respect for user privacy and consent.

In summary, the future of A/B testing is bright, marked by an era of hyper-personalization, enhanced autonomy through AI, digital immersion, and a renewed commitment to ethics and privacy. We will be navigating a world where experimenting is not just about optimizing conversion rates, but about creating experiences that deeply resonate with each individual, transforming the way we interact with the digital world.

The integration of technologies such as augmented and virtual reality into A/B testing will open doors to assess how consumers interact with products and services in immersive digital environments.

Advice for CRO professionals and businesses

Taciana: For businesses that are starting in the world of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and A/B testing, it’s crucial to begin with a deep understanding of their target audience, as this will guide the creation of more accurate hypotheses for testing. Starting with small and simple experiments can make managing and analyzing tests easier, allowing for progressive learning. It’s essential to establish clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of tests and to choose appropriate tools that fit the needs and budget of the company. 

Fostering a culture of testing within the organization encourages viewing tests as a continuous process of learning and optimization, not just isolated experiments. It’s also important to learn from each test, regardless of the outcome, using the collected data to refine future strategies. Prioritizing user experience ensures that optimizations contribute to lasting improvements in conversion.

Lastly, patience and persistence are crucial, as CRO is an iterative process that requires time to show significant results. By adopting a strategic approach from the start, businesses can ensure that their efforts in CRO and A/B testing are more effective, contributing to long-term success.

For businesses that are starting in the world of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and A/B testing, it’s crucial to begin with a deep understanding of their target audience, as this will guide the creation of more accurate hypotheses for testing.

The impact of VWO on testing programs led by Taciana

Taciana: Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to explore various A/B testing tools, each with its unique set of features and capabilities. Before Google Optimize announced its end, I was already navigating the A/B testing waters in agencies that preferred to use VWO. This choice was not random; VWO has always stood out for its comprehensive testing capabilities, from simple A/B tests to more complex multivariate ones and beyond. However, my real dive into VWO began about two years ago, and I currently use it frequently in projects for the CRO Brasil community.

Unlike other platforms I have used, VWO offers an incredibly user-friendly interface that does not compromise depth and functionality. This combination of ease of use and robustness has allowed me to set up, execute, and analyze experiments with far greater efficiency than ever before.

Moreover, VWO’s feature set goes beyond testing. The platform offers insight and feedback tools that enable a deeper understanding of user behavior, which is invaluable for creating and effectively testing hypotheses. This holistic approach to optimization has not only simplified my workflow but also led to more informed and impactful decisions.

In essence, the transition to VWO has been a significant upgrade in my testing approach. It’s not just about the tool itself, but how it has enabled me to be more strategic, collaborative, and ultimately, more successful in my optimization efforts. 

VWO’s feature set goes beyond testing. The platform offers insight and feedback tools that enable a deeper understanding of user behavior, which is invaluable for creating and effectively testing hypotheses.

How? 

Let me explain. 

You’ve carefully crafted and arranged the content of your webpage but tucked away some golden nuggets of value at the bottom. 

The idea is that visitors will effortlessly glide down the page, soaking in every detail. But in reality, visitors don’t always follow this script. 

Are visitors even diving deep enough to find them? Why would they care to scroll down your webpage? Do they wish they found information at their first few glances? 

Finding answers to these questions makes tracking scroll-depth in your webpage so important. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how tracking scroll-depth can improve visitor experiences and boost conversion rates, helping you make informed decisions about your website’s layout and content.

What is scroll-depth?

Scroll depth tells you how far down a webpage a visitor scrolls before they bounce off or take some other action, like clicking a button or visiting the next page. It is usually measured as a percentage of the page length or in pixels. 

Interpreting scroll depth as a percentage of the page length means that we’re measuring how far down the page a visitor has scrolled relative to the entire page length. For example, if a visitor scrolls three-fourth down a page, then it is 75%. 

We can measure scroll depth in pixels, which directly refers to the distance a visitor has scrolled down the page in terms of the number of pixels from the top of the page. For example, if a visitor scrolls 512 pixels down a page, the scroll depth would be 500 pixels as these values are rounded. 

What is a good scroll-depth?

Determining what identifies as a good scroll-depth depends on a couple of factors. Let’s try to understand them:

Set clear objectives

Ask yourself what you want visitors to accomplish when they visit your site. Your web page’s scroll-depth should complement these objectives. 

Consider a SaaS homepage featuring a lead-gen form above the fold. In this case, a lower scroll depth may suffice, especially if the rate of form submissions meets your satisfaction and the page’s drop-off rate remains manageable. 

Now imagine you’re managing an eCommerce website selling sporting goods. If your primary objective is to drive conversions, you’ll want visitors to scroll far enough to view essential product details and ultimately add products to the cart. To encourage visitors to act promptly, you might want to reduce the need for extensive scrolling and enable quick access to CTAs. Hence, a low scroll-depth is desirable.

On the other hand, if your objective is to increase engagement, you’d rather visitors scroll through the entire product description, browse through customer reviews, and interact with multimedia content like product videos or image galleries. In this case, a higher scroll depth would indicate deeper engagement with the content. 

This holds true when your page is delivering information or insight through the content. For example,  if your blog page features lengthy articles, you’d want visitors to scroll down enough to engage with valuable information. In this scenario, a scroll depth above 50% is considered good, while exceeding 75% is fantastic. 

Analyze industry benchmarks

Achieving a 100% scroll depth would be the gold standard, but let’s be realistic. Visitors often don’t scroll all the way down the page due to distractions or shifting priorities. They might get sidetracked by social media, notifications, or simply lose interest. Instead of fixating on pushing visitors to the bottom of the page, it’s more practical to understand the average scroll-depth in your industry.

Knowing where you stand compared to industry norms is key. By benchmarking your own scroll-depth against industry averages, you can gain valuable insights. This understanding helps you develop strategies to improve if your scroll-depth is below or at par. These strategies could include tweaking content placement, refining navigation, or crafting better CTAs to encourage deeper engagement with your webpage.

How do you measure scroll-depth?

By now, you’ve likely recognized that scroll depth is a valuable indicator of visitor engagement on your website. 

But how exactly do you analyze or determine scroll-depth? 

Studying scroll maps provides invaluable insights into visitor behavior, helping you understand how far visitors scroll down your webpages.

Many folks confuse heatmaps with scrollmaps, but here’s the lowdown: while all scrollmaps are a type of heatmap, not all heatmaps are scroll maps. 

Scroll maps highlight the most viewed sections of a page using colors, creating a vertical rainbow effect. It’s a bit different from traditional heatmaps, which typically focus on clicked or tapped elements through a similar color scheme.

While Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics can help track scroll-depth, for an in-depth analysis, they may need integration with other tools. To get the complete picture of your visitor behavior, count on VWO that assists you with its comprehensive robust features. 

Heatmaps of VWO Insights – Web lets you track scroll levels on your webpage as well. The scrollmap report highlights the most scrolled sections of your webpage with brighter colors. It shows the number of views and the percentage of visitors scrolling down your webpage. 

And what’s even more advantageous? VWO provides a plethora of other behavior analytics tools, enabling you to get a comprehensive view of visitor behavior. With this approach, there’s no need to hop from one tool to another, piecing together insights. You can seamlessly obtain a complete picture in one platform. To watch them in action, take a free trial now. 

How do scrollmaps meet the needs of different user personas?

Given their importance in understanding visitor behavior, scrollmaps are becoming a must-have in most companies’ martech stack. Let’s understand how different professionals may find scrollmaps helpful in the context of respective use cases. 

CRO marketers

Imagine you work as a marketer for a travel website. You check your analytics and see that bookings haven’t increased lately, and more people are leaving the site from the checkout page. You want to address the issue, so you turn to behavior analytics to understand what’s wrong.

You focus on scrollmaps to confirm a hypothesis: the checkout button’s placement below the fold, coupled with additional information, might be hindering easy access to the button, affecting bookings. The scrollmap confirms this suspicion as it shows less scrolling below the fold, indicated by cool colors, unlike hotter ones above it.

You realize that bringing the checkout button above the fold is the first low-hanging fruit you must catch. Next, you can make other changes, such as making the button more prominent and removing unnecessary information. This way, even if the scroll-depth isn’t great, tweaking the CTA button placement can still help increase sales and prevent high bounce rates.

Product managers

Suppose you’re a product manager at a B2B consulting company. You recently introduced a feature to allow visitors to create custom bundle service plans and receive personalized prices on the pricing plans page. 

However, your analytics tool indicates that the exit rate on that page remains high, as it was before. This is surprising because you anticipated that giving more power to visitors to customize their services would make the page more engaging and conversion-friendly. 

With the help of a scrollmap, you observe that visitors are not scrolling past the typical pricing plans with set offerings. The bundling option is buried deep within the page, so they may not realize it’s there. Now, you understand that it’s important to change the position of the bundling services feature to get more visitors to interact with it. 

UX researchers

Consider you’re a UX researcher at a gaming company that has just launched an online gaming website. At present, your company’s main objective is to grow a community around this game. They aim to organically spread awareness far and wide, prioritizing audience engagement without resorting to overly aggressive tactics to drive revenue right now. This is why researching visitor experience plays a monumental role for the company. 

It gives you a chance to comprehensively understand how visitors navigate the interface and interact with different elements. This will help you resolve UX issues proactively.

During your regular analysis of visitor behavior, you notice in the scrollmaps that visitors aren’t scrolling down enough on the home page. The cool blue colors toward the bottom of the page suggest they’re not reaching the area where social media share buttons are located. 

You realize that it’s crucial to make these social media share buttons more visible to visitors, as sharing these games on social media can significantly contribute to building a community.  Based on these insights, you might want to bring up the placement of the social media icons and improve visitor flow to them.

Top ways you can use VWO for scroll-depth tracking

Visitors often miss out on valuable content and experiences when they stick to the surface of a webpage. No matter how much we encourage them to explore further, they tend to follow their own instincts rather than our prescribed navigation paths.

The key realization? Visitors bring their own mental models of navigation to the table. Our task isn’t to force them into our navigation schemes but to adapt our designs to match their existing expectations. Now let’s understand how VWO Insights – Web helps you in this journey.

Leverage the collective power of behavior analytics

Yes, scrollmaps help you see how far visitors scroll on your website. But you should also use other tools to get a comprehensive view of visitor behavior. 

Let’s consider another type of heatmap – Clickmaps. They provide clear insights into which areas of your website receive how many clicks. Moreover, you can compare the clicks on two different areas. Unlike full-screen scrollmaps, typical heatmaps offer a detailed view of visitor interactions with different elements.

Additionally, session recordings show you exactly where visitors click and move around the page. Which element are they clicking the most? Are they clicking any non-clickable elements? They help you find these nitty-gritties. 

Let’s say you observe that visitors aren’t scrolling down and hence can’t see a form at the bottom of your page. Just moving it up might not be enough if there are usability issues within the form itself. This is where form analytics becomes valuable for field-level analysis. 

