Utilising conversion optimisation for your website
- Read time: 4 mins
- Tech level: low
- Key point: choosing the right conversion optimisation service is important to your business.
In digital marketing and e-commerce there is no one size fits all solution, there are only solutions to your problems for the market your business is in right now.
Conversion optimisation can improve almost any metric on your website that is important to your business. For these reasons and more, it’s important to choose the right service for your situation and goals. We are going to tell you how.
Knowing where to start will save you time and even if you’re planning on outsourcing this work – this article will tell you step by step how to brief your conversion optimisation expert.
What is conversion optimisation?
A quick refresher on what conversion optimisation is: commonly referred to as CRO, conversion rate optimisation uses analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of a website.
Popular optimisation areas on your website could be a landing page or a purchasing funnel for example. Conversion optimisation works on the method of getting the user more engaged, more involved and in the end, persuaded into converting.
It’s the first impression the user will have of your website, and brand.
Step 1: Know your business model
You first need to confirm what your goals are. In most cases this is pretty standard and obvious, (yet so many people tend not to sit down and nut out what their main business goals are). When thinking of using conversion optimisation services, you need to ask yourself a few simple questions:
- What is a conversion to you? (E.g. a newsletter sign up, an online sale etc.)
- What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?
- What are your business goals?
- What is it that your web visitors are trying to achieve on your website?
- How would you classify your goals e.g. long term, short term, awareness based, immediate sale?
- Have you got the appropriate tracking measures in place (it’s hard to measure success without the hard facts).
Step 2: Measure your success
The best tip in whatever online marketing and testing you do is to always accurately measure your conversion rates while you keep improving. “Test, measure, test measure”.
Step 3: Decide what you want to focus your efforts on
Landing pages are a common area that a conversion optimisation expert will look at first, being one of the most important areas for promoting growth for your business. Your website visitor will reward you for a good first impression, and will do the opposite for a bad one (leave your site to go to a competitor's website).
Step 4: Then select the right tool for the task
Session recordings:
You can now watch users navigating around your website by video recordings. This innovative analytic software is to improve your website conversion rate by watching user sessions. You will get to see what frustrates your web visitors and then make the necessary optimisation changes.
Heat maps:
Heat maps show where users are clicking, tapping or scrolling by recording the mouse action and where it navigates to. This software is great for navigation improvements and testing how well your call to action button is performing.
Purchasing conversion funnels:
If you have the proper conversion funnel it will help increase the conversion rate by a few percent, and will identify on which web page visitors drop off so you can optimise.
Analytics:
Find out exactly where people are leaving your site, which buttons have a poor completion rate or take too long to complete or even left blank. Optimise by getting reports and analysis so you can make your site more user-friendly.
While this is great for getting high level statistics, analytics is missing the human side of people interacting with your website. That's why we have user testing.
User testing sessions:
A common practice in the world of usability and user-experience (UX) is user-testing. These user- testing sessions involve a member of your target audience sitting in front of a computer that is recording what they do on screen and their spoken feedback. The audience member is then asked to perform particular tasks then the recordings are analysed to see how difficult or easy it is for members of your target audience to perform critical tasks.
