Conversion rate refers to the percentage of your website visitors that complete a desired goal. Optimization encompasses many different techniques and tactics, but every CRO campaign’s end goal is the same: to make it as easy as possible for a new visitor to take action your business desires. This post will provide an overview of the CRO process and some of the most commonly-used CRO strategies for business websites.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (also known as CRO) is an approach to online marketing that centers on increasing the actual percentage of visitors who convert to clients or otherwise take any desired action on a web page. While this definition might sound a bit vague, it actually explains the main concept of conversion rate optimization very well. The basic principle behind CRO is that you can increase the number of people who take the action you want them to take on your website (i.e., make a purchase, fill out a form, download a resource, etc.), manipulating specific elements of your website.
By tracking the actions of a browser-based on their intent and subsequent interactions with a web page, marketers can better understand user behavior and direct the marketing efforts in areas that will yield the greatest benefit to their businesses. CRO also gives you powerful insights into what your target audience is looking for, what they are searching for to find you, and what words and phrases bring that searcher directly to you.
Understanding Conversion Rate
The first step towards CRO is understanding your conversion rate. This is not a set number but rather a sliding average of all actions taken, measured against data from previous visits. Knowing your conversion rate will guide you in determining what types of changes need to be made to your website, what type of links you should include, what content needs to be added, and where your site visitors should be directed.
Conversion rates are calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get the percentage.
Leads Generated ÷ Actual Sales x 100 = Conversion Rate %
All of this will lead to increased sales, a higher return on investment, and ultimately, more profit. Online analytics tools are available to help measure your CRO and allow you to optimize for maximum benefit.
Conversion Elements
Conversion rate optimization uses several different measuring devices to determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. One such device is the key-to-key engagement scorecard, which monitors and reports user activity to provide marketers with metrics to support strategic decisions about site improvements.
Other performance measures considered by CRO include conversion rates on search engines, search terms used by the visitor, page views, the number of pages viewed, click-throughs to the web page, the time a user spends on the page, and the desired action, which could be as simple as registering a new user or buying a product.
Time Spent On Web Page
The most effective CRO measures the quality and duration of the user experience, allowing marketers to make informed decisions about optimizing their website. Ideally, marketers want to increase conversions even without increasing traffic because satisfied customers provide valuable feedback when making marketing decisions.
Marketers should also measure their conversion rates on web pages that visitors first view. These metrics can offer valuable information about user behavior and the factors that may influence their purchasing decisions. This advice from CRO gives marketers important information about their website’s value, which can then be incorporated into future SEO campaigns.
SEO vs. CRO
Conversion rate optimization is an essential part of effective SEO. Google, Yahoo, and Bing use a complex algorithm to rank web pages according to their importance and relevance to a search query. Although some SEO techniques such as link building and social media marketing are beneficial for improving a site’s popularity and visibility, marketers need to consider whether a different approach could prove more successful at driving conversions.
For example, some people may prefer not to purchase a product if they do not feel that the company they are making purchases from is reputable. Other people may have a more difficult time justifying purchasing if they have not been provided with a compelling reason for doing so. This means that while a social media campaign or link building might improve organic search results, it might not prove successful if it is not paired with conversion optimization.
Campaign Goals
Businesses must know what makes visitors stay and go, as well as why they do not. If a business has clearly defined goals, it will be easier to establish visitors that are more likely to make a purchase or click-through than other traffic types. Marketers can then use this to promote certain products or services to visitors who are more likely to be receptive to their needs.
Google, Yahoo, and Bing use various algorithms to rank web pages, so businesses must take the time to research the methods that appear to be most effective. Conversion optimization is an essential part of this process, as it ensures that visitors remain satisfied and will return to a site in the future.
What Are The Benefits of CRO?
The benefits of conversion rate Optimization are fairly obvious. By focusing exclusively on CRO, you’ll gain an improved understanding of your audience, convert more visitors into customers and lessen your overall CPA, increase your search engine visibility and boost your customer life span. And all of these benefits come at no extra cost. However, if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, the benefits may seem theoretical.