Further, surveys allow you to directly gather feedback from visitors on how to improve their experience. Using these insights, you can make more holistically informed decisions about content arrangement on your web pages.

And you guessed it right, VWO has all these features that simply make your visitor behavior research a well-connected exercise, saving you a lot of time and giving you ample insights.

Decide a strategic placement of key information

When armed with a reliable scrollmap report from VWO, you can strategically organize your page content based on its importance and the desired visitor actions.

For instance, if scrollmap reports reveal that visitors are not engaging with sign-up buttons below the fold, consider placing these CTAs prominently at the top of the page. Alternatively, arrange the content in a logical sequence that addresses visitors’ primary needs and inquiries first, with supplementary details presented further down the page.

Similarly, if a poor scrolling pattern is observed on your product page, prioritize showcasing product details and images above the fold, followed by testimonials. Visitors often seek reviews after examining the product closely. By placing testimonials within immediate view, you can ensure visitor engagement without the need for scrolling. Adopting such strategies across all your webpages can enhance visitor experience and drive desired actions.

Ensure content quality and relevance

Every piece of content on your website should add value for visitors. If scrollmaps show visitors scrolling past content you thought was valuable, it’s a sign your copy needs to deliver more value. This is especially important if you notice more visitors bouncing from that page.

Do you know what copies are turn-offs? Talking about your company instead of focusing on solving visitors’ problems. For instance, if you run a family-owned agency and have a home page with self-centered details like ‘We’ve been in business for over 50 years’ – save that for your ‘About Us’ page maybe. On the homepage, you should focus on addressing how you’ve been meeting visitors’ needs and highlight the benefits they’ll gain from your services. 

Quality content and relevance are paramount in keeping visitors engaged and interested in exploring further, encouraging them to continue scrolling and discover more about your offerings. Scrollmaps help you understand the pulse of your visitors by revealing whether they are connecting with your content through colored patterns.

Understand the placement of visual cues

Visitors often think they’ve reached the end of a webpage and leave, missing out on more content—a ‘false bottom’ effect. VWO can help spot these tricky areas with cooler colors.

Based on the insights gathered, you can place visual cues to encourage visitors to keep scrolling. You can do this by adding subtle animations or arrow icons to indicate more content below. Parallax scrolling effects can also create an engaging experience. 

Break up your content with appealing section dividers or progress indicators to show visitors their progress. Use vibrant images and graphics to capture curiosity and keep visitors exploring. Consider scroll-triggered animations or pop-ups to maintain engagement. 

For instance, on a fashion website, scrolling is preferable to switching pages for browsing apparel. To encourage prolonged scrolling, you could add a “load more” button after visitors have scrolled and viewed numerous products.

Additionally, ensure swift page load speed to prevent visitors from prematurely leaving due to slow loading times, mistakenly believing there’s no content left to explore.

Brands that have benefited from using scrollmaps

Scrollmaps benefit brands across various industries. We have selected three brands that utilized our scrollmaps to delve into behavior insights for shaping their optimization plans.

Elegant Steps improved conversions by 200%

Elegant Steps, a UK-based shoe retailer, observed low conversion rates on its mobile website. To address this issue, its digital marketing agency conducted a thorough investigation using data from Google Analytics, along with heuristics and VWO’s scrollmaps and heatmaps solutions, to uncover key insights. They found:

1. Limited engagement with the “Shop by Brand” section on the homepage suggested low visibility or interest.
2. Key USPs, like free shipping, were not prominently featured above the fold on mobile, along with text readability issues due to image overlay.

Based on these findings, adjustments were made, increasing conversions by 200%.

Therefore, we see that scrollmap analysis provided insights into visitor behavior, indicating areas of limited engagement and visibility on Elegant Steps’ mobile website. Accordingly, the team made adjustments that improved experiences and ultimately resulted in a significant increase in conversions.

Ubisoft increased sign-ups by 12%

Ubisoft Entertainment, a prominent French video game publisher, is known for managing successful franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Far Cry, and For Honor. To improve lead generation and conversions on the Buy Now page of their website, they started with an in-depth analysis of visitor behavior. 

By leveraging insights from scrollmaps, they hypothesized that streamlining the purchasing process and minimizing vertical scrolling would enhance visitor engagement, addressing a current issue identified in scrollmap analysis. Subsequently, a test aligning with this hypothesis yielded a notable 12% increase in sign-ups.

Sometimes, we think that to increase lead flow, we need to make significant changes, such as redesigning the entire website, launching a new marketing campaign, or offering substantial discounts. Yet, just by enhancing the scrolling experience based on scrollmap insights, along with a few other tweaks, they managed to increase sign-ups.

Bandwidth increased visit-to-lead conversion rate by 12%

Bandwidth, a company based in North Carolina, is a leader in Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS).  They noticed that the SMS API page on their website wasn’t performing well in turning visitors into leads. This insight came from studying heatmaps and scrollmaps provided by VWO, showing low engagement and scrolling on the page.

Their hypothesis centered on enhancing the above-the-fold experience, optimizing information architecture, and refining value proposition messaging to drive overall conversion rate improvement. Implementing these changes resulted in a noteworthy 12% increase in visit-to-lead conversion rate for the product page.

As you can understand, leveraging insights gleaned from scrollmaps, the company strategically tailored their web content to better meet the needs and preferences of their audience, ultimately driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Conclusion

Businesses sometimes use the ‘Guess and Check’ method to validate visitor problems they believe exist, but it may not always be effective.

They keep delaying research thinking they need to start perfect, with all the tools and expertise at their disposal. Well, you may start with something simple yet effective, like analyzing scrollmaps. If needed, you can complement them with more advanced behavior analytics tools later. 

VWO offers a range of behavior analytics tools to assist you. The key is to get started and tap into these valuable reservoirs of visitor behavior insights. Because if you don’t do it now, your competitors will get miles ahead of you. 

If you’re interested in exploring all the features of VWO Insights – Web, you can take a free trial and prepare to uncover intriguing details in your site’s scrollmaps.

They’ve woven A/B testing into their DNA, thriving as hubs for innovation, embracing both success and failure for learning and growth. A/B testing empowers them to make decisions after assessing the audience’s response to changes introduced on their websites. The success of ideas is then measured based on audience reactions. It’s no wonder they attribute a significant portion of their success to A/B testing.

Now, many eCommerce companies aspire to test, but they lack a solid starting point—something these big brands have already figured out as is evident by their success. 

Establishing a strong testing program requires a well-defined hypothesis-creation process. Skipping this step leads to guesswork – a ‘let’s try this and see’ approach. Successful businesses grasp the importance of understanding what they’re doing, why, and the changes they aim to bring about.

This is where building logical hypotheses plays a big role. Linking actions to expected outcomes ensures you know the direction in which your test is going. A hypothesis should tell that if you take a certain action, you should see a specific outcome for a particular reason. Constructing hypotheses for tests isn’t rocket science once you grasp the logic behind it and understand how to do it.

In this blog, we’ve curated 63 hypotheses for eCommerce companies to get started with well-planned tests on their websites. Drawing from our successful optimization of over 40 billion experiences through 1.1 million experiments on 450,000+ websites, we present these hypotheses using a proven template that has delivered great results for the best brands we’ve collaborated with. 

A quick look at a hypothesis template

Let’s understand what this hypothesis template comprises. It consists of three parts: The action you need to take, the expected results, and the underlying rationale. Here’s a hypothesis as an example: 

Providing a straightforward, action-oriented CTA copy will increase clicks on the CTA button because visitors can easily understand the next step to take in their journey on a website. 

The simplicity of the instruction will reduce friction that might arise from complex wording. The anticipated outcome is that a clear CTA copy will motivate visitors to take action, ultimately improving the number of clicks on a CTA button. 

This format ensures clarity in understanding the proposed action, the expected outcomes, and the underlying logic in a test idea. By focusing on specific areas for improvement, businesses have a clear-cut plan to start with and can invest time and effort strategically for maximum results.

1. Image repositioning increases add-to-cart click rates

Action: Changing the placement of the image will

Result: Increase the add-to-cart click rate because

Reason: It enhances the visibility of the element and encourages users to click it.

2. Countdown banner increases conversions

Action: Showing a sticky countdown banner across the website during the sale period will

Result: Increase conversions because

Reason: It creates an urgency in the visitors’ minds to purchase items before the sale ends. 

3. Enhanced mobile filter bar for easy navigation

Action: Positioning a sticky mobile filter bar at the top of the screen, featuring clear and consistent labels will 

Result: Boost filter usage and conversions. 

Reason: Users will find it more intuitive and accessible, encouraging them to navigate further and increase conversion rates.

4. Streamlined checkout creates seamless user journeys

Action: Removing extra steps and guiding customers directly to the shopping cart upon clicking the cart icon will 

Result: Result in increased conversion rates. 

Reason: This streamlined approach reduces friction in the user journey, facilitating a quicker and more seamless checkout experience.

5. Cross-sell section improvement boosts AOV

Action: Implementing a redesigned cross-sell section on product detail pages will 

Result: Boost revenue and Average Order Value. 

Reason: The enhanced presentation encourages customers to add complementary items to their cart. 

Bear Mattress increased revenue by 16% through testing this hypothesis on their website. Check out their testing strategy to inspire your own testing ideas.

6. Promotional scrolling banner boosts traffic

Action: A site-wide scrolling banner for special promotions will 

Result: Increase traffic to the promotional landing pages because 

Reason: This prominent feature attracts attention and generates interest.

7. Homepage first-fold ensures easy navigation

Action: Adding more information about services, products, and offerings on the first fold of the homepage will 

Result: Increase transactions. 

Reason: This reduces visitors’ cognitive load, helping them navigate and understand the offering, leading to a smoother decision-making process.

8. Discounts on the checkout page reduce drop-offs

Action: Offering upfront discount promotions on the checkout page will 

Result: Reduce drop-offs.

Reason: By minimizing uncertainties for users through a transparent pricing strategy.

9. Revamped site search experience for more conversions

Action: Improving the experience of the site search bar will 

Result: Lead to higher purchases. 

Reason: This is because visitors will easily find what they want, resulting in increased conversions.

10. Page revamp increases checkout rates

Action: Revamping a page design with subtle changes will 

Result: Boost checkout button engagement.

Reason: Guiding more users to the checkout page and reducing drop-offs.

Canadian company Hush Blankets redesigned their mobile cart page, increasing visits to the checkout page by 10.52%, resulting in a 23% uplift in revenue.

11. Upfront information encourages more purchases

Action: Displaying the return policy and shipping cost below two main CTAs will 

Result: Nudge visitors towards completing a purchase.

Reason: Strategically addressing common concerns and fostering commitment.

12. Homepage sub-categories enhance access to products

Action: Showing sub-categories on the homepage will 

Result: Lead more visitors to the listing pages because 

Reason: This direct navigation facilitates quicker access to specific product categories.

13. Clear CTA copies improve engagement

Action: Changing ambiguous CTA copies to clear ‘Quick Buy’ and ‘Add to Cart’ will 

Result: Encourage visitors to click through to the next page.

