You spend money getting someone to your website.

You write the landing page. Refine the offer. Make sure the CTA is impossible to miss.

And then, right when the visitor is finally interested, you hand them a form asking for their name, email, phone number, company, job title, employee count, annual revenue, country, industry, and perhaps a small autobiography while they’re there.

Then everyone wonders why people leave.

Make the form unnecessarily difficult and good prospects abandon it. Strip away every field, and you may get more submissions but also more leads your sales team doesn’t particularly want.

So the goal of lead generation form optimization is getting more of the right people through it, with as little unnecessary friction as possible.

We’ll look at how to do just that – where people struggle, how to reduce friction and build trust, and how to make forms work better on mobile.

What is lead generation form optimization?

Lead generation form optimization is the process of improving your form so more qualified prospects (who are more likely to turn into paying customers) complete it.

That can mean changing the number of fields, the questions you ask, the form layout, CTA copy, error messages, trust signals, mobile experience, or even what happens before someone reaches the form.

A better way to think about form optimization is to balance two things:

• Conversion friction: How much effort, uncertainty, or hesitation does someone experience while completing the form?
• Lead quality: Are you collecting enough information to identify and properly handle the prospects who are actually a good fit?

Sometimes removing a field improves both. Sometimes asking one additional question reduces total submissions but gives sales far better leads.

That’s why there isn’t a universally “perfect” lead generation form with three fields, one green button, and precisely seven words of copy.

The right form depends on what you’re asking the visitor to do, what they’re getting in return, how much they already know about you, and what information your team genuinely needs after they click the button.

Before optimizing your lead generation form, diagnose what’s wrong

Before you delete fields or rewrite the CTA, find out where the form is actually failing.

A low form conversion rate can hide very different problems.

Few visitors start the form

If people see the form but don’t interact with it, the fields may not be the problem.

Look at the offer, the copy around the form, its placement, and what you’re asking visitors to do. Have you made it clear what they’ll get in return? Do they know what happens after they submit?

If someone has to provide their phone number, company size, and annual revenue just to discover what “Get Started” means, some hesitation is understandable.

Visitors start but don’t finish

Now the form itself deserves more scrutiny.

Start by comparing how many people begin the form with how many actually submit it. In GA4, the form_start and form_submit events can track those interactions, so you can calculate completion and abandonment rather than relying on the overall page conversion rate alone.

If 500 people start a form and only 300 submit it, for example, your completion rate is 60% and 40% are dropping out somewhere along the way.

That said, analytics will only tell you where people drop off.

To know the “why” behind this, you need to perform behavioral research. For example, you can use FigPii session recordings and heatmaps to see whether visitors hesitate at a particular field, repeatedly trigger an error, or abandon the form at the same point.

If you want to dig deeper into using both types of data together, we’ve covered that in our guide to qualitative vs. quantitative research.

Plenty of people submit, but few become qualified leads

This is the nicer-looking problem.

Your conversion rate is healthy. Lead volume is up. Unfortunately, sales doesn’t want most of them.

That’s why form conversion rate shouldn’t be your only measure of success. Track what happens after the submission too: qualified lead rate, sales opportunities, and, ultimately, customers.

Say one form produces 100 leads and 30 are qualified. A shorter version produces 140 leads, but only 20 are qualified.

The second form converts more visitors.

It is also worse at its actual job.

So before optimizing anything, identify the problem: people aren’t starting, people aren’t finishing, or the people finishing aren’t the leads you need.

Once you know that, you can decide what to change.

8 ways to optimize a lead generation form

1. Ask only for information that earns its place

Every field creates a small cost for the visitor, so the information you ask for needs to justify that cost.

HubSpot analyzed more than 40,000 landing pages and found that conversion rates tended to decline as forms asked for more information. Fields requesting things like phone numbers and detailed location were also associated with lower conversion rates.

So should you start deleting fields until you’re left with an email address and good intentions?

No.

The amount you ask for should make sense for both what the visitor is getting and what your business genuinely needs.

For instance, a newsletter signup doesn’t need a phone number, annual revenue, and employee count.

But a request for an enterprise proposal may need more information so the company can qualify the inquiry and send it to the right person.

And simply making a form shorter doesn’t guarantee anything.

In one Invesp experiment, a client tested removing a form field from a lead-generation form, partly because competitors were using shorter forms. The original converted at 4.46%. The shorter variation converted at 4.29% and failed to outperform the control.

Lead generation form test: shorter variation failed to outperform the control.

The result wasn’t statistically conclusive enough to say that removing the fields hurt conversions. But it did show why fewer fields doesn’t always mean a better form.

Instead, go through each field and ask:

• What will we do differently because we know this?
• Does it help us qualify or route the lead?
• Do we need the information now, or could we collect it later?
• Is it reasonable to ask for this given what the visitor receives in return?

If nobody can explain why you’re collecting “Company size,” that’s a good reason to question it.

If the answer determines which sales team handles the inquiry, the field is earning its place.

That’s also why landing page optimization best practices should be treated as hypotheses, not instructions. Your competitors’ forms can give you ideas, but they don’t always tell you what will work for your visitors.

2. Decide whether a single-step or multi-step form makes more sense

Not every form needs multiple steps.

If you’re only asking for a name, email, and phone number, a single-step form is sufficient.

But some lead forms genuinely need more than basic contact details. For example, in some cases you may need to ask about company size, budget, service interest, timeline, location, or project goals before you can qualify the lead or send it to the right person.

That’s where a multi-step form can help.

So use a single-step form when the ask is short and straightforward.

Consider a multi-step form when:

• You need several details. Beyond contact information, you also need things like budget, company size, goals, or timeline.
• The questions fit into groups. For example, ask about the visitor’s needs first, then their company, then their contact details.
• Earlier answers change what you need next. Someone choosing Service A shouldn’t have to answer questions that only apply to Service B.
• The full form looks more intimidating than the actual task. Breaking ten questions into three small stages can make the work easier to understand.

If you do split the form, show people where they are. “ Step 1 of 3″ is useful information. Repeatedly clicking “Next” with no idea when the questions end is less charming.

3. Tell people exactly what happens after they submit

“Contact us” tells people what you want them to do. It tells them almost nothing about what happens next.

Will someone call? Email? How soon? Are they booking a demo or simply requesting more information?

Remove that uncertainty before they submit. HubSpot’s 2026 form guidance similarly recommends telling leads how and when they’ll hear from you after completing a form.

You can go further than simply saying, “We’ll be in touch.”

On Invesp’s consultation page, for example, visitors can book their call immediately and see exactly what those 30 minutes will involve before they commit. They know the site will be reviewed beforehand, what they’ll discuss on the call, and what happens if Invesp isn’t the right fit.

Invesp consultation page showing what happens before and during the 30-minute call.

You don’t need this much detail for every form. But at minimum, tell people what happens next, how it will happen, and roughly when.

No need to end form submission on a cliffhanger.

4. Make the form easy to complete

A form should not make people stop and wonder whether they filled it out correctly.

Small problems can add up fast: unclear error messages, fields that reset after one mistake, awkward dropdowns, or no sign that the information entered was accepted.

We saw this in one Invesp mobile experiment. On the client’s landing pages, 91% of mobile visitors were leaving without submitting the form.

So we tested a simple change: when someone completed a field correctly, a checkmark appeared beside it.

Before-and-after form comparison showing checkmark feedback confirming completed fields.

That version increased form submissions from 6.86% to 8.19% (a 19.39% lift with 96.8% confidence).

The lesson is simple: people shouldn’t have to guess whether the form is accepting what they enter.

A few practical things help:

• Keep labels visible. Don’t make people remember what a field was asking once they start typing.
• Flag errors early. Tell people something is wrong while they’re still on that field, not after they hit submit.
• Explain the fix. “Invalid entry” isn’t enough. Say what needs to change.
• Save correct answers. One mistake shouldn’t wipe out everything they already entered.
• Use proper fields. Set email, phone, date, and number fields correctly so browsers and mobile keyboards can help.
• Enable autofill. If the browser already knows the answer, don’t make people type it again for sport.
• Mark requirements clearly. Make required and optional fields obvious before submission.

Behavior tools can help you find those problems before you decide what to test. If you’re using an all-in-one CRO tool like FigPii, start with session recordings to see whether people repeatedly correct the same field, tap something that doesn’t respond, or leave after an error message.

Those patterns can give you a much stronger test hypothesis. Then, after the A/B test runs, you can go back to the recordings to see whether the new version actually changed the behavior you were trying to fix.

That gives you a much better place to start than deciding the form button might need a more enthusiastic shade of green.

5. Explain why you’re asking for sensitive information

Some fields naturally make people hesitate.

A phone number raises an obvious question: Are you going to call me? Budget can feel intrusive. Revenue and employee count can make someone wonder why you need to know quite so much before you’ve even spoken.

That hesitation is measurable. Baymard’s 2025 research found that 14% of users said they would never give an online store their phone number, and its usability testing found that unexplained phone-number requests caused some people to enter fake information or abandon the process. A short explanation beside the field relieved most of those privacy concerns.

So if the reason isn’t obvious, say it.

Instead of:

Monthly website traffic *

Try:

Monthly website traffic *
This helps us determine whether your site has enough traffic for A/B testing.

Or:

Phone number *
We’ll only use this to contact you about your consultation.

Keep the explanation close to the field. Don’t make someone hunt through your privacy policy to discover why you want their number.

And if you can’t give a convincing reason for asking? That may be a sign you don’t need the field in the first place.

6. Put trust signals where hesitation happens

A testimonial buried halfway down the page can’t do much for someone who’s currently staring at your form wondering whether to hand over their details.

Put reassurance close to the point where the doubt appears.

That might mean:

• Privacy reassurance beside an email or phone field.
• A relevant testimonial next to a consultation or demo form.
• Recognizable customer logos near a high-commitment CTA.
• A specific case-study result when visitors need proof you can actually deliver.
• Security or compliance information when you’re asking for particularly sensitive data.

This isn’t about decorating the form with every trust badge you can find. The proof needs to answer the actual concern.

This is how you approach customer fears, uncertainties, and doubts. First identify what’s making someone hesitate, then provide the information that resolves it.

If the concern is “Will you spam me?”, a client logo isn’t much help. Add a short privacy reassurance explaining how you’ll use their details.

If the concern is “Can this company actually do what it promises?”, a privacy-policy link won’t save the day. Show a relevant testimonial, case-study result, or proof from similar customers.

Put the right proof next to the right doubt.

7. Optimize separately for mobile

A form that feels easy on desktop can become annoying very quickly on a phone.

Typing is slower, the keyboard takes up much of the screen, and long dropdowns or badly configured fields create extra work.

So check your form on an actual phone, not just by shrinking your browser window.