The first step towards understanding the benefits of conversion rate optimization is to focus on the end-user. This is your visitor, not your ad. Conversions happen when your visitor clicks on your ad and proceeds to your website or landing page.
What do you want to accomplish?
Reduce your cost per visitor or improve your customer lifetime value? I will provide the elements that can effect your website’s conversions.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
In my experience, the biggest beneficiaries are websites with the highest CTR (click-through rate). Why is this? Because people spend a lot of time on websites that they’re interested in. So a website with an appealing design will generally draw many more visitors than one that’s ugly. And they will spend more time on those sites, so conversion rates are going to be higher. So you want to maximize your conversions to maximize your customer lifetime value.
Conversion Ratio
The second thing to consider is your conversion ratio. If you’re not getting a decent number of visitors each month, then your conversion ratio isn’t good enough. To remedy this, most online retailers with conversion tracking tools will provide you with a percentage, like 100%, of site visitors who converted from a sale to a lead. The smaller your conversion ratio, the better off you will be as an online retailer because you’ll make far more revenue when those visitors become customers.
Time To Conversion
The third thing to think about is the amount of money you could save with great conversion optimization. There are a few different ways to look at this. One is by estimating the amount of time it would take for someone who never visited your site to become a customer. This may not seem like a huge number, but if you just had one customer who started shopping and got a refund, you could easily save yourself ten thousand dollars or more just by paying attention to this number.
Cutting Costs
The last thing to consider is the amount of money that you could potentially save through cost-cutting. If you have more sales for the same amount of product, then you will have more profits. You could use the benefits of conversion rate optimization in various ways to increase your bottom line. It would help if you always were on the lookout for new and innovative ways to help your business grow and be as successful as possible.
How To Optimize For Conversions
Learning how to optimize conversion rates can make a big difference in your internet marketing efforts. Although it may seem like a fairly straightforward concept, most people learn how to optimize their pages manually, which is incredibly time-consuming and inaccurate. This is why you should avoid learning how to optimize for conversion rates at all costs, and I’ll show you why below. It’s a significant topic that can have a huge impact on your site’s success.\
To begin, I’d like to talk about why it’s so hard to optimize for SEO in the first place. It’s because so many website owners are focused entirely on optimizing for search engine results. This is a great thing, by the way – it makes your pages more accessible to users that need them, but it doesn’t do anything for your pages other than provide a number for the search engine spiders to crawl over. You really want to focus on providing useful content to users on whatever subject matter you’re in. If you do this properly, users will find it compelling to stay on your page rather than click to another site that does an even better job optimizing conversion rates.
Top 8 Practices For Better Conversions
There are a few different ways to optimize your page for conversions for your team to improve your bottom line results. But today, I’ll introduce some techniques that help elevate even successful CRO efforts to produce a lead conversion machine for your business.
Improve Your Meta Descriptions
This one is basic, yet we often find business websites with poor descriptions or none at all.
The first method involves including a meta-description on each page that your site is offering. This is a description that appears at the very top of the screen, above the links to the rest of your site.
Take your time to write a compelling description that will provide details about the page to turn traffic into leads. You want to make sure that your description addresses what people will be coming to see on your site.
Make Your Home Page Dynamic
When designing your webpage, try to make it very dynamic. The reason for this is that your audience will be jam-packed surfing through your homepage and trying to find what they are looking for. To entice visitors to stay on your site, you should use dynamic homepage elements such as drop-down menus and sidebars. Dynamic homepage elements will ensure that your visitors have many things to look at and lots of things to remember.
Once visitors land on your homepage, the goal is to convert them into buyers. There are two ways to do this. You can either give them a direct value proposition, such as a free e-book or a tutorial or seminar related to your particular business. You can also use a chatbot in case they have immediate questions.
Alternatively, you can encourage visitors to take further action by directing them to other pages on your website, such as your blog page. For example, if you own an online store, your homepage could direct visitors to click through to the online shop’s home page and find additional information. A good web design will ensure that all of your pages are optimized for conversions.
