When I'm on a typical product landing page, I instinctively avoid clicking any obvious call to action item, especially something like "Get Started".
Does anyone else do this? Do you often get to a landing page and feel like you can't figure out what to do next, because the idea of clicking "get started" honestly doesn't occur to you?
> People make fun of me. I’ve been saying this stuff about A/B testing and whatnot for years. I make buttons bigger and it almost always works better. One of the English as a second language folks in one of my forums was talking one day and he’s like, “I know Patrick loves his big, orange, pancake buttons.” Big, orange, pancake button is my keyword for this now because big, orange, pancake buttons really effing work. Go ahead.
There is a lot of psychology that goes into the wording of buttons, and while you may tell yourself "oh that would never work for me", the truth is that subconsciously it probably does work and you just don't realize it sometimes.
I have always found these two articles informative (actually the whole CopyHackers site is a pretty good resource in general):
http://copyhackers.com/2012/11/how-to-find-and-eliminate-fri...
http://copyhackers.com/optimize-your-business-online-trainin...
When that little nag element popped up in the bottom corner, I couldn't read the rest of the article. I stopped reading to try to remove it, but I couldn't. It was then really distracting, so I gave up just closed the tab.
Copyhackers must be A/B testing their site to death...So the percentage of people who have a similar reaction must be pretty small.
Every time I test a more prominent and specific button, it wins in terms of clicks or signups. So an indirect answer to your question is: "It usually works."
Does it win in terms of better customers? Not always. Which is why it's important to measure beyond just clicks.
> Does anyone else do this? Do you often get to a landing page and feel like you can't figure out what to do next, because the idea of clicking "get started" honestly doesn't occur to you?
If you're the target audience and you're hesitant to click "Get Started," then the landing page failed.
This is why I do usability tests in which I watch participants interact with a page and tell me what confuses them. You won't know those things from quantitative metrics.
When I see "Get started" I usually think "sign up" so it's not going to be the first thing I click.
But everyone puts the conversion button first...so maybe my intuition about what works for me is wrong. Or maybe I'm just weird.
Dave Johnson, President of Working Software told me the reason that so many advertisements say "BUY NOW! DON'T DELAY" is "because it works".
"Ask my mother why she likes advertising." -- Karen Salzman
"Why do you like advertising?" -- Me
"It tells me what to buy."
For me, just about the most effective call to action I've ever seen is a developer blog linked from here at HN. At the end of each article it said "Read This Next" then linked another technical article.
I read every article on that guy's site.
I find it helpful that someone notes the "Reading Time" at the top of each of his developer blogs; I plan to add that.
Because if so, I had a very similar experience. I also find material that has a lot of interesting in-text self-links will suck me in, ala TV Tropes, Wikipedia, etc.