Conversion Rate Optimization Case Study Blue Vs Green

Colours are powerful. They can evoke feeling, affect moods, direct traffic and even start and end wars.

The power of their symbolism is undeniable. People associate colours with different meanings.

This can be based on their own experience growing up, societal and cultural aspects or just plainly their favourite dress or football team. There’s meaning behind it. In the world of business, the importance of colour in relation to consumers dramatically influences direction and choices in how companies market brands and products.

Studies upon studies have been and are conducted to investigate how people react to colours in commercials both positively and negatively.

This sentiment holds true in the constant and rapidly expanding commercial environment of the internet. Choosing and designing the right colours and aligning them to your webpage effectively, is paramount to gaining the conversions you’re after. Employing a process known as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a great start to increasing conversions.

Conversion Rate Optimization - CRO

If you’re unaware or need to play a quick game of SEO catch-up, CRO is a systemised approach for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or take ideal action on a webpage.

As more and more business shift to online, creating a space that elicits more conversions is vital to initiate and increase sales.

Example - button colour

This is an example of changing button colour.

The change from green to red saw conversions increase for Performable by 21%.

As simple as that may sound, changing certain features on your web page can dramatically increase its capacity to generate more conversions.

Think of CRO in an abstract context. A customer finds a retailer he or she is searching for in a shopping centre. When they get inside, there is no sales assistant there to help answer enquiries or assist with a purchase.

What would happen? The customer would walk out and no sale would be made for that business.

Relate this back to CRO work on a website, if the tools aren’t available to help customers engage with your website, products and business, then the capacity to generate conversions is almost void.

Plenty of people visit pages, CRO is about utilising the space to turn those visitors into conversions, hopefully leading to sales. Supplying tools like a ‘call to action’, (CTA), button or link is an example of how to optimize conversions.

Altering your page to increase conversions is no easy feat. It simple enough to understand, but requires dexterous research and experimentation to execute successfully. So, how do you best approach it?

Conversion Rate Optimization Process

The process involved with CRO begins with collating data on how people interact with your website. If people are searching the internet for products that your business sells, or your website advertises rather, depending on your SEO strategy, there’s every chance they will find your page. Once they land on your page, the aim is to gain a conversion out of their time browsing your site. But what happens if your page is getting plenty of visits but little to no conversions? It would, sadly, be evidence enough that your website doesn’t possess the tools to generate the sought after conversions that browse the internet.

Programs like Optimizely and Google Website optimizer allow you access to information on how users navigate, react and respond to pages and links on your site. For business purposes, using these programs can present insights into the effectiveness of the design and links on your website. Subsequently, you have data at your disposal to make changes to the layout, links or buttons, to better increase your website’s capacity to engage users. It can offer a valuable understandings of user behaviour in relation to your website. This means if the information at hand suggests your current approach is not working, you can alter aspects accordingly, with the intention of boosting conversions.

This can be as simple as changing a colour of a button. Hence the aforementioned power of colour and layout. If you’re not getting the conversions you’re after, programs like Optimizely and Google Website optimizer provide a starting point to identify the current circumstances of your website and perhaps where to best amend or refine for conversion purposes.

Matter Solutions Case Study

Our team at Matter Solutions is very adept and skilled in conducting conversion rate optimisation. We have extensive experience in all aspects of SEO, from Technical SEO to Link Building, and are heavily versed in creating and designing pages.

Our Brainerd based expertise in SEO and Web Design give us with the knowledge and competency to successfully experiment with changing components of our clients pages that produce conversion results.

Let’s take a look at a simple example of CRO work at Matter

One of our clients at Matter Solutions was receiving adequate enough conversions to justify their SEO budget.

The layout of their page was clean, had sharp content and possessed visually stimulating and appealing images for business purposes. Their page ran quickly and was optimized as high as 3rd in search rankings related to the broad keywords of their business operations.

We wanted to see things continue to progress, hence the question: How could we get them even more conversions?

After careful assessment of their page, we identified that a simple change to the conversion tools in place could potentially reap rewards. The page had a call to action, (CTA), button to entice visitors to make enquiries that would initiate a sale or sales opportunity. A CTA is one of the primary tools used to instigate conversions. However, if they don’t stand out, or respect the notions of colour, content or placement, they can be effectively useless. For this case, our team concluded that the colour of the page layout, and other, less important buttons that weren’t CTA intended, were too similar and drew attention away from the intended CTA conversion button.

As a result of this diagnosis, we experimented with one simple change. It’s arguable if the saying ‘blue and green must never be seen” has any merit. This is because our team simply changed the CTA button from blue to green, creating a stark contrast from the blue theme present throughout the page. It made the CTA button stand out and more visible. The results from this experiment speak for themselves.

The stats below highlight the difference a simple change in the colour of a CTA button can make.

Overall results for CTA button colour change (PC & Mobile)

These results highlight how the minimalist change of the CTA button colour saw conversions double. What is interesting to note is that engagement with the page only increased 20%, indicating the unique influence of the CTA button colour change.

Mobile Users:

Changes in the CTA button colour saw mobile conversions increase the most. As online mobile interaction continues to rise, CRO practices will need to adapt to suit the alternative developing landscape.

PC Users:

PC and desktop CTA conversions almost doubled, but were overshadowed when compared to mobile.

This is a prime example of how exercising CRO can be extremely beneficial for increasing conversions. Something as small as the change of a button colour can be the key alteration needed to deliver results. While it was simply executed, it required time to first assess the status quo and then identify what changes could be made to achieve conversion outcomes.

Elements like colour, design and layout, still play an extremely significant role in engaging customers, even in the contemporary, ever changing online environment. To mirror, conversion rate optimisation compliments this notion by valuing the visual and engagement aspects of design and changing accordingly to achieve better results. As exemplified in our example, a change in colour of button text played a determining factor in doubling conversions.

Traditional marketing techniques and tactics are still effective in a new platforms and media environments. They combine components, like imagery and messages, that have worked for years. The challenge lies in recognizing these factors, and merging their value into digitized channels, in our case, websites.

When aiming for conversions on your page, it's imperative to consider that even in a digital environment, old dogs can learn new tricks.

It stills involves conducting research and evaluating metrics to gauge an understanding of user behavior. It then involves making changes to the simplest and oldest elements of your page to encourage conversions.

You never know, our Brainerd CRO team has the power to make blue and green work together.

If you interested in how to best optimize your website to increase conversions and sales opportunities, contact us at Matter Solutions.