Pay particular attention to:

• Typing effort. Use the right keyboard for email, phone, and number fields.
• Autofill. Let browsers fill known details where possible.
• Dropdowns. Avoid making someone scroll through a heroic list of options when a simpler choice or searchable field would work.
• Errors. Make sure messages stay visible and are easy to fix with the keyboard open.
• Tap targets. Buttons, checkboxes, and links should be easy to hit without precision surgery.

And don’t stop at checking whether mobile converts worse. Watch a few mobile sessions too. In FigPii, for example, you can filter session recordings by device and see where people actually struggle.

Maybe the same dropdown keeps tripping them up, an error message is easy to miss, or the keyboard is covering half the form. Those patterns give you something concrete to fix instead of just knowing “mobile is worse.”

8. Improve your CTA copy without looking for magic words

Your CTA should tell people what they are about to do or get.

This means, instead of:

Submit

You might use:

Get My Quote
Book My Consultation
Download the Guide
See My Results

But don’t assume replacing “Submit” with a livelier verb automatically improves conversions. The offer, page copy, form, and audience all affect how that button performs.

A better rule is: make the action clear, then test the copy if the CTA is important enough to warrant it.

That fits the same principle behind writing effective CTA copy: the button should communicate what the visitor gets or what happens next, not rely on a supposedly magical word.

Your next step: Optimize for lead quality

A good lead generation form shouldn’t ask for everything your sales team might possibly want to know.

It should ask for what you actually need, make those questions easy to answer, and give people enough confidence to finish.

That means looking beyond field count. Watch where people struggle, explain sensitive questions, make the next step clear, and judge success by the quality of the leads you generate.

And when you’re not sure what will work? Research the problem first, then test it. Your visitors are usually more reliable than a list of “form best practices” from the internet.

If your forms are getting traffic but not enough qualified leads, talk to the Invesp team. We can help you find where prospects are dropping off and test what actually improves conversions.

The post Lead Generation Form Optimization: How to Get More Qualified Leads appeared first on Invesp.

Most teams waste time testing low-impact ideas. This playbook helps you focus your CRO roadmap on what actually lifts conversions.

The Four Phases of a CRO Program (The SHIP model)

A successful conversion optimization project follows the same rhythm:

• Scrutinize stage: You conduct various activities to identify potential testing areas within a platform or campaign.
• Hypothesis: Create a hypothesis for each testing idea identified during the “scrutinize” phase.
• Implement: Validate your hypothesis through an A/B or usability test.
• Propagate: You look for insights, share them within the organization and across marketing channels and verticals.

Think of it as a continuous loop rather than a one-time project. Each phase feeds into the next, creating a compounding effect on your site’s performance and learning.

1. Scrutinize — Gather Data and Identify Issues

Your goal here is to uncover why visitors aren’t getting just where they drop off. Most marketers jump straight to testing without understanding the root cause. The Scrutinize phase fixes that by combining data, observation, and empathy to find what’s holding users back.

Think of your website as a sales conversation. When conversions stall, something in that conversation is breaking down. The Scrutinize phase is where you identify which part.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

Step 1. Start with quantitative data (the “what”).

Use our analytics to spot friction points.

• In GA4, check where users drop off in your funnel: product pages with high exits, CTAs with low click-throughs, or forms with high abandonment rates.
• Use server-side or event-based tracking to fill gaps left by cookie loss — especially for checkout or login flows.
• Add scroll-depth and click tracking to see which sections lose attention.

Bugs, usability issues, and conversion blockers

I will take a quick detour to discuss the various items we uncover during a website conversion rate audit.

1. Website bugs: areas where the website is broken and not functioning as expected. You should classify the bugs you identified by priority (P1: blockers, P4: small items). Bugs are typically put into the “fix it right away” bucket.
2. Website usability issues: issues where website usability is not ideal. Usability issues are typically classified as either “fix it right away” or “research opportunities” buckets.
3. Conversion blockers: issues that relate to persuading visitors to convert. Conversion issues are typically classified in the “research opportunities” bucket.

 

Many conversion consultants focus their effort on identifying bugs and usability issues on a website and rarely pay close attention to conversion issues. Without getting into a philosophical debate, I firmly believe there is a vast difference between creating a user-friendly website and a high-converting site.

Usability issues:

1. Fixing usability issues on a website makes it user-friendly.
2. Usability issues focus on making the site easier to use
3. Usability issues focus on top-of-mind issues for website users

Conversion issues:

1. Fixing conversion issues on a website creates a user-friendly website (Similar to fixing usability issues)
2. Conversion issues focus on making the site more persuasive
3. Conversion issues focus on psychological items that persuade visitors to convert

Every usability issue is a conversion issue, but not the other way around.

Beyond problems – adding new website features

CROs focus heavily on issues that prevent visitors from converting on a website. However, your research during the scrutiny phase should go beyond that to include potential new features you can implement on the platform to enhance conversions further.

Understanding your initial AB test plans: the research opportunities list

It is not enough to identify a list of research opportunities for a website. You will need to go a step further by determining your initial test hypothesis for each item on the list. The initial test hypothesis identifies how we think the particular issue could be tested/fixed.

A hypothesis is a predictive statement about a possible change on the page and its impact on your conversion rate.

Now, notice how I used the term “initial hypothesis.”

An initial hypothesis is the first stab our team takes on how we should address a potential problem on the website/webpage.

Example of an initial hypothesis:

“Adding social proof will enhance visitor trust in the website and increase conversions”

We use the initial hypothesis to assess each line item on our list of research opportunities. When we decide to implement a particular test, we further develop our initial hypothesis into a

“concrete hypothesis.” Let’s look at the initial hypothesis above and see the concrete hypothesis for it:

Based on qualitative data collected through online polling, we observed that website users do not trust the brand and are unaware of how many users use it. Adding social proof on the homepage will increase visitors’ trust and improve conversion rates by 10%.

A concrete hypothesis

• states how we identified the issue
• indicates the problem identified on the page
• states the potential impact of making the fix (we set an actual numerical goal for the test)

Now that you have your research opportunities list and each item has an initial hypothesis attached, we are ready to prioritize the items on the list.

Prioritizing your AB testing ideas (the research opportunities list)

CRO practitioners have used several frameworks to classify testing ideas. I will cover some common frameworks and suggest using a new model.

Karl E. Wiegers explains:

 “When setting priorities, you need to balance the business benefit that each function provides against its cost and any implications it has for the product’s architectural foundation future evolution.”

Pie by Widerfunnel

The pie framework evaluates items based on three different factors: potential, importance, and effort.

1. Potential: Not all of your testing ideas will have the same potential to increase conversion rates. A good example of this is testing different CTA colors on a page (with little to no real impact) compared to changing the page layout to emphasize the value proposition.

While the potential is significant, it is very subjective. What I might think will have a significant impact on the bottom line, someone else might think it will have no effect.

2. Importance: How important is the page you are optimizing?

The Widerfunnel team defines Importance as follows:

“How valuable is the traffic to the pages? Your most important pages are the ones with the highest volume and the costliest traffic. You may have identified pages that perform terribly, but if they don’t have significant volume of expensive traffic, they aren’t aren’tg priorities.”

According to Chris Goward:

“How do I figure out where to test first?”It’s a smart question to ask. You can’t test all pages at once. With limited time and resources to commit and, most importantly, limited traffic to allocate to each test, test prioritization is an important part of your conversion optimization plan.”

3. Ease: How easy is it to implement the test? Widerfunnel defines ease as:

There are two elements to consider when it comes to ease:

• Technical implementation
• Organizational or political barriers

 

Both of these elements impact how easy it is to implement a testing idea; however, they are somewhat subjective.

Hotwire framework

Pauline Marol, the Lead Product Manager for optimization at Hotwire, introduced this model back in 2015.

Here are the elements in this framework:

• Main Metric
• Location
• Fold
• Targeting
• New Information
• Benchmarking
• Conversion Veins
• Strategic Topic
• Mobile
• Opaque

What I like most about this model is the specificity it provides for the potential problem and potential fix. It also brings into focus how strategic a test is to the overall business objective. According to Pauline Marol: 

“Prioritization is a critical part when building an efficient, impactful testing program. Creating a framework to make smarter choices and thinking deeply about the key factors will make your program successful in the long term.”

PXL framework from CXL

The PXL framework uses the following criteria to score items on your research opportunities list:

• Is the change above the fold? Changes above the fold are noticed by more people, increasing the likelihood that the test will have an impact.
• Is the change noticeable in under 5 seconds? How fast does a user notice the change?
• Does it add or remove anything? The idea is that “removing distractions” or “adding key information: will have more impact.
• Does the test run on high-traffic pages? Changes to “high traffic page(s)” will have a larger impact on the bottom line.
• Designed to increase user motivation: does the introduction of your solution increase visitor motivation? Highly motivated visitors are more likely to convert.
• How was the problem identified?
  • User testing
  • Quantitative data
  • Qualitative data (polls, surveys, etc.).
  • Mouse tracking, heat maps, or eye tracking
• Ease of implementation

The PXL framework is a step in the right direction. Peep listed three main advantages to using it:

1. It makes any “potential” or “impact ” rating more objective
2. It helps to foster a data-informed culture
3. It makes the “ease of implementation” rating more objective

The central theme is the effort to establish a more accurate model for scoring different line items on your list.

I believe that there is room for improvement for the following reasons:

1. All prioritization frameworks use a mix of points to score the identified issue and its potential fix. But a single problem could have multiple possible solutions. And each potential solution should be assessed with a different score.
2. A potential problem could be identified in various ways, which give it a higher score. But does identifying a problem in 4 ways make that problem a more significant issue compared to a problem identified in 3 different ways? At some point, adding more ways to how a problem is detected should not give the problem more weight.
3. There is not enough focus on how a potential solution could impact visitors’ view of the website. PXL does an excellent job of motivating, but there are other criteria we should consider when evaluating a possible solution.
4. The models do not distinguish well enough between the different types of pages (top, middle, and bottom of the funnel).
5. Finally, the models use “high traffic pages” to score a problem. Since analytics provides a specific metric for identifying a high-traffic page, we should use it.

Invesp Prioritization framework

Let me state this again: a particular problem can have multiple initial hypotheses for how to fix it. Some of our team members like to call these testing ideas. This is important because each problem and each initial hypothesis is listed as a separate line item in our prioritization framework.

You can address a single research opportunity in different ways, each requiring different time to implement and having a different impact on the bottom line.

Next are the criteria we use to evaluate each research opportunity:

1. What is the potential Impact?
2. Is the problem above the fold?
3. Was the problem discovered through expert review?
4. Was the problem identified through qualitative research?
5. Was the problem identified through user testing?
6. Was the problem identified through analytics?
7. Was the problem identified through heatmaps/Video recording?
8. Known top competitor feature?
9. Does the test idea enhance primary conversion goal?
10. Is implementing the change easy (politically, LOE)?
11. Adding or removing an element?
12. Does the test idea increase visitor trust?
13. Does the test idea reduce FUDs?
14. Does the test idea incentivize visitors to act right away?
15. Does the test idea increase engagement?
16. What type of change?
17. What type of page?
18. The percentage of page views

Not all of these items carry the same weight.

