As you are aware, shopping and marketing have gone online. If you have an e-commerce store or business-to-business operation, you are always trying to get your potential customers to do specific things, like buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or download a free e-book. When a user completes one of these actions, it is called a conversion. Conversion rate optimization is the practice of trying to increase the number of users who interact with your site. This is usually done through a series of small changes, with the ultimate goal being to optimize your entire online marketing process.
First, let’s refresh our understanding of conversion rate: what it is, how to calculate it, and how to improve it. Additionally, let’s make sure we understand how to avoid getting in our way as we work to improve our conversion rate.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Let’s explore conversions and conversion rates, including how to track them, in more depth.
What is a conversion?
A conversion can be any action that is valuable to a business that is taken online. This could be a click, a purchase, a swipe, or a download.
Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the desired action in relation to the total number of people who could take that action.
Macro vs micro-conversions
You might have heard people talking about macro- and micro-conversions.
Macro-conversions refer to the conversion of a visitor into a paid client or subscriber of a web service. These are sometimes called website goals.
On the other hand, micro-conversions are seen as smaller, secondary actions that a visitor takes on a website that indicates that they might convert, for example, clicking through to the site, watching a promotional video, or adding an item to your cart.
Micro-conversions (e.g., add to cart, access to content) can be duplicated to create a complementary perspective. For example, if you want to measure how successful your tests are in allowing users to access interface elements, you can duplicate the test to measure how often the elements are accessed. If the results of the test show that the new functionality would not be used frequently despite an increase in users, then the test is not “sticky.”
What is a conversion rate?
The easiest example of conversion rate is when a customer buys a product from an e-commerce site. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that go through the entire process of buying the product.
If you want your e-commerce company to be successful, you should focus on optimizing your conversion rate. This can be done by tracking conversions through any web analytics platform, like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Mixpanel. By doing this, you will be able to see what areas need improvement in order to increase your bottom line.
How do you calculate conversion rate?
Now that you understand what a conversion rate is, you’ll want to figure out your own website’s conversion rate, in order to gauge its effectiveness. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a math genius to do so. Just divide the number of completed actions on your site (during a specific, defined period of time) by the total number of visitors during that same time frame. Then, multiply that number by 100.
In other words:
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
If 18.76% of your website’s visitors completed a transaction, that would be considered a pretty good conversion rate.
You can also find a calculator that will give you a precise calculation of your website’s conversion rate.
What is CRO?
The bottom line is that you need to find ways to increase your conversion rate. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for increasing your conversion rate. However, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of converting leads into customers. It’s always beneficial to try and increase conversions, no matter what business you’re in. Although pumping more money into advertising may seem like the way to go, more awareness doesn’t always result in increased sales. Therefore, you need to focus on ways to increase your conversion rate. While there’s no foolproof method that works for everyone, there are some steps you can take to better your chances of turning leads into customers.
Optimizing your conversion rate is a more affordable and effective way to get more traffic because you can make precise adjustments based on data that target the traffic you already have. You can focus on micro-conversions (e.g., getting customers to fill out forms so your sales team can contact them and move them through the sales process) or macro-conversions (e.g., confirmed purchases).
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization
There are many advantages to including CRO as part of your online marketing strategy. CRO can help increase the number of quality leads and sales from your website visitors. Additionally, CRO can provide valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors.
CRO creates a seamless shopping experience
Conversion rate optimization not only drives sales, but can also remove obstacles on your site that might prevent customers from completing a purchase. Small improvements to UX (User Experience) can have a big impact, and improve the overall shopping experience for your customers.
Creating a smoother shopping experience without these hindering roadblocks will make customers want to come back for more. This is done by analyzing feedback and testing solutions to ensure that the decisions you make are based on real data.
CRO helps you understand your customers
Gone are the days of making decisions based on educated guesses. A CRO specialist will use data collected to give you real insights and help you solve any problems you may be experiencing. For example, let’s look at the issue of shopping cart abandonment.
If you have users who add items to their cart but don’t finalize the purchase, it could be because of cognitive dissonance, a psychological barrier to purchase. You could try adding a pop-up message that the item is only on sale for a limited time, or that there are only a few left in stock, to create a sense of urgency. You could also add a badge to the checkout page that indicates that the checkout process is secure.
