The Simple Website Personalization That Increased Conversions by 560% As someone who does conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a living, I can’t express to you how excited I get when a simple change makes a big impact. And this particular example? It doesn’t get much simpler or more impactful. Sure, I’m a self-proclaimed CRO geek, but if you were able to increase the conversion rate on a web page by 560%, I bet you’d be geeking out, too. Personalization as an Optimization Tool As a member of HubSpot’s web strategy team, I’ve been optimizing the core website pages on HubSpot.com for the last eight years. Prior to that, I spent many years optimizing this very blog. And in the past year, I’ve been experimenting a lot more with personalization to improve both user experience and conversion rates on the website. The tactics   seem simple — I've tailored both calls-to-action (CTAs) and content for different segments of our website visitors. But personalization can be tricky. By creating more than one version of a single page, that means you also need to maintain more than one version of the page. Multiply that by each page on your website, and things can start to get pretty unmanageable. This makes it critical to track the performance of any personalization you put live on your website, and keep only the ones that are worth the return on investment. Luckily, this one was worth it. Personalizing for Free Users On many of the...

How Cutting Distribution Boosted Our YouTube Views by 420% When I first heard how HubSpot’s YouTube team bumped one channel’s views up by over 400%, I begged for permission to share the story. (I’m not above debasing myself on your behalf.) It’s a lesson that applies to nearly all content marketing — and one I promise you’re not going to hear anywhere else. Are you ready for it? Not all distribution is good distribution. And that includes your own. Below, I chat with our head of YouTube about how and why cutting off all external distribution actually increased our YT performance. And his advice for when you should consider picking up the axe, too. The Road to the Chopping Block When Carl Mueller joined us as HubSpot’s head of YouTube earlier this year, he noticed that one of our YT channels had a problem the others didn’t. If a video was six minutes long, most viewers were dropping off after only a minute or two. Though, to be fair, that’s still longer than my kid made it through Fantastic Mr. Fox. Carl’s been producing video for over 10 years for names like Business Insider and Morning Brew. Which is to say, where media and marketing mash up, Carl knows his s***. So when he says the content wasn’t the problem, I know he’s not just trying to avoid hurt feelings. “I got here in late February, and the first thing I did was watch our content from...

The Oops That Proves SEO Basics Still Matter When I asked today’s HubSpotter to share an SEO tactic, he asked if he could share a cautionary tale instead. And I accepted because his story proves that technical SEO basics still matter — even in the face of major search changes. It’s the scary story of how we lost, and then recovered, 41% of targeted organic traffic and conversions. Presented for the approval of you masters in marketing, I bring you a story I call … The Tell-Tale Tag. (The Cask of the Canonical? I’ll find the joke eventually.) A Scary Day in Search Our story begins with a call over to France, and a coworker whose technical skills are outmatched only by his wicked Gallic accent. (To get the most out of this post, I suggest you read his lines aloud in your very best French.) Sylvain Charbit, our senior technical SEO strategist, has been in SEO/content marketing for 15 years, so it takes a lot to rattle him — an 82% drop in daily organic traffic is just such a thing. “We discovered the problem in the most common way possible,” Sylvain laughs. “Conversion and traffic were in freefall all of a sudden.” As you can see from the graph above, pants were soiled on or around July 25th. The drop was first noted by our conversion optimization team, who immediately called over to SEO. (I like to imagine it like a disaster movie, where the...

What We Didn’t Do Boosted Our Paid Ad CVR by 11% Our CRO team made a change that lifted the performance of our paid ads by almost 11% — and they didn’t have to make any deals with supernatural beings to do it. So while I’m a little bummed that I don’t get to use my Ouija board, the good news is that you’ve already got everything you need to try this out for yourself. In fact, this tactic is all about what you don’t include on the landing page. Below, I chat with our sorceress supreme of conversion rate optimization to find out what that cryptic advice actually means. But first, a grave warning … Measure Twice, Cut Once Before you go cutting content from your website, a word of warning: “Yes, this works for us,” says Rebecca Hinton, CRO strategist and principal marketing manager at HubSpot. “But it may or may not work for you, so you always want to test it.” Rebecca’s tests have helped my program hit triple-digit growth, so I’m going to politely insist you take her word on that. At HubSpot, we never dive into changes without having the proof to back it up, and neither should you. Your audience could react very differently from ours. The tactic I’m about to share came from the results of a rigorous experiment, and later on, I’ll show you how to run one just like it. Okay, now onto the good stuff. What She...