Let’s discuss some of these elements:

1. Potential Impact: We do think that this is a subjective measure. However, we did not delete it. The value of the impact is high (score of 4), mid-impact (score of 2), and low impact (score of 1).
2. Is the problem above the fold? Where did you uncover the problem? The higher the problem is on a page, the more likely visitors will notice it.
3. How did you discover the problem? Most CROs will conduct a mix of activities to uncover issues on a site. Each of these activities should be called out. These are
4. Expert review (some might refer to it as heuristic analysis)
5. Analytics data
6. Heatmap/session
7. Qualitative data
8. User testing

Most conversion blockers are uncovered through a combination of the above elements. So, we decided to take a weighted average as follows:

If an item is discovered through one method                     score of 3

If an item is identified through two methods                      score of 6

If an item is identified through three methods                    score of 9

If an item is identified through four or five methods        score of 12

4. Known competitive feature: there are instances where you want to test an item because you observed that one of your competitors have implemented. By no means should you understand this as a way to copy your competitors, but you should not ignore them either.
5. Does the test idea enhance the page’s primary conversion goal? Is your testing idea going to increase that conversion goal?
6. Is implementing the change easy (politically, LOE)?
7. Adding or removing an element: Your test can do several things at the same time:

Add or remove an element: scored at 3

Replace an element: scored at 2

Change the location of an element: scored at 1

Emphasize an element: scored at 1

8. Evaluation of visitor-centric factors that would impact how a visitor perceives a page:

• Does the test idea increase visitor trust?
• Does the test idea reduce FUDs?
• Does the test idea incentivize visitors to act right away?
• Does the test idea increase engagement?

Two or more elements give you a score of 6. One gives you a score of 3.

9. Type of change: This focuses on the testing idea at hand. Are you:

• Focused on an element level (changing a single element), scored at 1
• Focused on page level (changing layout or several elements on the page), scored at 2
• Focused on visitor flow around the website, scored at 3

10. Type of page: How is the page classified in your funnel?

• Top of funnel page scored at 1
• Mid-funnel page scored at 2
• Bottom of the funnel page scored at 5
• Global Change scored at 5

11. % of page views: By looking at the % of unique page views the page gets compared to the overall website page views, you can select one of the following values:

Is there a perfect prioritization framework?

I do not think there is a perfect framework out there. We continue to tweak this framework as we work on different projects. On a recent project, our team identified close to 200 research opportunities. We ran it through a previous version of the framework and looked at the results. Some of the top items were confusing to us. It did not make sense for us to start with them. We went back and reworked some of the formulas. I am sure that someone can take the same framework and tweak it further. According to Chris Goward:

“There are no standard rules for which pages are best to prioritize. Your website lives in a unique target market, including factors like your competition, seasonality, and internal cultural environment; all of these affects how your site is used and should be optimized. The priority rating you give each of your potential test pages will depend on this unique business environment.

It is a step in the right direction. We built on existing frameworks and added elements that impact prioritization for our different projects.

You can download the Excel file for the prioritization framework from here.

As always, if you have suggestions, please do let us know

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

• Answer: Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the practice of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. It involves analyzing user behavior and implementing changes to improve the user experience and boost conversions.

What is a Conversion Funnel?

• Answer: A conversion funnel is a series of steps that a website visitor goes through before completing a desired action. It usually starts with attracting visitors to the site and ends with them taking action, such as making a purchase.

What is A/B Testing?

• Answer: A/B testing is a method where you compare two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better in terms of conversions.

How Do I Prioritize My A/B Testing Ideas?

• Answer: Prioritizing A/B testing ideas involves evaluating the potential impact, ease of implementation, and relevance of each test. Frameworks like PIE (Potential, Importance, Ease) or the Invesp Prioritization Framework can help in this process.

What are FUDs in CRO?

• Answer: FUDs stand for Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts. These are psychological barriers that can prevent a visitor from converting. Identifying and addressing FUDs can significantly improve your conversion rate.

What Does ‘Above the Fold’ Mean

• Answer: ‘Above the fold’ refers to the portion of a webpage that is visible without scrolling. Elements placed here are more likely to be seen by visitors and therefore have a higher impact on conversions.

How Long Does It Take to See Results from CRO?

• Answer: The time it takes to see results from CRO can vary widely depending on the changes made and the metrics you’re tracking. However, a good rule of thumb is to allow at least a few weeks for meaningful patterns to emerge.

The post Creating A Conversion Roadmap: How to Prioritize Conversion Problems on Your Website appeared first on Invesp.

Hiring the right conversion optimization agency can transform your business.

Hiring the wrong one can drain months of time and tens of thousands of dollars, with nothing to show for it.

After nearly two decades in the conversion optimization space, I’ve seen both stories play out. About 40% of my time is spent talking to companies evaluating CRO partners — some ask the right questions, most don’t.

The truth is, conversion optimization isn’t just about running A/B tests. It’s about understanding human behavior, building a culture of experimentation, and aligning insights with business growth. The agency you choose will directly shape how those principles are applied to your website.

This updated 2025 guide breaks down the 23+ most important questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency along with what a good answer (and a bad one) sounds like.

Whether you’re new to CRO or looking for a better long-term partner, these questions will help you separate firms that talk about optimization from those that actually deliver it.

Types of CRO Partners in 2025

Before determining the questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency, you need to have a better idea of the options you have, i.e., the type of CRO partners you can choose from. 

When conversion rate optimization first became mainstream, your options were limited. You had a handful of specialists, a few tool vendors, and maybe a freelancer or two.

However, by 2025, the CRO landscape will look very different. AI-driven analysis, privacy regulations, and deeper integration between analytics, UX, and experimentation have expanded the scope of what a “CRO partner” can look like.

Below are the five main types of CRO partners you’ll encounter today:

• Independent consultants: Solo specialists offering strategy, audits, or light testing support.

• Full-service marketing agencies offering CRO: Traditional agencies that integrate CRO alongside SEO, PPC, and analytics.

• Testing tool vendors with service arms: Platforms that provide add-on professional services for setup and test execution.

• Specialized CRO firms (for example, Invesp): Agencies dedicated exclusively to conversion optimization and experimentation.

• AI-augmented consultancies (emerging): New-age firms combining human CRO expertise with AI-driven data analysis and hypothesis generation.

Pros and Cons of Each CRO Partner Type

Type of CRO Partner	Pros	Cons
Independent Consultants	Lower cost and flexible scope Direct access to senior talent Great for smaller sites or one-time audits	Limited bandwidth and slower turnaround May lack design/dev resources Harder to scale large testing programs
Full-Service Marketing Agencies Offering CRO	Seamless coordination with paid, SEO, and analytics teams Unified campaign and CRO reporting Easier stakeholder alignment	CRO is often treated as an add-on, not a core capability Generic testing ideas (“best practices”) Shallow research and UX expertise
Testing Tool Vendors with Service Arms	Deep knowledge of their own platform Quick setup and QA of tests Good for teams new to structured testing	Narrow focus on tool execution, not research Strategic insights limited by platform scope Higher cost due to bundled software + services
Specialized CRO Firms (e.g., Invesp)	End-to-end CRO methodology (research → ideation → testing → learning) Dedicated, cross-functional team Proven frameworks and measurable impact	Higher retainers than freelancers/agencies Requires ongoing collaboration from client
AI-Augmented Consultancies (Emerging Category)	Faster data analysis and insight generation Machine learning aids segmentation and pattern discovery Scales testing velocity for mature programs	Still early stage, so human oversight is essential “AI-driven” claims vary in authenticity Privacy/compliance management adds complexity

Cost of conversion optimization companies

I wrote a detailed post about the cost of hiring conversion optimization agencies. Keep in mind that a good consultant should increase your annual online revenue from 30% to 50%.

CRO consultants will charge anywhere from $40 per hour to $250/hour. A specialized conversion optimization company will most likely charge a monthly retainer of $2,000 to $30,000 per month. Many of them will also require a multi-month commitment.

25 questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency

These are the specific questions you should ask before hiring a CRO firm:

1. How do you determine what pages you will optimize?

Choosing which page to optimize first and creating a conversion roadmap will impact your project. Remember that optimizing any page requires analysis, development of a test plan, implementation of that test plan, and finally waiting for testing results.

This could translate into 2 to 4 weeks’ worth of work per page.

If the CRO firm chooses the wrong page, time and money are wasted.

What you need to focus on is understanding the agency’s process to determine what to work on and how to prioritize different conversion-related work.

There should be no shortcuts here. Without following a process or providing a generic answer, such as using best practices, the firm is essentially making random guesses.

If they are randomly guessing from the start, avoid them.

A top-tier conversion agency will use a mix of the following activities to come up with a conversion roadmap for the site:

1. Expert reviews & heuristic analysis
2. Jobs to be done interviews (JTBD)
3. User research (qualitative analysis, including on-site polls)
4. Data analysis ((quantitative analysis)
5. Usability testing
6. Competitive analysis

2. How do you determine what changes you will make on a page?

This question helps you understand how the conversion company determines what changes they should make on the page. Again, you are digging deep to understand the process the conversion firm uses.

You want to validate:

1. The process they use to determine which elements will be changed and tested
2. How will that process be applied to your particular website

Best practices are great in theory, but difficult in practice.

How does that impact you?

Relying on good practices will not take you anywhere. We have seen this firsthand with over 3,000 A/B tests. What works for one website may or may not work for your website. Different conversion optimization designs and processes are effective for websites within the same industry.

You can find several renowned methodologies in the CRO space. For example, Invesp’s Conversion Framework and Widefunnel’s LIFT model are well-known conversion models in the industry.

 

It is beneficial when a company claims to follow a specific process, but you should always request a brief demonstration of how that process would be applied to your website. The CRO company should select a page on your site and utilize its conversion process to identify weak areas on that page.

3. What type of user research (qualitative research) will you conduct on the project?

User research explains the “why” question on your website and informs your assumptions about your visitors. Multivariate and A/B tests validate these assumptions.

Good conversion optimization requires the firm to conduct some level of user research to understand its customers.

CRO qualitative research is a vast and complex field, including:

• Jobs to be done interviews
• Online surveys
• Focus groups
• One-on-One interviews
• Website exit surveys

You should avoid companies that ignore doing qualitative research, regardless of the excuse they might give.

Optimizing a website for conversion without conducting qualitative research is flying blind.

4. What type of data (quantitative) research will you conduct on the project?

Quantitative research answers the “what” question on your website:

1. What are visitors doing on your website?
2. What pages are performing well, and what pages are underperforming?
3. What areas of your website are leaking visitors?

