AARRR Audits: 5 Growth Experiments To Grow This $180K/year PDF generator

5 growth experiment ideas for CraftMyPDF.com which offers API-based products which allow businesses to generate PDF documents and images from reusable templates.

Welcome to AARRR Audits

If you don’t already know, AARRR, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, is a growth framework popularised by Dave McClure. It is especially popular among big tech companies.

This week, we take a look at how PDF generator CraftMyPDF.com.

For this issue we’re doing things a little bit differently because I found a lot of things that can be improved on just ONE page which is part of the Activation step plus one potentially juicy one for the Revenue step.

I think just by improving these steps in CrafyMyPDF’s funnel can result in massive CRO benefits.

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💡Experiment 1: Activation

Go Plug Yourself

According to AHREFS, CraftMyPDF ranks #1 on Google for “c# pdf generator” with their article about 5 ways to generate c# pdf.

This is great content and is likely attracting high quality traffic. It also happens to be their 2nd top visited page.

So given that it’s

• A) 2nd most visited page, and

• B) likely to attract quality traffic, this should be THE place for them to sell hard.

What I would like to see them do is not shy away from plugging & linking to themselves.

In the list, they’ve listed “Using a Third-Party Cloud-Based API” as the 2nd option when that’s what they are.

I would make the following changes:

1. Move this to number 1 on the list

2. Include their brand name in the headline so it reads “Use a Third-Party Cloud-Based API (Like CraftMyPDF)” or change it entirely to “Use CraftMyPDF”

3. Hyperlink the headline and some of the body text to the home page or whatever landing page

💡Experiment 2: Activation

Give people what they want → Summaries

When people are searching for solutions, they really just want to be recommended ONE solution.

This is a win win because A, you can push your product and B, saves people time researching options.

So still on this page, summary recommendations are basically TL;DR.

How you do it is you create a list that goes something like “Best overall for c# PDF generation”, “Cheapest option”, “Easiest to use”, etc.

Then you add this summary before the actual list so people can just skim easily and quickly decide for themselves what their priority is.

See a sample below of how an article that ranks for “Best dog ear wipes” does it.

Experiment 3: Activation

Improve conversion rates with comparison tables

People love comparison tables and it’s a great way to help people come to a quick decision (hopefully about using CraftMyPDF).

You know who else loves comparison tables? Affiliate marketers!

If there’s one segment of internet marketers who know their conversion rate optimisation it’s affiliate marketers whose income relies on them improving click through rates and conversions.

Check out how Campaign Monitor did its own comparison table comparing itself to other email marketing companies.

Source: CampaignMonitor

💡Experiment 4: Activation

Capture more leads with pop-ups 

I’ve been on this page for a good while now and didn’t encounter a popup. That’s an unforced error.

We want to not only drive traffic to our site but also capture email information or better yet get sign ups.

Again borrowing some tips from the affiliate community here, you can introduce abandonment popups.

Abandonment popups (typically works only on desktop) only show up then the users’ cursor starts to move towards closing the tab.

If you get a lot of mobile traffic, you can use delayed popups instead.

💡Experiment 5: Revenue

Create alternative monetisation for their top visited (but less relevant) page

Based on the website copy, the target audience of this product are developers familiar with APIs. Their page that has the most traffic however is for generating free online certificates. 

While this is good for traffic and potentially backlinks, the audience for free online certificates which are likely educators and employers, are probably low quality in respect to the core product. 

Given the above info and without having an inside peek at their analytics, I’m going to take a guess here that there’s not much sign ups coming from this page.

IF this hypothesis is true and we’re:

• A) likely not going to get sign ups from here but

• B) getting lots of traffic,

I recommend trying to monetise this page another way.

Given that the certificate creator indicates a max of 6 certificates for every 24 hours, it might benefit from creating a separate paid option for bulk certificate creation where users can just plug in several names and the app will generate as many certificates.

Also borrowed a tip from Harry Dry’s newsletter about reframing the price to something the target audience would likely relate to e.g. $3 is the price of 1 latte (I think? Not from the US)

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TLDR

1. Go Plug Yourself

2. Give people what they want → summaries

3. Improve conversion rates with comparison tables

4. Capture more leads with pop-ups 

5. Create alternative monetisation for their top visited (but less relevant) page

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Thanks for reading!

What did you think of this week’s audit?

Reply to this email and let me know. And a MASSIVE thank you to all who made it to this point.

Until next week,

Anthony

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