Reason: Providing them with a clearer understanding of the subsequent action.

14. Enhancing menu improves for engaging experience

Action: Improving the menu UI will 

Result: Lead more users to the product page.

Reason: Positively affecting eCommerce conversion rates. This enhanced menu design provides a more intuitive and engaging browsing experience.

15. Prominent review starts boost revenue

Action: Enhancing the review star size above the text reviews will 

Result: Increase value per visitor or revenue per visitor because 

Reason: Visitors will be encouraged to take action reading positive feedback. 

RubberStamps, a custom stamp seller, tested a hypothesis on their website, leading to a 33.20% increase in RPV. Explore their problem statement, observations, and learnings in the case study.

16. View product button piques visitors’ interests

Action: Including an extra ‘View Product’ button beneath the main CTA on the product listing page will 

Result: Motivate visitors aiming to explore the product description page. 

Reason: This additional option caters to diverse visitor preferences and encourages further exploration.

Watch CRO expert Rich Page examine the live websites of some top eCommerce brands in this webinar. Learn about common mistakes and what you should be doing on your website. 

17. Optimizing filters boosts interaction

Action: Enhancing filter presentation by dividing them into ‘sort’ and category-specific filters, and keeping them fixed at the top will 

Result: Increase visitor interaction with the feature. 

Reason: This improves accessibility and usability, leading to more visitors landing on desired product pages.

18. Improved search accessibility improves engagement

Action: Highlighting the search bar so that it opens when the user lands on the website and merges with the top navigation upon scrolling down will 

Result: Encourage visitor engagement with the feature. 

Reason: This enhancement improves convenience and visibility, leading to an increased ability to search and find desired products.

19. Redesigning carousels boosts engagement

Action: Redesigning an image within a carousel and incorporating a static CTA button at the bottom, which becomes visible only when the page’s CTA button is not, will 

Result: Boost clicks on the image. 

Reason: This, in turn, will drive more clicks on the main CTA button, as the dynamic design actively encourages interaction and engagement.

20. Prominent search enhances product discovery

Action: Making the search bar prominent and displaying popular searches made by others will 

Result: Direct visitors to the desired landing pages.

Reason: Facilitating the easy discovery of relevant content.

California-based Best Choice Products tested this hypothesis of making the search bar prominent for its mobile website, leading to a 30% increase in clicks on the main CTA.

21. Colorful display of USPs attracts attention

Action: Introducing green color to the icons displaying the USPs will 

Result: Create a positive impression because 

Reason: This color addition attracts attention and conveys positivity.

22. Layout experimentation improves conversion rates

Action: Experimenting with page layout, different product images, and various CTAs will 

Result: Yield valuable insights for improving conversion rates. 

Reason: These tests provide essential data on visitor preferences and how they behave on a website.

23. Right USP placement guides visitors in their journey

Action: Showing the USPs in two parts with keywords in the first row and related important content in the second will 

Result: Nudge visitors along their journey on a website. 

Reason: Highlighting USPs allows visitors to easily understand the benefits offered and proceed confidently in their journey.

24. Header USP bar encourages conversions

Action: Adding a USP bar below the header will 

Result: Motivate visitors to convert because 

Reason: This prominent placement brings benefits to visitors’ notice.

25. Prominent CTA button placement drives checkout

Action: Adding a CTA button at the top of the mini cart will 

Result: Help visitors quickly transition to the cart page because 

Reason: This addition streamlines their journey, facilitating a smoother checkout process.

Grene, a Polish company, moved the CTA above the mini cart, resulting in a 2x increase in the quantity of purchases on its website. Read the case study for more details.

26. Enhanced cart layout boosts purchase completions

Action: Crafting a well-organized layout featuring a ‘remove’ button on the right and displaying the multiplied value of products on the cart page will 

Result: Motivate visitors to complete the purchase. 

Reason: This modification results in an enhanced layout that offers detailed information and an intuitive path to conversion.

27. Prominent CTA positioning spurs visitor interaction

Action: Implementing bigger CTA buttons will 

Result: Motivate visitors to go further down the conversion funnel and complete their journey because 

Reason: This prominent button encourages visitor interaction.

28. Personalized checkout elevates conversions

Action: Personalizing the checkout page for each visitor based on their country will 

Result: Improve conversions because 

Reason: Personalization strikes a chord with visitors, making them feel important and valued.

29. Free shipping promotes upselling

Action: Adding a free shipping strip on the product pages will 

Result: Result in increased upselling, with the ultimate goal of increasing revenue. 

Reason: This promotional element encourages additional purchases.

30. Improved homepage navigation boosts engagement

Action: Improving the homepage layout for better navigation will 

Result: Enhance visitor engagement.

Reason: Making it easy for them to find the products they need.

Flos USA improved the homepage layout, which increased visits to the category page by 6.77%. They created and tested hypotheses for the full-funnel journey on their website, improving the checkout rate by 125%. Read the case study to learn how they did it.

31. Add CTAs for increased product page visits

Action: Adding a CTA to the product listing tiles will 

Result: Prompt more visits to the product page. 

Reason: Easy access to CTA enhances product findability and prompts visitors to quickly advance to the next steps in their journey.

Listen to this podcast episode where experts discuss how to design winning experiments with data-backed hypotheses. 

32. Displaying swatches allows product customization

Action: Updating the ‘Choose Finish’ option to view color swatches on product pages will 

Result: Remove confusion among visitors about product customization. 

Reason: Clear visual cues will encourage them to use this feature.

33. Clear navigation streamlines engagement

Action: Retaining only the essential details and incorporating a header with a link to the cart page will 

Result: Enhance visitor engagement. 

Reason: This approach reduces information overload and improves navigation, providing a smoother and more focused visitor experience.

34. Feature highlights drives more sign-ups

Action: Improving the display of core features on the homepage, during the comparison journey, and at checkout will 

Result: Motivate more visitors to sign up. 

Reason: This highlighted information emphasizes the value proposition and helps prevent visitors from choosing a competitor.

35. Simplifying navigation improves visitor engagement

Action: Replacing “Wholesale” with other marketing categories (like “super saver” bazaar) and moving it to the left navigation bar will 

Result: Attract better-qualified visitors to each of the category pages because 

Reason: This repositioning enhances the visual appeal.

ShopClues, an eCommerce company in India, tested this hypothesis on its website and observed a 26% increase in visits-to-order. Learn about the other tests they conducted that improved conversion in this detailed success story.

36. Testimonials build trust, increase conversions

Action: Adopting eCommerce best practices like adding real customer testimonials will 

Result: Lift conversions on the homepage because

Reason: These testimonials build trust and credibility.

37. Removing distractions improves visitor journeys

Action: Removing distracting videos that hinder users from clicking through to the product page will 

Result: Streamline the visitor journey and boost conversions.

Reason: As users can then focus on the desired action.

38. Security affirmations increase checkout clicks

Action: Adding security affirmations to the eCommerce checkout page will 

Result: Encourage visitors to click “checkout” because 

Reason: This addition instills trust and reassures users about the safety of their transactions.

39. Product finder drives visitors through a sales funnel

Action: Providing a “product finder” tool on the product page will 

Result: Push more visitors into the sales funnel

Result: By replicating the salesmen and fitting room experiences online.

40. Decluttering cart page reduces abandonment

Action: Removing the ‘special offer’ and ‘gift card’ code boxes from the shopping cart page will 

Result: Reduce cart abandonment because simplifying the checkout process 

Reason: Minimizes potential points of friction.

UK-based Bionic Gloves removed gift card/special offer code boxes from their cart page against the common belief that adding these offers increases purchases on a website. Testing this hypothesis helped them increase revenue by 24.7%. 

41. Detailed descriptions aid informed decision-making

Action: Providing detailed product descriptions will 

Result: Increase conversions because 

Reason: Comprehensive information helps visitors make informed purchase decisions.

42. Streamlined interface reduces distractions

Action: Reducing the number of CTA buttons and the number of links will 

Result: Lower the bounce rate and get more visitors into the sales funnel because 

Reason: A streamlined interface minimizes distractions and improves user focus.

43. Seamless buying journey reduces bounce rates

Action: Reducing distractions in visitors’ buying journey will 

Result: Decrease the bounce rate because 

Reason: A focused visitor experience helps retain their attention.

44. Incentivizing encourages more visitor actions

Action: Providing customers with an incentive to make a purchase will 

Result: Captivate and motivate them to take action on a website. 

Reason: This strategy leverages the psychological impact of incentives, encouraging customers to make decisions that benefit both them and the business.

45. Above-fold product display boosts sales

Action: Keeping the display of products above the fold on the homepage will 

Result: Encourage visitors to proceed with their purchase. 

Reason: This strategic placement enhances visibility and prompts quicker decision-making.

Muc-Off, a UK-based retail company, changed the position of their product images, bringing them above the fold on the homepage. Testing this hypothesis not only reduced drop-offs but also increased purchases by 106%.

46. Promotional banners improve visitor engagement

Action: Placing commercially-focused banners on top of all the information pages of the website will 

Result: Enhance visitor engagement by 

Reason: Attracting attention and conveying promotional messages.

47. Showing competitive pricing increases conversions

Action:  Displaying competitors’ higher prices on 5,000 product pages will 

Result: Increase clicks on ‘Add To Basket’ and boost the overall website conversion rate. 

Reason: This is because showcasing competitive pricing influences purchase decisions.

48. Prominent CTA buttons increase checkout clicks

Action: Enhancing the prominence of the main CTA button on the cart page will 

Result: Increase click-throughs to the ‘Continue to checkout’ button, encouraging more visitors to complete their orders. 

Reason: This design modification improves user navigation and prompts desired actions, reducing the likelihood of users leaving the page.

49. Clear product information boosts conversions

Action: Providing relevant, detailed product information will 

Result: Increase conversions because 

Reason: Visitors can comprehend the key features and benefits of different products available on a website.

50. Showing discounts increases conversion rates

Action: Emphasizing the discounted price shown on the product page will 

Result: Increase conversions because 

Reason: Highlighting savings gives visitors a sense of achievement that they bought something at a much lower rate than they actually would have.

Royal Discount, an online computer software seller, increased revenue by 10.21% by testing this hypothesis on its website using VWO. Take a free trial and discover how easy it is to set up a test on VWO.

51. Facebook Connect boosts checkout rates

Action: Offering checkout with Facebook Connect will 

Result: Increase the checkout rate because

Reason: This convenient login option simplifies the checkout process.

52. Bulk discounts improve profit margins

Action: Offering bulk discount deals on select products will 

Result: Increase the profit margin from the website because 

Reason: Enticing promotions encourage larger purchases.

53. Easy product selection process boosts revenue

Action: Streamlining the initial product selection process, by replacing the drop-down with a complete product category page, will 

Result: Boost revenue by 

Reason: Enticing more interested visitors to buy.