Analytics software provides a wealth of information for quantitative research.

You should assess the firm’s ability to provide deep analysis and insights beyond exit and bounce rates. Assess the CRO firm processes towards:

• Data segmentation
• Funnel and goal creation
• Heatmap analysis

5. What is the most challenging part of doing a conversion optimization project?

Increasing a website conversion rate is a complex problem. Otherwise, most websites will convert at 20 or 30%. Solving the conversion problems for a website requires a careful analysis that generates focused solutions with a higher probability of success.

You should ask this particular question to the team members who will work on your project. Listen carefully to their answer.

Do they find the analytics assessment challenging, or is it a qualitative research approach? Perhaps it is identifying problems on a page or creating a successful A/B test.

Your follow-up question is, “What are you doing to mitigate these challenges on my particular project?”

6. What was the worst conversion optimization project you worked on?

Most companies think of conversion optimization as a one-time effort, a campaign they conduct once, and they are done with it. Needless to say, that mentality is counterproductive.

As a result, a company that has been doing conversion optimization long enough must have run into a bad project now and then. If the company claims they never did, they are lying or have not been doing CRO long enough.

This is not unique to conversion optimization. It is the nature of doing business. Large and well-established consulting firms in various industries often have unsuccessful projects.

Assess the answer of the company about their worst project by analyzing:

1. The reasons the firm gives for the bad project. Are they blaming the client? Even with lousy clients, who do exist, a consulting firm should have a process in place to manage expectations and implementation.
2. How the firm handles bad projects.

7. How many experiments do you launch per month?

It goes without saying that the more tests you can launch on a website, the higher the chances are of increasing your website’s conversion rate. This, however, should NEVER come at the expense of following all the required and necessary steps to create a fruitful A/B test.

There is a delicate balance between launching a limited number of tests and an excessive number of tests.

You must understand how often the CRO company plans on launching tests on your website. You will also have to allocate your resources to conduct a test. If the company is running just a few tests, your development team would not be involved. These few tests are typically small and have a limited impact on your bottom line.

Different companies take different approaches to the number of tests they launch:

• Some CRO companies conduct one test every four to six weeks
• Some CRO companies conduct two tests per month
• Some CRO firms conduct three or more tests per month

Conducting one test every four to six weeks is too slow. Following this approach, you will perform between 8 and 12 tests per year. In our experience, that will generate a lower ROI.

Conducting more than three tests per month means that tests are not carefully analyzed, nor are results studied to determine marketing insights. This approach of throwing things at the wall rarely works.

Conducting two tests per month is the ideal target, where careful analysis is applied to test creation and results. In this approach, you will launch 20-24 tests per year. An expert CRO team should easily generate a 35 to 65% uplift in conversions in this scenario.

8.  Do you conduct concurrent split tests?

Our recommendation to conduct multiple tests per month comes with the caveat that:

1. The tests are not run concurrently, or
2. If tests are run concurrently, each test runs in a separate swim lane.

If tests run in separate swim lanes, traffic from one test intersects traffic from the other test. This rarely happens on large, complex websites where visitors jump from one side to the next.

9. How do you handle mobile website optimization?

Mobile traffic accounts for 35 to 50% 70% of online visitors to most websites. Examining your website analytics will help you understand:

1. What percentage of your website visitors are coming from mobile devices
2. What is the conversion rate for mobile visitors compared to desktop visitors

Mobile website optimization requires a different set of processes compared to desktop optimization. Visitors on mobile devices typically progress through two stages: the research phase and the action phase. Presenting mobile visitors with the right information will have a significant impact on your bottom line.

When evaluating different conversion rate optimization companies, ask them for examples of their mobile device optimization. Also, understand their mobile optimization process.

Stating that mobile device optimization is similar to desktop optimization is a red flag!

10. Who will handle implementing the test on our website?

Understanding who will handle implementing the A/B tests ensures you will allocate the required resources to guarantee the project’s success. It will also provide you with insights into the types of tests the firm plans to introduce during the project.

AB tests require development time. The amount of time depends on the complexity of the AB testing that you will run on the site. Most AB tests are implemented using front-end developers. These tests use JavaScript to manipulate how a page appears on the site. Some CRO agencies ask you to handle the development of the AB tests yourself. Some clients prefer this approach since it helps them control the project’s cost.

This, however, is not a good idea.

I have seen it fail one too many times for two reasons:

1. Your development team gets busy.
2. AB test development is different from regular development. It requires an entirely different skill set.

Look for an agency that will handle the AB test development for you. That will save you a lot of time/effort/money.

11.  What type of resource commitment do you require from my team?

Most conversion optimization services will require some level of commitment from you. You should meet with the company regularly to see their progress, provide feedback, and analyze results.

When you have a winner for an AB test, then your development team should implement that winner on your site. Please also account for some development time on your side.

12. What additional fees should I expect to pay in addition to the consulting fees?

Expectations must be set correctly. That will ensure the success of any conversion optimization project.

The conversion consulting agency will require you to install and use conversion optimization software to collect visitor data and launch the tests.

Some tracking and A/B testing software can be expensive.

This will largely depend on your website and the number of visitors it gets. If your website gets more than 100,000 visitors per month, the cost for the testing software can run you up to $500 per month. Even more, some software will require an annual contract commitment.

A recent company seeking conversion rate optimization services had 500,000 monthly visitors to their website. They were not allocating any money for the testing software. They had been negotiating with several optimization firms. No one bothered to explain to them that the cost of the testing software would run them close to $20,000 per year.

13. What type of education do you require from your conversion optimization staff?

Conversion optimization is an ever-changing field. If online marketing is on the cutting edge of marketing, conversion rate optimization is on the cutting edge of online marketing.

Effective conversion optimization companies should invest in and require their staff to be educated. At a minimum, a conversion rate optimization consultant should stay up-to-date with the latest in the conversion optimization field and analytics.

In addition, since conversion optimization impacts different aspects of a website, an expert conversion optimization consultant should have a well-rounded knowledge of SEO, PPC, and social media.

The education a firm requires from its staff is a great insight into how much it wants to see its clients succeed.

14. Can you guarantee an increase in conversion rate?

This is an easy one. If anyone guarantees results for conversion optimization services, run away from them as fast as you can.

Many factors impact the result of conversion work. Among these factors, several are not within the control of the conversion rate optimization firm.

Take, for example, the quality of traffic coming to your website. If the site receives a substantial number of visitors organically from search engines, a change in the quality of that traffic (such as an increase or decrease in rankings) will directly impact your conversion rate.

The conversion company also does not control some market factors. A major ad campaign of one of your direct competitors will impact your conversion rate.

In our experience, companies that guarantee conversion optimization results fall in one of two.

• Companies that are trying to make quick money and will not be able to deliver on their promises
• Companies that guarantee an uplift define the uplift as for any success on any test they launch. This includes conducting a test that generates a 0.00001% increase in conversions!

Both practices are somewhat deceptive.

15. How do you determine the success of the project?

Website owners conduct conversion rate optimization to increase their conversion rate and revenue. But as we clarified in the previous question, no reputable CRO company can guarantee the results of their work.

If you set expectations correctly from the start of the project, you will save yourself many headaches and heartburn.

When we talk to clients, we define the success of a project according to three factors:

1. The percentage of successful tests: In our experience, up to 70% of the tests we conduct generate a conversion uplift.
2. The detailed and well-thought-out process we demonstrate first-hand to the client in every interaction with our team.
3. The learning process that the client team receives from watching and interacting with our team on the project.

16. Why should we hire you vs. another?

Why is one firm different than another one?

Differences could include process, experience, deliverables, and cost.

All of these are valid differences that will have a direct impact on the success of your project. Ultimately, your goals are to:

• Assess how their firm distinguishes itself from competitors
• Validate the claim of the company on its differentiators

17. What is the makeup of the team working on my project?

CRO agencies employ various approaches to structuring their teams. At a minimum, your project team should include the following people:

• CRO specialist
• UX designer
• Front-end developer
• Quality assurance analyst

Smaller agencies might not have a project manager staffed. However, if you are going to run multiple experiments simultaneously, you will need someone to make sure the work is running smoothly.

18. How many projects does the team working with me handle

I’m often asked about the number of clients we handle at any given time. We limit the number of our projects to 15 at the same time. But that is our approach. We employ a high-touch approach to managing CRO projects. A better question is how many projects does a team handle at the same time?

Top-tier CRO agencies work in pods. A pod typically handles 3-4 projects at the most. That allows the CRO pod to focus on the clients and deliver the best results for them.

19. How often do we meet? Do you have weekly or monthly standing meetings?

There are two sides to this.

• For you as a client, meetings are important. You get to know what the team is working on. You provide feedback. You learn. I can go on about the benefits of meetings.
• For the agency, meetings eat up time that could be used in doing work (for you or other clients).

While I appreciate that agencies try to manage the time spent on a project, I believe that successful CRO projects require regular meetings. My recommendation is to expect at least a meeting every two weeks, preferably once a week.

20. What methods of communication will we use on the project?

In addition to the standing meetings, how else will you communicate with the CRO agency? Avoid email at all costs. It isn’t easy to track. Instantaneous chat programs are okay, but they are not a good idea if you run a high-velocity testing program. A good project management tool (there are hundreds of them) provides a central repository of all the work on the project.

22. How fast do you launch the first AB test on my site?

While conversion research is important, some companies spend six to eight weeks conducting research. Their first AB test is not launched until the end of the second month. I don’t think you need to wait that long to launch your first A/B test. Our goal is to launch the first A/B test within 2 weeks of the project start (at the latest, 3 weeks).

23. How much time do you spend on my project?

The agency’s goal is to spend as little time as possible on your project while generating the most wins for you. It is a win-win strategy.

At least, in theory.

CRO projects require a lot of time. There are too many resources involved.

Agencies that try to cut corners end up launching simple tests (test the color of a button or the text on a CTA). While some of these experiments yield results, it is not a winning long-term strategy.

Trying to measure the activity of a CRO agency by looking at the number of experiments they produce in a month is also not a good idea. You can create 10 experiments in a month in less than 10 hours.

I would like to understand how many hours the team I will be working with will dedicate to my project.

What if the agency doesn’t tell me how much time they spend on my project?

You can do simple math and figure this out.

Ask two questions:

How many people work in the agency?

How many clients do they handle at the same time?

Let’s say that an agency has 25 resources. Most likely, 20 of them will be working on projects. Let’s also assume that the agency handles 50 clients simultaneously.

Therefore, the time spent on these 20 resources is dedicated to working on 50 projects.

Let’s say a full-time resource spends 120 hours a month doing actual CRO work. That means that the company pays 20 resources * 120 hours = 2,400 hours working on client projects.

How much time do they spend working with each client?

2400 hours/ 50 clients =48 hours at best.

