Does your web design suffer from conversion cannibalism?
Organisations add CTAs frequently, hoping to increase conversions. They hope that 1+1=3, but in reality, it’s closer to 1+1=0.
Adding more CTAs (call-to-actions) to a single browser view will allow these buttons and forms to cannibalise each other’s conversion rates.
I will demonstrate why less is more in web design.
Here we go:
Conversion Cannibalism
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Conversion Cannibalism
Imagine a web page with 1,000 visitors per day. The page has only one button for the users to click. On average, the site’s conversion rate is 2%, equal to 20 clicks on your button.
So, what if you add another button? The page’s conversion rate doesn’t increase in most use cases — it falls. Instead of getting 20 clicks on one button, you might get 10 clicks on two.
Two call-to-actions in the same browser view will typically cannibalise each other.
The Paradox of Choice
An easy way to think of website CTAs (call-to-actions) is to think of buttons and forms.
Buttons and forms are subject to 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. 1Piasecki, M., & Hanna, S. (2011). A Redefinition of the Paradox of Choice. , 347 – 366. https://doi.org/10.1007/978 – 94-007‑0510-4_19
Horizontal vs Vertical CTAs
On the web today, we see a trend where there is white space to both the left and right of buttons and forms. We also see a trend where more of the same CTAs are stacked from top to bottom.
There is a form of “alignment cannibalism” taking place when it comes to buttons and forms. These alignment issues should be considered when designing a web page:
Learn more: Beware of Conversion Cannibalism
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The Classic Front Page Debate
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The Classic Home Page Debate
“We must put all these items on our home page because they’re all important to us.”
I often get involved in heated debates on what to include on the home 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 home page?”
Since this situation is tricky, here’s a mental model to help you clean up your home page approach:
The key to an efficient home page design is to stop thinking about what’s “important” and “not important”.
Take a look at Google’s de facto home page:
Now, Google has many essential products:
… to name a few. However, the only service on the home page apart from Google Search is Gmail (top right corner), which isn’t prominent on the home page.
All these Google products are reasonably significant, right? However, they still don’t replace Google’s de facto home page — the Google Search page.
If Google can keep its home page clean, why can’t you? Is everything in your business more important to your visitors than, let’s say, Google Drive?
Small Ask vs Big Ask
What single CTA (call-to-action) should you focus your home page on? Instead of basing your design decision on “bottom line importance,” focusing on a small rather than a big ask often makes sense.
Small ask = a value proposition that requires little effort and resources for a prospect to accept. It works best when the ask offers a swift, hassle-free solution for an urgent pain point.
Big ask = a value proposition that requires high engagement and a substantial transaction by the prospect. It works best when mutual understanding and trust are thoroughly established.
By prioritising a small ask on the home page design, you increase the likelihood of building a “yes ladder” by asking posing slightly bigger asks in sequence over time.
Learn more: The Classic Home Page Debate
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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, it should be regarded only as a point of entry into your brand’s universe.
Instead of cramming everything into one front page, your business could utilise multiple high-converting landing pages, a strategy I call iceberg publishing, where many hidden direct landing pages are beneath the site’s surface.
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%.
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: 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.
Types of Landing Pages
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Types of Landing Pages
Landing page (LP) = a single-purpose web page stripped of standard menus and sidebars with a single CTA (call-to-action) chosen to match the visitor’s demonstrated intent.
Here are a few examples of landing page types:
The above examples are to name a few examples of landing pages. Only your imagination will determine what types of efficient landing pages you can develop!
Each landing page type serves a specific purpose in the customer journey, focusing on a single objective: increasing conversions.
Read also: Types of Landing Pages
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PR Resource: The Engagement Pyramid
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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. 2Trevor 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:
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 3Carron-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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PR Resource: Deep Content
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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:
Deep content is centred around providing increasingly higher quality to engaged users. ideally, the user’s engagement should determine when the information need has been fulfilled, not the limitations of the website’s available content.
As for the importance of structure and depth, the logic is the same as that of iceberg publishing and content themes.
Learn more: The Deep Content PR Strategy: Win By Going Deeper
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ANNOTATIONS
| 1 | Piasecki, M., & Hanna, S. (2011). A Redefinition of the Paradox of Choice. , 347 – 366. https://doi.org/10.1007/978 – 94-007‑0510-4_19 |
|---|---|
| 2 | Trevor van Mierlo. (2014). The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 16(2), e33 – e33. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2966 |
| 3 | Carron-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 Zipf’s Law. Internet Interventions, 1, 165 – 168. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.INVENT.2014.09.003 |