54. Free shipping reduces bounce rates

Action: Displaying  “Free Shipping” above the fold will 

Result: Reduce the bounce rate and encourage users to continue down the conversion funnel. 

Reason: This prominent positioning attracts attention and communicates a compelling offer.

55. Relevant logos and icons increase add-to-cart clicks

Action: Adding product quality certification logos and payment icons near the ‘Add to Cart’ CTA button on the product page will 

Result: Increase clicks on the button, as

Reason: This visual reinforcement builds trust and credibility.

Manna, a Hungary-based online store, tested the above hypothesis, resulting in a 490% increase in clicks on the ‘add-to-cart’ button.

56. Showing review widgets increases sales

Action: Enlarging the TrustPilot widget on the website will

Result: Increasing sales from the site because

Reason: Positive reviews and trust signals build confidence and decrease buyer anxiety

57. Product badges boost trust and credibility

Action: Introducing the ‘WOW’ badge on a website will 

Result: Convey a higher level of trust and credibility than just the count of followers on Twitter because 

Reason: A distinctive badge enhances the perception of authenticity.

58. Optimized lead forms encourage more interactions

Action: Introducing changes to the lead enquiry form will 

Result: Increase the conversion rate because 

Reason: An optimized form encourages user interaction.

59. Simplifying layout leads to higher conversions

Action: Reducing distractions like too many outbound links on the webpage will 

Result: Encourage more people to buy from them or submit the enquiry form because 

Reason: A cleaner layout improves focus.

60. Highlighted product USPs drive more orders

Action: Articulating the product-related USPs will 

Result: Encourage more people to place orders or at least submit the enquiry form because 

Reason: A clear value proposition resonates with the target audience.

Cocohanee added product-related USPs to its product page, resulting in a 40% increase in transactions. Learn how they achieved this now.

61. Informative videos increase conversions

Action: Creating a video that explains a business’s products or services will 

Result: Increase conversion rates because 

Reason: Visual content enhances engagement and understanding.

62. Streamlined forms help improve submissions

Action: Reducing the number of form fields will 

Result: Increase form submissions because

Reason: A shorter form is more user-friendly and reduces friction in the submission process.

63. Prioritizing product in visual hierarchy improves engagement

Action: Emphasizing a particular product in the visual hierarchy of a page will 

Result: Drive greater visitor engagement with it because

Reason: Doing so will overshadow other elements of secondary importance.

Watch this video to learn more about generating high-quality hypotheses for higher conversion uplifts.

How Amazon Attributes a Part of Its Success to Testing

There is a reason we say successful eCommerce brands owe a part of their success to consistent testing. Amazon exemplifies this approach better than anybody else. Experimentation is key to Amazon’s incredible success. How? Through testing, they figure out which ideas resonate with their audience and which do not. This way, they fail fast, learn fast, and grow fast. 

The ideas receiving positive customer feedback move forward, while those that don’t align with customer expectations are discarded, saving the company valuable time and resources. This process allows the eCommerce giant to innovate and deliver experiences ahead of their time. 

If an experiment fails, Amazon learns what doesn’t work and swiftly moves on to the next one. Amazon’s website stands as a product of such continuous experimentation, setting a benchmark that any eCommerce brand aspires to follow. Further, Amazon listens to customers through data, creating great offerings by anticipating their preferences before they know it.

The combined power of listening to customers and a commitment to testing is what makes the stage for experimentation fertile for eCommerce growth.

Conclusion

Just a heads up – these hypotheses are inspired by the awesome eCommerce brands we’ve worked with. This compilation is here to spark ideas and help you build empirically testable, specific, and precise hypotheses. However, the key is to understand your visitors’ behavior and craft your unique hypotheses accordingly. If you spot any similarities with your goals, feel free to draw inspiration. 

No, they don’t wave a magic wand to score successes.

Among the strategies they employ, a common thread is placing customers at the core of everything they do. It all begins with tuning in and understanding how audiences navigate their websites and engage with their brands. And this naturally leads them to leverage behavioral analytics.

While anyone in an organization can explore visitor behavior, certain professionals absolutely need to delve into it because their work is rooted in deriving valuable insights from such analyses. And when they become pals with behavior analytics tools, they can do justice to the work they do. 

Product managers convert insights from visitor behavior into actionable steps for the development team to create features that visitors love.

Next, we have the marketers who identify conversion roadblocks and optimize them to maximize the return on marketing investments through behavior analysis.

Lastly, UX professionals leverage behavior analytics to craft intuitive, frictionless website journeys, addressing visitors’ pain points and needs. 

Their use cases may vary, but they recognize the value of analyzing visitor behavior for their company’s success. 

Continue reading to know in detail how each of these personas can benefit from using behavior analytics.

How Product Managers benefit from behavior analytics

Product managers are responsible for recognizing customer needs and improving the product, either by enhancing existing features or introducing new ones. It’s not just about meeting customer needs; they also make sure these improvements help achieve the overall goals of the business. 

They act as a link between customers and the development team, turning feedback into practical plans. This entire exercise requires a solid understanding of how visitors behave on their websites – indicating a lot about their needs, expectations, pain points, and aspirations. 

Prioritize features that users want

Wondering if your product has peaked and reached its best version? Well, that might not be the case. Visitor needs are ever-evolving, and it’s essential to stay tuned to their preferences. Some innovative ideas arise from their needs, ones you might not have considered. In such cases, using behavior analytics tools like surveys allows you to directly understand what they’re looking for.

But it’s not always a straightforward conversation. Sometimes, you have to observe their actions, pick up on subtle cues, and figure out how to enhance their website journey without them explicitly stating it. This is where tools like heatmaps and session recordings prove invaluable. 

Hot red colors on heatmaps indicate high engagement, while cool blue colors show low engagement. On the other hand, session recordings offer a comprehensive view of visitors in action—revealing where they pause, what they click, and more. This way, these tools help uncover the challenges visitors face, providing product managers with opportunities to create new features that align with evolving needs.

Increase feature adoption

Introducing cool features is fantastic, but the real magic happens when our visitors actively engage with them, doesn’t it? Now, how do we gauge their usage? Heatmaps and recordings step in to showcase how smoothly audiences interact with the new features. 

Let’s say you’re a product manager at a gaming company, and you want to see the audience’s reaction to a new feature showing interactive gaming tutorials and walkthroughs. By tuning into insights from visitor behavior, as unveiled by these tools, you can effectively assess how players are responding to the feature.

Are the heatmaps indicating less engagement in this area? Do recordings reveal that not many visitors are interacting with these tutorials? Delving deep into their behavior will help you determine at what stage of engagement the visitors are with your new product feature. This allows you to refine visitor experiences, encouraging them to embrace the feature with ease. 

Expedite bug fixes

Imagine you have a website selling various products, and customers often encounter broken links when trying out a new feature, such as viewing a product in a 3D setting on the product page. That’s a bug, and they happen in software. But the quicker these bugs are fixed, the happier users are. Swift bug resolution is essential for maintaining a seamless user experience. 

Behavioral analytics tools, such as session recordings and surveys, offer a proactive approach to bug detection and resolution. Suppose, when you observe in a recording that visitors are clicking the link and it shows as broken, it indicates a friction in their journey. This way, you know where the problem is, and you can take quick action. By leveraging these tools, product managers can promptly identify and prioritize fixing critical bugs, ensuring a more stable and reliable product for users.

Decrease support tickets

While efficient customer support is crucial, we should ensure that our product is so finely tuned from the get-go that our visitors face little to no problems to begin with. Consider a travel booking website where users occasionally encounter hiccups in the flight search process, leading to a surge in support tickets. 

Now, through heatmaps and surveys, the product manager gains a sneak peek into visitors’ sentiments and pain points during the booking journey. This way, they can proactively tackle specific challenges, like fine-tuning the search filters. This not only elevates the booking experience but also naturally reduces the number of support tickets, ensuring a smoother journey for visitors planning their trips right from the start.

A product manager’s strategy is rooted in creating a product that is intuitively designed, motivating visitors to make the most of the new features. Incorporating intuitive guides and tooltips within the product can preemptively assist visitors, reducing the likelihood of queries and support ticket submissions.

How Marketers benefit from behavior analytics

In today’s era where data fuels business growth, marketers zero in on a data-driven approach for sustained business growth. Hence, by investigating visitor behavior on websites, they uncover optimization opportunities and implement effective strategies. In doing so, they ensure maximum conversions from website traffic, contributing to businesses’ returns on marketing investments.

Reverse low conversions

The role of a CRO marketer is to decipher why website visitors may slip through the cracks without completing desired actions. Are there any friction points hindering them from following the expected conversion route? Heatmaps and session recordings shed light on visitor behavior, unveiling areas causing confusion or disinterest. By addressing these pain points, you can effectively reverse the trend of low conversions.

Let’s consider a scenario where your heatmap reveals a lack of engagement with the primary CTA button on your website. After adjusting its placement and design based on insights from session recordings, you’ll likely observe an increase in conversions.

Note: Qualitative research reveals the ‘why’ behind visitor behavior, explaining why visitors act a certain way on a website. However, before delving into qualitative insights, quantitative research provides the ‘what’ – identifying specific issues on the website. 

Once quantitative research uncovers problems like drop-offs and declining average page sessions, qualitative research comes into play to understand why visitors exhibit certain behaviors causing these issues. In all these scenarios, personas either proactively dive into behavior analytics to stay ahead of visitor behavior or turn to qualitative research after identifying problems in quantitative research (using tools like Google Analytics 4) for in-depth analyses.

Discover engagement gaps

Websites serve as intricate canvases, capturing the ebb and flow of visitor interactions. Ever noticed those quiet corners or pages where visitor engagement seems to dim? CRO marketers pinpoint and revive these areas of potential disengagement.

How’s that possible? By turning to behavioral analytics. Heatmaps highlight areas with low and high engagement, offering a detailed map of user activity. Meanwhile, session recordings delve into the subtle nuances of visitor disengagement, providing a playback of their journey on the website. Armed with this insightful palette, you can strategically enhance specific sections, improving the overall experience.

Consider a scenario where a clickmap signals low interaction with a crucial product description. By delving into the related session recordings, you hypothesize that bringing it above the fold could enhance visitor engagement, offering them maximum information for their purchase decision. Strategic adjustments like these demonstrate how marketers can effectively leverage insights to bridge engagement gaps and drive results.

Segment for personalization

Embracing a one-size-fits-all approach can spell disaster for any website’s conversion rates. Instead, you should uncover the unique behaviors within diverse visitor groups and tailor experiences to align with their preferences. To achieve this, employing a behavior analytics tool like VWO becomes essential—it allows you to delve into specific segments for personalizing experiences. 

For example, simply choose the segment you want to see the session recording for and create a targeted view of a specific page. Additionally, with advanced filters, you can gain insights into how various segments engage with forms and on-page surveys on your website. This wealth of information becomes the foundation for building your personalization strategy.

