Conversion Wizards Background

Conversion Wizards is a consultancy that offers conversion rate optimization, performance marketing, and business intelligence services. They have also worked with brands like Microsoft Office, Virgin, Nike, Cotopaxi, The Washington Post and 100+ smaller online sellers and SaaS companies.  

Rotoballer Background

Rotoballer.com  is a leader in fantasy sports content. Their in-depth research can significantly improve a player’s odds of winning, just like studying companies can make you a more informed stock market investor. Bootstrapped by two childhood friends Leor Rabe and Alex Roberts, the company is profitable, growing at almost 100% year over year, and challenging much larger institutional incumbents.  

Challenge

Rotoballer makes most of their money from display ads, but they also have a premium subscription product that they’d like to grow. The challenge is increasing the conversion rate on the paid product without cannibalizing advertising revenue.  

To conduct a Conversion Rate Optimization Audit, Rotoballer engaged The Conversion Wizards, who provided actionable improvements described below. 

Analysis Summary

The Conversion Wizards used both CRO best practices and insights from Microsoft Clarity, focusing on three dimensions: Value Proposition, Friction and Anxiety. They conducted the analysis on mobile as it accounts for 70%+ of traffic. 

Value Proposition: Why Should I Click Through the Premium Offer? 

Above on the left is a screenshot of Rotoballer’s homepage (mobile version). On the right is a Clarity heatmap overlaid. 

The first thing Conversion Wizards noticed was the small number of people clicking through to the premium tools and subscription page. If Rotoballer wants to rely less on ad revenue, more people must see the premium offer. And for more people to see it, they must first click on the areas leading to it, shown below. 

As shown above, the areas leading to the premium tools have little heat and few clicks! 

Interestingly, right below the banner on the left is the most-clicked element. This element received 41% of all clicks despite being towards the bottom, so the problem with the banners isn’t simply that they are lower on the page. 

To address this problem, Conversion Wizards suggested some optimizations: 

1. Reinforce the value each visitor receives:  The header, “Gain an Unfair Advantage & Win Big,” is then backed by “FantasyPros certified top-accuracy NFL rankers.” People engage in fantasy sports to win and earn bragging rights among their friends. Connecting directly with this motivation is better than simply stating that you have premium tools. 

2. High visibility. The CTA is placed right beneath one of the highest clicked areas and a brighter color should get more attention. The element really pops, begging to be clicked. 

3. Promise immediate gratification (“Get Instant Access”). Selling the click for the premium product to be seen.  

4. Invoke curiosity. The line, “These two certified rankers,” piques curiosity and entices some users to click simply to find out who they are. From testing, this strategy creates intrigue and higher clickthrough.  

Conversion Wizards also recommended testing a minimized version of this reminder as a floating footer on mobile. 

Friction: Reducing Difficulty of Taking the Desired Action 

Conversion Wizards define friction as an aggregation of all the length and difficulty-related aggravation factors that occur throughout the conversion process. 

Examples of friction on Rotoballer’s site include: 

• Difficult to find/see upgrade CTAs because they look like the ads on the page. 

• No clear navigation or guidance on where the user should navigate next. The first page of a site should quickly answer these three questions: 
  • Where am I? (who is Rotoballer and what do they do) 
  • What action should I take? 
  • Why should I take it with Rotoballer? (vs. some other fantasy sports site?) 

• On-page CTAs and links don’t provide context or set clear expectations for what happens once a user clicks on them 

• No clear hierarchy within the website’s layout to communicate relative importance and guide users where to look first. Conversion Wizards call this “allowing visitors to engage in unsupervised thinking,” a problematic source of friction. 

To address these issues, Conversion Wizards suggested using a contrasting color to highlight the premium offering. This quick solution led to 3x more clicks on the premium button.  

In the first screenshot below, the red color blended with site content and got 0.06% of clicks. The second used a bright yellow which increased this number to 0.19%. 

Anxiety: Anticipate a User’s Concerns and Address Them 

Unaddressed questions and concerns can cause anxiety, a conversion killer. To effectively reduce anxiety, Conversion Wizards suggest anticipating a user’s questions and concerns at each step and overcorrecting with specificity and proximity. 

Using a stronger and more prominent guarantee at the point of purchase was one way Conversion Wizards suggested reducing anxiety. Below is a screenshot of the purchase area with the weak guarantee. 

Compare that with a stronger, money-back guarantee which can increase conversion rates by more than 2x, net-net i.e. the rise in purchases more than offsets the refund requests. 

Two other ways Conversion Wizards suggested reducing anxiety were reinforcing the value proposition close to the point of purchase and using a “value positive” call-to-action. 

