Calls-To-Action Demystified

When building websites, someone may ask, “What’s your call-to-action?” So, what are they, and more importantly, why are they important to your website?

What Is a Call-To-Action?

Simply put, a call-to-action is what you are asking a user to do on a webpage. This “ask” can come in many different forms. Typically for webpages calls-to-action are buttons, links, forms, and content. But at the base level, a call to action is any way you want your users to interactive with your webpage.

Best Practices

Don’t put too many calls-to-action on any given page. Think of any web page you’ve visited that gave you a feeling of overload. Often that’s because a web page is asking too much of you. Instead choose one thing you want the user to do and focus your efforts there. So, if you’d like a user to sign up for a newsletter, don’t also ask the user to buy products, follow you on social media, complete a survey, and read an essay.

Don’t make the ask too soon. We’ve all been to web pages where a form drops in on us before the page even finishes loading. You’ll never get someone to fill out a form if they don’t even know why they are filling it out. Same with buttons, don’t label a button “Click This!” Let the user know what happens if they click the button with labels like “Download PDF” or “Add To Cart.” Let the user be in control of when they choose to engage with your web page.

Are Your Calls-To-Action Working?

Great question! First you should have Google Analytics set up on your site to track traffic. Once done, you can have Analytics track certain events on your site. Events are any interactions your user has with the site. These are things like clicks, scrolls, submissions…pretty much anything involved with calls-to-action. However, event tracking is not turned on by default. With Analytics you’ll need to add a bit of javascript to your site to tell Google what events you’d like to track. But once that tracking kicks in, you will be armed with valuable data to determine if your calls-to-action are working like you’d intended. And if they aren’t, try making some changes or running some split tests.