Suppose you apply a filter to form responses and observe that new visitors show the highest drop-off from your services website. You can brainstorm creative solutions such as introducing complementary offers or discounts to incentivize this specific visitor group to complete form submissions. By adapting your approach based on these insights, you tap into the power of personalization for improved conversion outcomes.

Refine messaging

Do you know what’s the best way to strike a chord with your website visitors? Talk the language your visitors really want to hear. It’s all about paying attention to how visitors behave on your website and tweaking your messages accordingly. 

And you can probably guess what helps you in this case? Yes, behavior analytics. Let’s say you have a real estate website, and you see on GA4 that visitors from urban areas are spending more time on modern condo listings than suburban homes. When asked through surveys what exactly they are looking for, you get to know visitors want to see more benefits of booking condos on your website. 

You can refine your messages on those condo pages, highlighting the verified sellers, affordable pricing, and perhaps emphasizing the nearby trendy spots. It’s like customizing your property listings based on what urban dwellers are truly seeking. Hence, behavior analytics empowers you to craft messages that resonate with potential buyers. 

Watch our webinar to discover how to write copies that solve visitors’ pain points and improve conversions. 

How UX Professionals benefit from behavior analytics

UX professionals play a crucial role in shaping how visitors experience a website. Starting with UX researchers, their responsibility is to deeply understand the needs, behaviors, and preferences of visitors. With these insights, UX designers create user-centric interfaces that are intuitive, visually appealing, and aligned with user needs. 

Throughout this journey, behavioral analytics serves as a valuable companion, supporting them every step of the way. This data-driven research and design approach ensures that decisions are well-informed, making the overall visitor experience effective. 

Uncover navigation bottlenecks

A visitor-friendly navigation structure isn’t just a fancy improvement. It can boost product or information findability by 72%. This is supposed to have a positive impact on the overall visitor experience. The key lies in employing behavior analytics tools to keep a close eye on how visitors interact with your website.

For example, imagine discovering through clickmaps that visitors are frequently clicking on a non-clickable element, clearly indicated by a conspicuous red color on your website. Concurrently, session recordings show instances of rage clicks followed by a subsequent drop-off. Based on these insights, your UX team can proactively address the challenge, delving into strategies to enhance navigation and ensure a smoother user journey on your website.

Expedite research with visual data

Trends are fleeting, and visitor preferences evolve rapidly. Therefore, the ability to promptly make well-informed decisions that align with current audience desires is crucial. 

Behavior analytics provides an immediate and comprehensive overview of visitors interactions on your platform, accelerating your research and design executions. For instance, imagine you manage a learning platform and observe through visual insights from heatmaps and session recordings that students tend to skip lengthy lecture recordings. 

To delve into the reasons behind this behavior, you initiate quick and focused surveys, efficiently collecting user opinions. The feedback indicates a desire for quizzes and community discussions in addition to traditional lectures, revealing the pulse of your visitors’ preferences.

Make targeted improvements

Understanding the unique needs of diverse user segments is crucial for tailored improvements. Behavioral analytics tools allow us to investigate and enhance the experience for specific visitor groups. 

Let’s say your UX team notices through qualitative research that mobile visitors often struggle with the checkout process on your eCommerce site. So, armed with these insights, your UX team optimizes the checkout flow, making it simpler for this segment to complete the purchase, ultimately enhancing their overall shopping experience.

Sounds like a hassle? If you’re thinking of skipping, remember the fact that personalization helps companies get 40% more revenue than those that don’t. This should motivate you to have your UX teams trained on behavior analytics if you have not already. 

Validate designs with user feedback

When a UI matches a visitor’s mental model, it feels intuitive and reduces the cognitive load on visitors. It aligns with their expectations, making it easier for them to navigate and interact with the interface seamlessly.

That’s why validating your UI with visitor feedback tells you that you are on the right track. Behavior analytics, like heatmaps and session recordings, play a critical role in understanding how users interact with the UI.

Consider a scenario where a UX team is working on the mobile version of a banking website. An increase in premature drop-offs as shown in Google Analytics tells you to identify potential friction points. Session recordings reveal users struggling to find the transaction history. Surveys further confirm that users expect the transaction history to be more prominently placed on the home screen. Subsequently, the UX team redesigned the layout to align with users’ mental models, resulting in a more intuitive and user-friendly interface. 

If you’re eager to contribute to your company’s growth through visitor research, our blog will guide you on how you can make a meaningful impact within your role. We’ve discussed examples to justify the perks of behavioral analytics – and guess what? It works in almost every industry! 

Just make sure to follow best practices, starting with quantitative research to identify problem areas. Then, move to qualitative analysis, document your learnings, and set the right goals you want to achieve based on the insights gained from visitor behavior. 

So, let’s say you have hands-on visitor insights, but you’re unsure whether you need them to reverse conversions or bridge engagement. In such cases, it might make little sense, and you could inadvertently encroach into another persona’s work territory

VWO Insights – Web: The go-to behavior analytics tool for businesses

VWO Insights – Web has always been at the forefront of visitor behavior analytics, providing businesses with profound insights into their websites. Recently, its power has doubled with the launch of the Insights dashboard, bringing your website’s overall engagement performance report to your fingertips. Now, you can view page-level heatmaps, session recordings, segments with the lowest user experience, and more.

And you know what else? We’ve integrated AI into surveys that generate questions for your surveys until you’re satisfied with the output. You also receive summarized survey responses with key insights, actionable for easy implementation of optimization ideas. To witness all these features in action, try a free trial with VWO. So, get ready to experience its magic and unveil more visitor insights than you could ever imagine. 

These two days had everyone in the business world talking. 

On the 11th of July, we bid farewell to the old Google Analytics after it faithfully served us for 11 long years. It’s a bittersweet goodbye – the comfort of familiarity versus the looming learning curve of its replacement Google Analytics 4. 

And on the 30th of October, Google pulled the plug on its once-mighty A/B testing tool, Google Optimize. The reason? It did not provide the features and services that have now become crucial to experimentation.

Now, there might be a concern among A/B testing enthusiasts because of these developments. With Google Optimize gone, they need an alternative platform to carry on with their testing activities. If they opt for a third-party platform, will it seamlessly integrate with GA4 for in-depth A/B testing analysis? Moreover, how seamlessly can they use GA4 audience data for running experiments in their testing platform? 

Given that both GA and GO have been Google products, this question of seamless integration didn’t pop up until now. 

In this blog, we provide answers to these questions and explain how VWO plays a role in addressing these challenges. Keep reading!

A/B testing analysis using GA4 – Is that possible?

Well, GA4 doesn’t come with an in-built A/B testing capability. But it does allow integration with third-party A/B testing tools. 

Keeping Google’s product line restructuring in mind, VWO introduced a two-way integration with GA4. Plus, to help businesses carry on with testing efforts, we also provided a quick migration from Google Optimize to VWO. You can read more about GO migration to VWO. 

A case study in point: Critique Jeu, a gaming and sports company, transitioned from Google Optimize to VWO and achieved a successful test. By experimenting with color changes in internal text links—shifting slightly from their brand color scheme—they observed a significant increase of 22.8% in clicks on internal text links.

How do you benefit from VWO<>GA4 integration?

VWO’s campaign data, including experiment variations, now appears in GA4 in real-time. This enhances the data in GA4 and simplifies audience creation using VWO data in GA4. Further, you can use this campaign data for launching activities using AdWords and retargeting. 

Earlier, combining these two platforms needed custom dimensions in Google Analytics, which had limited applications and demanded manual efforts. 

Imagine you manage a hotel booking website, and you’ve conducted a test on the booking form. It succeeded in driving more visitors to the cart page but didn’t significantly impact booking values. To reconnect with these cart page visitors, you plan to run retargeting ads, offering a 10% discount for bookings made within 24 hours. 

To achieve this, you can create a campaign audience in GA4 and initiate a retargeting campaign using Google ads. Also, you can conduct an in-depth audience analysis, segmenting them by demographic, location, traffic sources, and other criteria to optimize your marketing strategy further.

So, say you notice that visitors from specific regions or countries – European countries, for example – are more receptive to your offer, you can create location-specific discounts or promotions. 

Now, we talked about two-way integration sometime back.

Yes, you can run A/B tests by targeting audiences in your GA account. These audiences in GA are created based on similarity in their certain characteristics. So, for example, engaged users could be an audience group comprising individuals who have visited your website at least 5 times in the past month and have spent 5 minutes in each visit. 

These defined audience segments allow you to fine-tune your testing campaigns from VWO, aligning your marketing efforts with specific user behavior and characteristics. 

Let’s understand with an example. Suppose you own an e-learning website where users frequently view course details but don’t enroll. By transferring this audience data from GA4 to VWO, you can conduct an A/B test. In this test, you split the audience into two groups: the control group sees your current course page, and the variation group sees a revamped course page featuring testimonials, detailed lesson plans, and a short introductory video by the instructor himself. 

Alternatively, you can implement a personalization campaign by offering a bundle of two relevant courses for the price of one. 

Here’s an added bonus: You can deploy these experiences without IT involvement and with shorter lead times. Be it a small change, adding a new section, or a website section, you can get the work done hassle-free!

Watch the benefits of VWO’s 2-way integration with Google Analytics 4 in the webinar.

How can you leverage Google Analytics for your experiment setup?

Experiment, a feature absent in GA4 but present in our old Google Analytics, may seem a bit obsolete now. But let’s take a quick look back for those of you who are still interested. 

Tucked within Google Analytics’ Behavior section, you’d find the ‘Experiments’. Here’s how it worked:

1. Start by selecting an Objective: You could define a specific outcome to measure and determine the winning variation. Next, you had three options:

• Choose an existing Goal
• Select a site usage metric
• Create a new objective or goal if you don’t already have one set up

2. Once you’ve set your Objective, the next step is to add the URLs of the page variations you wanted to test.
3. Finally, add the script code to your page to start the experiment. 

How do you analyze your A/B test results with Google Analytics?

To analyze your A/B test results in GA4 is no rocket science. Let’s understand how you can go about it with an example. 

Suppose you want to boost bookings on your e-Health website. You decide to promote the ‘Same-day consultation’ offer through three distinct formats: a status banner, a side pop-up, and a modal on your website. Once you’ve segmented audiences in GA4 for each format, you can establish comparisons to evaluate their respective responses. 

You can add and tailor your metrics for a more in-depth performance analysis In this example, you can compare audiences based on metrics like successful bookings, booking abandonment rates, consultation duration selection, and so on. 

Need a step-by-step guide on how to study A/B test results in GA4? Read our guide and get all your questions answered. 

Conclusion

Google’s product line restructuring has brought some big changes for businesses. But don’t worry, dealing with these changes can be easy if you’re smart about it. 

First of all, you can ease into the GA4 learning curve using Google’s handy learning materials. And as for your A/B testing programs – they’re in good hands. Even though GO has sunsetted, you’re in luck because you can easily migrate all your campaigns to VWO in less than a few seconds. Plus, VWO and GA4 integrate nicely together to help you get the best of both worlds. 

