Performance Based Marketing: 4 cases

If there's one thing we love, it's numbers. A gut feeling can be a good advisor but ultimately we need data when optimizing websites and webshops. With this data, we can help you improve your website, webshop and return.

One of our most popular services is Performance Based Marketing. As the name implies, we focus on results. While optimizing websites and webshops, we try a lot of things and in this blog, we share 4 cases with you that have contributed to a better result for our clients:

• Buttons in your shopping cart

• Category blocks

• Texts on pages

• More visible through link building

These 4 cases are by no means the only thing we do within Performance Based Marketing, but they do help you to gain insight into the possibilities.

 

Do It Yourself?

Feel free to implement these cases yourself, but keep in mind that every webshop is different and the results might be as well. It will not be the first time that an A/B test that worked perfectly for one webshop has the opposite impact on the results of another webshop.

Before you start, you have to have a good baseline measurement so that you know where you stand now and so that you can make a comparison after a set period: did the change work, or did it not?

We have added screenshots below as an example. They don't belong to the numbers below, because we will never share traceable numbers.

 

1. The buttons in your shopping cart

Which text in the button works best? A common question, but the answer is different on every website. This is the button you see below right:

Now it says “Next step” but you can also make it something else:

• Proceed

• Continue to order

• I'm going to order

• Order

• ... and so on

We did an A/B test to see which text worked best. You can see the percentages per text below. A higher percentage means that more people click through and so the number of orders has increased as a result:

• Continue - 13.72%

• Continue to order - 17.28%

• I'm going to order - 13.86%

• Order - 13.62%

So you see that 3 of the 4 texts yielded almost the same results, but the 2nd variant scored the best. So our advice is not to stop if a text does not yield relevant results: be creative and come up with a few more, because eventually, you will find a winner!

 

2. Category blocks

Every webshop is full of visual blocks because that is how one builds webshops in 2021. One of our online marketers wondered whether the title text above the block could be improved and thus lead to more orders.

In the screenshot above it says “Visit our garden center”. We had devised the following variants for this:

• Visit our garden center

• View our offer

• View our range

• Discover our range

These blocks are on the homepage of the webshop and we measured how many people click through on these blocks:

• Visit our garden center - 1.91%

• View our offer - 1,57%

• View our range - 1.79%

• Discover our range - 1.28%

So the original text turned out to be the best. But it was more surprising to us that the "discover" variant scored so poorly. This one sounded the best to us and also indicates that there could be something surprising. But visitors don't like surprises, so they didn't click on it!

 

3. Texts on pages

In addition to the A/B tests, we want to improve a number of other things with Performance Based Marketing, including the content on websites. The idea is that more and better content ensures better findability in Google and therefore more visitors. 

But there is another advantage to this: more and better content also ensures that visitors stay longer on the website. And the longer they stay, the more likely they are to place an order!

In the graph above you see the dark blue line (the visit duration) and a light blue line (the conversion rate.

In the first period, both are high: a long visit duration leads to more conversions. But then the visit duration decreases and with it the conversion rate. At the end of the period, the visit duration increases and the conversion percentage also rise again.

Coincidence?

Nope, visitors who spend longer on a website simply convert better! That is why we try to improve the content on your website with Performance Based Marketing. As a result, visitors stay longer and convert better.

 

4. More visible with link building

Another factor of importance to us is the number of words with which a website was found in Google order. Usually, there is a focus on a limited number of words with which you optimize, but there is of course a lot of other content in a website.

The number of keywords with which you are found is a good indicator of whether the findability has indeed improved. There are several ways to measure this, but we focus on keywords with which we are in the top 25. We started in November 2019 for one of the garden centres that use Performance Based Marketing.

• In June of 2020, they were in the first 25 results in Google with 112 search terms. 

• A year later, June 2021, there were already 484, so an increase of 432%.

How did we do this? 

First of all, we expanded the content as explained in the third case above. But we have also significantly improved the link profile. The link profile is, in particular, the number of links from external websites that refer to this webshop:

• June 2020 - 252 links

• June 2021 - 396 links

These 140 extra links ensure that Google's appreciation for the webshop increases and therefore that we score well with many more keywords.

Keep in mind that not all links necessarily help: you have to be very careful about which links you place to prevent your efforts from being fruitless. So don't just buy links anywhere, because the chance that you waste money is quite high.

 

What will you improve?

You have now read four cases of how we improve garden centre websites and webshops. But what do you want to improve now?

You can apply our tips and tricks yourself, but you can also save yourself time, effort and frustration by giving us a call. We are happy to help you!