24. How do you incorporate AI or machine learning in analysis or experimentation?

AI is changing CRO from manual analysis into a faster, insight-driven process. Top firms now use machine learning to spot patterns, prioritize test ideas, and analyze qualitative data at scale.

For example, clustering models can surface hidden friction points like visitors who apply multiple filters having a 40% lower conversion rate than average. Multi-armed bandit algorithms reallocate traffic dynamically, helping tests reach valid results 30–50% faster. And natural language models can sort thousands of survey responses by themes like “trust,” “pricing doubts,” or “delivery anxiety” in minutes instead of weeks.

Ask your prospective agency all the pertinent questions related to AI:

1. Don’t just ask if they use AI, but how they apply it and whether they can show concrete examples of better decision-making through it.
2. How exactly do they use AI in their CRO workflow—data analysis, hypothesis generation, or traffic allocation?
3. Can they show a real example of an AI-driven insight leading to a successful test?

25. How do you address consent, cookie restrictions, and data privacy in user research?

With privacy laws tightening and browsers phasing out third-party cookies, CRO agencies must now collect and analyze data responsibly without losing insight quality. The best firms use first-party tracking, server-side analytics, and anonymized qualitative research to stay compliant while maintaining accuracy.

They also rely on consent management platforms (CMPs) to record user permissions and test privacy-friendly setups, like cookieless analytics and masked session recordings.

Good agencies treat compliance as part of UX optimization, even A/B testing consent banners for clarity and opt-in rates.

Here’s what you should ask a CRO agency before hiring:

• How do they handle user consent and data retention in tests or recordings?
• Can they still run meaningful analysis in cookieless or limited-data environments?

 

The post 23+ Questions To Ask Before Hiring a CRO Agency appeared first on Invesp.

Imagine a chessboard where each move reveals an opportunity or threat. Without studying your opponent’s strategy, you are likely to get outmaneuvered. The same applies in business—competitive analysis is your playbook for success.

By assessing competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies, you can uncover opportunities, refine your plans, and stay ahead of industry trends.

This article breaks down the essentials of competitive analysis with real-world examples and actionable steps to help you outsmart the competition.

What Exactly is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis involves analyzing your competitors’ successes and losses to identify their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and market positioning. This helps you identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and make informed decisions to gain a competitive edge. 

Think of it as doing homework before playing a high-stakes game—you can’t win if you don’t know your opponent’s moves.

Why is Competitive Analysis so Important?

Imagine running a race without knowing who else is competing, their speed, or their strategies. That’s what it’s like for a business without competitive analysis.

In the early 2010s, Nokia dominated the mobile phone market. Yet, they failed to recognize the shift toward smartphones driven by Apple and Android. Without a solid competitive analysis of these emerging players, Nokia stuck to outdated strategies and missed the touch-screen revolution. The result? A dramatic fall from being a market leader to an industry afterthought.

Here’s a quick overview of why competitive analysis is so integral to a business:

• Understand Market Gaps: Identify untapped opportunities your competitors are missing.
• Refine Your Strategy: Adjust your pricing, marketing, or customer experience based on competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Stay Relevant: Predict industry trends and customer preferences before others do.

How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Define goals and objectives

Defining your goals and objectives is the first and most critical step in conducting a competitive analysis. Think of it as creating a map before you start a journey—you need to know where you’re going and why you’re going there.

Without clear goals, your analysis risks becoming a pile of data without direction or purpose.

Here are some types of goals for competitive analysis:

• Understand market position: Where do you stand compared to competitors? What gaps or opportunities exist in your industry?
• Improve customer experience: What do competitors do better? How can you adapt their strengths to meet your customers’ needs?
• Refine marketing strategy: What messaging resonates with your audience? How can you differentiate your branding?
• Identify innovation opportunities: What new features or trends are gaining traction? How can your business stay ahead?

Now that you know the goals you can set for your company, how will you define your goals? Here’s a step-by-step approach to help you determine your goals effectively: 
Start with your business objectives. Every competitive analysis should tie back to your company’s larger goals. For example, if your company wants to expand into a new market, your analysis should focus on local competitors and customer behavior. For example, when Starbucks expanded into China, it aimed to understand local tea culture and how competitors catered to it. The competitive analysis helped them integrate tea-based beverages into their menu, establishing a strong presence in a tea-dominated market.

• Identify your target audience. Define whose needs you want to meet. Your goals might focus on understanding why competitors attract a specific customer segment. In fact, a study by Epsilon revealed that 80% of customers are more likely to engage with brands that offer a personalized experience. And knowing your competitors’ audience can help you deliver personalization better.

• Ask key questions. Frame questions in a way that answers shape actionable goals.
  • “What do customers love about my competitors?”
  • “How do competitors use pricing, promotions, or products to win?”

• Use data-driven insights. Back your goals with data. You can use tools like Google Trends, SEMrush, and social media analytics to get insights into what works for competitors.

Pro tip: Use the SMART framework for goal-setting (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). For example, “Increase market share by 10% within six months by targeting Gen Z customers through Instagram ads.”

Gather competitor data, including strengths and weaknesses

When conducting a competitive analysis, the next important step is to gather accurate, actionable data about your competitors. This data helps you identify their strengths, weaknesses, and ways you can differentiate yourself from them.

Here’s how to do it effectively:

• Start by defining what data you want to collect. Start by identifying the key aspects of your competitors you want to analyze. These typically include:
  • Product or service offerings: Features, quality, and pricing
  • Market positioning: Where they stand in the industry
  • Marketing and branding: Channels, tone, and customer reach
  • Customer experience: Support, reviews, and engagement

• Use reliable tools for data collection. To gather valuable and actionable competitor data, you’ll need the right tools to save time and provide deeper insights. These tools analyze everything from website traffic to customer engagement, clearly showing how your competitors operate and where they excel or fall short.

• SEMrush or Ahrefs: Analyze competitors’ SEO performance, keywords, and backlinks.
• SimilarWeb: Understand their website traffic, audience demographics, and referral sources.
• Sprout Social or Brandwatch: Monitor their social media strategies and audience engagement.
• Glassdoor or Indeed: Learn about internal strengths and weaknesses through employee reviews.

• Gather qualitative data. In addition to using tools, you need qualitative methods to gain deeper insights into what competitors are doing and how customers feel about them. These methods focus on understanding the why behind the data and provide actionable details that numbers alone can’t offer. Here’s how you can do it:
  • Competitor websites and reports: Look for annual reports, press releases, and blog content. Use these reports to determine their pricing details, product features, and unique selling points. Their blog content, whitepapers, and press releases will help you understand their brand’s messaging and priorities.
  • Customer reviews and forums: Use Yelp or Reddit to uncover customer sentiments about competitors.
  • Mystery shopping: It involves experiencing the products or services firsthand.

• Apply a framework to analyze strengths and weaknesses. To break down data, use a framework like SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) framework to break down data.
  • Strengths: Look for their competitive edges, like superior technology or loyal customer bases.
  • Weaknesses: Identify gaps such as high prices or limited product diversity.

Companies that fail to identify their weaknesses and those of their competitors often lose the market to a new contender. One of the most prominent examples is when Kodak failed to recognize its weakness—reluctance to embrace digital photography—and lost its competitive edge to companies like Sony and Canon.

• Combine insights from multiple sources. Cross-reference findings from tools and methods to build a holistic picture. For example:
  • If SEMrush shows high traffic for a competitor’s blog, use social media tools to check how they promote it.
  • If customer reviews indicate poor service, check Glassdoor for potential internal issues.

Pro tip: Competitors evolve constantly, so don’t forget to update your data regularly to stay informed—for instance, track product launches, partnerships, or rebranding efforts. You can also set up Google Alerts or subscribe to competitor newsletters to keep yourself updated.

Evaluate key metrics

The next step is to evaluate key metrics—which involves analyzing measurable data points that reveal your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and market performance.

Tangible metrics will show you where your business stands compared to others and what to improve or focus on to succeed in the market.

Start by understanding the key metrics to evaluate:

To get a complete picture, focus on these critical areas:

• Market share and reach: How much of the market do competitors control?
• Customer sentiment and engagement: What do customers say about their products and services?
• Product or service quality: Are their offerings superior or lagging?
• Pricing strategies: Are they underpricing, premium pricing, or bundling effectively?
• Operational efficiency: How quickly do they deliver, and what’s their supply chain like?

For example, Tesla disrupted the automobile market by evaluating its competitors’ reliance on internal combustion engines. Focusing on electric vehicles and assessing gaps in innovation, the company managed to carve out a dominant niche.

Leverage metrics to measure marketing effectiveness:

Use marketing metrics to see how competitors connect with their audience.

Here’s a list of metrics and elements to consider:

• Website traffic and SEO performance: Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush to reveal traffic volume, top-performing keywords, and backlinks.
• Social media engagement: Leverage tools like Sprout Social to determine likes, shares, comments, and audience demographics.
• Content marketing impact: Look at the frequency of blogs and videos and how they resonate with the audience.

Evaluate financial metrics:

Assessing competitors’ financial performance is essential to see whether their efforts are paying off. Financial metrics will give you a clear picture of their stability and growth.

Key metrics include:

• Revenue growth: Indicates market demand and business health.
• Profit margins: Reflects operational efficiency.
• Investment trends: Look at R&D spending or acquisitions to gauge innovation.

Track industry-specific metrics:

Depending on your industry, metrics may vary. Examples include:

• Churn rate: It’s especially critical in SaaS to measure how many customers cancel their subscriptions.
• Foot traffic: Important for retail and hospitality businesses.
• App downloads and ratings: Crucial for tech and mobile-first businesses.

For instance, Netflix tracks user churn to understand when and why subscribers leave. It uses this insight to adjust pricing, add new features, and prioritize trending content, keeping churn at competitive levels.

Finally, use collected data to compare competitors’ metrics against your own performance.

You can do this by identifying areas where you excel, and double down on those strengths. Secondly, spot gaps where competitors are ahead, and develop strategies to close them.

Create actionable strategies

Once you’ve gathered data and evaluated key metrics, the next step in a competitive analysis is to use your uncovered insights than turn them into actionable strategies.

This ensures your findings drive tangible changes to improve your position in the market and get an edge over the competition.

Your first step is to align findings with your business objectives. Ask yourself:

• What gaps can we exploit in the market?
• Where can we differentiate our offerings?
• How can we strengthen our weaknesses against competitors?

Once you have an answer to these questions, it’s time to develop strategies to get a competitive edge.

Your strategies can fall into two categories:

Offensive Strategies: Playing to Your Strengths

Offensive strategies are about staying ahead of your competitors by using your strengths or targeting areas they’re missing. They involve focusing on:

• Building on your strengths: Use what you do best to create an advantage.
• Filling market gaps: Look for unmet customer needs or underserved groups and step in.
• Innovating boldly: Introduce unique products or features competitors don’t offer.

