SmartBug Media™ grows client conversion rates by 80% with Lucky Orange

You could say that SmartBug Media™ knows a thing (or 400) about inbound marketing.

As a HubSpot Diamond Agency partner and the highest-rated inbound marketing agency in the world, SmartBug made a name for itself as the go-to Intelligent Inbound marketing agency, trusted by clients to drive real, measurable results.

With clients ranging from B2B technology/service companies to senior living communities, SmartBug’s team leverages its expertise and the latest technology to help clients achieve their goals.

However, even with hundreds of five-star reviews left by clients on HubSpot, SmartBug knows the pressure is on to keep clients happy and results pouring in. Doing that isn’t easy when outdated technology holds you back.

A data disadvantage

Even though SmartBug and its clients turn to data to help drive their projects, the team sought to answer two major questions to make better conversion decisions:

• What were visitors doing on clients’ websites? It wasn’t enough to know bounce rates or time on site; the team wanted to dive into details such as where visitors clicked (or not) and whether the content was unclear.

• Put an end to the time spent managing data updates and reports: With static heatmaps, it took hours of extra work for the team to update reports each time a webpage was changed or added.

Juli Durante, SmartBug’s marketing strategist and team leader, knew there had to be a better option.

SmartBug looked for a solution that would:

• Allow for on-the-fly changes and reporting

• Segment data for specific campaigns, personas, and visitors

• Analyze visitor paths, scrolling habits, and reading habits

• Track where visitors go once they land on a website

Although other tools on the market could meet just a few of these qualifications, Lucky Orange provided the technology and accuracy that SmartBug and its clients needed. Not only did Lucky Orange automatically address all of SmartBug’s needs, but it also added new features such as dynamic heatmaps, segmentation capabilities, a HubSpot integration, form analytics, and conversion funnels.

As Juli’s team and SmartBug’s clients quickly discovered, Lucky Orange’s heatmaps could drive changes that would make serious impacts on their clients’ bottom lines:

• Updating a contact page led to 101% increase in submission rate

• Introducing related offers on thank you pages decreased an exit rate by 8%

• Updating a media gallery design and adding a new conversion opportunity decreased bounce rates for a client by 11%

A game-changer

Almost immediately, Lucky Orange became a favorite tool for Juli’s team and clients alike.

“When establishing new client relationships and building initial strategies, the reporting and insights we can gain with Lucky Orange is a game-changer,” Juli said.

A deeper, interactive look into visitor behavior

Although the inbound methodology focuses on attracting more visitors, Lucky Orange could go further than other CRO tools to show exactly where visitors go on a website.

The team could answer questions like:

• Do they immediately click a login button, indicating most traffic is existing customers?

• Are they clicking on an above-the-fold call to action?

• Are visitors seeing the conversion opportunities we want them to click on?

• What are the top landing pages, and where do visitors go from there?

• What links in the navigation were clicked most, and how can the client get people to those links/webpages easier?

• Are visitors clicking on elements that aren’t linked?

• How do people respond to images?

With the answers in hand, Juli’s team could build a comprehensive gap analysis to drive intelligent strategies that could produce qualitative and quantitative results.

“When we watch recordings in Lucky Orange, we can see what people are reading more than once, what isn’t clear, what they’re clicking through to and, perhaps most importantly, what they’re not clicking,” Juli said. “We can easily identify if, for example, we’re offering a related content piece that isn’t as related to our visitors as we think it is and then create a new piece in its place.”

From a conversion standpoint, Juli explained:

“We can see on website pages where people are just scrolling through and not finding what they’re looking for, whether that’s product- or service-specific information or a premium content offer to download for more educational background—and [we can] add that in where it makes sense. If we look at scroll rates and see a big drop-off from one portion of the page to another, that’s an indicator we either have a really strong call to action on the page (which is a good thing!) or we need to add some content or a call to action to get people where they need to be.”

Less time spent updating and gathering heatmap data

Although Lucky Orange provides actionable results through deeper insight into visitor behavior, Lucky Orange has also made a huge impact on how much time it takes for SmartBug to update analytics reporting and data.

Using other heatmapping tools, Juli’s team had to rerun heatmap experiments every time a webpage was created or updated. It took time to set up the new experiments and then wait—as much as a month, in some cases—just to see the results.

With Lucky Orange’s heatmap, new or updated websites were automatically available without any setup or time constraints. As a result, the SmartBug team saved several hours each month updating heatmap experiments and made it possible for changes to be made in real time.

