Since 1960, Discount Tire has stayed true to its goal: “to provide unexpected experiences that delight our customers and keep them coming back for more.” How do they do it? By providing great prices on quality tires.
Just like any booming business, Discount Tire has a blog especially for consumers to learn more about tires, wheels and auto accessories. Could one simple change to Discount Tire’s calls to action (CTAs) improve blog conversions? We could test that.
The Opportunity: Readers May Completely Ignore Ads Inside or After Blog Posts
Currently, many of Discount Tire’s blog posts include red button CTAs throughout the post. Many consumers understand these CTAs to be sales tools, which can discourage conversions. Readers often overlook or ignore ads inside or at the end of blog posts, which can pose a significant loss in revenue opportunity for the business.
The Control
Our Hypothesis: Adding Anchor Text CTAs Will Increase Conversions
According to Orbit Media, 52% of bloggers say it’s getting harder to engage with readers through their content. While business-to-consumer blogging continues to grow year after year, businesses still struggle with attracting visitors and creating a consistent flow of visual content that converts them into customers.
Anchor text CTAs might be able to help. According to Spiralytics, anchor text or inline CTAs can boost conversion rates by up to 121%. Pamela Vaughan, the principal marketing manager on Hubspot’s optimization team stated:
“In every single post we tracked, the anchor text CTA was responsible for the largest percentage of that post’s leads (by far). In fact, between 47% and 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone.”
Anchor text CTAs serve two key purposes for businesses that want to increase traffic and conversions:
- When linked to relevant text such as important keywords, these CTAs tell readers what they can expect before clicking. This means they can point readers to what they’re looking for before they need to scroll or before they leave the page.
- These CTAs tell Google algorithms what the internal content is about. Google uses anchor choices to understand what topics are linked to inside the copy.
The Potential Fix: Add Inline CTAs Right Into the Blog Post Copy
Why do these CTAs work? Anchor text CTAs don’t look like a typical CTA. Plus, they’re relevant to blog content by being inside the copy. We would start our test by adding an inline CTA early on in the blog posts for Discount Tire.
We hypothesize this change would decrease bounce rate, increase onsite traffic and boost conversion rates.
The Variation
What Can Cro Metrics Test for You?
Something as simple as an inline CTA could change your business. You just have to test to find what you’re missing. We can help. To learn more about our experimentation and optimization programs, send us a message.