If you are looking to learn more about your customers in order to better target your marketing efforts, CRO can give you valuable insights into buyer personas and user psychographics.
CRO improves marketing ROI and lowers acquisition costs
You probably know the saying that it’s more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. It’s true! But the good news is that the higher your website’s conversion rate is, the lower your customer acquisition costs.
We are aware that you have to spend money on advertising and that paid advertising can be costly. commonplace keywords are not inexpensive, so if you can determine the issues on your website and the phrases that result in the most conversions, it will save you a lot of money on futile paid advertisements and also better your marketing ROI (Return on Investment).
How to create a CRO strategy
The research indicates that the vast majority of businesses find CRO beneficial in achieving their aims. Let’s explore how to devise a successful CRO strategy.
1. Identify Drop Out Points
All conversion rate optimization strategies involve improving the weakest part of the customer experience on a website. If a company does not know where their website is lacking, they will not know where to direct their resources.
You can find problem areas of your website without being an analytics expert or having goals or funnels set up.
Look at the pages that lead to the most exits from your site. These pages are typically underperforming.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s conversion rate, it’s important to take a close look at every page in the process, from product selection to checkout. Identify where people are abandoning the process so you can make changes to improve the experience.
You should focus your attention on the poorest performing pages on your website. You can always come back to the other pages later. You should be constantly optimizing your site for conversion by following these steps. This is not a one-time process.
2. Identify the Problem on the Underperforming Page
After finding a problem page, the next step is to figure out what is wrong. To do this, we need to learn more about the page and how users interact with it.
What to Look for When Seeking to Optimize a Page for Conversion
There is not one specific way to identify what is wrong on a page and how to fix it. It often depends on factors such as experience, intuition, and empathy. However, three common issues are often seen.
User’s Didn’t See Something
Many people overlook essential information or actions on a website, which makes the site less likely to achieve its goals or stops visitors from completing an important task.
One way to determine if a webpage is effective is to look at how people scroll on the page or watch session recordings. Another way to tell if a webpage is successful is to use an eye-tracking simulation tool like Attention Insights to see where people are likely looking on the page.
3. Test the Solution
Your next step in optimizing your conversion rate should be to think of ways to improve upon the current deficiencies of your page. This process is mainly based on experience and instinct.
There is no single answer for achieving a high conversion rate on a page. The only way to find out what works is to test and experiment.
The way you test your ideas depends on their complexity. If the changes you need to make are small, such as changing text or images, then AB testing is the best way to go. You can make these changes quickly in a tool like Google Optimize or Optimizely.
A prototype may be necessary if you need to make more substantial changes, such as altering the page layout or the way pages flow together.
A prototype can be helpful in testing how visible and user-friendly a potential solution is. However, AB testing is often better at determining whether a proposed solution is likely to convince users to take action.
Testing is the most important of all conversion rate optimization techniques. Iteration and testing are essential in order to find the optimal solution, but there is always room for improvement.
4. Rolling Out a Solution
If you’re not seeing significant improvements from your testing, it’s time to implement the solution you’ve developed.
If the proposed change is a simple improvement to an AB test, rolling out the change will be relatively easy. However, if a prototype has been built, you will most likely need to present a business case justifying the development cost for making the changes. But don’t worry, the testing you have carried out to date should provide you with all the evidence you need.
One word of warning: make sure you can roll back to the previous version if things go wrong. Even though you test your solution thoroughly, things can still go wrong when you go live. Always have a way to revert to the previous version just in case.
Although it may be difficult, try not to worry if you receive a negative reaction when making changes, especially if the changes are significant. It takes time for people to get used to change and they often have a negative reaction at first, even if the changes will be beneficial in the long run.
After successfully implementing your improvement, it’s time to start the process anew.
5. Rinse and Repeat Your Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy
If you are asking yourself, “what is a CRO strategy,” at its heart it is extremely straightforward. All it involves is going through an ongoing cycle of:
- Identifying under performing pages.
- Working out exactly what is going wrong.
- Proposing and testing possible solutions.
- Rolling out the highest performing solution.
Repeat the process for the next poorest performing page.
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