Less is more: how we used Crazy Egg to boost our own conversions

This article is summarized in this 58-second video

How we used Crazy Egg to improve our own site.

The challenge: increase our opt-in rate

Recently, we aimed to improve the opt-in rate for the following page:

Screenshot of the learning zone on CRE’s website
The subscription page for our newsletter.

This page had been performing fine for us. We had surveyed our visitors using Qualaroo (formerly known as KISSinsights), Kampyle and 4Q, and most of their responses were complimentary. It wasn’t obvious that anything needed changing. In such situations, we often interrogate Crazy Egg.

Crazy Egg gave us the clue we needed

When we looked at the Crazy Egg overlay for our page, this is what we saw:

Screenshot of a heatmap of the Crazy Egg report
Crazy Egg revealed that some visitors were clicking on the sidebar.

Notice how most of the clicks are where anyone would expect them to be—in the sign-up area for the free toolkit showcased on the page. (Ignore the rectangular area near the top of the page—it’s an entry overlay.)

If it hadn’t been for that pesky sidebar…

However, also notice how we were getting some clicks on the right sidebar area. It wasn’t red-hot, but we still got a noticeable number of clicks.

We realized that our site-wide sidebar was distracting some people from the task at hand, which was to download our free toolkit. We were practically asking them to click off to the right and not stay on topic.

We whipped up another page where everything stayed the same, except that we removed the right sidebar. The information in that sidebar appears in sidebars on other pages, so we were confident that sooner or later our visitors would see it all. A much higher priority was to have those visitors get our toolkit right now, so we’d have a way of contacting them in the future with news and other information.

Here’s the test page we created:

Screenshot of Conversion Rate Experts’ learning zone
We removed the sidebar from the page, because Crazy Egg had revealed that visitors were distracted by it.

We tested it using Visual Website Optimizer. Here are the results:

Screenshot of the VWO interface
The Visual Website Optimizer results report.

The new version of the page generated 25.9% more opt-ins during the test period, and was 99% likely to be better than the control.

It never ends—nor should it

Crazy Egg is a powerful tool for understanding visitor behavior, which in turn allows you to help direct that behavior toward your desired outcomes. To discover some other fantastic tools, visit this page.

Disclosure: Crazy Egg is one of our clients—though we were recommending it years before it was a client.

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