Get your CTAs right

Five tips to help you boost your online conversions

Conversions from a webpage are influenced by many things, from user experience design to the quality and amount of content.

One aspect that’s easy to get right, yet is often done wrong, is the call to action (CTA). Use these tips to get yours right every time.

Remember it’s a button. Web users expect CTAs to look like buttons on a screen. Don’t play around with them for the sake of being creative – you’ll only damage your data capture. Feel free to tweak their formatting, so long as you don’t negatively impact your clicks.


You can't miss this button on the Netflix homepage.

Make them stand out. It may sound obvious but CTAs are meant to attract attention. Give them a splash of colour that contrasts with your webpage – or, if you’re worried about breaking with your brand style guidelines, put them on a blank space to boost their prominence. You might want to check out this infographic to see which colour best suits your needs.

Use snappy content. Keep your content instructional, urgent and short. Using verbs conveys a sense of action while adding a sense of urgency encourages users to interact. There’s no rule on CTA length but shorter ones generally do better, with three to five words being the sweet spot. Check out this post for a breakdown of some words you may want to use.

Two words - "Download now" - is all it takes to instruct the user about the point of action in this example from Cranfield School of Management.

Place them logically. In western cultures, our eyes move left to right, up to down when reading – so it's no surprise that CTAs beneath, or to the right of, content usually perform better. Place them after you've led your customer to a point of action. Avoid overcrowding the page and placing competing CTAs side-by-side.

Test them. It’s easy to carry out A/B tests with CTA buttons, where a small tweak could make a huge difference – here's an example of how simply changing one word boosted click-throughs by 90%. Experiment with things like content, colour, shape, size and position to find out the best type of CTA for you. Analyse the data and tailor your content accordingly.

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