How Rotoballer Got 3x Higher Click-through with Microsoft Clarity
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Promise immediate gratification (“Get Instant Access”). Selling the click for the premium product to be seen.
- 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.