What is a good website CTA click-through rate?
All marketers are inundated with data. We’re looking at dashboards and reports almost daily. But deep down we all know the goal isn’t to create the reports, review the dashboards or share the results in a presentation, but to uncover insights and drive recommended changes to improve performance.
Unfortunately, that last part is the unicorn of marketing, rarely seen and even less often captured.
You’ll get tons of articles on how to improve your CTA click-through rate, but nothing on what a benchmark for CTA click-through rate performance should look like.
How is that possible? All these marketing experts, marketing rock stars and marketing gurus, and no one knows a good click-through rate for your CTAs? It doesn’t seem possible.
But it’s not surprising when you consider what’s going on in the marketing world. Best practices, tips and general techniques are easy to write about but rarely provide massive lift. Looking at performance and finding insight to inform your upgrade plan and drive business results is hard. And that’s why no one ever writes about it.
Where To Find Insights And Recommendations
There is only one place to turn if you’re looking for the insights and recommendations buried in your data.
Experienced marketers who have worked with a wide variety of clients, delivered a wide variety of program tactics and spent over 10,000 hours looking at data are the only ones with the skill set to look at data, uncover insights and create an action plan with recommended upgrades.
Until now!
Here It Comes To Save The Day! MAXG Is On Its Way!
MAXG is designed specifically to address this issue. No more generic best practices, just insights and recommendations based on your data. We put MAXG on the CTA click-through rate challenge and in seconds here’s what it found.
MAXG looked at 618 different CTAs. This isn’t just three months’ worth of data, but years and years’ worth. Across all those CTAs, the average click-through rate was 3.53% and the average conversion rate from the landing pages was 43.1%.
MAXG also looked at the CTAs by stage. The team who built MAXG taught the artificial intelligence that supports it to look at everything in context to the buyer’s journey, specifically the Cyclonic Buyer’s Journey.
Early-stage CTAs converted at a higher than average rate of 4.4%, middle-stage CTAs converted slightly lower than average at 2.78%, and late-stage CTAs converted even lower than that, at 1.7%.
It’s not surprising to see the click-through rates go down as you look at CTAs further along the buyer journey. As the traditional funnel highlighted, more people are in early stages than in late stages.
Late-stage offers and their CTAs are also more challenging to create and optimize. These offers must be delivered by the sales team handing the calls, and the sales/marketing alignment also must be tight.
But all this data still fails to show us whether we’re performing well, just OK or poorly.
Find Out How You’re Doing Vs. Your Peers
MAXG has benchmark data to compare your performance and identify recommendations for improvement. For instance, let's look at the performance of my agency, Square 2. Business services, our industry, has a 2.9% CTA click-through rate, so our 3.53% outperforms that benchmark.
If you want to compare your performance across all industries, MAXG’s benchmark data shows a 1.34% CTA click-through rate. We’re outperforming that number at almost triple. Not bad.
But let’s remember the end game here: It’s not reporting, it’s insights and recommendations. So along with the benchmark data that lets you see how you’re doing against others in your industry, the big win is those insights and recommendations.
With MAXG crunching the numbers and providing recommendations on how to improve performance, we also looked at different types of CTAs: buttons, text and graphically designed image buttons.
Interestingly enough, our link CTAs converted at a much higher rate, 7.72%, but then failed to deliver the submission, turning only 26.8% of the visitors to the landing page into new leads. Our button CTAs converted at 2.65% and only turned those click into leads 16.9% of the time; they were by far the worst performing type for us.
Our image CTAs (graphically designed images used as CTA links) converted at a 2.96% rate, very close to our average, but drove the highest conversion, at a staggering 56.6%.
Once MAXG gets access to this data, its insights are going to look something like this:
Insight – Image-based CTAs are performing only slightly below average compared to all CTAS for conversion, but once visitors hit the landing page, image-based CTAs are turning visitors into leads at an above-average rate.
Recommendation – Consider swapping out link or button CTAs on high-traffic web pages with image CTAs.
Recommendation – Here are the high traffic web pages where you should consider using image-based CTAS. [The list of links would follow.]
Out of the 615 CTAs, which were the most successful? Which ones had the highest click-through rate? What pages were they on? Were they links, buttons or graphic images?
MAXG can let you know instantly which CTAs are performing the best, and also recommend what pages to consider adding those CTAs to. Those pages would have high traffic but also be highly contextual to that specific CTA.
Impact On The Big Picture
Keep your eye on the prize. It’s technically not about these small improvements. These have to add up and produce more leads, better leads, more sales opportunities, and sales ops that close, close quickly and close at a higher clip than currently.
Your lead generation effort will be much more effective when you can instantly identify pages that can be improved, CTAs that are outperforming benchmarks and landing pages that with just a tweak can double or even triple the number of leads.
All this insight is how you turn a marketing program that’s performing moderately into one that’s performing at extraordinary levels. While someone with over 10 years of analytical and tactical experience would probably uncover the same insights, MAXG does it in seconds.
Instead of waiting for months for a marketing program to produce, or even longer for it to sustain a positive up and to the right, now you can do it in weeks or in some cases even days. The results are going to be dramatic and you’re going to be the hero who figured out how to do what no one else has been able to do.
It’s the future of marketing and it's available today.