So, keep your testing engine running and keep moving forward. Good luck! 

Disclaimer: The synergy between VWO and GA4 enhances your A/B testing analytics, but potential data discrepancies may occur due to differing handling methodologies between platforms. This is not specific to VWO and can happen with any tool, as each has its unique setup. 

Frequently Asked Questions

In the realm of visitor behavior analytics, we resonate with the same wisdom. 

Trying to guess what might be off in the visitor journey or what issues they are dealing with can only get us so far. 

Diving into the insights hidden within visitor behavior is crucial for making smart decisions for unbeatable business success.

VWO Insights has been a game-changer in the journey of scores of brands to help them understand their visitors’ behavior using heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and forms. 

However, with the latest upgrades, we’ve taken its potential to the next level, making the data more actionable than ever without demanding endless hours of human effort.

In this blog, we’re giving you a refresher about all that’s achievable with this capability. So, keep reading!

How do you maximize insights with heatmaps?

Heatmaps by VWO Insights – Web serves as an excellent starting point for analyzing visitor behavior. With heatmaps, one can get a visual summary of visitor interaction on the page – mainly of clicks and scrolls.

Let’s understand a use case where you can analyze visitor behavior through heatmaps. 

Consider you run a relocation service company and you want to see how your website is performing in terms of visitor behavior. As you navigate to Google Analytics 4 to review current metrics, you’re struck by the high bounce rate on service pages. To understand why this is happening, you initiate a qualitative analysis, starting with the heatmaps. 

You observe through the Clickmap that the ‘Read more’ button, intended for exploring service details, receives the least percentage of clicks on these pages (indicated by a cooler color). 

Further, you click and compare different areas to see that blue bolded text in the copy garners the highest percentage of the total clicks on the page. This indicates visitors might perceive them as anchor text links to take them to a new page. 

Next, the scrollmap indicates a consistent decline in views as visitors scroll through the page. This tells you that visitors are not even scrolling down and engaging with the section that talks about the benefits of your service.

Additionally, the heatmap on a dynamic element like the ‘Get a quotation’ pop-up reveals that visitors click the close option more than they engage with the content in the pop-up. Interestingly, in segment-level analysis, you see visitors using the Safari browser are the most engaged group on your page. 

You can download the heatmaps and even share the click area data with your marketing team to brainstorm optimization ideas. That way, your entire team can stay posted about engagement status on a webpage. 

Read our detailed article to know how to get started with heatmaps on VWO. 

A real-life example to inspire you:

Ubisoft Entertainment, a leading French video game company recognized for franchises like For Honor and Assassin’s Creed, prioritized lead generation and conversion rates for overall performance analysis. Despite strong performance on several pages, the ‘Buy Now’ page for ‘For Honor’ needed improvement. Ubisoft’s team, leveraging click maps, scroll maps, heatmaps, and surveys, discovered a tedious buying process on that particular page. Driven by these insights, the team completely overhauled the page, increasing the sign-ups by 12%. 

How do recordings help you keep an eye on visitor actions?

Session Recordings by VWO Insights – Web literally lets you watch visitors in action. What path they take, where they click, if they wait somewhere before clicking – it’s all about capturing these granular details that make our recordings a favorite among businesses.

Consider a scenario where people are actively engaging with the navigation menu on your website. You can see this through the warm red colors in the heatmaps. But the website funnel analysis shows that not many visitors are reaching the product listing pages. It makes you wonder if the visitors are having trouble finding products. To investigate, you turn to session recordings.

So, you create a view for the page and choose a segment you’d like to see recordings for—perhaps shoppers from Singapore, your upcoming market where you aim to maximize sales. 

While reviewing the recordings, you observe the visitors’ mouse movement, noticing pauses and hesitancy about selecting a product in the navigation menu. They go back and forth without making a selection. Ultimately, you come to believe that the product categories could be arranged more systematically to simplify navigation.

Additionally, you see a couple of sessions of this visitor with dead clicks where he tries to click a product but it doesn’t take him to the listing page. This is another problem area that needs to be addressed.

If the visitor has been to your website across multiple sessions, you can review recordings of their interactions in those sessions. Check other recordings, if available, to see if the same issues persisted or if new problems emerged. 

Watch recordings of other visitors in that segment to determine whether the problem was unique to the previous visitor or whether they were also hesitant and failed to click through to the product listing page.

You can even share any visitor profile with your team if you identify something interesting in their behavior that your team can glean insights from and refine their optimization efforts. 

Get details on how to create a session recording, how to interpret it, and much more in our in-depth article. 

A real-life example for you:

Pearl Only, an online jewelry store, first discovered through analytics that there was some scope for optimization on its website. Paired with this insight, the team identified that the checkout page was cluttered and distracting visitors from the main CTA. To confirm these observations, they analyzed recordings of visitor sessions on the checkout page and discovered that visitors weren’t paying attention to the USPs. Instead, they were clicking on elements that led them away from the page. Based on these insights, the team implemented changes that resulted in a 10% increase in revenue. 

How do surveys keep you up to date with customer feedback?

Surveys by VWO Insights – Web always helps you stay updated with customer feedback, and its power is now doubled with AI. 

Wondering how? Let’s break it down with an example. 

Meet Smith, concerned about the declining visitor engagement on his news publishing site, as reflected in the reduced average time spent in GA4. To uncover the root cause, he decided to set up an on-page survey.

Here’s how he gets started: Smith enters the goal ‘Ask visitors for improvement ideas’ and is presented with a series of AI-generated questions. Because this AI-powered feature lets visitors regenerate questions, Smith takes full advantage of it and finalizes a question after 3 iterations. 

Next, he selects a single text box format and sets the trigger to display the survey after visitors spend 3 minutes on the page. Of course, you can choose other triggers, like showing surveys when visitors click somewhere or when they’re about to leave the page. The choice is yours. 

Fast forward to a month later, Smith is ready to analyze the survey responses. He’s saved from the hassle of sifting through piles of responses as AI steps in to summarize the key insights. 

For instance, a key insight emerges, revealing that most visitors perceive the website as text-heavy. To enhance the visitor experience, actionable takeaways include making the site more visually appealing by incorporating multimedia elements, adopting a minimalist layout, and strategically increasing white space. 

Even if you wish to delve deeper into responses, you can do so. Let’s say Smith filtered responses specific to a segment, such as new visitors, and found some really good suggestions he thinks can be tried out.

Overall, implementing improvements based on these insights allows you to seamlessly integrate customer feedback into website enhancements. 

Are you intrigued to give it a try? Learn how to use surveys on VWO in our in-depth article. 

A real-life example for you to read:

Encyclopedia Britannica added Q&A accordions to engage visitors on their site and prevent them from searching on Google. These accordions offer helpful information related to what visitors are reading. The company identified popular articles, used our surveys to learn what visitors wanted to know more about these topics, and then created accordion features with top Q&As for each article. The result? More than 23% of visitors clicked to see answers and explore more content.

How does form analytics improve form conversions?

Have you been on the lookout for a tool that can dive deep and provide field-level analysis? Form Analytics by VWO Insights – Web has got your back. 

Imagine you have a loan application form on your finance website. Lately, there has been a surge in live chat queries about the loan form, suggesting confusion among visitors. 

Using form analytics, you dig deeper and find that the total time spent on filling out the form is unusually high. Moreover, hesitation around sharing credit history is noticeable, with a significant drop-off from this field. Visitors are also neglecting the fields where they have to enter the address.

Real-time updates reveal that the number of visitors landing on your form, interacting with it, and then dropping off is steadily increasing. Moreover, when you apply filters to identify the segment from which most visitors drop off, you notice that the majority is coming from mobile. 

This suggests that mobile visitors may encounter difficulties when filling out a lengthy form on a small screen.

These insights suggest that shortening the form by removing insignificant fields could be the solution to engage visitors more effectively.

To get the ball rolling for your form analysis, read how to set up form tracking, use the dashboard, and more in our article. 

A real-life example to inspire you:

PayU, an Indian-origin fin-tech company, wanted to reduce drop-offs from the checkout page for their merchants. All PayU had were quantitative metrics such as time duration and bounce rate. They lacked qualitative insights into the specifics of what happened on the checkout page. Leveraging our form analytics, the team identified that requiring both telephone and email addresses caused friction and contributed to significant drop-offs. In response, they promptly eliminated unnecessary fields from the form, resulting in a 6% increase in the checkout rate.

Insights Dashboard – What’s new and how does it simplify behavioral analysis?

As you can understand from the above discussion, our session recordings and heatmaps give you a full view of how visitors behave on your site, helping you make better decisions for website improvements. 

However, in the past, going through hundreds of recordings and heatmaps was needed to validate your analyses. You had to go through heatmaps for page after page or session recordings from visitor after visitor to actually derive a concrete actionable insight – where the consistent friction is and what could be done. 

Now, with the Insights Dashboard in VWO Web Insights, you can easily understand the overall visitor experience. Check average engagement scores, pages with lowest engagement scores, segments with lowest scores, and identify problems like high rage clicks or errors. 

You can use heatmaps and session recordings for the lowest-performing pages, along with other page-level details like friction trends, errors on the page, segments with the lowest engagement, sessions with the lowest engagement, and so on. The dashboard also covers form performance and survey responses for a quick overview.

By bringing actionable insights to your fingertips, the dashboard saves you time and cuts down on effort. It makes finding problems and understanding segment-level behavior for each page easier, making the analysis process smoother and more effective.

What does Behavior Analytics mean for Product Managers, UX designers, and Marketers?

Behavior analytics is a game-changer for professionals across various roles in businesses today, enabling them to get to the root of user problems. Let’s see how product managers, marketers, and UX designers leverage behavior analytics for experience optimization. 

Product Manager

A product manager can enhance feature adoption by prioritizing visitors’ input, addressing glitches, and improving the overall product experience. Leveraging behavior analytics plays a crucial role in this process that helps refine features based on visitors’ actual behavior and preferences.

Consider this: As a product manager at an executive education learning website, you’ve been tracking the adoption rate of the new “Career Find” feature through your product experience platform, Userpilot. You see the numbers are not impressive, indicating that not many visitors are interacting with the feature as desired.

Warm colors in the heatmaps indicate that visitors are most engaged with the advanced search filter, featuring multiple boxes and different selectors like location, experience level, and industry. You see this area receives the majority of clicks compared to other sections of the page. To find out why adoption is low despite many people using the filter, you check session recordings for more details.

The recordings reveal that, after entering their criteria, the page loads for 7-8 seconds, displaying delayed results. This is the first roadblock because ideally, any page load time should be under 3 seconds. 

Interestingly, visitors click through to a job page from the job listings results but often return to the “Career Find” page, eventually scrolling back to the search filter. The goal now is to understand what prevents them from fully exploring job pages and makes them go back to the search boxes. 

To understand their concerns better, you initiate a survey on the career find page, seeking visitors’ feedback on the feature and discovering areas for improvement. The survey responses provide valuable insights: visitors want additional search options such as job type (full-time, remote, internships), salary range, and skills for more relevant search results. 

