The primary focus of most marketing teams today is to drive traffic to their websites in the hopes that this traffic will convert into qualified leads for sales reps to close. But that’s only half the battle.
Companies that focus on getting more out of their existing traffic and leads are more likely to see long-term, sustainable growth. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. This guide discusses the advantages of conversion rate optimization (CRO) and why it should be a focus for your business. It also covers the basics of getting started with CRO.
Conversion Rate Optimization
CRO is the process of making your website more effective at generating leads. CRO is improved by making changes to content, split testing, and improving efficiency. Conversion rate optimization can result in increased revenue from high-quality leads, as well as lower acquisition costs.
What Is a Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate is the percent of visitors who take the desired action. For example, this could be completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product.
The higher your website’s conversion rate is, the better designed, formatted, and appealing it is to your target audience. There are a few potential reasons why your website might have a low conversion rate. It could be something to do with how well the website works, or it might be to do with the design. There are many common reasons for a poor conversion rate, such as slow load times, a broken form, or copy that doesn’t effectively communicate the value of the offer.
What Is a Good Conversion Rate?
There is not a set number for what conversion rate is considered good because it varies based on the industry, target market, objectives, traffic source, and other population characteristics. The global average conversion rate for eCommerce sites was 2.17% in the third quarter of 2020, down from 2.37% the previous year. In the United States, the eCommerce conversion rate was higher at 2.57%.
There is a lot of variation in the average amount of money made by different people in different years and countries. This average also differs depending on what type of job someone has. The average conversion rate for eCommerce sites in the food and beverage sector is 5.5%, while the average in the hair care sector is 3.5%.
If you want to improve your conversion rate, here are some things you can do.
Conversions can occur on multiple pages of your website, such as your homepage, pricing page, blog, and landing pages. To increase the chances of website visitors becoming paying customers, you should improve every aspect of the website.
Before we investigate the advantages of CRO, we should figure out how to calculate your site’s conversion rate. This will give you a better understanding of how much time and resources to invest in a CRO strategy.
How do you correctly measure Conversion Rate?
It starts with understanding how to look at data.
To measure the success of something you’ve done – like a site redesign – you’d look at the conversion rate.
The default dashboard for Google Analytics shows you how many users visited your site during a set period of time.
The thing is, that’s just background noise and it wouldn’t make much difference to your bottom line.
A conversion rate that includes all users provides results that are all over the place, data-wise.
You can see what you’re working with when you take bailed users out.
What are bailed users?
A user whose session duration is less than one second is considered a bailed user.
If the majority of your users are bailouts, this will have an impact on your conversion rate.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
As long as you know what you are defining as a conversion, then it is easy to calculate your conversion rate. To calculate a percentage, you multiply the two values by 100.
Let’s say you’re defining conversion as a newsletter opt-in, and you have an opt-in form on every single page of your website. Then, every time a visitor goes to your website, they have the opportunity to opt-in to your newsletter. To calculate the percentage of website visitors who fill out a newsletter form, divide the total number of newsletter form submissions by the total number of website visitors and multiply the result by 100. If you had 500 submissions and 20,000 visitors last quarter, your conversion rate would be 2.5%.
This process can be repeated for every conversion opportunity on your site. Only count the number of visitors on the web pages where the offer is listed. The conversion rate of your eBook offer is calculated by dividing the total number of downloads by the number of people who visited web pages where the eBook is listed.
You can find your website’s conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions on your site by the total number of visitors.
Where to Implement a CRO Strategy
-Your website’s homepage -Your website’s product pages -Your website’s pricing pages -Your website’s contact page There are four potential areas on your website that could see significant benefits from conversion rate optimization: -The homepage -The product pages -The pricing pages -The contact page
Homepage
Homepages are prime candidates for CRO. The homepage is also an opportunity to guide visitors further into your website.
There are several ways to make your website more user-friendly, such as adding links to product information, offering a free signup button, or incorporating a chatbot that solicits questions from visitors.
Pricing Page
The price of a website can make or break it for many visitors. CRO can help increase the conversion rate of a pricing page by changing the price intervals (e.g. price per year vs. price per month), adding descriptions of the product features associated with each price, or including a phone number for visitors to call for a price quote.
Adding a simple email opt-in popup form on its pricing page, Hotjar was able to generate over 400 new leads in just three weeks.
Blog
A blog presents an opportunity to convert website visitors into leads and customers. If you want to generate leads from your blog, in addition to publishing quality content, you can also use CRO techniques.
