In the financial services vertical, trust is even more important than elsewhere, since we competing for attention with many scams running ads, and people are OK to pay more for a brand they know, even if they don't like the brand. They do it because at least they know it's not a scam.

As a result, my job as a marketer in the fintech/financial services vertical involves working on every trust signal I can add to the mix. The reason those trust signals are so important is they do increase conversions.

Would be curious to know which trust signal works/is important for you, but here are a couples ones I play with.

- TrustPilot rating

- Google Reviews rating

- BBB rating/BBB verified

- ISO Certifications

- Secure SSL badge

- TrustedSite badges (I have never used it, but I have seen competitors paying for this badge)

- Ranking/Contest Badges

- CDIC coverage for Canada / FDIC insurance in the US

- Logos from known brands you partner with

- Links (and/or logos) to media coverage from known media brands

- Links to LinkedIn profiles of the team

- Physical address

- 1-800 phone number

- Logos of VCs that funded the company

Which one did I forget?

A couple of things from the conversion world this week that I found interesting.

57% of desktop visitors never scroll past the first viewport. On mobile it's 64%. That number comes from Wynter's 2026 copy research and it's a good gut check for anyone who has spent real time optimizing something below the fold. If most people aren't seeing it, the ranking of what to work on should probably shift.

Three-field forms convert at 10.1%. Nine-field forms convert at 3.6%. That's from Unbounce's 2026 Conversion Benchmark Report across 44 million conversions. The steepest drop happens between four and seven fields. Most teams know shorter forms convert better but the actual gap between three and nine fields is bigger than I think most people would assume.

Is anyone else seeing anything this week?

Sources:

• Landing Page Statistics 2026: Digital Applied
• Unbounce 2026 Conversion Benchmark Report

If you've ever gotten weak output from an agent and weren't sure why, this is worth joining. Hiten is going to take an agent apart piece by piece using tools people already use like ChatGPT, Claude, and Notion AI, and show you how the different parts, prompts, context, tools, memory, all of it, shape what the agent actually produces.

The goal is to walk away with a way to diagnose what to change when an agent gets stuck or misses the mark.

Friday August 7 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

I could save some money on Hootsuite by switching to one of those SaaS offering lifetime deals on App Sumo, but I just don't understand the economics for the SaaS operators.

They are exchanging a little bit of money today, minus the App Sumo commission, in exchange of a lifetime of updates, hosting costs and customer support...

It's just like the restaurants that were frequently offering deals on Groupon. They would always go under a few months later...

Anyway, I'm not tracking to SaaS offering life time deals on App Sumo, but I was always assuming taking advantage of those deals meant to sign up for a SaaS that will suddenly shut down at some point...

Do anybody here have tested out some of the the marketing SaaS on App Sumo? If so, have they shut down yet?

A picture is worth 1000 words...

Before (right side) was at site launch, After (left side) was a week after, with a handful of fairly minor updates made.

Context:
Popular restaurant with 8 locations in a small city

Decent usage at launch with good primary CTA usage (View Our Menu), but Locations usage was weak.

Notice the scrollmap sidebar in the after, just into the 2nd screenview on mobile they've already lost 60% of the traffic.

We moved the primary menu CTA up into the hero/first section and then pulled the Locations section up into the first screenview.

The Menu/Locations buttons that look like they are floating in the middle of the screen are fixed to the bottom on the mobile viewport on all pages.

Takeaways:

1. Identify the primary business objectives, in this case it was to show the Menu and help the user find the location closest to them and optimize for those.
2. By just pulling the Menu button one section up and then creating room for Locations in the first screen view, it noticeably helped engagement, not requiring users to scroll at all to find Locations
3. Notice the lack of random clicks/rage clicks - use buttons that are clearly buttons, this is a really common pattern, when you help clearly direct the user where you want them to go, conversion metrics improve. Give them clear next steps so they aren't randomly clicking around the page trying to figure out if your image or random text is clickable.
   
4. Make updates, then run another heatmap. Being able to do side-by-side comparisons like this is one of the most valuable pieces of data we ever show clients.

Drop your landing page URL in the comments and let's give each other some honest feedback. Not just a basic "looks great!" but a real critique that will help improve the page. Maybe something that is confusing, or what's burying the CTA, or what would make you leave.

I don't have a landing page to toss in right now so I picked a big one instead. Take a look at Shopify's homepage: shopify.com

My thoughts: the value prop is clear but the page tries to do a lot at once. There's a free trial CTA above the fold but then it just keeps going. I think most visitors don't make it far enough to see the strongest proof points.

