Beware of Conversion Cannibalism

Does your front page suf­fer from con­ver­sion cannibalism?

Most organ­isa­tions put too much con­tent on their front pages. Unknowingly, they hurt their con­ver­sions and, by exten­sion — their busi­ness objectives.

In this art­icle, I will demon­strate why less is more in front-page design.

Let’s go:

The Website Front-Page Debate

“We must put my stuff on the front page because it’s crucial.”

I often get involved in heated debates on what to include on the front page. If I weigh into the debate that they should remove cer­tain ele­ments, the chances are that someone will get offen­ded. Like, “how dare you remove my work from our front page?”

Since this is a tricky situ­ation, I want to give you some easy-to-fol­low examples to help you straight­en your front-page strategy.

The key to an effi­cient front page design is to stop think­ing about what to put on the front page regard­ing what’s “import­ant” and what’s “not import­ant”. Take a look at Google’s front page:

Now, Google has lots of essen­tial products. Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Trends, Google Adsense, Google Scholar, and many more. The only ser­vice that makes it onto the front page is Gmail (top right corner), but it isn’t exactly prom­in­ent on the front page.

All these Google products are reas­on­ably sig­ni­fic­ant, right? Even still, these Google products don’t make the cut for Google’s front page — the Google search page.

And Google ought to know some­thing about how the web works.

The Paradox of Choice

Imagine a web page with 1,000 vis­it­ors per day. The page has only one but­ton for the users to click. The con­ver­sion rate for the site is 2% on aver­age. That’s 20 clicks on your button. 

So, what if you add anoth­er but­ton? In most use cases, the con­ver­sion rate for the page does­n’t go up — it falls. Instead of get­ting 20 clicks on one but­ton, you might get ten clicks on two buttons. 

Competing call-to-actions will can­ni­bal­ise each other.

This is the para­dox of choice. In 1995, Professor Shena Iyengar from Columbia University launched a mar­ket stall with dif­fer­ent jam fla­vours. When she offered twenty-four options, more people came to the booth. When she only offered six choices, more people con­ver­ted into pay­ing customers. 

Our decision-mak­ing pro­cess is com­plex, but research­ers have offered many pos­sible explan­a­tions, such as decision fatigue, ana­lys­is para­lys­is, and buy­er­’s remorse.

Strive to show vis­it­ors only what they came for. Kill your darlings.

Only when the user goes deep­er into your site can you show them more of your content.

Horizontal vs Vertical CTAs

An easy way to think of web­site CTAs (call-to-actions) is to think of but­tons and forms. Buttons and forms are pre­cious since they determ­ine your conversions.

There is a form of “align­ment can­ni­bal­ism” tak­ing place when it comes to but­tons and forms. And these align­ment issues should be con­sidered when design­ing your front page.

On the web today, we see a trend where there is white space to both the left and right of but­tons and forms. And we see a trend where more of the same CTAs are stacked from top to bottom.

You’re Probably Not an Exception

Yes, there are suc­cess­ful busi­nesses that also have cluttered websites:

Amazon​.com might be the prime example, but my favour­ite got to be ling​scars​.com and her rather “more-is-more” approach to web design:

But your busi­ness is prob­ably not Ling’s. And it prob­ably isn’t Amazon’s.

You also have to ask your­self if cluttered is the right dir­ec­tion for your brand. A stat­ist­ic­al guess would be: No.

Unless you’re run­ning a non-posh e‑com­merce- or news site with lots of con­tent and a high turnover on con­tent items, I would be care­ful with such an over-the-top strategy.

Priority: The Small Ask

The choice of what to put on the front page isn’t related to what’s neces­sary or not neces­sary. Instead, your front page should be regarded only as a point of entry into your brand’s universe.

The psy­cho­logy behind focus­ing on smal­ler asks is straight­for­ward, as explained by the Engagement Pyramid:

Spin Academy | Online PR Courses

The Engagement Pyramid

The 1% rule of online engage­ment was mainly an urb­an legend on the inter­net. However, a peer-reviewed paper from 2014 con­firmed the 1% rule of thumb. ¹Trevor van Mierlo. (2014). The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 16(2), e33 – e33. … Continue read­ing

Active pub­lics dis­trib­ute them­selves in a way proven sci­en­tific­ally by soci­olo­gists — long before the inter­net and social media emerged. 

The Engagement Pyramid divides pub­lics into three dis­tinct groups:

• Creators (1%)
• Contributors (9%)
• Lurkers (90%)

When study­ing inter­net for­ums spe­cific­ally, it’s not uncom­mon to find that 90% of users have nev­er pos­ted (lurk­ers), 9% are adding only to exist­ing top­ics and threads (con­trib­ut­ors), and 1% are act­ively start­ing new sub­jects and threads (cre­at­ors).

The Engagement Pyramid is some­times called the 1% rule or the 90−9−1 principle.

“The 90−9−1 prin­ciple and Zipf’s Law both effect­ively clas­si­fy mem­bers in online sup­port groups, with the Zipf dis­tri­bu­tion account­ing for 98.6% of the vari­ance.”
Source: Internet Interventions ²Carron-Arthur, B., Cunningham, J., & Griffiths, K. (2014). Describing the dis­tri­bu­tion of engage­ment in an Internet sup­port group by post fre­quency: A com­par­is­on of the 90−9−1 Principle and … Continue read­ing

Learn more: The Engagement Pyramid (The 90−9−1 Principle)

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By mak­ing a small ask (your email address in exchange for some­thing valu­able to you) instead of a big ask (invest in hir­ing me as an advisor), I can cap­ture and nur­ture trust­ing rela­tion­ships over time, slowly mov­ing pro­spects from 9% to 1%. 

(Small asks are often referred to as lead mag­nets.)

The Iceberg Publishing Strategy

Looking back at the Google example, one could say they use mul­tiple front pages. If we look at Google Drive’s “front page”, we can see the same strategy; there is just one mes­sage and one call-to-action above the fold. It works because it’s crys­tal clear:

More and more con­ver­sion experts argue that most pages with­in a web­site’s struc­ture should be land­ing pages. Landing pages are access­ible for search engines to drive rel­ev­ant traffic since they’re stripped of unne­ces­sary content. 

Instead of cram­ming everything into one single front page, your busi­ness could util­ise mul­tiple high-con­vert­ing “front pages” instead, a strategy I call ice­berg pub­lish­ing — where there are many hid­den dir­ect land­ing pages beneath the site’s surface.

Bonus Resource: Deep Content

Deep Content

Above is an example of an online con­tent struc­ture that’s five levels deep.

In the example above, five lay­ers of ever­green con­tent are stacked:

• Level 1: Articles
• Level 2: Content Upgrade
• Level 3: Resource/​Lead Magnet
• Level 4: Ebook
• Level 5: Online Course

Deep Content is centred around provid­ing increas­ingly high­er qual­ity to Content Divers (click­ing ver­tic­ally) since they’re more valu­able than Content Surfers (click­ing horizontally).

As for the import­ance of struc­ture and depth, the logic is the same as for Iceberg Publishing and Content Themes.

Learn more: The Deep Content PR Strategy: Win By Going Deeper

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