Additionally, they need more comprehensive job details, including job descriptions, company information, images, website links, employee strength, and required qualifications for the post. 

Currently, just stating the company name and role expectations isn’t enough for the visitors.

You now understand what’s lacking and where improvements are needed. 

With these observations, you can enhance the feature to be more visitor-centric, thereby improving the overall experience and driving increased adoption.

UX teams

UX researchers and designers can enhance visitor flow by leveraging visual data insights, incorporating feedback, and eliminating navigation bottlenecks. Behavior analytics helps with this granular understanding by revealing visitors’ pain points, friction areas, and improvement opportunities.

A short hypothetical example can help you understand better: Emma, a skilled UX researcher at an online fashion store, observed a sudden increase in drop-offs from the cart page while reviewing the metrics in their analytics tool. This shows a clear disruption in their behavior flow, preventing them from following the expected journey on the website. 

Instead of making assumptions, Emma sought an unbiased understanding of the issues. She turned to heatmaps to understand visitors’ behavior and explore ways to improve their journey.

Emma’s observations were intriguing. Firstly, she saw visitors engaging with the product quantity selector button the most as shown by warm colors. Secondly, not only did views decrease towards the bottom of the page, but the number of clicks on the ‘Proceed to checkout’ button was also lower. This indicates that visitors didn’t scroll down and, as a result, couldn’t find the button, which appeared below the initial scroll depth on the page.

To understand the reasons behind this click behavior, she delved into session recordings. Emma observed that although visitors clicked the quantity selector button, it didn’t help remove or add products, likely causing frustration. Moreover, visitors hardly scrolled down the page to click the check-out button. Eventually, they left without knowing it was at the bottom.

These observations convinced Emma that addressing these two major problem areas can smoothen visitors’ flow toward the checkout, making it easier for them to take the actions they want to on the website. 

CRO experts and marketers

Marketers aim to boost website conversions by optimizing problematic areas, enhancing engagement, and tailoring experiences for visitors. In this regard, behavior analytics helps them understand how visitors navigate, what they like, and what might distract them from taking desired actions, impacting conversions.

Consider this: As a CRO marketer at a consulting agency, you usually monitor form submissions on its website, tracking the lead flow into the conversion funnel. Things were going well, but this time, you noticed a 12% increase in visitors leaving the form without completing submissions. 

The main culprit seems to be the field requesting visitors to share their company revenue—a new criterion for lead selection introduced by the company. It was decided to include the criterion here to filter out prospects that didn’t meet this field from the get-go. 

You realize you need to look beyond the form and understand how visitors behave before and after interacting with it to get a complete picture. You observe dense red areas in heatmaps on the navigation menu, texts, and pictures on the left, while the form on the right exhibits low engagement in cooler colors. 

For even better analysis, you watched recordings of what a visitor’s behavioral flow looks like on the website. What is distracting them from noticing the form? Is there something that they find more interesting? Watching their movements is key to solving this mystery. In the recordings, you observe that although visitors move their mouse over the form, they pause frequently, indicating hesitation. 

This made you realize that asking about the company’s revenue might be too much for them at this point. Because the drop-offs from the form were manageable or within acceptable levels before adding the specified field. Now that you know where people are having a hard time, you can optimize the form and see if it improves form conversions again. 

How will visitor behavior analytics contribute to your business?

Investing in visitor behavior analytics provides you with a wealth of actionable insights that can be translated into growth strategies contributing to the overall success of your business. 

Early detection of potential issues

Monitoring visitor behavior through analytics tools allows you to detect potential issues or roadblocks in the visitor journey early on. Whether it’s a poorly performing landing page or a cluttered form, identifying and addressing issues promptly helps maintain a good visitor experience before they start affecting your conversion rates and the bottom line of your business.

Reduced bounce rates

Analyzing visitor behavior helps spot friction points that prevent them from taking the desired actions on your website. When you address these challenges, you create a smoother experience for them, encouraging them to spend more time on your website. Visitors finding what they are looking for easily can help reduce bounce rates and, in turn, improve conversions.

Data-driven decision-making

Data is the fuel that powers your decision-making process. Hence, basing your strategies on actual visitor interactions enables you to resonate with your audience and drive more business success.

Personalization opportunities

By understanding how visitors interact with your website through heatmaps and session recordings, you can tailor content, recommendations, and various other touchpoints to their preferences. For instance, if you see a segment of visitors most engaged with your forms after applying filters, you can target them with more relevant and personalized offers to push them to the next level in your conversion funnel.

Enhanced customer retention

Understanding visitor behavior and gathering their direct feedback (surveys) can give you insights into their needs and expectations. When you use this information to enhance your website, product, or services, you align with their expectations, fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty. This way, they stick around for a long time with your brand.

Final thoughts

Cutting corners on visitor research is a risky decision that can backfire. If your offering doesn’t align with their preferences and expectations, your efforts could go to waste. Don’t you think it would be worthwhile to align it with their behavior and make them feel valued?

With the incredible capabilities of VWO Insights, why delay adding this powerful tool to your tech stack to ensure a top-notch experience on your website? If you’re on board to give it a try, start with our free trial. And if you see the value in supporting your growing business ambitions, scaling up to a paid plan is just a smart move away. Happy researching, and improving! 

But you know what? The real work begins now! Promoting your content and affiliate link. With tons of content on the internet these days, it’s indeed difficult to garner your audience’s attention. On top of it, getting your audiences to click the affiliate link is even more challenging. 

Fret not, we’re here to help you. In this blog, we tell you how to promote your affiliate content and links so you get the most returns out of your efforts. Let’s get started.

Leverage your list of email subscribers

Your email list is a valuable asset. By building your email list, you own customer data without being at the mercy of third-party data providers and therefore control your communication with your subscribers. This ensures that your loyal fans receive your message without worrying about algorithm changes or policy changes on external platforms.

So, don’t delay and explore different ways of incorporating links in your newsletters. Create content that’s solely meant for promoting our product. Alternatively, you can include the link in non-promotional yet informative content. Let’s say you prepare a list of martech stack tools you tried and loved recently and you include the VWO platform in the list. The key is to make the link flow naturally within the content and position it prominently. 

Need inspiration? Pat Flynn is a big name in the affiliate industry and who better than him to inspire you? Look below how he chose to promote a software product and the corresponding affiliate link in one of his newsletters. Reads easy and organic, right? Also, he doesn’t miss a chance to promote his eBook while mentioning why he thinks reading it can help his audiences. 

Make the most of your blog posts

Including the affiliate link in blog posts is one of the oldest and proven strategies to promote affiliate marketing links. But some wonder if it’s even relevant in the times of digital boom and cut-throat competition with 32 million bloggers in the US alone. Surprisingly, the fact that 77% of people still read blogs online shows that blogs are still an important source of knowledge consumption and should be made the most of to reach more audiences. To establish trust with your readers, your blogs must be based on original research and reflect your authority on the subject. 

Your next goal is to make audiences click your affiliate link without making them feel compelled to do so. One way to achieve this is by putting the affiliate link in the content to make certain words clickable. See the two options below and decide which one you like as a reader:

1. Click https://vwo.com/free-trial/ to unlock the true marketing potential of your business.
2. Take a full-featured trial of VWO to unlock the true marketing potential of your business.

Of course, the second option is easier to read and more user-friendly as it weaves smoothly into your content. On the other hand, the first option looks a bit forced and when read in a flow, it can stand out as the right affiliate link promotion tactic. Inserting your affiliate link organically in your content is an art that you get better at with practicing. 

Influence customer decisions through product reviews and tutorials

Users reading product reviews and tutorials are usually said to be in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Now that they’ve done their research, they want to get their hands on a tool that will help them solve their problem. This is where promoting your affiliate link through reviews or tutorials that highlight your first-hand experience with the product becomes so important. 

Don’t hesitate to go analytical. Explain what you like about our VWO products and why you like them better than other tools you tried before. And precisely for this kind of content, place affiliate links toward the end of the content. Why? When the affiliate link is placed toward the end of the product review, it shows that your priority is providing an honest and informative review of the product.

John Chow is a superstar in the field of affiliate marketing, having earned millions in this industry.  Here’s an example of his way of promoting AWeber email marketing software. He ditched the usual long-form copy content and shared a video where he explained how to write for an automated email campaign using AWeber. And it’s only towards the end that he mentions that AWeber is offering a 30-day free trial for new customers. And like any smart affiliate marketer, he also promotes his personal content on a free video course at the bottom. 

Spread the word on social media

If you want to promote your content on social media, there are different formats you can experiment with! For example, try posting articles and snippets on LinkedIn or go for reels on Instagram and long videos on YouTube. Joining groups and communities on social media platforms – be it LinkedIn or Facebook – is also a great way to connect with potential customers and share your content with like-minded audiences.

But there are also nuanced differences in the different types of content you create. For example, creating content for reels and videos is fundamentally different. Reels are all about being concise and entertaining, while long videos give you more room to showcase your skills and knowledge. For instance, you could create a brief reel providing an overview of VWO Insights, and then elaborate on the details in a longer YouTube video.

When it comes to link placement, you can add them in the descriptions along with a few lines on the product you’re promoting. And since Instagram doesn’t let you add links to descriptions, don’t forget to keep updating the link in your bio as and when new affiliate content comes up.

While sharing affiliate links directly on forums like Quora and Reddit is considered spam, you can still include links to your content in your answers to questions. This way, you can attract potential customers without coming off as too pushy.

Don’t leave out podcasts and webinars

The recipe for successful affiliate link promotion remains the same even when you’re creating podcasts or webinars – create high-quality content and include relevant affiliate links in the description.

For instance, imagine you’re a digital marketer who hosts podcasts on marketing trends. In one of your episodes, you emphasize the significance of conversion rate optimization and share your trust in VWO for testing not only your website but also those of your clients. Simultaneously, you include your affiliate link in the description.

Dough Cunnington, an affiliate marketer, runs his podcast show called The Doug Show. In one of his episodes, he discusses prompt engineering with another expert and includes affiliate links for two AI products he endorses in the description. While he has kept the description quite straightforward, you can explain a synopsis of the podcast of your episode, so users can feel the context in which you’re promoting a particular product without having to listen to the entire episode. 

Maximize reach through short videos

Short-form video content, exemplified by platforms like TikTok and Instagram, has revolutionized our way of online content consumption. Today, we crave concise, creative, and personal content that helps us save time by sharing only the necessary information. 

Now, don’t downplay the effort required to create this content only because it’s brief. You’ve to work on creating engaging content infused with authentic storytelling to hook your audience. Your content should do a good job of piquing audiences’ interests and making them eager to explore the products or services you’re promoting. And to do that in a few seconds is not a cakewalk. 

If you regularly update your product reviews, place the latest affiliate link in your Instagram bio, and be sure to mention it in your posts or stories. Also, you can use hashtags to help broaden your content’s reach. 

