CRO for B2B lead generation: sunshine and rainbows
October 2019
Earlier this week I brooded over the challenges that come with optimizing B2B lead generation websites đ
Iâm over it. Thereâs actually a s**t ton you can do to optimize this kind of site. Starting with âŚ
Get data you can trust
How many leads did your site get last month? How many Google Analytics Goal conversions did you track?
Itâs pretty common for these two numbers to be way off. Theyâll never match perfectly, but if we canât get them close enough to trust, weâre better off ignoring Google Analytics completely.
Common issues:
- Spam. (Make sure youâre filtering out bots in Google Analytics. Implement reCaptcha if necessary.)
- Customer support requests. (Give your existing customers a prominent, separate âSupportâ CTA, support page, and form.)
- Test submissions. (Block office IP addresses in Google Analytics, and/or have the team use Ghostery when visiting the site.)
Fix broken stuff
Youâll never have the luxury of running an 8-variation experiment on your lead form to determine if a rounded input field border raises submissions by 0.82%.
Thatâs actually a good thing. It grants you permission to audit your form based on uncontroversial best practices, update it accordingly, and move on with life. (Here is a great guide; you can also trust Luke W. or Nielsen Norman Group.)
Beyond that, getting another set of eyes on your site (especially the most direct landing-to-conversion path) can point you to obstacles or confusing elements that are best removed. Hire a CRO guru ninja unicorn, or if youâre on a budget, have 5 user testers complete a conversion task on the site. Watch the recordings and fix anything that brings you deep shame.
Get to know your visitors
User testing and best practices wonât tell you anything about your special snowflake âď¸ visitors. So, do this:
Segment Google Analytics data by âConvertersâ and see what theyâre up to
Once a quarter, ask GA a few questions about the visitors who submitted a lead form:
- What pages did they land on?
- What channels did they come from?
- What referral partners sent them?
- What device types do they use?
If you can take action to get more visitors like these, go for it! If you see an obvious reason why certain pages, channels, or devices are not associated with conversion, go fix it!
Check back next quarter to see if the answers to these questions have changed.
Install a heat mapping tool and run heat maps on your top 5-10 pages.
Donât bother looking at them until theyâve reached at least 1,000 visitors. When you do look, ask âIs everyone clicking exactly where we expect them to?â
The answer is almost always âWTF, not at all.â So ask why, or whether you can make the page easier to use by moving or removing something. Then go do it, run another heat map, and see if you impacted how people use the page.
Run polls on high exit pages
Asking people âWhatâs missing from this page?â after a reasonable duration of non-interaction is one of my favorites. You wonât get many responses, but youâll get some đ¤Śââď¸ obvious insights.
Past realizations based on this type of poll include:
- âOops, yeah, we donât mention our iOS app anywhere on the site đâ
- âOh, forgot to mention, most of our visitors are actually here for [secondary service] ⌠maybe we should add that to the navigation?â
- âWow, tons of people ask about [feature] ⌠maybe we should list it on the Features page?â
If youâre having one of these đ¤Śââď¸ moments once per quarter, based on data youâve collected on your website, congrats - youâre doing optimization.
Maybe test stuff
If your lead volume doesnât support the statistics needed for A/B testing, itâs best to leave it alone. But you may find that your site has a secondary goal thatâs valuable enough to justify optimization effort.
Maybe your quarterly Google Analytics audit showed you that your newsletter subscribers are a high-converting audience. Youâd like more of them. At present, youâre getting 300 signups per month.
Thatâs an optimizable metric! If you can do it on the cheap, run a test on different subscribe experiences.
Even if you never get to experimentation, though, following the above steps gets you a site thatâs 93% free of embarrassing issues, and builds a continuous improvement process for your site.
It ensures that every few months, youâll know a little more about your visitors. Youâll make better decisions. You may even decide this stuff is fun, and start to dig deeper. In time, youâll have the most amazing B2B lead generation site on the internet. âď¸đ