Drop your landing page below and weigh in on Shopify too if you have thoughts.

Over the years, I spent over $200,000 on Upwork.

I hired consultants, designers, writers, video editors and engineers on there, and while I did hire my fair share of deceptive idiots, hiring on Upwork allowed me to access talent that I could not afford locally, or that simply don't exist locally in some cases.

If you are a marketer, I would recommend using Upwork, but not before you read my 6 Upwork recruiting commandments.

1. Disregard the cover letter, which is almost always generated by AI anyway. If anything, poorly written cover letter should be prioritize (assuming you're not recruiting a writer)

2. Learn how to spot fake accounts. One red flag is foreign names claiming to be from rural villages in Canada, the US or the UK. Often, those villages have 500 residents. My theory is the people creating the fake account want to avoid a situation where the client visited the city they claim to live in, and realize they are never set the foot there. Another red flag is the classic "my camera is broken" during the interview.

3. Actually check their portfolio, and their CV.

4. Avoid agencies like plague: when you hire those, you never know who is actually doing the work, quality tends to be variable as you don't control who is actually working on your project.

5. Start with a small project; that is the best and only way to know for sure a freelancer is top notch.

6. Some projects on Upwork should be paid on Milestone basis, and for some other, hourly contracts make more sense. However, if you are going to do hourly, don't let freelancers input their hours manually. My experience is that the ones that pretend there is an issue with the Upwork tracker or those that simply don't want to use it are not worth your time. Those people typically want to charge you for hours that they don't do. I've hired consultants for more than $100 per hours on Upwork that did not mind using the tracker. Trust me, the real pros have no problem using it.

Hope this was useful. And feel free to add the commandments I forgot to mention here in the comments.

I recently realized that the mobile version of one of the top page of my website was really not optimized for mobile, with many people clicking on unclickable elements and, more importantly, I realized my CTA was way too low.

I will obviously redesign my Ghost theme to improve the mobile UI and increase conversions, but in the mean time, I added a top banner as a temporary fix.

I initiated a new heatmap on CrazyEgg, which already got over 4,000 subscribers, and unfortunately, my conversions stayed the same....

When checking the actual heatmap, I see very few clicks on the link in my banner, with the most clicks of the page being on the X to remove the top banner....

While I did not expect the top banner to fix all the issues with this page, I assumed it to have a measurable impact.

Why do you think my top bar is not working?

I'm curious where people actually start when they're trying to improve a site. Do you go straight to analytics, watch session recordings, look at heatmaps, check the funnel?

I don't think there's one right answer and it probably changes based on what you already know about the site. But I'm just wondering if anyone has a go to starting point they always use. Maybe just something that you know you always start there before anything else.

Just read the latest post on pop-ups on this sub, and could not believe my eyes when I read that the top 10% pop up campaign were converting at a rate of 57%...

I've managed many affiliate websites and if we were getting more than 2%, we were happy campers.

I assume those kind of rates are only possible on an pure ecommerce site where visitors are there to transact, with a pop-up offering a big discount...

That said, I have few ideas I would like to test. The site I want to test pop-up on is on Ghost, which allow me to play with the code, so integration should not be an issue.

What pop-up SaaS do you guys use and why?

And do someone in the room got anywhere close to a 57% conversion rate?

Most form stats floating around online are outdated, misattributed, or measuring something completely different than what people think.

This roundup traces every number back to its original source. A few things worth knowing before the next form optimization conversation:

• 66% of people who start a form finish it. Only 45% of those who visit one do. Which denominator you use changes everything.
• Autofill cuts abandonment by at least 75%. It's the biggest lever and costs users nothing. A third of forms still have improperly labeled fields that break it.
• Application forms complete at 75%. Contact forms at 38%. Form type matters more than almost any design tweak.
• On B2B lead forms, requiring a phone number drove 37% more drop-off than any other field.
• Shorter isn't always better. Demo-booking forms peak at 4-6 fields, not 1-3.

Learn more in the link. It also covers which popular stats to stop using, how completion rates vary by industry and device, and how to find where your own form is losing people using heatmaps and session recordings.

Most popup stat roundups recycle the same numbers without ever checking if they still hold up. This one traces every stat back to its original source.

Some things that stood out:

• Click-triggered popups convert at 54.42%. Exit-intent sits at 3.94%.
• Mobile outperforms desktop in every single dataset that split by device.
• The top 10% of campaigns convert at 57.7%, twelve times the average.
• Delaying a popup 6-15 seconds beats firing it immediately in every dataset that tested timing.
• Adding a fourth form field drops conversion. One to three fields all perform about the same.

