Conversion Optimisation that Converts
Conversion Optimisation does exactly what it says on the tin: converting potential leads that visit your site into customer’s. It’s as simple as that.
The idea is that a potential customer completes a Call to Action. See that tab on the right? It’s just like that. A call to action could be anything from filling out a call-back form, making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter.
However, you measure your success, we’d like to help you achieve your goals.
We love to see our customers succeed, so we test multiple versions of your website and assess which is more likely to achieve your conversion optimisation goal.
This means that you’re not throwing cash into generating leads and traffic, but instead achieving a balanced and organic method to generate business.
You set your target conversion rate, which is defined by the number of visitors that complete your call to action. Methods such as A/B testing enable us to monitor the headlines, content and clickable elements that convert more of those visitors into customers.
There’s two things to consider when tracking conversion optimisation.
The first method is more focused on testing the site to see what’s best to increase traffic, using campaigns and landing page conversion rates.
The second method is focused on testing the site before the actual optimisation.
We have spent a lot of time getting to know our customers and their audiences, and this is the only way we can realistically create a targeted CTA that will appeal to them.
So if you’re looking for an expert hand to guide your conversion to success, then give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.
Lets imagine that you have a website for your business (of course you do, every business needs one these days) and its doing well, generating sufficient amount of leads and delivering decent profits.
But you want more
More out of your website
More traffic
More leads
More conversions…
Basically, more of everything.
What can you do in such a situation? Maybe you can try some of these options:
- Buy more ads from say Google adwords until you get more traffic.
- Try targeted SEO to increase your traffic
- Hire a marketing team to generate greater interest in your brand
- Offer more products
Now, if you think about it, all of the above-mentioned options might be able to assist you in your quest for maximising profits, but at what cost?
Buying more ads or using targeted SEO might deliver more traffic to your website, but that would be like spending £10,000 to gain additional revenue of £12,000 giving you a net profit of a mere £2000 for all the efforts put in.
Hiring a marketing team or manufacturing more products again involves a great amount of initial investment and comes with no guarantee of success.
Isn’t it just better to maximise the effectiveness of your website without having to make intensive investments to do so (and isn’t that the whole point!).
How is this possible?
Simple really, by getting in touch with a Conversion Optimisation Expert, by getting in touch with DAPA.
Free SEO Consultation
Come in for a coffee or schedule a conference call with one of our leading UK specialists.
Get Started Now!What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
In digital marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation refers to the system of increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers. It is also referred to as CRO.
Most important thing you should remember about CRO is that it not just increases the traffic to your website, but it increases the traffic of visitors who are more likely to convert.
Conversion for most businesses is associated with a sale. Whenever a user makes a purchase from your website, you count it as a conversion.
However, the meaning of conversion can be different for each business.
For example, if a user visits your business’s twitter account and then ends up following you, it can be counted as a conversion. Or if a visitor ‘lands’ on a page you have created and signs up for the mailing list, you can view it as a conversion.
A conversion occurs when the visitor takes an action that you want them to take and this can range anywhere from signing up for coupons to buying a product.
For small consultancy businesses a conversion is probably when a visitor ends up calling after viewing the landing page. If you own a restaurant, a dinner reservation might count as conversion.
The whole point of CRO is making use of resources that you already have, optimising your website and creating more business from your existing traffic.
Conversion Rate Optimisation- The Metrics That Make a Difference
How can you gauge the current rate of conversion of your website? How will you know about the problematic areas and come up with a plan of action that addresses all those problems?
All the important metrics or numbers you need to boost your conversion rate can be found through Google analytics.
Here we take a look at the numbers we are looking to boost a website’s CRO:
Conversion Rates
Depending on what is counted as a conversion for your website, you can obtain your conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions achieved within a fixed time period by the total number of visitors to your website (or the number of unique visitors).
For example, if your website has achieved 60 conversions from a total of 6000 visitors within a specified time frame, your conversion rate stands at 1%.
Bounce rate
How long are people spending on each page of your website?
The bounce rate of each page will help you know more about that.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who are leaving your website after viewing a single page. Obviously, a high bounce rate is never going to be good for your conversion objectives.
It also indicates that customers are not getting what they want from your website and as a result are leaving almost immediately.
Exit Rate
Exit rate refers to the percentage of people leaving your site after viewing a particular page. Each page on your website will have a specific exit rate.
The exit rate informs you about the last page a visitor was on before they leave your site.
A high exit rate on a particular page of your site can never be good and can hurt your conversion rate.
Average Time On Site
This metric gives you an idea about how much time visitors are spending on your site before they leave.
A high bounce rate directly translates to a low average time on site. It means that your visitors are not sticking long enough to make the action that you want them to make.
Average Page Views
This metric lets you know about the number of pages on your website a visitor views before they decide to leave.
More page views can mean two things.
