Category: Optimisations

Conversion rate optimization looks to increase the chance of website traffic (leads) engaging in an action on your website. This is most often submitting a web form, making a purchase, signing up to a newsletter, etc. In practice, businesses are able to get a higher percentage of their traffic, paid and organic, to convert. Tactics such as AB testing and heat mapping give the business an look into how traffic behave on their site and allow for better decisions on layout and website offerings.

A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a “goal”. Goals can be anything from invoking a button click to submitting a form or making a purchase and are created based on each businesses focus.

Depending on the targeted audience, there are several ways to increase conversion rates. If the business runs PPC marketing through Google AdWords, we can target a specific demographic of incoming traffic, based on the keywords of the campaign that were clicked and serve a message or offering that best resonates with that audience.

Another form of conversion rate optimisation are landing pages, which are a great way to serve a simple and enticing user engagement for your PPC traffic. Optimising the ‘above the fold‘ content to urge visitors to sign up or click a button that will ultimately send them down a sales funnel.

These pages are normally targeting one service or area of services and consist of a signup form and brief but important information about what the user will receive.

In the early days of publishing, ‘above the fold’ was a term used for content that appeared on the top half of the front page of a newspaper. When newspapers were displayed on a newsstand, the headlines and lead stories that appeared above the fold were the most visible, and catchy headlines and vivid imagery were commonly used to attract readers’ attention, convincing them to buy the paper.

As publishers moved their businesses online and web design evolved in the 1990’s, the term continued to stick. Today, the fold no longer refers to an actual fold in a newspaper, but the bottom of a browser window, or approximately 600 pixels from the top of the page.

Why Is Above the Fold Important?

Content layout and placement is important because content that appears above the fold is what is first visible when the user loads the page. It is the prime real estate that gets most of the attention from users.

Because of its high visibility, the content that you place above the fold should be the content that is most important to achieving your business goals. The content should immediately grab the user’s attention and present them with the content that they are looking for so that they don’t bounce and visit another site.

When it comes to advertising, placing ads above the fold improves their visibility and generates more ad revenue than ads that are placed in less visible locations.

How Is Above the Fold Measured?

It is impossible to define a single fold placement for a website.

The precise location of the fold differs because of the variety of monitor sizes (both desktops and laptops), screen resolutions, browser plugins, and sizes of various phones and tablets.

When determining an average fold placement, most web designers agree that the fold line is at approximately 1,000 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall.

This is the best-case scenario for the most common monitor/browser combination of 1024×786 pixels, with the browser window maximized and are no installed toolbars at the top, pushing the content down.

Your website’s analytics program should be able to tell you which are the most common screen dimensions for your visitors. While 1024×768 has traditionally been the most common, new dimensions are rising in popularity, such as 320×568 and 360×640.

Considerations for Mobile

The increasing usage of mobile devices for web browsing further complicates the concept of optimizing web design for above the fold.

Mobile devices offer a large variety of screen sizes. In addition, users on phones generally browse in portrait mode rather than in landscape mode, turning the traditional page design sideways.

With so many people accessing web pages across such a variety of devices, current web design practices entail using responsive design: making use of flexible layouts, images and cascading style sheets. In responsive design, there is no fixed layout for a page, and content reflows to a screen of any size. Responsive web pages react or “respond” to the environment in which they are consumed or browsed.

While the important content still needs to be higher on the page, nowadays, the pages should be designed to entice users to scroll so that they don’t miss important content.