For example, Airbnb expanded globally by addressing gaps in affordable and unique accommodations. Instead of competing directly with hotels, it targeted travelers seeking home-like stays or unconventional options, like treehouses or houseboats.

Defensive Strategies: Protecting What’s Yours

Defensive strategies are about holding onto what you already have—your customers, market share, and position. The goal is to address any weaknesses and prevent competitors from taking over your space.

It involves focusing on:

• Improving customer experience: Look at where competitors excel (e.g., faster delivery, better support) and close the gap.
• Matching competitive pricing and promotions: Keep an eye on competitor pricing—if they lower prices or run promotions, respond quickly. Offer added value like loyalty rewards or free shipping to stay ahead.
• Strengthening brand loyalty: Reward loyal customers with exclusive perks, early access, or personalized offers. Create emotional connections through strong branding and consistent messaging.
• Enhancing product and service quality: Focus on fixing weaknesses competitors could exploit. Improve durability, ease of use, or features in your offerings

One of the biggest examples of defensive strategy in the competitive market is between Walmart and Amazon.

When Walmart noticed Amazon’s dominance in convenience and delivery, it overhauled its e-commerce platform, launched same-day delivery services, and introduced grocery pickup options. 

The result? Walmart’s shopping app is now more popular in the US than even Amazon’s app. Addressing these operational gaps helped Walmart maintain its position as a major retail force.

Your Turn to Gain an Edge Using Competitive Analysis!

Competitive analysis is a powerful tool to stay ahead in business. By studying your competitors, you can spot opportunities, fix weaknesses, and improve your strategies. This helps you stay relevant, offer better experiences, and outsmart the competition.

Use the steps in this article to guide your analysis. By understanding what your competitors are doing, you can make smarter decisions and keep moving forward. Competitive analysis isn’t just about keeping up—it’s about leading the way. Stay proactive, and let this strategy help you win.

Competitive Analysis FAQs

What is a Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis is a deep dive into your competitors—who they are, what they offer, their strengths, weaknesses, and how you compare. It helps you spot opportunities and gaps in the market.

How do I a Competitive Analysis?

Identify your key competitors, analyze their products, pricing, marketing, and customer experience. Look at their strengths, weaknesses, and what sets them apart. Use this data to refine your own strategy.

What is Included in a Competitive Analysis?

It covers competitor offerings, pricing, positioning, marketing strategies, customer reviews, strengths, weaknesses, and areas where you can stand out.

How to Present a Competitive Analysis?

Keep it clear and actionable. Use tables, charts, and summaries to highlight key insights. Focus on what matters—where you can win and what threats to watch.

Why do a Competitive Analysis?

It helps you understand the market, stay ahead of competitors, and make smarter decisions. Without it, you’re flying blind.

The post What is a Competitive Analysis (With Examples) [2025] appeared first on Invesp.

Before jumping into conversion optimization, you need to identify your site visitors by recognizing, for example, concerns, motivations, uncertainties, and trigger words.

One of the first tasks we do as a company that has been helping marketers optimize their content and conversion rates is to delve into understanding the market as best we can prior to initiating the recommendation process.

Most companies are aware of the importance of understanding their customers, but few grasp all that this entails, especially online. The majority are still keeping their heads in the sand and overlooking the high costs of stepping away from clients.

The Global Customer Service Barometer, after interviewing more than 1,000 adult customers about how they view their brands, reports disappointing results: 38% of participants believe that businesses are not customer-oriented and fail to provide enough attention.

Image source: AmericanExpress

The data show that many people are frustrated by how businesses still use outdated methods to interact with their customers and pay too little attention to their needs.

We find that companies face one of two challenges when it comes to integrating their marketing data into their selling process:

• Smaller companies lack the know-how or means to conduct research to effectively identify and segment their markets. Some of them might not even appreciate the value market research brings to their business. As a consequence, they often make assumptions about their clients that are wrong and risk missing crucial segments that can generate significant revenue.

• On the other end of the spectrum, many mid- to large businesses conduct due diligence by researching the market but do not know how to apply the results. They are unable to integrate that data into actionable insights that can be applied to their sales process, marketing campaigns, or their websites.

Regardless of the size of the company, the overwhelming question is: how do you use the marketing data to make sure website copy, design, navigation, and overall site structure will engage most visitors, if not all, and move a high percentage of them through the conversion funnel?

When the average e-commerce store converts only 3-5% of its visitors into customers, you must pause and wonder what is stopping the other 95% from proceeding with the purchase.

Conversion optimization starts with gathering detailed market information. The more detailed the information, the more precise the optimization process. You then use that data to shape your website’s interactions with visitors.

The most efficient way to address market concerns is to create buyer personas.

But what are personas? And how can they help with conversion optimization?

Buyer personas are models, examples, and archetypes that humanize and individualize a precise target market. They are hypothetical individuals who represent target consumers.

Image source: Amy Cotton

Through persona creation, you should be able to relate to customers on an individual level, bringing personalization, engagement, and enthusiasm to your website by understanding what appeals to them and what turns them off.

And because buyer personas are at the helm of conversion optimization, they should guide every aspect of your website, including user interface and screen design, process flow, and web copy development.

Too many websites cater to the masses and not to a single person. As a result, the copy is dull, the design is boring, and visitors are left frustrated.

Creating your own buyer personas will help you relate to your customers’ different personalities and address their needs accordingly.

Market Segmentation Vs. Persona Creation

When we first present the concept of buyer personas to our clients, they often mistake persona development for market segmentation. These are not the same. However, persona creation relies heavily on market segmentation.

To create buyer personas, you need to understand market segmentation and the various customer profiles you compiled with your team. Segmentation is the division of the market or population into subgroups with similar motivations.

Also keep in mind that there is a huge difference between marketing to a business (B2B) and marketing to a customer (B2C), although both involve selling to a person.

The widely used bases for segmenting business-to-customer markets usually include geography, demography, personality (behavior), and psychographic factors. The bases used to segment business-to-business (B2B) markets differ; they include location, company type, and behavioral characteristics.

This article focuses on the techniques used in B2B markets during the buyer persona creation process.

The use of personas is growing rapidly, as more than 93% of companies that exceed revenue and lead goals use personas, segmenting their databases accordingly to personalize experiences for their visitors.

A recent study on the most important elements of effective B2B content has demonstrated that audience relevance ranks the highest at 90%.

Image source: Marketing Chart

In another survey of 640 global senior B2B marketing executives and business leaders, half of whom are in the internet and software industries, 69% of participants agree that understanding buyers’ needs or pain points is the most effective go-to-market strategy for a product launch.

These studies show it’s high time for marketers and business owners to put their feet in their customers’ shoes and start building buyer personas that reflect their customers’ real needs and demands.

Every company, online or offline, must understand the market they operate in and the best techniques to better serve their ideal customers.

You can go in depth and analyze the various demographics and similarities within the market to create segments and narrow the target market. This information must be quite detailed to create the ideal target customer.

How Are B2B Marketers Building Buyer Personas?

Cintell surveyed 137 B2B marketers to find out how they build their buyer personas and what data they use.

Image source: Marketing Charts

The survey segmented these marketers into three different groups, as shown in the graph above. The first group, the one doing well by exceeding revenue and lead goals, was conducting qualitative interviews for both customers and non-customers, including the executive team and the salespeople. The data obtained were more likely to be segmented by demographic factors than by other fields mentioned above, and their focus was on addressing the fears and motivations of their customers, as these are more applicable to buyers as individuals.

Consider a site that sells discount furniture, catering to three different market segments:

• Middle-income families, middle-aged, 70 – 100k household income
• College students, 10- 25k income
• Building company

The three markets differ in income, personality traits, and needs. Their interests and motivations for the purchase differ. One group is purchasing for their families, another for themselves, and a third for potential clients or home staging. The site’s goal is to appeal to all markets equally. Buyer personas help you achieve this goal by guaranteeing you capture each group’s interest.

In this scenario, we would introduce Jennifer, a 45-year-old homemaker. She likes to update her home furniture every year. She enjoys decorating her home and always needs to update because of her rowdy kids. She is price-conscious but looking for something sturdy with good quality. She wants to ensure that her satisfaction is guaranteed because she needs quality items. Return policies are apparently imperative to her.

Compare these traits to those of Evan, a 37-year-old builder who must find great, unique pieces to stage the homes his company builds. He wants to find pieces that are neutral enough for prospects to imagine themselves in the home. He also tries to find items that will pique prospects’ interest so he can sell them with the home. He is not as concerned about price but does have a budget.

Finally, the website targets Sally, a 19-year-old college student who is rooming with two other friends. She needs cheap, nice furniture that’s a bit trendier. She is trying to make a quick decision because move-in is within the next couple of weeks. She needs white-glove delivery and someone to build the pieces. She is looking for practical solutions for their tiny space and considering items with tons of storage.

Selling to these individuals is a lot easier than selling to a general market segment because you can put yourself in Sally, Evan, and Jennifer’s shoes. You can anticipate their concerns and personalize the experience with them.

Buyer personas pave the way for:

1. Understanding what makes different segments tick, what appeals to them, and what turns them off.
2. Relating to the various personality types that will come and addressing their needs accordingly.
3. Recognizing that all users come at different buying stages. Evoking empathy within site developers, marketers, and sales teams.
4. Knowing competition well, starting from which market segments are likely to identify with a competitor more than with you, and why?

The Four Temperaments

Many philosophers and psychologists have explored the concept of temperaments at length, beginning with Aristotle in 325 BC, passing through Carl Jung in the 1920s, and culminating in a modern-day version by David Keirsey in the 1950s. The concept boils down to the fact that humans carry particular sets of characteristics. For a marketer, understanding what makes each temperament tick can help move the needle on conversions.

As you create each persona, you can also assign a temperament (or a combination of them). That way, when designing, you may have Jennifer in mind, but now you also have in mind that she is a caring person, triggered and motivated by social proof, which can be something to address on the website.

These are the four temperaments to consider.

Logical

A logical persona is meticulous, methodical, and detail-oriented.

When a visitor of a logical nature enters your site, she searches for every single detail of your products and services. She also expects your site to offer answers in a logical, systematic, and easy-to-locate fashion.

Someone logical is going to research your product or service longer, reading and looking for information about it more than others. The purchasing decision for logical personas results from researching, shopping around, and getting to know your and your competitors’ offers better.

How do you address logical personas?

When targeting a logical persona, your site should:

• Have easy-to-locate information.
• Contain answers to all questions about your company (date of establishment, range of products and services offered, reputation).
• Refer visitors to the methodology, the About Us page, or the blog.
• Detailed product pages with detailed descriptions.
• Systematic explanation of your services.

Caring

People impact the caring persona.

A caring visitor to your site looks for reviews and testimonials. She searches for others’ opinions, as well as the number of customers who have used your product or hired your service. People with this temperament are trusting. Their buying decision is influenced by what others say and feel about your company.

