Finding The Right Calls-To-Action For Your B2B Website

Marketers continue to search for ways to convert more website visitors into actual leads. Using the power of website analytics can help make that search a little easier. By understanding the type of information your prospects are looking for, you can create unique Calls-To-Action specific to their needs.

Let’s walk through an example of using web analytics data to identify important topics, helping to create valuable assets in exchange for your prospects’ contact information. By knowing the right assets to offer, this will help convert more website visitors into qualified leads.

How To Identify The “Right” Calls-To-Action

Your website analytics data, if setup properly, can be very revealing. Just by looking at a few reports, you can identify what types of information your prospects are interested in. Most often, your homepage may be your most visited page, but where do visitors go next? Do a good portion of visitors click on your “About Us” page to learn more about your company, or do they click on a “Solutions/Services” page to understand more about your offerings?

Here are two important web analytics reports I recommend focusing on:

1. Top Content/Pages

These reports show the most visited pages on your website, which gives insight into the topics your visitors and prospects find important.

For this example, let’s say your “Solutions” page is the 2nd most visited page on your site.

Once a visitor is on your Solutions page, where do they go next? What additional information are they trying to gather? That’s where the next report comes in…

2. Navigation Summary (or) Click Path Analysis

Many analytics packages, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends, and Omniture, have Navigation or Click Path Reports that show which pages visitors came from – and which pages they visited next.

Understanding the “next pages” is extremely helpful in identifying topics important to your visitors…what do they want to know more about? Once you know which topics are important, you can then create or gather related marketing assets.

If your “Solutions” page is the 2nd most visited page on your site, look at the Navigation Summary to determine which page most visitors clicked on next.

Example: Navigation Summary report from Google Analytics.

(To access this within your own account, click on Content > Navigation Summary).

In this example, many visitors came from the “Home Page” (/) – visited the “Solutions” page – then went to the “Solution-2” page.

This would tell us that the product or service provided on /Solution-2 is a topic they want to know more about. So, gather or create a marketing asset related to /Solution-2 (like a white paper) that you can offer as a download in exchange for your visitors’ contact information.

Where To Test The Calls-To-Action

Now that you know your Call-To-Action should be “Download the Free Solution-2 White Paper”, next it’s time to decide which pages to include this Call-To-Action.

Go back to that same Navigation Summary report, and now look at the /Solution-2 page. Identify the page(s) visited immediately before this page.

If visitors mostly came from your Home Page (/), and your main Solutions page (/Solutions), then add a Call-To-Action on those pages to “Download the Free Solution-2 White Paper”.

When a visitor clicks on the Call-To-Action, you request contact information (Name, Company, Email, and Phone) in exchange for the white paper.

Since it’s a valuable topic that many visitors want to know more about, they are likely to give you their contact information in exchange for the white paper.

You now have converted a website visitor into a qualified lead that can be added to your database or CRM and your sales team can follow-up with them by email or phone.

Additional Testing Ideas

I recommend continually testing various Calls-To-Action. If the white paper isn’t working, try hosting a webinar on the topic, or even offering a short video. Look at the Navigation Summary report for at least your top 10 pages and determine various hot topics you can create marketing assets around. By engaging your visitors in various ways, you’ll identify the types of Calls-To-Action that work best for your audience.

One other important thing to note, it is critical that you conduct at least monthly or quarterly reviews of your web analytics data, ensuring the code is intact and that you’re tracking the right information. If your analytics are not setup properly, your data will be inaccurate and you’ll be making decisions off of false information.