One of the biggest challenges we face as web designers and UX experience designers, user experience and customer first designers, is, how do we guide the user once they land on your site. How do we guide the user through the site to experience your product, your service, your business in the most effective way. One of those tools that we use on a lot of pages and especially the home page is what we call a call to action so you’ll hear it a lot is the CTA. What’s the CTA of a particular site on a particular page I should say.
Let me just to quickly explain what CTAs are, I’ve already pretty prepared a few little sketches here so let’s let’s have
a look. So, when we land on a web site so this is same desktop version of the site when we land on a site there’s a few things that appear in the page quite often you’ll see big banners here you know sliders that rotate every couple of seconds the logo there’s a menu structure of this content in the page but usually there’s a one button there’s a button that’s asking the user to do something and that’s the call to action. What do you want me to do in that first few seconds to guide the user to the most important component of the site that might be a product it might be an article your latest blog it might be a download of some content. Could be any number of things that you want the user to you to do but the key point the key takeaway about all this is that you don’t ask multiple things on the site so you don’t want to confuse the user you want to put one or two at the max elements in the site that are going to get the user to do something like or hopefully get the user to do something you want them to stay on the site what you want them to do on the site.
So, in this case we have our sliding banner our slideshow and a button here that stands out in the content that is like learn more find out more read more download discover whatever those keywords are that you would like to lead the user into the section.
So there’s other key parts of the page that may actually contain the Call To Action. One is this top corner up here so this might be actually a phone number so it’s instead of doubling up here you just want people to call in fact I had a colleague recently tell me just by adding a phone number to the headline the header of their site increase their inquiry by 15% so in some businesses you just want people to call. I’d like the phone to ring, wouldn’t you as a business owner so it makes it really important to where those things are placed to make it convenient to the user nice user flow remember so this can be difficult to translate as in these long scrolling pages now very you know the the latest design trend you might be halfway down the page in there might be want to find out more about this particular project you know download our FAQ sheet or speak to a consultant or call a consultant so there might be like a line part in the page that is also a call to action as you scroll through just to remind the user or what you actually want them to do each of those is there’s no right or wrong here it’s about testing that experience and creating experience that you’re comfortable with so where it can get tricky is how this translates to mobile.
So over here I’ve done a quick little snapshot of what this may possibly be on a mobile site so you may not have room for a big slide some text and a big button here you may not want to do that you may just want a positioning statement here so a little bit of text and your call to action is still above the fold line so phone line is that imaginary line of scroll on your desktop that might be about here on a mobile you know that’s the end of your screen you can’t see anymore but you actually want people to scroll so it’s important that your call-to-action actually is above the fold visible on the page you don’t want this image to fall down the page and you can’t see anything on here so you may need to ditch the phone number directly here but have an icon for a phone that’s a click to call. So there’s a couple of different ways you can modify these pages to suit how they work between devices. Other businesses just really want that phone number in the page visible if they can’t click to call and they can always see that number you know a lot of tradies on their mobiles all day and a constantly you know they’ll go to the website to find the phone number you don’t want them to click through necessarily to the contact us page let’s just display that number in the header to make it make it easy everyone.
So a really good call-to-action are ones that are clear – you’re not confusing the user with multiple options you’re just asking them to find value further in your site and lead them down a path in Google Analytics you can look at behavioral flow in one of the options and it shows you how the users move through your site so like hit your landing your homepage and then move to those sub pages they may do it through your navigation but they also made it from your calls to action and how effective your calls to action are you can really judge that from that Analytics so connect in your Calls To Action with goals in your analytics and see if they’re working for you.
