How to fix website CTAs

Website calls to action (CTA’s) commonly fail in three ways, but there are also easy solutions.

What is a call to action (CTA)?

This can be any form of action that you want people to take when on pages within your website.

Most commonly this could be a contact form, demo request area, or a click off to another page.

It can also be pop-ups that are timed to appear after a certain time or actions are taken within the website (e.g. someone scrolling down the page triggers a box to appear).

The three ways that calls to action fail

Too soon CTA

A CTA that happens too fast is typically:

  1. A part of the page that encourages action too early.   For example, an enquiry form high on the page before someone has had a chance to understand more about what’s on offer.
  2. A pop-up that appears too fast.  For example, someone who has been on a page for a few seconds and a pop-up appears before any trust has been built.

In both cases, the website visitor hasn’t had enough time to absorb what’s on the page and build up enough trust to want to take any action.

It’s no different to you going on a date, meeting the person, and quickly asking them to go back to your place before any sort of rapport has been built.

Solutions:

  1. Delay the timing on any pop-ups appearing, closely monitoring CTA response rates and adjusting until you get the optimum rate of clicks.
  2. Move some CTAs further down the page so that people don’t think you’re trying to sell to them before they’ve had a chance to investigate what you offer.  Again, you can monitor the CTA response rates from those calls to action that you move down to different positions of the page.

 

Too many CTAs

This is where people think that more is better, but the website visitor becomes overwhelmed.

For example: a pop-up that appears, then a slide in, then something else.

It can also be the same CTA that’s persistently in people’s faces, which feels too salesy.

Solution:

Choose one (maybe two) CTAs for your page and turn off the rest.

 

Too plain CTA

This is the other end of the scale – CTAs that are practically invisible because they blend into the rest of the website page, which means people don’t take the action.

Solution:

Find the colour palette of your website page and then make the CTA so that it’s in a contrasting, but associated colour that isn’t on the rest of the page.   This will ensure your CTA stands out without being garish.

 

15 minute CTA audit

See from 2 minutes 39 seconds into the video below, which takes you through this easy method to audit your website pages calls to action:

  1. Use your website analytics tool to find your top three most visited pages.
  2. Review the CTAs on those pages to see whether they fit into any of these ‘Too’ categories:
    1. Too soon
    2. Too many
    3. Too plain
  3. Apply the suggested fixes if the CTAs do fall into any of the ‘Too’ categories.
  4. Document the date and changes made so that you can measure against them in the future.