topic Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button in Blog, Website & Page Publishing

Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

MNault — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:39:44 GMT

Could someone share with me your best practices for when to use a button link in an email or web page vs. when to make a CTA button? We have some clients that make every single button in the CTA tool. I would imagine that quite often a simple button/link is good enough. Thoughts? Recommendations?

Thank you!

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

danmoyle — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:11:27 GMT

@MNault I think of it like this: If I want to compare the effectiveness of this button across multiple channels, it's a CTA button. Then I can use it in emails, blog posts, website pages, etc. If instead it's a simple call to action I'm giving to just email recipients, then it can be an email button and not a full CTA. HubSpot will still measure the clicks, but I can't include that data in comparisons.

Hope that helps!

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

Jnix284 — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:44:02 GMT

@MNault happy to help share best practices and a few insights about CTAs vs buttons!

As @danmoyle mentioned, if you're trying to track information across multiple channels, CTAs are a great option. Any time you want to track conversions, especially when you are running a campaign, using a CTA will provide the additional insight you need.

In the early days (pre CMS Hub), using CTAs was an easy way to add a styled button to website templates, many of the old template packs relied on this and CTAs were created in abundance.

For the most part, I think this has improved with the release of Themes, but there are still many HubSpot customers who use CTAs for everything because of how easy it is - even if they aren't looking at any of the data.

The downside of CTAs is that they add the HubSpot tracking code to your pages, which adds to the load time and impacts page speed - having all of the buttons as CTAs can have a compound effect.

We typically recommend using CTAs on high conversion pages, where you have active campaigns, or when you're doing A/B testing - otherwise, a button should suffice.

Using a tool like Hotjar, to see heatmaps of user activity, are often more helpful for improving the UX than using a CTA for the same purpose - if you use Google Tag Manager to add the script, it will have a minimal impact on your page speed and it's quick and easy to add to the pages where you need it.

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

MNault — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:50:57 GMT

Thank you @danmoyle and @Jnix284 ! This is what I suspected but wanted some amunition to take back to team members and clients.

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

Mattheus — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 12:44:09 GMT

@MNault to add on this topic: You can see the amount of clicks on an e-mail button in your e-mail performance overview. But with a normal button you cannot see that in the contact activities overview and you cannot see the total amount of clicks if you have the same button in another e-mail or also on your website.

If you link to a PDF file then a CTA button helps you to see how many times the file has been seen by the amount of clicks. But, it's also possible to use a CTA button click as a trigger for a workflow. So you could start or stop a workflow based on which CTA button contacts clicked. That's a nice trick to initiate marketing automation towards known contacts on ungated pdf's

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

MNault — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:16:12 GMT

Yes, this is good information to keep in mind. Thank you!

Re: Best practices for using a button vs CTA button

danmoyle — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:19:54 GMT

CTAs as a workflow trigger - great call out @Mattheus !