The second treatment reminds the buyer they are about to “gain an unfair advantage”. In a previous project, a similar reminder led to a 29% lift in credit-card gated free trials. 

Another suggestion like the mockup above is a call-to-action that connects with the visitor’s primary motivation—winning and bragging rights. An additional recommendation is reassuring them with the text “easily cancel anytime”. The Wall Street Journal famously ran a test where adding just this text to their paywall increased subscriptions by 9.8% 

Further Clarity Analysis: QuickBacks (Possible Friction) 

Quick backs tell users when a visitor navigates to a page then quickly returns to the previous one. In CRO, this can be a clue that a link or button may not set proper expectations for what the visitor will see next.  

In the example above, the visitor is searching for “NHL DFS Picks” but goes to “More DFS Articles” instead of “DFS Picks Articles” where the correct link is available. Other recordings showed similar issues. 

This informs users that the overall navigation flow and structure need to be addressed.  

Conclusion

This case study was a look into Clarity from a CRO perspective by examining value proposition, friction, and anxiety. Conversion Wizards used the tool to provide key insights that Rotoballer used to increase clickthrough rates.

If you would like to have your site audited, reach out to The Conversion Wizards.

Testimonial

“As a long-time Conversion Rate Optimization practitioner, I was excited to discover Clarity. It is 100% free, does not cap sessions and has interesting new features like Conversion Heatmaps for ecommerce. Now even the tiniest businesses can get rich insights without worrying about costs” 

Jasper Kuria, Managing Partner, The Conversion Wizards.

What is Overfuel?

Overfuel provides the fastest, most reliable mobile-first websites for dealerships. Founded in 2022, Overfuel released automotive’s first no-code website platform with drag-and-drop content management, natively integrated digital retailing, and advanced visitor-level analytics.  

Who is Overfuel intended for?

Overfuel powers automotive websites across the United States, including both franchise (Honda, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, RAM) dealerships and independent pre-owned lots. They target dealerships with anywhere from 50 vehicles to over 1,000. With a focus on lead generation and digital retailing, Overfuel aims to drive more online car sales by offering direct-to-consumer vehicle reservations like Carvana and Vroom, to dealerships of any size.  

The Challenge

The primary challenge in the automotive industry is the unnecessary complexity and poor user experience caused by third-party plugins. Everyone has a horror story of trying to shop for a car online, with slow websites, pop-ups competing for their attention, and competing calls to action. Third-party plugins not only slow down a website, but they create gaps in reporting because they’re competing against each other for leads, rather than communicating with each other. The conversion funnel ends up broken up across multiple vendors with no connectivity between them.  

Finding a solution

Overfuel added Microsoft Clarity to its highest traffic dealership websites to track user behavior and make improvements to its user experience. Clarity helped make significant improvements to consumer-facing products and also educated dealerships on the best practices for improving conversion rates. Since 80% of car shopping takes place on a mobile device, Overfuel used Clarity to keep a close eye on mobile browsing behaviors and optimize for a mobile-first experience.  

After deploying Clarity for a few weeks to collect data, Overfuel closely monitored the dashboard and email digests to see if any interesting metrics stood out. One thing that immediately grabbed their attention was the JavaScript error tracking. They found that customers using third-party plugins (live chat, iFrame forms) experienced a 10-12x increase in errors. Overfuel hypothesized that these plugins may be hindering user experience, and Clarity’s data proved it. For example, the “Close” button on a third-party live chat product accounted for 20.5% of all clicks on a vehicle listing.  

Second, they noticed a substantial percentage of dead clicks, sometimes exceeding 20% of all interactivity. They were able to use session recordings to identify design elements that confused customers. The issues varied widely: sometimes it was not clear that an element wasn’t intended to be clicked, or it exposed elements that were too small which they fixed by expanding click radiuses.  

The third interesting metric was rage clicks. Clarity’s session recordings showed numerous instances of third-party plugins blocking users from actions they intended to take. In one instance, a broken pop-up widget prevented a customer from completing a lead form. They were stuck rage clicking, unable to convert or close the pop-up. 

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Overfuel used heatmaps and scroll maps to understand how consumers were interacting with products. When Overfuel realized that 80% of users don’t scroll more than 25% of a page, they were compelled to rethink the placements of the most important calls to action.  

They also found that: 

 ● Freeform inventory search accounts for 24.9% of all homepage activity, so they implemented “Smart Search” improvements to detect common vehicle misspellings, recommend search results, and enabled customers to search by color and body type (“red SUV”) or popular features (Apple CarPlay, heated seats). 

