Learn With Me is a series where I write about a process, tool or similar that I need to learn for my current UX position. On today’s agenda I am going to write about applying UX with content marketing to solve a problem.
The Issue
Our homepage is the core of our content marketing strategy. It is the home for our personas to find first-hand information and educate themselves further via blog. Last year we launched a large study about the industry, which we are currently offering for prospects to download for free once they fill out a form.
To boost the download rate and guide more prospects to our homepage and services, the marketing team decided to invest into online advertising. According to the marketing team, they are happy with the numbers of people being guided by the ad and finding the report, but they are worried about the “low” download rate.
My goal is to investigate the user behavior and find out why the report is lacking downloads. This post is a description about how I went about it.
The Process of Analysis
Based on the problem description, my educated guesses are forming two hypotheses. First, users do not want to sign away their data to download a report. Second, the initial advertisement is not tailored for the right audience.
As the next step after forming these assumptions, I need to check the numbers via Google Analytics and check the content of the ad via Google Ads.
Are we driving the wrong audience to our site?
Google Analytics report for the whole November and December shows straight forward the issue. The traffic to the report site is enormous, however, 75.21% for the DE and 84.52% for the EN site of prospects did not interact with the page in any way. Meaning, these prospects never downloaded the report. Note: These numbers are more or less meaningless if we do not know what the benchmark for these numbers is. 80% bounce rate could be the industry standard but it could also mean the opposite. As we do not have any benchmarking in place, due to our policy of not sharing data with Google or other parties, I have to do some research on that end. According to several sources, it can be expected to have a bounce rate between 70% to 90% for landing pages. Could this mean that we are likely driving the wrong audience to our site?
I then wanted to see which referral channels perform the best to locate the main issue. While filtering the Analytics report on sources, the paid sources over Google have the biggest bounce rate of all, which is another indicator that the advertising might be the problem. On the positive side, all referrals from social channels are organic, which gives us an indicator that our audience there is at least reading and interacting to some extent with our content, but even there, the bounce rate is between 60-80%.
What is the matter with our Google Ads?
The Ads campaign recorded for November and December 40700 impressions, 419 klicks, 61 conversions for EN and 60900 impressions, 792 clicks, 92 conversions for DE. The Google Ads benchmark that we are interested in are the average click-through rate (CTR) and the average conversion rate (CVR). As we offer B2B services, our CTR is 2.41% on the search network and the CVR is 3.04% on the search network.
Translating these numbers into the recorded ones, the search CTRs are 1.03% (EN) / 1.3% (DE), the search CVRs are 14.5% (EN) / 11.6%. Our click-through rate is not reaching the benchmark but our conversion rate is, which ranks us to be just average. However, if we put it into relation to 10.000, then on average 7.32 people see the ad. Checking this with our results for EN (0.0103 * 0.145) / DE (0.0130 * 0.116) we get 0.15% for both. This means that we are advertising double the amount of the average of 7.32 people. In conclusion, given that we are advertising to a very specific industry and customers, the “small” amount of CVR has a high quality in terms of conversion.
There seems to be something wrong with the prospects coming via paid Google Search and looking into the hotjar Analytics, it is not the user’s fault but that of how our content is presented. Hotjar has recorded all interactions with the report and shows that users are trying to interact with objects probably hoping they will reveal a peek into the study report. If they want to download the free study, they need to give us their contact address. This could be a potential wall for interested users not downloading the report.
Solution and the next steps
We need to track exactly how users behave with the contact-form versus without the contact form. If we remove the contact-form, will the download rate be higher? I could not access the data of the submitted contact forms to see how many wanted to be contacted by us. If for example out of 4 submissions only 1 person agrees to be contacted, then the form should be easily accessible. For now, it is recommended to continue observing the behavior via hotjar, as analytics and ads work as they should. Another option would be to offer the survey as an online content experience instead of a PDF. This gives us a better view of tracking the behavior there, as PDFs do not allow that.
Playful Brain Demand 