It could be interpreted as a sign of your website engaging new visitors.
It could also indicate a lack of clarity with regards to the conversion path you want your visitors to take, if the high number of views do not lead to any conversions.
Conversion Rate Optimisation-The Basics
Consider this example, you own a retail store and a customer comes in, possibly to buy something or maybe just to check out your products.
Your top sales clerk is immediately pressed into action and he does a good job.
The customer is suitably impressed perhaps even tempted to buy a product. But, right at that moment your customer gets a call and he or she steps out to take the call.
Or maybe your customer fakes a call to go out and check the cost of products in a rival establishment. At the end of their search, you might find that customer returns to your store, ready to make a purchase.
The customer has entered your store three times and each separate entry into your store is counted as unique visit.
Think of this as an example of how visitors to your website shop online. They may look around for a bit, check out the design, the content and then they might get distracted.
Or they might check out competing websites for the services they offer.
Wouldn’t it be unreasonable to reprimand the sales clerk for not converting the first visit of the customer into a sale? Similarly, it would be unreasonable to expect a sale or a conversion, every time your website receives a new visitor.
Consistency Is Key
That is why sometimes webmasters consider unique visitors as an important metric to evaluate their conversion rate.
The important thing is to be consistent with the metric you decide upon to evaluate your conversion rate.
If that metric is total number of visitors and not unique visitors, then so be it. Another important factor when determining your conversion rate is the time period you want to use.
By dividing a week’s unique visitors or total visitors (whichever is your metric) by the number of conversions you have achieved, you obtain the conversion rate of your business for that week.
Again it is important to be consistent when you are trying to determine your conversion rate.
Once you are aware of the current conversion rate of your website, you can begin identifying potential problems in your conversion funnel.
The main flow of customer experience provided by your website that leads to a sale is known as a conversion funnel.
For example, the conversion funnel for a website could be from home page to product page to checkout.
Free SEO Consultation
Come in for a coffee or schedule a conference call with one of our leading UK specialists.
Get Started Now!What Does The Conversion Rate Of Your Website Depend Upon?
Boosting the conversion rate of your website could depend upon the following factors:
- Value Proposition- This refers to the sum of all benefits received and costs acquired in taking action. How much benefit does your customer perceive in buying from your website? Those perceived costs and benefits underline your value proposition.
- Relevance- How relevant is your value proposition to the needs of your customer? Is the content of your website relevant to the page title or with what your visitors are expecting?
- Clarity- Is your value proposition, CTA and main message clear to all your visitors?
- Anxiety- Do certain elements on your page create anxiety in the minds of your customers, thus creating uncertainty?
- Distraction- What are most visible elements of your page? Does it help or hurt the main message you want to promote? Do you have elements on the page that is off target or conflicting?
- Urgency- Why should your visitors buy your products now? Are you providing offers or incentives or are your products going to go out of stock soon and there are only a few items remaining?
At DAPA before we decide on a strategy for optimising conversion rate, we put ourselves in the shoes of the customers of the website we are working on and try to understand the barriers in the website that is preventing a visitor from converting into a customer.
Where Should You Start With When Coming Up With A CRO Strategy?
Here are some areas we strongly recommend that you start with when optimising conversion rate:
- Is the CTA on your website well defined and easy to locate? Your website might be beautiful to look at and graphic intensive, but are they necessary for your website? Are they relevant to your customers or are they the cause of further confusion? Do you have a lot of unnecessary content on your page?
- Consider the usability factor of your website. Can visitors easily search for what they are looking for after they land on your website? If you are operating an e-commerce website, check if your customers are able to finish the checkout process. How many clicks or pages are required before a conversion is made? Do you have a mobile compatible version of your website and if you do, is it easily navigable? To boost your conversion rate ensure that your registration, navigation, contact and payment process is easy and uncluttered.
- Can your website be trusted? How much importance do you place on the security of your visitors?
- Are your SEO efforts up to date, relevant and executed properly? Are you using accurate optimised titles, relevant meta data descriptions for each page on your website? Have you used the ALT tag to give an accurate and optimised description of the images used on your website? If your page titles are not accurate, your visitors might land on your website looking for something else, while the visitors who are on the lookout for the products you offer might not be able to find you.
- Social proof is a great way to boost your business’s conversion rate. Do you have customer testimonials on your website letting new visitors know about how happy people are with your services?
Again the important factors that drive CRO may vary from site to site. What works for one site might actually hurt the user experience of another site, thereby also affecting its conversion rate.
Steer clear of using generalised alterations as they can vary rarely solve some of the serious issues mentioned above.
Remember, each website is different with unique advantages and obstacles, ensure that you find solutions that are necessary for your website and do not make changes just because it worked for somebody else.
Ultimately there is only so much you can find out through numbers and analytics. Ensure that you make a concentrated effort to reach out to your users and ask them about areas you can improve upon.