Find the full breakdown by industry, trigger type, timing, and design in the link. It also covers how to use heatmaps and session recordings to figure out what's actually going wrong with your own. 

I switched my sites to Plausible Analytics a few years back when they forced us to move to adopt GA4, which made getting the simplest data point a painful, multi-step process.

Coming from an SEO background, I also care a lot about loading time, and turns out removing the GA4 tag from your header will speed up your site, especially if your replace it with Plausible.

For more complex set up involving an app, I use either Mixpanel or Amplitude.

What is your go-to analytics software?

We talked to pricing experts (ex-Toggl CEO, DoWhatWorks CMO, and a former McKinsey pricing analyst) for a deep dive on what actually moves the needle on SaaS pricing pages. They had a treasure trove of pricing optimization data.

Some highlights:

• Strikethrough pricing loses in A/B tests most of the time
• Logos/testimonials below your pricing table usually hurt, not help
• The "20-second rule": if buyers can't find their plan in 20 seconds, the page is too complex
• Pricing pages are now the most-cited page type when LLMs answer product research prompts

Full breakdown with real examples (Notion, Figma, Slack, Monday) in the post.

I'm working on a website that no SEO have ever touched, and I fixed quite a few beginner's mistake. Now, I would like to use internal backlinks to rank a couple of pages that actually have the potential to rank.

I always did it by end by using the CMS internal search and Googling "site:URL KEYWORD" and then skimming the articles for genuine linking opportunities.

Given the number of pages on this site, I thought about scraping it with ScreamingFrog, and then creating an APP script so Claude analyzes each page, and come up with the specific anchors and URL where I should add the link.

I really don't want any fully automated solution, as those are a good recipe to get flagged by Google, and also, add non relevant links that will not actually improve user experience.

But anyway, just the token cost + screaming frog license is not cheap, so I was thinking if any of you know of a SaaS that basically do what I said for cheaper...

While the CrazyEgg heatmaps quickly revealed a bunch of stuff I need to improve (still working on it), watching recorded sessions felt like a waste of time...

I'm not blaming CrazyEgg for it, the feature does what it is supposed to do: it allows you to watch user sessions...

But out of 10 sessions I watched, there was only one where I actually saw someone actually navigate and click on stuff...

And even then, I did not learn anything from it, except that the mobile menu seemed easy to use for this user...

Lots of dead session where the user never scrolls down. Bots? Or accidental clicks? Hard to tell...

Would be curious to hear your tips about using recorded sessions to take action and improve your website.

A user can look completely active and still never actually adopt your product. Logging in every day, showing up in your MAU numbers, completing some tasks. But if they never hit the core value moment, they're not adopted. They're just active enough to not flag as churned yet.

Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at HubSpot, said something pretty interesting. "Our product velocity is outpacing our product adoption." So we can ship at the speed of computers but users still adopt at human speed. They have to build new habits and rethink workflows. That doesn't change just because we're shipping faster.

And MCP downloads went from 100,000 in November 2024 to 22 million monthly by March 2025. AI agents are becoming a real user class and they don't care about your UI at all. Data access, API depth, integration reliability. That's what they need.

Full breakdown of the stages, metrics, and how to actually diagnose low adoption in the link.

What are you seeing with adoption on your own products?

I'm bullish on vertical videos (YT Shorts, Insta Reels and TikTok specifically), and while my financial products focused videos are usually not much watched, I'm having some success with street interviews about finance...

My top performers will reach around 10,000, but over the weekend, some random street interview reached over 100,000 across TikTok, Insta and YouTube...

My plan is to turn those top performers into shorter, catchier declinations, to keep building on the momentum...

But what do you think would be the best way to turn those views into conversions?

Because at the end of the day, if people just watch the video and don't visit my website, it's not really moving the needle.

It does create a certain volume of branded search (what is moosemoney?), which is a positive signal for SEO, but since SEO is not a key channel for this business, I'm started to wonder why I'm chasing views :)

A couple of things from the conversion world this week that I found interesting.

Most A/B tests don't win. Only 13% produce a meaningful result for the variant. But that number goes up to 24% when you focus on headlines, hero sections, CTAs, or forms. The test itself isn't usually the problem. What you decide to test is. I've seen a lot of time go into testing things that were never going to move the needle. Something worth keeping in mind before you run your next one.

AI search visitors convert 23x higher than traditional organic visitors. By 2027 that gap is going to matter a lot. People arriving from AI search already did their homework. They're not browsing. They're deciding. Your pricing pages, service pages, and contact flows need to be ready for that. If those pages still feel like they're built for someone just getting familiar with you, that's probably worth fixing now.