The purchasing decision for caring personas takes some time. They are not disciplined in considering alternatives, which makes selling to them a bit harder.

How do we address caring personas?

When targeting a caring persona, your site should:

• Provide testimonials.
• Present news quotes and announce awards received.
• Show numbers of clients.
• Display reviews on product pages.
• Showcase social media mentions.

Impulsive

The impulsive persona buys quickly and regrets it quickly.

The credit-card-in-hand type of visitor may make an impulse purchase but often regrets the decision. Attempt to understand how to get them to click right away, with the right elements visible. However, try to avoid the regret phase by providing them with the information they will need throughout the conversion process.

Impulsive personas are determined to make a purchase. They need to find a reason to buy from you as soon as they visit your site, or they will leave to purchase elsewhere.

Impulsive buyers are an e-commerce company’s dream client.

How do you address impulsive personas?

When targeting an impulse persona, your site should:

• Present benefits in the form of 3 or 4 extremely convincing bullets.
• Include a big “call to action” in a bright color, immediately following the benefits.
• Make sure the check-out process is smooth and fast.

Aggressive

The aggressive persona is highly competitive.

This persona type likes to stand out and acquire the finest products and services. Convincing them that you offer premium, first-rated products or services will help you win them over. These personality types strive to be the best by flushing out the competition.

If an aggressive persona visitor sees a reason your product or service will put them ahead of the crowd, they will be loyal customers.

How do you address aggressive buyer personas?

When targeting an aggressive persona, your site should:

• Offer great incentives, such as the best price and the newest product.
• Give a good reason why your product or service is the best and what it will do for them.

Do you need to address all 4 persona temperaments on your web pages?

That is a good question!

These are some of the things you should keep in mind when creating a web page that caters to the four persona temperaments:

1. Depending on what you are selling, you can determine which temperaments you will probably address. If it is something rather expensive, whatever personality type you are dealing with, the likelihood of more methodical instincts is higher. That does not dismiss the fact that many spontaneous individuals still want to buy cars and diamond rings. However, you can expect them to ask “more” questions because it is a greater buying decision and investment. High-value transactions (contracts worth thousands of dollars) will be meticulously reviewed in a very methodical format. For smaller decisions, you are more likely to have all 4 temperaments.

2. The ratio of temperaments within a population is:

• 45% logical
• 35%impulsive
• 15% caring
• 5% aggressive

3. Within a single page, yes, you absolutely need to have the language that can address these 4 temperaments.

In the video below, part of one of our webinars, Ayat Shukairy and Khalid Saleh discuss different persona temperaments and explain psychological understandings of personas through a historical progression.

The post Using Buyer Personas: The Cornerstone Ingredient for Better Conversions appeared first on Invesp.

Humans are flawed creatures. We conform to a number of biases outlined by the world’s greatest psychologist. Wikipedia has listed 180 biases that impact our everyday decisions.

This in turn makes our jobs as marketers and optimizers quite tricky. According to social scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, you can’t quite overcome your biases. You’ll always fall into them. Tversky died in 1996 and Kahneman went on to win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the both of the men did together. His work was summarized in the highly acclaimed and 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.Wait so marketers and conversion rate optimizers– they’re biased creatures too!? Reminder: we are as human as the consumer.

I relay the story of my own bias during a qualitative research session with my team where I was completely convinced that the target customer behaved a certain way.

And that’s just taking into consideration the marketer and optimizer who most likely is somewhat conscious of these biases humans hold (if they know what they’re doing). On the consumer side it’s worse. This concept that we cannot change our predisposed biases, ultimately means, we can’t alter consumer behavior.

The bias that Kahneman and Tversky listed as the most damaging: the confirmation bias. Think about the current political divisiveness in America. The confirmation bias allows for this to fester because it’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect. The right believes the left is bonkers and is driving the country to shambles, and the left believes the right is extreme and out to destroy the fabric of America. Neither, even when confronted with opposing data to what they believe, are willing to accept anything but what they believe.

This idea scares me about what many marketers and optimizers may be doing. They may not be conscious of this bias and they simply continue to investigate in within a scope of data that confirms what they believe refusing any alternative evidence.

I read an article a year ago in the New Yorker on how facts simply do not change our mind. This is present in our every day life if we consider the deep partisanship of America as mentioned above. But it’s even present in the racial divide in terms of how races view each other and themselves.

The confirmation bias actually impacts me personally very often. I speak internationally at conferences such as Inbound, SMX series, Business of Software and many more. But as a hijab adorning (the scarf on my head) Muslim woman, I’m wearing a label that many people have a confirmation bias against. Whether I like it or not, as much as I talk and reveal my expertise, there are too many people that cannot “change” their minds about me because of the bias they have against Muslims.

Kahneman himself is pessimistically convinced is it almost impossible change our biases citing the Muller-Lyer Illusion. It is basically two lines, both the same length, but at the end of each line the arrows are pointed in different directions; one inward, and one outward.

In the real world, it’s not so easy to reach system 2. And when dealing with daily quick decisions by consumers, the challenge is greater. Most of our decisions are made with system 1 (about 90% of them!).

There are many stories and experiments done testing the effect of psychological biases. What we have found conducting CRO for many years that indeed, it’s not easy to change people’s thinking, although not impossible.  

This is supported by social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. He believes, as a result of his research, that there is a great possibility in training people to overcome pitfalls of various biases.

The reality I found while researching this article was that the biases touch each and every part of the sales cycle and consumer journey. And this confirms something I’ve talked about in regards to CRO: it’s not about testing your website. If you have a company that is doing template tweaking for you, it’s not going to give you that huge impact you’re seeking. Ultimately every decision at any point in the sales cycle may already have preconceived biases or builds up biases. If the marketer or optimizer is tackling just one small part of the experience, they are missing the boat.

Let’s peel it a part – understand some of the most prevalent biases that impact the consumer, your customer, and you, and then present different methodologies and approaches to countering the particular bias:

The Confirmation Bias

I’ve talked about this specific bias at length above. 

“Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or my side bias,[Note 1] is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.[1] It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.”         Wikipedia

How does it impact consumers?

According to Jeff Toister, confirmation bias can: 

• “A customer’s first impression can anchor how they feel about your business.
• Online reviews can convince customers that you’re awesome (or not).
• How quickly and how well you handle problems can cement a reputation.
• Making personal connections with customers can strengthen their positive bias.
• One prickly employee can convince customers you suck.”

Well, for one, we find this present in consumers when they are exposed to negative reputation or reviews about a company. It’s very difficult to “change” their mind’s to believe that the reputation is sound and the negative comments are isolated incidents.

Think about McDonald’s and their attempt to redeem their reputation by advertising better quality, and fresher food options.

What we’ve found is businesses battling confirmation bias need to be transparent and honest. This is paramount to repair the damage confirmation bias causes. Like the infamous KFC full page advertisement admitting their erroneous error of running out of chicken, they tackled the issue head on.

Social media is also a great tool to connect with customers, hear their voice and address the issues head on.

Another way of countering this bias is by feeding into already held beliefs. So if you’re promoting a product of sorts, try to fit it within preconceptions and expectations that your consumer may already have. For example, a client of ours promoting their book’s compatibility with e-learners or e-books like the kindle, use that convenience element that the kindle’s have to promote their own books.

Of course if someone has a positive confirmation bias of your organization you have it made. For example, this happened to me, when Zappos first became popular with their “free shipping both ways” policy. I was infatuated with the ease and convenience of it, that although I had personally experienced inconvenience with their service and found their prices outrageous, I still shopped there. It happened to me when “Ideeli” was a thing. I loved the concept of getting designer labels for a fraction of the price, and ignored some of the negatives I experienced with the service.

I am your typical consumer. Eventually I recognized what was happening and stopped shopping at these places. But the point is, confirmation bias can actually be positive, and what’s key is to keep those already happy customers happier. That rarely happens.

Duration Neglect

“Duration neglect is the psychological observation that people’s judgments of the unpleasantness of painful experiences depend very little on the duration of those experiences.”            Wikipedia

I always tell my clients, our work does not happen in a vacuum. I’m sorry, if your visitors turned customers have a beautiful, seamless purchase experience, but the end result is negative, they will remember the negative part. And that’s why it’s important to us to be a part of the entire experience, because it all impacts the end result of what we are trying to achieve.

In consulting this is a constant struggle. We have clients that are super happy with our service, and one misstep, wrong email, negative performing test, and it all goes to hell.

While this bias is present, it’s actually not difficult to counter. A friend of mine started an e-commerce operation. In all of the packages she included a special letter and beautifully scented tissue paper. She found eventually that this wasn’t sustainable, and removed it from her process as she grew. What she forgot was how that final unpacking is what clings in people’s minds about the product. And that beautiful scent and experience is what is paramount to leave lingering in people’s minds.

So don’t just care about making the sale. Care about the long-lasting relationship, the repeat customer, because that confirms the type of lingering effect your changes had on the consumer (positive or negative).

Loss Aversion

“In cognitive psychology and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5”    Wikipedia

Visitor’s always want to feel like they’re winning. If they feel like they’ve lost or were somehow ripped off, this will certainly leave a bad taste in their mouths.

We has a client that built his entire model on hiding fees from customers. He would make money off of the hidden fees. Long term, this plan did not pay off for him. People felt they lost a few more dollars when they thought they were going to be getting a discount, so the psychological effects were great. Ultimately they were unable to maintain long-term, repeat business in a space that easily could have achieved that for them.

I have this when I shop at any of the online flower shop. The deal looks great but then I see the attached fees for shipping and handling and I become supremely discouraged. What starts out as a $50-60 dollar purchase, reaches 100 easily when everything is said and done. Every single time.

Other Biases that work to our advantage

There are a number of other biases that we need to be aware of. I’m sure we will have webinars and posts that delve deeper on this topic (shedding to light other very important biases).

But the interesting thing is there are a number of biases that actually help marketers and optimizers as well. If we are able to anticipate the negative biases, and tap into the ones that work in our favor, we can really understand what our customers want at a deeper level.

Let’s see what some of the biases are and how to tap into them:

Anchoring – with anchoring this is prevalent in SaaS when listing the different packages – marketers tend to list 3 or 4 with varying benefits, and they anchor the packages with the most expensive package, but offer a “best value” at the most desirable package at the price point that makes the most sense to the company.

Bandwagon Effect – the tendency of people following the group. This is helpful if celebrity or influencers use a product or service, many will “jump on the bandwagon” and get the same product or service.

Framing and Priming – priming specific desirable packages with better value by using terms that help visitors see it. We conducted a test with a gift basket retailer by placing badges on the category page to draw attention and distinguish some baskets over others.

In-group favoritism – Apple does this wonderfully. This is the idea of creating a tribe around the product, and once you’ve committed to the tribe, you likely have the business forever. In Apple, Samsung, and other competitors, they continuously have more products to up-sell their customers. That becomes challenging for retailers that don’t have the same type of product that constantly needs uploading .