Reducing Your Bounce & Exit Rates Through Conversion Rate Optimisation
After all the time and hard work you have put in, your website is finally up, your product available to everyone and your message visible for everyone to see and soon visitors will come knocking curious about what you have to offer.
Despite the vast depths of the internet, people are ‘landing’ at your website and then without you realising why, they are leaving.
One minute they are here and the next minute they are not. Imagine how it feels if all your visitors leave about a minute or so after reaching your website, after all the hours you have invested in creating the website.
The bounce rate and exit rate of your website will provide you some clarity as to why all your visitors are leaving so early.
How Can You Determine The Bounce Rate?
An analytics report will assist you in evaluating your overall bounce rate, with options if needed to find out the bounce rate for each individual page.
Here’s a quick guide on bounce rate if you need brushing up:
Once you understand the overall bounce rate of your website, it is time to figure out why visitors are leaving your website so early.
Analytics- Google Analytics assists you in figuring out the traffic sources and bounce rates for all your popular pages.
The overall bounce rate might be too vague in terms of helping you figure out what exactly the problem is.
A detailed page-by-page report will be of more assistance in that regards.
It will let you figure out which pages on your site are popular and which pages on your site are contributing significantly towards the overall bounce rate.
Analytics will also let you know about the pages on your website that receive maximum traffic.
User Testing- Don’t you want to know how visitors are interacting with your site? You can figure out user behaviour by using heat maps.
This might reveal useful data such as how many visitors can see your CTA, which can assist you in determining why you have a high bounce rate and help you take steps to remedy it.
Some Common Reasons For Low Bounce Rate
Visually Unappealing Website
Is your site easy to navigate?
Or is it flooded with a lot of overwhelming graphics, pop up ads and a messy layout?
Your objective should be to deliver the kind of user experience that potential customers are on the lookout for.
If any visual element of your website causes friction, it can affect the chances of a potential conversion.
If your website is not easy to navigate, it is unsuitable for your visitors.
To fix these issues you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Does every link on your website work?
- How much is the load time of each page?
- Does the page run into technical errors when loading?
- Is it possible for you yourself to follow your website’s navigation to a desired action?
Your Website Does Not Satisfy User Expectations
Are your visitors satisfied with the experience your website is providing? Ask yourself this:
- What search query did the visitor enter before landing on your website
- What ad or website did your visitors arrive from?
If the answers to these questions are not obvious, you can make a few guesses about what works for your visitors when they land at your website. Again you can make informed assumptions based on analytics.
Most of the traffic to your website will be directed from search engines and therefore it is important that you remain aware of the intention of your visitors and ensure that your site holds true to those expectations.
For example, if your business sells software for marketing automation, but a large number of your visitors are looking for performance-based agencies, a proportion of your visitors will never convert into customers, no matter how well you optimise the pages on your website.
How A/B Testing Can Assist You In Boosting Your CRO?
A/B testing (sometimes also known as split testing) is a process wherein you compare two versions of a webpage in order to test and evaluate which one works better.
For example, you compare two pages by showing two variants, lets call them A and B, to visitors to your website at the same time.
The one that delivers a better conversion rate is the one that wins.
The most important aspect of A/B tests is to change only one thing from each variation. This is most vital aspect of CRO.
For example, if you have altered the placement of a button, copy or image from version A to version B and then B delivers a higher conversion rate, how will you zero in on the individual factor that contributed towards the increase in conversion rate?
Did the improvement occur because of the movement of the button or was it because of the new image?
It would not be possible to get meaningful results from A/B testing if you make multiple variations at the same time.
Here are some things you can A/B test to drive up your conversion rate:
- Headlines
- The colours chosen for your design elements
- Where you place buttons on a page
- Page layout
- The content
- CTAs
- Text vs. images vs. videos
How dapa Can Help Your Conversion Optimisation?
DAPA is home to the biggest and most talented team of SEO specialists in the region.
The team here includes SEO specialists, project managers, a content team, and of course the best web developer in the area.
You can count on us to deal with any/all SEO, design and development problems you might have.
From designing and optimising a website for search engines to conducting SEO audits or consultancy or full fledged SEO of a website to conversion rate optimisation, DAPA does it all.
We have over 30 years of experience in the field of SEO and have worked in some of the most competitive SEO markets in the UK such as travel, insurance, finance and the law.
Devising creative and innovative SEO strategies is just one of the reasons why we have managed to stay at the top of our game and is something that differentiates us from our competition.
When you choose DAPA, you are not only getting assistance from the best SEO team in the area, you can also be assured of our constant support.
We do not guarantee a magical fix to all your problems (and we strongly advise against choosing firms that give you such promises), but we can assure you that in time we can achieve all the long-term SEO targets of your business.
If you need help with your SEO strategy or website design, contact us at dapa Marketing on 0800 634 3007 to find out more about our services.