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Neil Patel

A Straight-Forward Guide to Optimizing Your Funnels for Maximum Conversions

Maximizing your conversion funnels can only happen when you experiment with each element of customer interaction, dig deep into the analytics and then optimize the design.

Fortunately, you don’t have to test everything at once. But where should you start?

In this article I’ll tell you:

Let’s get started.

1. Create Google Analytics Funnels

Your first step to building a well-built online conversion funnel is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics.

If you don’t have this set up…stop right now and go set it up. The data you will collect will reveal where your users are abandoning the conversion funnel.

The requirements are simple:

This tracking will help you discover when and where people are leaving your site during the conversion funnel.

For example, you may see that visitors are bouncing off of one page in the conversion path. You discover this page is where you have the price listed. Can you improve conversions by moving the price further down the sales path? Would adding trust elements on that page help?

If you ask these kinds of questions as you work through the data you’ll be able to fix the leakiest parts of your online conversion funnel.

To learn more about how to set up funnels in Google Analytics, please read our articled called How to Get Actionable Data Out of Google Analytics.

2. Analyze Your Landing Pages

Once you’ve got funnel visualization set up, your first round of testing should focus on your landing page. Here are the elements you should test:

Click on this image below to get an even better understanding of what elements you can test on your landing pages:

The one final piece to creating a high-converting landing page is to limit distractions. Anything that is unrelated to the focus of that page should be cut immediately.

3. Analyze Your Sign Up Forms

The next interaction step to test is your sign up forms. The common elements to test are as follow:

4. Test Your Trust Elements

Trust on the web is huge…especially when you are trying to get people to give you their money. This is why you have to build trust into your landing page and throughout your online conversion funnel.

At minimum, you need these elements:

I think for the best results you should use all three of those trust elements above, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do a few rounds of A/B testing, experimenting to find out which logo is the most effective. You’ll especially want to find out the best position of each trust element on the page.

Zappos is a company that uses trust symbols and guarantees really well. On every page they have what we call “The Extreme Guarantee”:

The Zappos footer also has all the relevant trust symbols:

Be sure to read our article 10 Ways to “Guarantee” More Sales and Conversions for more information and examples on this topic.

5. Test Your Email Conversion

Building an email newsletter list is an essential part of your online conversion funnel. Test these elements in your emails:

By the way, check out my article 5 Reasons Why You Can’t Make Your Email Marketing Work for more advice on this topic.

Let’s shift gears now and talk about how you can test these different conversion funnel elements.

6. Combine Usability And A/B Test Results

Talk to most people about metrics and they’ll either talk about user testing or A/B testing…but never both. That’s unfortunate because they work together perfectly.

Let me explain.

In the end, A/B testing will confirm your usability test insights…giving you more effective results than if either were used alone.

If you’re new to usability testing, here are some resources to check out:

And if you’re new to A/B testing, check out our A/B testing guide.

7. Run A Mom Test

Okay, so it doesn’t have to be your mom…but make sure it isn’t one of your internet savvy friends. In other words, it should be a normal web user.

Call this person and ask them to find your site on Google and complete the conversion process. Make sure you tell them what you expect users to do at your site.

Stay on the phone and ask them to talk out loud as they do their search. Record the phone call and take notes until they are finished.

Make tweaks to your conversion process and repeat the process until people can work through the process without abandoning the process.

8. Run An Online 5-Second Test

Finally, when it comes to creating a well-built conversion funnel, you need to keep things simple. Eliminate all distractions.

I’ve found that by running a simple visual presentation you can learn a lot about the simplicity of your funnel.

This is where the five-second test comes in.

Vinod Khosla originally created this test to show executives and VCs that slides thick with information would fail. The test involved nothing more than putting a slide in front of someone and then pulling it after 5 seconds. Khosla would then ask the tester to tell him what he remembered.

The lesson was always the same…less is more. The 5-second test has been adapted online to help you test web designs with a tool like fivesecondtest.com.

You can use this to test wire-frames, mock ups and call to actions. And it’s easy to get started:

  1. Get a free account.
  2. Upload a screenshot of the web page you want to test.
  3. Let members test your web page.
  4. See your results.

You can see in the red outline that in a quick glance what most users were seeing as the most important goal of the web page. In this case it was “download this.”

Is that what you want to be the main goal?

If not, then you need to change the design and re-test. The tool is free so you can do this as many times as you want!

Conclusion

When it comes to creating a well-built conversion funnel, you should be testing all the time. You’ll get plenty of actionable data that will help you improve your conversion rates.

Listen, if you’re not testing, you’re leaving money on the table. And as I shared above, there are so many easy and inexpensive ways to test that you really don’t have any excuse. Besides, who wants to lose money? Not me!

What other elements in a conversion funnel should you be testing? And what other tools do you know about?

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