The HubSpot advantage

Though SmartBug wasn’t actively looking for a reporting tool that integrated with HubSpot, Lucky Orange’s HubSpot integration easily became a client favorite.

When clients are introduced to Lucky Orange’s HubSpot integration, it’s not uncommon for the SmartBug team to hear, “Oh, wow!” or, “We can look at just the traffic from paid?!”

Needless to say, SmartBug loves to incorporate Lucky Orange’s integration for those clients that use HubSpot.

“On the back end, this integration gives us the opportunity to segment visitor tracking based on specific client needs and design very specific experiments and collect the right data,” Juli said. “For example, we may want to look at a segment of contacts at an SQL lifecycle stage and see what actions they take from the homepage, and make improvements to move them to an opportunity stage more efficiently.”

Clients especially love the Lucky Orange integration to look at contact-based visitor recordings to see what happened during a specific visit.

“This depth of information is exceptionally helpful for marketers and reps,” Juli said.

Results speak for themselves

As the team loaded Lucky Orange on more client websites, the information gained from Lucky Orange’s data produced results by:

1. Improving clients’ user interface/user experience

To call tests conclusive, SmartBug looks for them to be statistically significant. Juli’s team looks for a 95 percent confidence rate determined by an A/B test calculator.

Juli said, “We’re not afraid to test the big things—you can tweak tiny things like button colors for weeks on end, but sometimes you have a much bigger hypothesis than a color or form location. Sometimes, you may need to see if radically changing an entire page layout will result in radically improved results. If you do that brick by brick, it might take a year to get to that radically different page. Who has that kind of time?”

Whether it’s for a tweak or a major redesign, Lucky Orange is there to drive the update process and validate the results.

For one of SmartBug’s clients, Juli and her team looked at a person’s journey from homepage to an individual location page. For most localized businesses, such as this particular client, most sales qualified leads (SQL) happen on an individual location page, rather than a corporate website.

People visiting the client’s website had to make four clicks to make it to a localized community page. SmartBug found that most of the traffic dropped off after just a few clicks and analyzed the visitors’ paths using the following Lucky Orange technologies:

• Session recordings to watch how real users journeyed through the website and interacted with on-page elements

• Click heatmaps to identify if people were clicking where the client and SmartBug team thought they should be clicking and where they clicked instead

• Scroll heatmaps to see if the client’s key call to action was even being seen or if most people weren’t scrolling far enough on the page to see it

After watching and analyzing the results, Juli’s team recommended a new path that removed the second step of the navigation process. As a result, the client saw 82 percent more sessions ending up on the community page where they had the greatest likelihood of becoming SQLs.

This client’s success wasn’t an anomaly. With Lucky Orange technology and SmartBug’s expertise, Juli’s team regularly sees an 80 percent or more lift in conversion rates with conclusive tests.

2. Empowering clients to love data

SmartBug’s clients are no strangers to traditional analytics, but Lucky Orange is a different world of data.

“Most clients like to geek out with us over their website user data, which is something they haven’t seen much of before. It’s exciting to see them get excited about this information,” Juli explained.

Especially when it comes to the Lucky Orange HubSpot integration, it’s not unusual for a visitor to say things like, “Oh wow!” “This is so cool!” and, “We can look at just the traffic from paid advertising?”

3. Making smarter decisions

For SmartBug, life without Lucky Orange was frustrating.

“Before Lucky Orange, we spent a lot of time cobbling together the ‘story’ of web visitors for a client,” Juli said. “We may have a static heatmap, [but] we weren’t able to see if a hot spot was a CTA button or a menu dropdown. It was clunky—we created a new heatmap for every page, every experiment, every time.”

Lucky Orange helped SmartBug make a huge difference.

Juli added, “With Lucky Orange, we’re able to create dynamic heatmaps that help us get much more specific when we design experiments, which increases our chances of positive outcomes that improve conversion rates through the visitor funnel.”

Conclusion

It took SmartBug just a few days to realize Lucky Orange was the perfect addition to its tech stack.

“I find time and time again that the more Lucky Orange features I share with clients and team members, the more excited everyone is about what we can see—and what we can do with that information,” Juli explained.

“Particularly when we are viewing visitor information via the Lucky Orange/HubSpot integration, I see so many ‘aha moments’ that lead to actionable tests and improved results. … Having used several different visitor tracking solutions, I’m confident that my team is armed with the best data and overall experience today.”