Over to you

It can be quite challenging to cut through the clutter and promote your affiliate content and links to the right set of audiences. But hang in there! It might take some time, but when you have a solid plan, you can stay assured of great results and succeed as a VWO affiliate. We hope you found our tips on promoting your affiliate content and links helpful! Now that you have all these tips, it’s time to put them into practice, catch your reader’s attention, and watch your commissions soar. Good luck with your affiliate marketing journey!

Only a handful of brands manage to find that perfect balance between the two.

But, Lego, the iconic toy brand, has cracked the code with their fantastic initiative called Lego Ideas. It acts as a welcoming hub for Lego fans to share their imaginative designs, and if the community gives them a thumbs up, these ideas can become real Lego sets! This strategy perfectly aligns with Lego’s core value of product innovation through creativity and imagination. 

What do we learn from this example? When you put customers at the center of your brand engagement, you let them resonate with your goals, ensuring your brand stays on their radar over time.

Let’s explore more about this concept in our blog. Continue reading!

What is brand engagement and how is it different from brand awareness?

Brand engagement and brand awareness are both vital components of a company’s marketing strategy, but they serve distinct purposes. 

Brand engagement focuses on the depth of the connection between the audience and the brand. This involves active participation, interaction, and emotional attachment. 

For instance, when customers actively engage with a brand on social media, leaving comments, sharing content, or participating in discussions, they are demonstrating brand engagement. It’s about building a loyal, dedicated customer base that actively supports and promotes the brand.

Brand awareness, on the other hand, is the extent to which a target audience recognizes a brand, primarily through exposure to its name, logo, or slogan. It’s about making the brand known and familiar. For example, when someone recognizes the golden arches of McDonald’s, they are displaying brand awareness.

Brand awareness is about recognition, while brand engagement is about fostering a deeper, more interactive relationship between the brand and its audience. Both are crucial for a brand’s success, with awareness being the first step toward engagement.

Brand engagement vs Customer engagement

Most of us tend to use these two terms interchangeably. But no, that’s not how it is. 

Brand engagement and customer engagement are different from one another. While the former centers on how customers connect with a company’s identity, values, and story, the latter relates to customers’ interactions and experiences in their journeys with a brand. Let’s understand with the example of Nike, one of the world-renowned footwear brands. 

Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ tagline captures the brand’s core values of motivation and empowerment. Consumers resonating with this slogan feel a strong emotional connection to the brand, making it more than just a sportswear company. This is an example of Nike’s brand engagement strategy encouraging consumers to embrace an active lifestyle, pursue their athletic goals, and overcome obstacles with determination. 

Coming to Nike’s customer engagement strategies, their Nike Training Club app offers personalized workout recommendations, building a direct and ongoing connection with users. Plus, their loyalty program, NikePlus, rewards customers for their brand loyalty, enhancing customer-brand relationships. 

Get the difference now? Nike demonstrates how brand engagement shapes their overarching message and values, while customer engagement focuses on the day-to-day interactions and experiences that enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Tune in to learn more about the link between customer loyalty and revenue growth.

Why is brand engagement important?

Many brands frequently overlook brand engagement because it takes time to secure a lasting place in customers’ minds. Nonetheless, they need to initiate this process today to enjoy the following benefits:

Improved word-of-mouth marketing

Think word-of-mouth marketing has lost its effectiveness? Not so fast! According to a survey, a whopping 88% of customers still go ahead with recommendations from their friends and family. When customers are emotionally invested in a brand, they become natural brand advocates, setting the ball rolling for powerful word-of-mouth marketing and boosting a brand’s reputation and awareness.

Increased sales and revenue

Engaged customers are more likely to make larger purchases and explore a brand’s products or services, increasing conversions and sales. They are less price-sensitive and are willing to pay a premium for products or services they trust and value. For instance, Apple’s brand engagement strategies led users to purchase not only one product but multiple ones over the years, from iPhones to MacBooks and more. 

Competitive edge

Companies that prioritize building strong connections with their customers are more likely to stand out in the market. Engagement customers are less likely to switch to competitors, helping a brand maintain and even expand its market share. Tesla’s emphasis on sustainability and innovation resonated with eco-conscious consumers and technology enthusiasts, making them a leader in the electric vehicle industry. 

Brand resilience

Successful brands with high engagement can weather crises and negative events more effectively, thanks to their loyal customer base. 

Coca-Cola, a globally recognized brand, faced a significant challenge with the rise of health-conscious consumers and concerns about sugary beverages. Despite these headwinds, Coca-Cola’s long-standing brand engagement allowed them to adapt and thrive.

To increase customer engagement, the brand diversified its product offerings to include a wide range of healthier beverage options, from bottled water to low-calorie drinks. They also engaged in transparent communication about ingredient changes and nutritional information, building trust with their audience.

Their brand resilience, fortified by decades of brand engagement and a willingness to adapt, has enabled them to not only weather the changing market but also grow and prosper in a time when many beverage companies faced declining sales. 

How can you improve brand engagement?

Now that you know what makes brand engagement an indispensable component of your business growth strategy, here are the top things you must leverage to improve your brand engagement: 

Personalization

Personalization is key to creating a relevant and engaging experience for each customer. It can boost customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and retention.

For example, the eCommerce giant Amazon uses customer data and browsing history to offer personalized product suggestions, creating a highly engaging and unique shopping experience for each user. 

If you want to release personalized experiences on your website as well, take a free trial of VWO Personalize. With the dynamic Visual Editor and advanced segmentation, you can sharpen experiences based on buyers’ journeys using this tool. 

Watch this video to get started with personalization in a step-by-step process.

Social media

Social media platforms provide an excellent opportunity to create a dialogue with your audience and showcase the human side of your brand.

Nike’s active presence on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter enables them to engage with their community of athletes and fitness enthusiasts. They share inspiring stories, interact with customers, and even respond to user-generated content.

Customer feedback

Actively seeking and responding to customer feedback not only demonstrates that you value their input but also helps you continuously improve your products and services.

Airbnb uses a two-way review system, where both hosts and guests leave feedback for each other. This encourages accountability, trust, and constant improvement.

Build a community

Community-building fosters a sense of belonging and encourages users to become brand advocates while regularly staying up-to-date about your brand’s latest developments. 

Red Bull, known for its extreme sports and adventure content, has built a strong community of enthusiasts who engage with and share the brand’s thrilling content.

User-generated content

Encouraging user-generated content leverages the authentic experiences and creativity of your customers.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign invited customers to personalize bottles with their names. This initiative led to a flood of user-generated content shared on social media platforms, increasing brand engagement and brand visibility.

Organize events

Hosting events allows for direct interaction, education, and the opportunity to connect with your audience on a deeper level.

At VWO, we organize ConvEx, a free virtual summit for experimentation and growth teams. Our event features industry experts speaking and sharing their insights from working for the top brands. The best part is as our event is virtual, enthusiasts from all over the world can be a part of it. 

Watch video recordings from ConvEx’23 and implement the learnings in your optimization strategy for better engagement. 

Work on areas with low engagement

Identifying and addressing low-engagement areas demonstrates your commitment to improvement and a better customer experience.

Imagine you manage CX for an online retail site and you noticed low engagement on the “Home Office Furniture” category product pages, leading to low conversion rates. To address this, you can perform an A/B test before implementing any final changes, such as adding product recommendations or social proof elements. 

A successful A/B test will help identify the most effective enhancements to improve user engagement and increase conversions. Learn how VWO can help by taking a free trial now. 

How do you measure the success of your brand engagement strategy?

Measuring brand engagement involves assessing various aspects of how your audience interacts with and perceives your brand. We’ve listed metrics that can help measure brand engagement effectively:

Email open rates

Increased email open rates indicate that your recipients are showing genuine interest in your email campaigns or brand’s content. They’re not just skimming the surface; they’re willing to delve into your emails and learn more about your products, services, or information.

Social media engagement

Social media is a potent tool to increase brand engagement. When your audience engages with your posts by liking, sharing, commenting, and participating in discussions, it’s a sign that they’re not just aware of your brand, but actively involved in your online community.

Customer feedback

Positive user feedback, reviews, and testimonials reflect a strong emotional connection that loyal customers have with your brand. When they take the time to provide feedback or endorse your offerings, it’s a clear sign of their engagement and satisfaction.

Website traffic

An engaged audience tends to spend more time on your website, exploring different pages and content. Increased page views and longer session durations indicate that visitors find your content compelling and engaging, leading to a deeper connection with your brand.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS serves as a straightforward indicator of customer loyalty and brand advocacy. Customers who provide high NPS scores not only engage with your brand but are also likely to become brand advocates, promoting your products or services to others. 

Now, you might wonder about the metrics for customer engagement, which differ from brand engagement. Read our blog for the essential metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your customer engagement campaigns. 

Top real-life brand engagement examples

Leading brands today employ various strategies to increase brand engagement, including consistent messaging, creating emotional connections, aligning with customer values, and offering personalized experiences. We’ve shortlisted 5 such brand engagement examples below. 

Apple

Apple excels in creating brand engagement by offering a seamless ecosystem of products and services. Their devices work cohesively, allowing users to easily transition between them. This ecosystem keeps customers invested in the Apple brand because they don’t want to switch to other brands that may not offer the same level of ease of use. 

Starbucks

This massive coffee chain brand excels at building brand engagement through its commitment to sustainability and community engagement. Initiatives like the “Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices” and their support for local communities strengthen the brand’s engagement with socially conscious customers.

Disney

Disney’s brand engagement is deeply rooted in storytelling and iconic characters. They understand that connecting emotionally with their audience is key. By continuously introducing new characters and expanding on beloved franchises, Disney maintains a strong relationship and lasting bond with fans of all ages.

As a part of its customer engagement strategy, the brand’s theme parks provide a real-world experience, allowing customers to engage with the brand in a tangible way. From meeting their favorite characters to immersing themselves in themed environments, the parks enhance customer engagement by creating unforgettable memories. 

Salesforce

 A trailblazer in the world of B2B SaaS space, Salesforce has built a thriving online community called the “Trailblazer Community.” This platform connects Salesforce users, administrators, developers, and partners. It fosters knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and networking, creating a sense of belonging. Clients actively engage with Salesforce and with each other, strengthening their ties to the brand.

Dove

Dove’s brand engagement shines through its “Real Beauty” campaign. By promoting self-esteem and body positivity, they’ve engaged in meaningful conversations about beauty standards. Dove’s messaging aligns with its brand identity, which resonates with customers who appreciate authenticity and social responsibility.

Kickstart your brand engagement efforts today

In a world where brands often find it challenging to stand out, the true essence of brand engagement is in cultivating a profound, authentic connection that transcends only products and services. 

It’s about nurturing a bond, an emotional resonance that lingers in the minds of your audience. The strategies and examples we’ve shared are here not only to guide you but also to fuel your imagination as you embark on the path of crafting your unique brand engagement plans. 

So, get ready to embark on this journey because, in the end, it’s all about forging relationships that endure a lifetime.

Frequently asked questions