Salience – if your product or service has a compelling characteristic, consumers tend to focus on that one thing over others. This makes the job of marketers a bit tricky to ensure that certain characteristics become more memorable for the visitor.

Zero-Risk Bias – no surprise, humans hate risk. That’s why when you offer 100% satisfaction guarantees and free trials, people jump on the chance. If there’s 0 risk, they are more likely to try it.

The Decoy Effect – By presenting visitors with options that offer more value as compared to a more expensive or less expensive option, it taps into the decoy effect bias. Visitors will see it as getting a great deal and go with the medium option.

The Humor Effect – People remember humor, so by offering something funny or running a humorous campaign, you can stick better in people’s minds.

Mere Exposure Effect – Retargeting campaigns work for a reason. By getting your product in a potential customer’s face repeatedly, on many different platforms you’ll be in mind, especially when they need your product or service.

Sunk-cost fallacy – I’ve already invested in it, I may as well see it through. When President Donald Trump decided to send more troops to Afghanistan because: “Our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives.” More lives and more investment in a lost war because we’ve already started is a clear case of sunk-cost thinking.

Ultimately it tells us to stick with a bad investment, a product, a service: because of the money we have already lost on it. This happened recently when I decided to watch the movie Crazy Rich Asians. I know I’m one of the few people out there that didn’t enjoy it, but I really disliked it and just went because of the bandwagon effect on me (everyone was buzzing about it). From the onset I didn’t like it but I gave it a chance. 40 minutes in I knew I hated, but thought, I already sat through half of it, I really don’t want to walk out now, maybe it’ll get better. It didn’t. And I was so angry I lost all that time watching a movie I really hated. But I fell into the sunk cost fallacy.

Ok how can this help marketers? Actually, stay away from this if possible. Don’t make people start with your product and service and just stick with it because they already started.

Conclusion

But remember, tricks and simple nudges are no longer enough. Marketing campaigns need to be studied, tested and really push the limits to give visitor’s an experience they won’t forget.

The post The Reason CRO is FLAWed appeared first on Invesp.

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Visits, page views, bounce rates, cart abandonment, etc. are all great metrics, but their utility wanes when it comes to their ability to provide any actionable intelligence about advanced efficiency metrics (attribution, channel ROI, etc.) and effectiveness metrics (think strategic business outcomes like market share, category growth, etc.).

Advanced metrics inevitably require combining data from various sources and businesses to make informed decisions about the best approach to implementing analytics rigor that is in line with business priorities, resource availabilities and commercial constraints.

In this post, I discuss the importance of tagging within the context of digital data mining and outline 3 different implementation approaches. I will contrast the limitations of various tagging approaches when dealing with advanced data analysis scenarios and how they impact decision making.

Digital data collection-The technology options

The common vocabulary used for enriching clickstream data is tagging. For the purpose of a wider discussion around digital insights though, we swap the word tagging with Digital data collection. A capability that can be implemented using 3 distinct approaches.

Option 1– Using Plain JavaScript

Tech-savvy analysts would already be aware of how JavaScript tags are typically used in conjunction with pixel-based tracking techniques (Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Adobe Analytics etc.) to capture data about important events relevant for specific business context.

Image source: Tekraze

This technique is the predominant method for collecting digital behavior data, yet it has its limitations in terms of how effectively and efficiently can the data be collected and the ease with which it can be assimilated to provide advanced digital intelligence.

Consider for example a simple use case of a small SaaS business that is just starting out with its analytics journey. Basic metrics such as page views, unique sessions, newsletter signups, CRM leads, collateral downloads etc. would likely be enough as a starting point to building an optimization agenda. The company is likely using simple lead capture forms with inbuilt support for plugging into tools such as Google Analytics. In such cases, simple JavaScript snippets are written directly within the CMS (e.g. within WordPress themes or landing page builder platform) would likely be enough to send any additional data into the analytics tracking tool.

Small team sizes, in-frequent website code updates, single installation web properties, and an online-only acquisition channel are some of the factors that make it perfectly fine to simply use vanilla JavaScript coding to enrich basic clickstream data already captured by the web analytics tool.

In terms of technology options, tools such as Google Analytics or Mixapanel can be easily set up to use JavaScript-based coding approach.

Option 2 – Using Tag Management Technology

Tag managers provide an alternative to the direct JavaScript tags-based data collection approach but come with their own limitations around getting insights for metrics that were not originally planned when the data layer was put in place or where merging with offline datasets is required.  

Consider the scenario of a media publisher whose business model relies heavily upon how well it can monetize its digital properties. Some specific considerations around business context include the following:

1. The publisher operates multiple sites for varying audience categories, but all of them just follow the same underlying analytics architecture.
2. The Company is looking to roll out an analytics solution that will help better quantify digital engagement so it can use the stats to demand better pricing for its digital inventory.
3. The Company wants to segment its users based on various behavioral signals that the visitors exhibit as they browse through the company’s media properties.  A Technology advertiser looking to target its content specifically to an engaged and in-market C-level audience would likely pay a higher price for ad exposure if the company can show the advertiser’s ads specifically to cookies that meet this criterion.

How can this be implemented technically?

Behavioral signals used to assess engagement are generated as the user interacts with a website.

Is it still advisable to capture these using plain JavaScript?

Perhaps not. Consider the following arguments to understand why;

1. The company has multiple web properties with different HTML markups. Building code that reads directly from HTML DOM can be highly problematic because the changes will have to be implemented separately for every DOM variation. For example, we need to tag all visitors who come from a specific campaign and interact with an article in a certain manner (spend > x secs on a page, reach section y of the page, etc.). Site A identifies all such articles of interest as HTML id ‘A’ while Site B uses different identifiers. How do we write JavaScript code once and make it work across HTML DOM variations?
2. Every digital property has its own release cycle, which means that putting a code into production cannot happen simultaneously if we inject JavaScript code directly into web pages. This will likely present significant reporting challenges when conveying campaign performance figures to Clients.
3. The specific signals that define ‘intent’ may be a matter of experiment and involve trying out different JavaScript codes before adding a cookie to a segment. For example, the first iteration might assume engagement to be consisting of:

a. Visitor spending > x seconds on an article

b. No exit from the landing page

c. At least one follow-up interaction (submit a query, phone call, online webinar registration etc.)

However, the company might want to try out different such conditions and then run A/B experiments to identify the most relevant definition of engagement. All this requires a significant amount of testing with JavaScript coding variations and having a dependency on code release cycles can be a significant drag in the marketing team’s ability to provide answers to sales teams about exactly what constitutes engagement.

4. The operational issues around maintaining JavaScript code that must change every time the HTML markup is changed can be simply unmanageable and cost prohibitive. Consider the process nightmares involved in having to communicate code changes to a central team or worst, having to take formal approvals before making HTML DOM changes!

As you can see, directly injecting JavaScript code into HTML pages may no longer be a viable option in this specific scenario.

A better approach would use a Tag Manager solution that can provide the following benefits:

4. 4. 1. Tag Managers use an intermediate data layer that can decouple server-side logic from HTML markup. For example, instead of having separate code on site A that counts the number of downloads of a form with div id ‘A’ and then another code on site ‘B’ that identifies the same form with div id ‘B’, we could write and deploy a single snippet that fires for every value in an intermediate JavaScript variable ‘C’. This variable would be populated at the time of page load and would require no changes in the client-side JavaScript code.
      2. As long as an intermediate canonical data format is used (a.k.a. the data layer), individual website owners would have the flexibility in using whatever HTML markup that they have been using historically and not run the risk of break existing functionality.
      3. One of the biggest USPs of the Tag Management approach would be that all changes to JavaScript tags can be implemented centrally as opposed to on individual properties. This would allow not just the centralization of Technical Architecture but also significantly reduce the time taken to roll out tag changes.

But of course, these benefits come with additional costs and implementation complexities and every business must make its own unique assessment around which approach might suit better given a set of constraints about business requirements, skills availability, and time/budget constraints.

In terms of technology options though, tools such as Google Tag Manager, Qubit, Ensighten can all be considered as viable platform choices.

Option 3- Using Server-side tagging on raw clickstream data

This is the most flexible but the most resource and cost intensive approach to data collection and involves creating meta-data on the fly instead of using JavaScript-based tags.

The first two scenarios outlined above focused entirely on tracking behavior online.

But what if analysis needs require working with a combination of online/offline datasets?

To illustrate the tracking complexity in this situation better, consider a large B2B Software Company that captures leads online but where the actual conversion happens after a number of interactions with the website, webinar presentations, offline events, and sales team calls.

How does this company profile and segment its prospects and customers? Can we still feasibly send interaction data from multiple channels into the analytics tool via the Tag Management solution?

Perhaps not. Consider some reasons as to why not;

4. 4. 1. Every interaction would have a different customer/prospect identifier. Even if you could somehow send in offline data into the analytics tool, you would still need to bring data out to create a single profile that combines the data from different events into a record with the common identifier. Tag Manager and certainly basic web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are simply not designed for this use case.
      2. Most large companies have enterprise-level data warehouses and advanced business intelligence tools that are purpose-built for aggregating and analyzing complex data sets created from varied sources. Going off the established Enterprise Architecture would almost always be resisted by most IT teams.

A better approach in this scenario would be to deploy a server-side tagging architecture which allows not just attaching arbitrary metadata to visitor level clickstream records but also facilitates complex ETL operations through integration with leading data integration tools.

Such an approach could include following general steps:

4. 4. 1. In addition to sending interaction data into the web analytics tool, we would record the cookie ID in CRM as soon as a lead is generated online.
      2. The backend code would ensure that the cookie ID gets associated with the unique CRM record identified.
      3. The cookie ID could then be used to regularly pull all web behavioral data into an intermediate data store.
      4. Finally, the behavioral data from intermediate data store could be merged with data collected from other offline interactions such as event attendance, roadshow participations, webinar registrations on third-party sites etc. to create composite datasets for powering advanced customer intelligence.

By following the 4 steps above, you will have a unified profile of every visitor and which combines data from online(web/mobile) and offline interactions would allow the brand to develop advanced personas that can then be deployed in personalized marketing.

Tools such as iJento, Tealium, and Adobe Insights provide varying degrees of capabilities when it comes to server-side tagging.

Summary

Small businesses may never have an immediate need for implementing advanced digital measurement infrastructures but would like to at least be aware of the options. Mid-sized companies may have clarity about the specific analysis needs but lack the knowledge (or budget!) to get there. Large companies may have both the need and the knowledge but might lack the roadmap that incrementally onboard analytics rigor in line with business priorities and resource constraints.  

Regardless of the context though, analytics and conversion specialists should have a perspective of the various approaches (and the pros and cons of each) that can be leveraged to put in place robust digital insights capabilities.

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