

Why you Should Bury your Sign Up Button - jsavimbi
http://bokardo.com/archives/why-you-should-bury-your-sign-up-button/

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wccrawford
He's right. We don't care yet. If we did, we'd have searched for the signup
form and used it. Pushing it in front our our faces does not help.

But you know what's even better? Let them try it without signing up, but make
it easy to sign up (but not annoying!) while they try it.

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rglover
Good point, that's why I love this: <http://chartbeat.com/demo/>

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iseff
That's a really nice feature, though it's surprisingly hard to find on their
site. I wonder why they prefer to promote their Tour rather than the Live Demo
(found via a small link in a list on the right rail of the Tour page).

Would be interesting if a Live Demo doesn't convert nearly as well as a Tour.

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maxmcd
The tittle is a little sensationalist. This article should be about correctly
informing and selling the product to the consumer. The conclusion should
really be "don't think too much about the button" not "bury the button". If
your single splash page really informs and sells me an obvious button is going
to help. Nothing obnoxious, but there is nothing more infuriating than finding
a product I like, and having difficult accessing, or signing up for it.

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rglover
Agreed. I recall situations where I wanted to buy a product in the past and
due to a lack of an obvious sign-up/purchase button, I left the site and
forgot about it all together. Honestly, my favorite type of CTA button is one
that follows me down the page. What I mean by that is that there's an obvious
button at the top, but then inline with the content that explains the product
(usually inline with the headline for that section's content) there's a button
to sign up as well. No need to outright hide it, though.

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adambarber
Looks like the site is down. Here's the google cache -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bokardo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bokardo.com/archives/why-
you-should-bury-your-sign-up-
button/&hl=en&biw=1146&bih=1279&site=webhp&strip=1)

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bokardo
Sorry about that...

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edash
Conversion rate is so much more than design:

Where are their website visitors coming from?

What is the messaging that got them there?

What are they trying to accomplish?

Does this product or service solve their problem?

Burying the sign-up button is an extremely simplistic hypothesis for a low
conversion rate.

~~~
badclient
Yeah, I like to actually picture a any online transaction from retail store
perspective where you have people coming in. If you have a retail store and
say "Everything Free Inside" on your door, sure you may get lots of foot
traffic but almost no sales and lots of pissed off people.

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powertower
Sometimes you have to engage the visitor before showing a sign-up/buy button.
Otherwise they expect something free, see a price, and just leave.

My conversions dropped (something like 30%-50%) when I placed the buy button
above the folder vs. at the very bottom of the page.

<http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper>

It's perfectly reasonable to me now, but before I would have never guessed
that "below the fold" was better than "above the fold" in some circumstances,
considering the first one is the golden rule of conversions.

"Don't assume, and try different and contrasting things" should really be that
rule.

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perucoder
Am I the only one who thinks perhaps his expectations were too high. I'd be
extremely happy if the redesign I'm working on increased the conversion rate
by 20%. How is that failure?

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CapitalistCartr
He was starting from extremely low numbers. " . . . the rate itself was so low
to have very little effect on the company’s bottom line." 20% of a half of a
percent still sucks, for instance.

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perucoder
right, but wouldn't low numbers to begin with indicate problems beyond just
the website? What's the metric then? If the site is generating 100k a year and
you bump conversions by 10% is that success? If the site is only generating
10k per year, then does conversion need to go up 50% to be considered
successful?

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bokardo
Sorry for the site being down folks...my wordpress install is leaking serious
memory somewhere and I'm restarting it every five minutes...

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dclaysmith
The name of the article should be "Why you should explain what your service
does". The problem isn't that we are prematurely given a sign up button--it's
that they haven't convinced the visitor that they should click it.

You should be able to make a compelling case for your product in a single page
AND provide them with a clear call to action.

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badclient
You really mean "Why you should explain what your service does _persuasively_
", right?

Almost all pages have _some_ explanation of the service. But there's a huge
difference between an explanation and a compelling explanation as you point
out.

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nbashaw
It's nice that he followed his own advice. None of us knew we were reading a
sales letter for his new book until the end of the blog post!

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wnight
Yeah. Wonderful. Nothing says loving like a teaser of info and a "Buy The
Rest" button.

And I'm sure whoever wrote the article has spent time reading free
documentation, using free languages, free community specs, etc.

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jsavimbi
And he's also spent a lot of time and effort freely disseminating a lot of
good information and sharing techniques based on years of fieldwork and
analysis. Look him up some time.

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jsavimbi
> Let them try it without signing up

Couldn't agree more. Just yesterday I went through the exercise with a
stealthy music discovery service and I paced well through the required sign-up
but was then floored by the lack of usefulness that the product actually has.