 ● Clicking vehicle tiles (Cars, Trucks, SUVs) accounted for 14% of all homepage clicks, and Overfuel discovered that the most common behavioral pattern is clicking a body type (“SUV”), selecting a color (“Red”), then narrowing down the results by color. 

The Results

Overfuel’s philosophy is to provide customers with exactly what they want as quickly as possible. To achieve this, the company has made the top three consumer intents available above the fold.

The team at Overfuel has been successful in increasing user engagement by implementing Smart Search directly into the hero banner. The company has since expanded the use of Smart Search across its customer base due to its positive results.

Prior to this implementation, search was only available in the hamburger menu, which was the third most-clicked element. Since the implementation of Smart Search, the hamburger menu icon has shifted to the fourth most-clicked element, while Smart Search has taken over as the most-clicked element.

Testimonial

“Microsoft Clarity helps us empirically prove what many have believed in automotive for years: many dealership websites are inundated with plugins and unnecessary complexity that hinders the car shopping experience for consumers. By monitoring our websites with Clarity, we’ve dramatically improved user experience by reducing dead clicks, rage clicks, and using heat maps to inform where we put calls to action throughout a website. Not only has it helped us increase conversion, but it’s helped us identify problematic plugins and third-party widgets that get in the way of a positive shopping experience.”  

Alex Griffis; President & CTO, Overfuel 

What is RicketyRoo?

RicketyRoo is a remote-based SEO agency that provides premium services in Local SEO, PPC/SEM, and website design.

Celeste Gonzalez (pictured below) is an SEO strategist and account manager for RicketyRoo, and the primary lead for this project.

Challenge

Their client in the home building industry had been experiencing consistent growth in organic traffic year-over-year. However, despite attracting visitors to their website, the conversion rate for form submissions was very low, at less than 1%. The agency identified several issues that were contributing to the low conversion rate, including slow page loading, unoptimized hero images, and poor placement of contact forms and calls-to-action.

Finding a solution

RicketyRoo used Microsoft Clarity‘s session recordings, heatmaps, and Google Analytics integration to analyze their client’s website. This allowed the team to gain insights into user behavior and engagements.

Metrics such as sessions, scroll depth, pages per session, time spent, dead clicks, quick backs, form completions, and calls were monitored, and Microsoft Clarity helped uncover specific issues that were affecting the user experience on their client’s website.

While watching session recordings, the team noticed that the pages loaded too slowly, the hero image was the only visible content once the pages loaded, and there was no content above the fold that urged users to reach out. Additionally, contact forms were placed above the blog content on mobile, and some text was hard to read due to font color and placement on the homepage.

Based on the insights from Clarity, several actions were taken to address the identified issues on their client’s website:

• The hero image size was decreased across the site to ensure that users could quickly access the information they were looking for.

• The hero image was removed from blog posts, and the contact form was moved below the content to enhance user experience and encourage engagement.

• A call-to-action banner was added above the point in the floor plans page, where the majority of users scrolled, urging them to contact the client.

• Changes were made to the homepage, including adjusting font colors, reducing hero image size, and replacing a “Watch The Video” button with a “Contact” button.

Results

After conducting a test, the team observed that their client’s site visits increased, scroll depth slightly decreased, and there was an uptick in dead clicks on the floor plans page. This confirmed their suspicion that they needed to improve site speed.

They also discovered that users expected to be redirected to a specific floor plan page when they clicked on a particular element on the floor plans page. To address this issue, they decided to create individual floor plan pages to improve the browsing experience for users.

After implementing this second round of changes, RicketyRoo measured the results over a three-month period, revealing that there was a significant increase in both form submissions and phone calls by 122.22% compared to the month before implementation.

Learnings

The implementation of UX/UI changes based on Microsoft Clarity’s AI-driven insights led to a significant improvement in conversions for their client, demonstrating the effectiveness of small, targeted improvements in user experience. By identifying and addressing specific issues such as slow page loading, unoptimized hero images, and poor placement of contact forms and calls-to-action, the team was able to enhance their client’s website user experience and increase engagement from prospective customers.

Testimonial

“By leveraging Clarity’s session recordings, heatmaps, and valuable metrics, we identified key areas for improvement in user interaction on our client’s site. The detailed insights provided by Clarity empowered us to make strategic UX/UI changes, resulting in a remarkable 122.22% increase in conversions over just three months. Clarity isn’t just a tool; it’s a catalyst for transformation, even for smaller sites. It’s an essential ally for any business looking to enhance user experience and drive meaningful results.”

Celeste Gonzalez, SEO Strategist