Conversion Optimization seeks to convince visitors of your website to take an action they desire – anything from purchasing something directly through you or filling out an online contact form.
Before fixating on an industry average percentage figure, the better strategy is to understand your visitors, users and customers and give them what they want.
Table of Contents
Identifying Your Conversion Goals
Establishing success metrics you want to track for every web page or mobile app screen is one of the first steps of CRO.
Your goals may depend on your type of business, but some common website conversion goals include purchases, lead submissions, and white paper downloads.
As part of setting conversion goals, it’s essential to distinguish between macro and micro conversions. Macro conversions refer to actions you want your site visitors to take that will have the highest value for your business such as sales of products, subscriptions, or donations – or for content-based businesses, even social shares of articles and blog posts!
Micro conversions, on the other hand, are smaller steps that lead to macro conversions. They are often taken by your audience in order to understand and trust your product or services and build rapport with your brand. Examples of micro conversions could include adding items to a shopping cart, filling out forms, or downloading an app.
By clicking Settings > Goals in your AdWords account’s left menu, you can also set custom Google Analytics conversion goals for individual campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords in your AdWords account. Or create a default conversion goal that will set conversion and optimization targets across all your ad campaigns automatically.
Once your conversion goals are in place, it’s time to start making improvements. Testing various hypotheses before implementing changes is essential; prioritize tests based on their potential impact on conversion rate so as not to waste time with tests that won’t have significant effects.
Understanding Your Target Audience
An essential step of conversion optimization is understanding your customer base and what motivates them to take desired actions. This data can be obtained through customer surveys, market research, and web analytics.
With this knowledge in hand, you can determine what kinds of messages and calls-to-action would best encourage visitors to convert – such as providing FAQ pages, writing more compelling product descriptions or designing a more user-friendly site design.
Conversion rate optimization enables marketers to uncover deeper insight and analyze changes they are making by offering tangible proof. Conversion can refer to any desired interaction on a website that contributes revenue for a business – this could range from visitors subscribing to newsletters to purchasing products or services.
Quantitative analysis plays a vital part in this process as it provides hard numbers that back up heuristic analysis results, providing marketers with hard numbers they can use to measure conversion rate improvements made.
This method also enables them to better measure results in terms of conversion rate optimization by digging deep and seeing what impact the changes they made are having on revenue-producing interactions on websites.
Identification of groups who will not benefit from your products and services is also vital, such as by looking at demographic data to see if there are any common interests, needs, or pain points among individuals within them. You can learn more about demographic data by clicking the link.
Furthermore, customer feedback should also be reviewed closely to uncover any themes. By understanding who it’s not meant for, time and resources won’t be wasted on potential customers who won’t ever use what your offering provides.
Recognizing who your target audience is will enable you to utilize retargeting effectively in increasing conversions. Retargeting is a marketing technique that involves monitoring those who visit your website and using their online behavior to show them personalized ads – helping build trust between businesses and their target audiences.
Creating a Conversion Funnel
Conversion funnels (often known as sales funnels) can help businesses visualize and understand the journey their potential customers take through various stages.
It consists of four main steps: awareness, interest, desire/decision, and action. A great online business will use multiple marketing channels and mediums to move potential customers through each step in its sales funnel – often employing multichannel strategies in order to move leads through each stage as quickly as possible.
At the start of a conversion funnel, awareness must first be created through various marketing channels and mediums.
These may include content marketing, social media advertising, SEO services, email marketing, and influencer outreach efforts. No matter which channels or mediums you utilize for awareness creation, consistency is essential in moving audiences through this stage of the funnel.
Once your audience has gone through the awareness and interest stages of the conversion funnel, they’re ready to consider your products or services more seriously. You can learn more about sales funnels by clicking the link. At this stage of conversion funnel development, marketing messaging should emphasize benefits over features of competing offerings, which is where free trials or demos of products or services could prove immensely helpful to your business.
At this stage of your conversion funnel, it’s essential to remember that not all of your audience is ready to buy right now. They may just not be interested in what’s being offered, or still researching options; in either case, the key to success lies not forcing a sale but instead building relationships through invitations such as signing up for email newsletters, adding items to carts or downloading more information about your company and its offerings.
Finally, it is time for your audience to take action and convert. This could involve something as straightforward as clicking the “Buy Now” button or more complex such as entering their credit card details on a shopping cart page.
Once this final stage of conversion funnel is reached by your audience, setting goals within Google Analytics would help monitor their success and measure future steps forward.
Testing Your Conversion Funnel
Once you’ve identified key touchpoints of your conversion funnel, testing can begin.
Funnel analysis and heatmaps/session recordings offer more granular insights into what’s happening at each stage. Placing a heatmap on high-exit pages reveals exactly where and how users click or scroll until they find what they’re searching for, as well as any issues such as broken links or unseen CTAs that prevent them from taking action.
Once your conversion funnel has been thoroughly examined, testing should begin gradually with small tweaks to measure their impact before undertaking more extensive changes. A/B testing provides an easy way to monitor how significant one change or tweak can be, such as changing one word in your signup form or including video on landing pages. You can click the link: https://ai.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-Art-Science-of-AB-Testing-for-Business-Decisions.pdf to learn more.
When testing your conversion funnel, keep this goal in mind: to optimize customer flow. By improving each touchpoint’s experience and making potential buyers aware of everything they need to decide and become loyal customers, your conversion funnel testing should prove fruitful.
At the bottom of your funnel is another prime opportunity for optimization efforts to focus their efforts. This could involve making sure that shipping and processing processes run efficiently to prevent issues from costing sales or alienating customers so much that they never return.
