2020 GatedContent.com Benchmark Report
Leveraging our insights and expertise for best practice web conversion
Marketing Performance Insights
When it comes to making decisions based on marketing performance insights, access to your own data is critical. However, more data equals better decision making. GatedContent.com anonymize visitor data to gain insights into conversion behavior covering multiple industries and buyer personas to identify global trends in marketing performance data that will supercharge your decision making. This page is a summary of the analysis we undertook across the full spectrum of data we have available to us. Sectors ranging from manufacturing, technology, FinTech and business services. The data provides detailed insight into different aspects of marketing performance analysis from upwards of a million form submissions taken over the past 12 months. A quite note before you dive in, we talk mention two key metrics throughout, conversion rate and competition rate. Completion Rate compares the Form Starts to Form Submissions. Conversion Rate compares the Page Loads to Form Submissions.
What Can This Data be Used For?
According to Hubspot’s 2020 State of Marketing Report the top priority for marketers in 2020 is generating leads. The same report says 64% of marketers have increased budget to hit targets this year but also cited that customer acquisition costs have increased. Marketing performance insights are critical to helping marketers generate leads. These insights are designed to improve conversion rates without further investment. We’re not focusing on driving increased traffic or revising your content strategy, these insights are about improving conversion at the last 10%. It’s about the tweaks you can make once a user is on the page to the way you capture data to make prospects more likely to take the desired action.
The Data we Analysed
We've been crunching the numbers to find out what factors influence form conversions. Below you'll find a summary of our data analysis so far.
Progressive profiling
Did you know you can split your data collection strategy over several sessions? In this section we are finding out whether collecting relevant information gradually as opposed to all at once encourages engagement and conversion.
Time on Page
What impact does the user's time on a page have on form conversion? In this section we look at the window of opportunity you have to convert unknown web visitors into prospects.
Form Pre-population
Does pre-populating forms with prospect data make them more likely to convert? In this section we asses the impact of reducing friction for returning visitors.
Marketing Opt-in Checkboxes
How has GDPR impacted your conversion rate? We discuss the the differing levels of conversion and engagement when a marketing opt-in checkbox is shown or not.
Time of Day
Do your marketing campaigns line up with user activity? Based on all of the data we gathered we've identified optimum days and times of day for conversion.
Data Driven Insights For Web conversion Optimization
We've analysed the data from over 1 million form submissions to find out what factors influence web conversion. Dive in and see how you can boost your web form performance.
Progressive Profiling
We analysed three types of forms. Normal, progressive and multi-step. A normal form is a standard form asking for basic information. On a progressive form you might ask for just an email and the first name on the initial signup, then strategically request more data at intervals throughout a buyer’s journey. In the case of multi-step a long form is broken into multiple pieces and used to make longer forms less intimidating for the user. GatedContent.com data shows progressive profiling as by far the most successful in both completion rate and conversion rate. With a completion of almost 85% and a conversion rate of 20% this was a significant improvement against both alternative gates which had around 76% completion and 4% conversion rate. There are a number of other benefits of progressive profiling including creation of a better, more personalized experience; acceleration of the buyer’s journey and creation of better lead profiles.
Visitor Time on Page
Time on page has a significant impact on the number of form submissions. Submissions drop dramatically beyond during the first 100 seconds on a page. Your best chance of conversion is in the first 20 seconds. Making your call to action clear, and either above the fold or a pop up within the first 20 seconds of a user landing on the page will increase the likelihood of submission. However, it’s not just about the time a user spends on a page that will impact submission and conversions rates. Analyzing user behaviour is critical to understanding where users gravitate to on a page; where clicks result from and at what point and page users commonly exit. Using platforms like Hotjar or Heatmap will allow you to analyze real-time user behaviour on your site, and Google Analytics will help you drill down into behavior flow and exit patterns. This data, combined with GatedContent.com’s analysis on form submissions will significantly impact your overall conversion rate.
Form Pre-population
Unsurprisingly when a form is pre-populated with prospect data results in an almost 91% completion rate and a 23% conversion rate when compared to 69% completion and 3% conversion when not pre-populated. Of course pre-population is still reliant on you having the prospect data in the first place, but if you have the option it’s well worth doing.
Marketing Opt-in Checkboxes
When a form opt-in is shown there is a 14% increase in conversion and a 19% increase in completion rate. Opt-in and privacy laws differ from country to country, but even if not required by legislation it’s still advisable to include opt-in to ensure you have explicit prior permission from the prospect to use their data. A healthy data economy is critical to maximize marketing performance, and in order to build a healthy data economy brands need to be transparent about data use and consumers will respond positively by sharing their data. This argument is further bolstered by the stats, suggesting not including opt-in is detrimental to conversion rates.
Time of Day
According to our data, Thursday’s have a higher conversion rate (15%) and an completion rate (80%) than any other day. All other days of the work week are very similar to each other with an average conversion rate of 13.2% and an average completion rate of 78.5%. Weekends see a significant drop to 8% conversion rate and 70% completion. In terms of optimum time of day 10am sees the highest number of submissions, with that number gradually decreasing through till 3pm with a sharp drop off beyond that.
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This guide offers a lot of data and trends to consider. Using data to optimize marketing performance is critical as we know, but to test all of your own data, plus what we’ve advised in this guide is time consuming. However, there are tools and tech to support you through each step. In our digital era, much of data collection; analysis and testing relies on automation and support tools like GatedContent.com. Our site offers tons of resources to help you plan your strategy. Get in touch to discuss ways we can help you better, and more quickly utilize your data to optimize marketing performance.
By analyzing your current web conversion rates and optimization practices, we can estimate the projected uplift in leads you can expect from working with GatedContent.com.