Our Guest: Matt Inglot is the Founder of Tilted Pixel, a web agency that specializes in helping clients increase sales and online conversions. He is also the host of Freelance Transformation Podcast. A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to redesign webpages for maximum conversions
- Why you should be using eye-tracking data to optimize your site
- The one tool that shows your web elements that are drawing the most attention
To See These Tactics In Action:
Click Here To Learn How Matt Increased Sales By 35% Using One Simple Tool & TacticTo See The Transcript: [showhide type="podcast" more_text="Click Here" less_text="Hide The Transcript" hidden="yes"] Tim: If you’re ignoring your analytics, you’re likely missing out on simple changes that could have a big impact on your bottom line. And when you do look you’ll find that the things causing the things causing sales to drop are the things you never expect. Matt Inglot from Tilted Pixel had exactly this experience when he was working with a client. Not that he ignored analytics or anything but he found that a really odd part of the site was drawing the majority or viewers’ attention. Once he made the change, he saw a 35% increase in sales right off the bat. Pretty impressive right? I’m Tim Paige, the senior conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast. Hey Matt, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show. Matt: Hey Tim, thanks so much for having me on. Tim: Absolutely. So we have a really fun one but I think obviously as usual we need to start with the results. So tell us the results you were able to get with this tactic. Matt: Yeah. So the results that I was able to get with this tactic was a 35% increase in sales so sales not just email opt-in or so on but real dollars coming in from a fairly minor homepage redesign. Tim: [Laughs] Yeah it’s fun. I’m excited. You know, anybody listening knows I’m not big on the whole mystery thing but I think this is so much fun that I’m just really anxious to hear kind of tell people what it was. But first before we get into that, tell everybody who you are and what you do? Matt: Sure. So I’m Matt Inglot. I’m the founder of Tilted Pixel, a web agency that specializes in helping our clients get more conversions, get more sales and so on. I’m also the host of the freelance transformation podcast. Tim: Awesome love it. Alright so that being said, let’s talk about you did some research to find out what changes you need to make. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you discovered? Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So as part of a bigger project, we were doing some experiments on a client’s homepage. The goal of course being to increase sales. This was a homepage that we had built in 2011 and we felt that we were using the best practices to 2011 standards, certainly what we knew about conversations. But we had never done any sort of optimization AB testing anything like that. So we knew there was probably some gold hiding in there somewhere. But at the same time I happen to be testing out a tool called the Eyequant. Eye is kind of interesting because it’s a tool that uses a database of actual eye tracking data. So I think this was someone’s like university research study that this originally came out of to analyze and predict where people on a webpage will actually look with their eye. So it’s not just tracking mouse movements or anything like that. it actually interprets the image data and predicts where people’s eyes will go. So we uploaded a copy of the client’s current homepage to that service and got back a heat map with where exactly people’s eyes are likely going on that homepage. Tim: Okay. So the first part of this result was or of this test was figuring out what people are looking at. What is it that’s drawing people’s attention. And what did you find? Matt: So we found that in the most important part of the homepage right there in that first upper section, the thing that was drawing people’s attention by far the most like lit up on fire on the heat map was the client’s tie in his photo. Tim: [Laughs] So you have calls to action, you have all these different things but people were focused on the tie. Matt: Yeah, exactly. And certainly I mean it’s obviously that was something to be fixed but it’s not like we had built the homepage not understanding how conversions, headlines, and all of that stuff worked. We had a headline, we had a sub headline. We had what we thought was a good enough butt in to stand out. We didn’t think too much about the client’s photo. We just kind of did our standard formula. So we were shocked to see that the tie was getting all of the intention and the butt-in, the most important part, the call to action was basically cold. Tim: Interesting. Okay. So you made this discovery, what did you do about it? Matt: Sure. So the next thing we did was we tested it because of course this is software so what do machines really know about people. So we kind of thought okay well you know, we are going to try this thing. So we made some minor homepage adjustments. The reason the client’s tie was taking all the attention was partly the tie itself. Partly I think it was the size and placement of the butt-in relative to the tie. [0:05:01] We basically moved the butt-in. we made it bigger. We got a different tie for the client and I mean we had to at that point right? And we ran it through the software a coulee of more times just iterated our design until we had something that the software at least said was good. And then we put it up online. We did a split test and sure enough with this new design, no other changes just redesigning that upper sections, sales increased by 35%. It’s a big enough site that the data is very substantial. It was a 35% increase. Tim: Yeah. I mean I think that’s substantial for a lot of folks and you know, what I love about this is that you know, it would be easy to hear this and go oh okay well that means I shouldn’t to have a loud tie in a picture or I shouldn’t-you know, I should make sure that people aren’t their attention isn’t being drawn to my picture on the website. But there’s a lot more to it than that. It really comes down to the whole picture isn’t that right? Matt: Yeah. That is the crucial thing. I mean this test was such a good reminder of something that people forget all the time which is that all of the elements on your homepage or on your landing page play together. So you can’t just say well this is going to be the best converting butt-in of all time or this is going to be the best converting headline because it’s this size a text and it’s placed this way. It’s how all of these elements work together. So for example the butt-in was the wrong color for that photo, for that background, and it didn’t have enough contrast. And that’s something that you can’t determine just by looking at the butt-in on its own. Tim: Right. Yeah that’s I think the biggest question I get asked when I host a webinar is you know what’s the button color that converts the best. The answer really typically is the one that stands out the most. You know, having a button that there’s no color it’s not like green means go, so that’s going to get more people to click it. I was mentioning to you before we started recording the button on my landing pages that converts the best or I read that the landing pages that converts the best of all of mine has a red button on it. Traditional wisdom oh red means stop so don’t use that for a button. But it you know, provided the most amount of contrast. It stood out and people clicked it. So it really this goes to show that one you need to look at your whole website as or the whole page as the big picture as opposed to just going oh what element is going to or what do I do for a particular element. Also, it goes to show that you should be testing everything right? I mean you need to test these things to know what works best for you. Don’t just listen to us and go oh well I should not have a picture with a loud tie in it because maybe that works for you right? Test what works for you. Would you agree? Matt: Oh 100% Tim. That’s exactly the lesson to take away is to test everything. I mean do take kind of a more structured approach to your test. Tim: Yes. Matt: So one thing that worked for us was we did this intelligently. We didn’t just start moving around calls to action in headlines. We had software telling us hey wait a minute this is the data that says this might be a trouble spot. Tim: Right. Yeah when I saw test everything, I mean you know, if you’re going to make a decision, if you’re going to try something out, test it to make sure that that is going to work great. I think one of the things that I learned was always test to do no harm because sometimes you can make a change that you think is going to work well when it ends up dramatically decreasing your conversions. But it just really comes down to finding out what works best for you, and you know not just jumping to conclusions without any kind of data to support it. so I love it Matt. This is great. It’s a simple thing but I think it’s an important lesson. So thanks so much for sharing this with our audience, we really appreciate it. Matt: No problem. I hope everybody enjoyed that. [/showhide] Listen To Discover The Minor Change That Dramatically Increased Sales [episodebox]