The process of lead generation often includes adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout an article or inviting readers to submit their email addresses in exchange for an eBook or industry report in order to learn more about a topic.
Landing Pages
Since landing pages are designed to encourage people to take an action, they usually have a higher average conversion rate than other signup forms. An example of an event landing page would be a page that has a video of last year’s event. This would encourage visitors to register for this year’s event. A landing page that is offering a free resource can be more effective with a preview of the content that is available for download. This entices visitors to go ahead and download the resource.
After reading this article, you may wonder when your business is ready to start optimizing for conversions.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
CRO is the practice of optimizing your website to increase the number of people who take the desired actions.
The actions that can be taken by a customer include, but are not limited to, filling out a form, downloading an eBook, following a link, signing up for a free trial, deleting items from a cart, and making a purchase.
But pause for a minute.
You’ve probably been the recipient of CRO without even realizing it.
At some point, you’ve signed up for a service, added something to your cart online, and clicked the “pay” or “buy” option.
There were factors pushing you to make decisions at each point of contact.
The art of Conversion Rate Optimization is using multiple tiny optimizations to guide a user from the moment they land on a website to their final action.
No matter how much each customer spending, it is important to have a high rate of converting anonymous website visitors into paying customers.
You never find a website for free; either you have to pay with hard dollars (advertising) or soft dollars (content marketing) to get the click. Therefore, it is important to make the most of this opportunity.
The more visitors you convert into paying customers, the higher your revenue and margins will be.
What is Conversion and How Does it Work?
Before you can go about CRO, you need to understand what conversion is all about and how it relates to optimization.
Changing from one form to another.
Interacting with a website should result in a change from one form or stage to another for marketing purposes.
The process of converting something into a different form.
- For a B2B company, a conversion can be a visitor signing up for a newsletter.
- For SaaS companies, a conversion can be a sign-up for a free trial.
- For an eCommerce website, a conversion can be a product purchase.
There are many examples of this in every industry, but one thing is certain – in order for conversion to take place, there needs to be a change from one form to another.
But that’s enough with definitions. Let’s get practical on how conversion works.
For example, if you are a visitor who lands on an eCommerce website looking for something to buy, you will be able to find what you are looking for.
The Two Main Problems With Conversion
therapy There are two primary issues with conversion therapy when you examine it.
- Are you bringing the right people to your website?
- Are you giving them content that’s engaging them?
If you want to increase the number of visitors you convert, make sure you’re addressing them with the right content.
Most people don’t just buy something after looking at one web page. On average, it takes a customer 9 visits to a website before making a purchase.
This allows you to create a baseline conversion rate, and know that people who engage with more than one page are expressing buyer intent.
This means that 63% of people who visit the website only view one page before leaving.
The reasons for the low number of sales could be due to errors, spam, or people simply browsing rather than making a purchase. Most likely, the cause is poor performance. If your website loads slowly, people will become frustrated and leave.
Asking the Right Questions
The first thing to do is remove any user who only visits one page. At the very least, get rid of users who weren’t on the page for more than one second.
We are now focusing our attention on users who stayed on the site for one second or longer. This means that 61% of users are leaving the site before it has even loaded.
Think of it like this. If there are 8 million people in New York City, and my hypothetical ice cream shop only sold seven ice creams, is my conversion rate 7/8,000,000?
Of course not!
You want to measure people who are actually interested in your brand and who engage with it regularly. But you need to understand this:
Conversion optimization and traffic acquisition are two separate dynamics.
Third-party marketers will use social media and other tools to increase traffic to the site.
However, their job is not to convert traffic, but rather to acquire it.
If you don’t know how to weed out the bullshit, you’ll just have to agree that they’re right and that they brought more people.
We’re currently having an issue with our conversion rate optimization because our traffic levels aren’t where they need to be.
Most marketing is geared towards the artists rather than towards data analysis.
Users who only stay on the site for less than one second are called “bailed-out users.”
The default dashboard for Google Analytics does not include important data like that of users who have been bailed out. add these segments in the same way as we did before
If you create a segment, it will show up in all of the default views. When you’re looking at conversion rates, you can filter out the inaccurate data.
Acquisition will not show any users who have been bailed out. And that’s because Google charges you per click.
If you’re paying for 300,000 people to use your site and only 100,000 of them are actually interacting with it, you’re wasting a lot of money.
The bail ratio is the difference between the advertisement you paid for and the advertisement you got value for.
If you look closely at this data, you will be very confused and wonder if these are real people.
This is a common problem that affects your conversions. Factors that influence how well your conversions will be optimized.
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