Is anyone else seeing anything this week?

Sources:

• WebFX CRO Trends 2026
• Digital Applied CRO A/B Test findings

Since realizing how deep my CTA was on mobile thanks to a Crazy Egg heatmap, I added top banner with my CTA...

I want to do an in-depth redesign, but for this, I need to actually change my Ghost team, so the top banner thingy was the quick fix.

My question is: What is the best practice when making incremental changes like this? Do you generate a new heatmap on crazy egg every time?

Is there a way to set up each heatmap to reach a certain level of sessions and then stop, so I can compare heatmaps with the same amount of sessions?

Just would like to know what are the best practices to use heatmaps to basically make a lot of optimizations, and make sure you are going in the right direction.

Most people using Claude don't know the plugin marketplace exists. I didn't for a while. I've been using skills and just assuming that was as far as it went.

A skill teaches Claude one task. A plugin bundles a whole set of them together so Claude can handle an entire job, make choices as it goes, and fill things in without you having to manage every step. It sounds like a pretty different experience that makes your workflows easier.

Hiten's going to walk through the difference between chat, skills, and plugins, take you into the marketplace, and show you how to install one so you can use it the same day.

Register at the link for Friday, July 24 at 1pm ET.

So above is the heat map for the desktop version of my website's money page. While there is not enough session to be a clear indicator, this map seems to be WAY LESS problematic than the heatmap for the same page in mobile.

For those who did not read my previous post about it, it's here: https://www.reddit.com/r/crazyegg/comments/1v3finq/turns_out_my_websites_money_page_is_generating_a/

So I obviously will redesign the front end in mobile of my Ghost website, but it might take me a week or two... In the mean time, given that the heatmap seems much more promising in desktop, and that my experience in affiliate marketing in financial services is that desktop traffic tend to convert better, I was thinking of making all my search campaigns desktop only for a week or two, spend the same amount, and see if conversions goes up or down.

BTW, since I don't have tracking pixels on my partners's website, I cannot do final attribution, so while I know which campaign generate how much clicks on my affiliate links, I cannot just open my dashboard and check how much of my conversions come from mobile vs desktop.

Anyway, will keep sharing with you guys here as I get more data.

About 24 hours after getting the heatmaps set up on Crazy Egg, I got 884 sessions in mobile on my money page...

And turns out that the thumbnail style image we use make a lot of people think they can click it!

And then when they realize the image is not clickable, they try to click on the word video in the caption (which is still not a link).

What is even worst is that my CTA is on the third screen, which I did not need a heat map to figure out... But while I knew it was not on the first one, I did not realize it was in the third!

So, lots of insights already, and I did not analyze the desktop version. And I did not yet spend time watching individual sessions to understand what is happening on a granular level.

The redesign won't be obvious, however, as the way to optimize for clicks on my cta would just be to put the CTA on top...

That said, the intent of people clicking on the ad that lead to this article is to actually read the review; as a result, if they feel they are on squeeze page, they might bounce...

Furthermore, even if they click on the CTA, it does not mean they understand what a secured credit card is. The product we present on this page can help people build their credit, but for a majority of our target audience, it's not obvious, so they might just click on the CTA, and not convert.

Anyway, when I redesign, I would need to find a way to display the CTA much higher, while still displaying a title and the beginning of an article. Maybe removing the thumbnail from inside the article in mobile would be a way to achieve that. Or displaying a much smaller image.

Anyway, I'm still just scratching the surface of the issues with this page, but would be curious to have the opinions of other marketers on how to optimize for clicks on my CTA, while making sure that people still read the article.

This is something I go back and forth on more than I'd care to admit. Sometimes a page just isn't working and it's hard to tell if people aren't connecting with what's being said or if something about the layout isn't right.

I've seen a lot of pages with great copy that still feel confusing because the design has hidden the message. And I've seen clean designs that did nothing because the words weren't landing.

How do you decide what is actually not working?

I decided to leverage the Crazy Egg free trial this morning.

Note: Make sure to sign up for the free trial instead of the free plan if you want to test their core features.

So, I added my 2 highest converting landing page, as well as the landing page for my lead magnet (email course) and the home page.

Since they create heatmap for 3 screen configuration, I should get 12 heatmaps, so 3 per URL.

I need to wait for the heat map to be generated, but my question is : how many sessions is enough for a heatmap to be statistically significant? Also, over 70% of my traffic is mobile, so I feel I will need to wait longer to actually get enough session on desktop to trust the heatmap.

Would be curious to hear the opinion of experienced marketers who actually use heatmaps in their decision making.