Goal-Oriented Landing Pages
Another way to optimize your landing pages is to offer easy-to-follow instructions. As you optimize your site for visitors, make sure that your visitors always have clear instructions on what they need to do next. You should provide clear and easy to understand instructions every step of the way, or else you run the risk of losing potential customers.
Try to remove as many distractions as possible to keep the end-user focused on a specific call to action. You can run A/B tests to see what works best. For example, removing the header and footer is a prevalent strategy to keep people moving towards your conversion goals.
You should also make sure that your pages load fast. You can test your website with online tools to make sure. A/B testing is vital when it comes to optimizing squeeze pages. It’s almost impossible to know what options will convert better until you can see the proof in writing.
Navigate People To Take Action
To encourage more visitors to look at the rest of the site, you need to create an easy navigation system. The easiest way to achieve this is to use drop-down menus or a mega menu at the top of your home page, allowing visitors to go to various sections of your website. This also enables them to explore the product features of your products or services easily.
Create CTAs That Engage
There are various types of call-to-actions (CTAs) that you can use on your web pages, such as action buttons, contact forms, customer surveys, phone numbers, etc. But there are 2 types of CTAs that work best for micro conversions.
Image-Based CTAs – These are hyperlinked images that are placed in strategic positions to attract clicks. They can be placed on sidebars or across the page as banners. Just be careful to make sure that they do not look like sponsored ads since people have developed banner blindness, ignoring these calls to action.
Anchor Test CTSs – Hyperlinks direct the user to an offer page or a subscription form to grow your email list. These hyperlinks are different than your typical link as they are usually designed with different font-size, font colors, or wrapped with a light background.
Again this is where multivariate testing can help you with elements that are converting the best so that you can make necessary adjustments along the way.
Understand The Conversion Funnel
It’s important to understand that different types of leads will come to your website. These leads are at different stages of the sales funnel.
TOFU – These prospects are at the top of the funnel, also known as the discovery process, and have not made a decision to take action. They’re just looking and maybe looking for information.
MOFU – Middle of the funnel leads are more serious about the buying process and see if your company has what they are looking for. Popups such as exit-intent popups and subscription forms will help engage these users to nurture them through the process.
BOFU – Bottom of the funnel leads are persons who have decided that they want or need what you are offering, and you have to make it easy for them to take action.
That’s where our next tip comes into play.
Provide Direct Promotions Or Offers
Lead prospects ready to buy or sign up for your services are called marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Help them get right down to business by providing a clear call to actions to your sign up page, price list, or add to cart page.
It’s obvious that most e-commerce stores got this packed down, but we often find service-based websites that make it near damn impossible to convert.
Lastly, you can use social proof, reviews, or case studies to promote past or existing customers’/clients’ success stories.
Prove It
As the saying goes, put your money where your mouth is. You can help prospects become customers by showing proof that other people are satisfied with your products or services. Showcase your social proof, reviews, or case studies to promote your expertise.
Re-engage Website Visitors
Remember, a win is a win. Not all visitors are going to convert the first time that they visit your web page. You can leverage the poser of tracking pixels to retarget people on other websites. For example, using the Facebook pixel will allow you to stay on the prospect’s mind while watching cute puppies.
Conclusion
The best way to build a viral website is by ensuring that your website is easy to find on search engines, contains strong call-to-action, and provides relevant content that is particular to the market.
By employing the above suggestions and attracting visitors through various social media outlets and advertising campaigns.
The more you incorporate these strategies, the more visitors you will attract, which will lead to an increase in conversions. Optimization is one of the more difficult topics to master because there are so many moving parts.
If you’re new to online marketing, you might consider partnering up with a digital marketing agency that can provide optimization techniques before you proceed with anything. Conversion rates are one of the most important things to understand, and the topic is always evolving. There’s no reason not to learn what you need to know and then move on to the more advanced strategies.
