What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Digital marketing is a minefield of acronyms and jargon. You don’t need to be an expert in digital marketing to optimize your website. There are a few fundamentals that are worth doing to optimize your business online. One of the key aspects to understanding your customer’s behaviour can be revealed with conversions.
What is a conversion?
A conversion can refer to any desired action that you want the user to take.
Some examples of conversion rates are:
- Clicking on a video
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Downloading a PDF
- Submitting a form
What is a conversion rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action that has been set up as a conversion.
A high conversion rate indicates that your website has been designed effectively with the user experience in mind. If a website is poorly designed it will lead to lower conversion rates and potentially high bounce rates, with less traffic. Slow load speeds, inconsistent formatting, broken forms or overtly complex copy (or text) can damage your conversion rates.
How to track conversion rates
Tracking and optimising conversion rate is an important branch of the digital marketing tree. Business owners and marketeers need to know if conversions are performing more poorly or more successfully than expected so that they can adapt as needed. Tracking conversion rate data throughout the year is a great way of analysing your digital marketing efforts. Understanding where your wins and losses come from is the best way to learn more about conversion rate optimisation, so you can adapt your strategy for the future to achieve CRO success.
Why not check out our CRO case studies, to see how we have improved conversion rates for our clients?
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Optimising your conversion rates is a crucial digital marketing practice that can help businesses achieve their goals whilst learning the keys to conversion rate success. Improving your conversion rate begins with analysing the current data. When analysing your conversion rate, the first step is to find your industry’s benchmark. These range widely across different sectors, and having this data alongside your current analytics can help identify whether your strategy needs adapting.
If you’re curious to know what the 2022 conversion rate benchmarks are for websites and devices, Smart Insight’s data (2022) found that “10% of website users prefer a call direct button rather than sign up form”.
Whilst data is very important when it comes to conversion rate optimisation, we should also remember that it is individuals who drive these numbers in the first place. If your optimisation strategy is not user-centric, then it is unlikely that it will be successful. At MBD, we believe in a holistic approach to CRO that looks at what attracts visitors to your website, what blocks them from getting any further and what convinces them to stay. By focusing on these things, we can give users the best experience possible which in turn will lead to greater conversion rates and customer and/or client loyalty.
Focusing on the final conversion is important, but in reality, the user goes on an entire journey before they reach this point, and it is through understanding the journey that we can optimise our conversion rates appropriately.
So you’ve analysed your data, compared it to the benchmark of your industry and are beginning to think about the users. What’s next? Well, try asking yourself the following three questions.
- What ATTRACTS people to our website?
- What BLOCKS people from moving on in their journey?
- What CONVINCES people to convert?
Often the answers to these three questions will highlight the key areas of weakness and strength in your current optimisation strategy. However, when you’re working on optimising your strategy, not all problems have an easy answer. Sometimes there’s a simple error that is blocking a form from loading, other times there might be no data to explain why a specific conversion has a low rate. When this happens, we dig deeper into the user journey and unravel the mystery behind the current rates.
Imagine that you’ve been tasked with improving the conversion rate optimisation this month for webinar sign-ups. However, you have no hard data to make sense of why current rates are so poor.
Follow your customer’s journey
What do you do next? In short, you analyse the user journey for this specific conversion.
Your product is a webinar for productivity at work. How would a website user even begin that journey? What is their state of mind? Someone searching for this product would probably start by feeling overwhelmed or stressed by their current workload. After attempting to resolve the issue themselves they might search ‘how to increase productivity at work’ in Google. The SERP will bring up so many different articles and lists in response to the user’s question that they might feel even more stressed than before! They might leave the computer for a few days and then return to search ‘how to be less stressed at work’.
If they typed this into google and the first thing they saw was a blog article that linked to your website with easy information that reassured the user, they might click on the link. After reading through your blog post, they may try out a few of the tips that you have given. Maybe they return to your website three weeks later for another article and see a banner at the bottom that is advertising a webinar about stress and productivity at work. They might click the banner and investigate the webinar, but there’s no saying they’ll sign up there. The user might revisit this page several times before deciding to fill out the form, they might even submit a contact form to ask the company questions before choosing to attend.
Have we lost you? It’s certainly muddling. The point is that the user journey is not simple. It is often over a long period and involves several interactions with the website before the desired conversion is taken. From the example above we can see multiple touchpoints that could have blockers to prevent the user from converting.
Unlocking the secrets of CRO requires patience, deep analysis and sometimes a little bit of help. At My Bright Digital, we offer a Conversion Rate Optimisation service that may help you if you’re feeling a little stuck.
A/B Testing for CRO
One way MBD optimises conversion rate is through split-testing different potential blockers of the user journey.
Using the productivity webinar example, there are a variety of options that could be preventing the user from converting:
What if the blog post had nonsensical copy?
What if they missed the webinar banner because it was only placed at the very bottom of the page?
What if the webinar form required information from them that they did not want to give?
Once you have identified what might be preventing a user from converting, how do you optimise this? One idea is split-testing. Using the idea of the banner, you might split-test having the banner in different places on the web page. The banner might be shown at the top of the page to one group of visitors, the middle to another group and the bottom to another. By measuring the data from this split test you can get a pretty good idea of which placement is the most successful, and optimise this in light of the data.
Split-testing isn’t the only way to improve conversion rates. Here are some other ideas for CRO:
- Add a pop-up to your site
- Remove unnecessary sign-up form fields
- Add testimonials, reviews, and logos to build postive reputation
- Remove distractions, uncessisary pop ups and outdated videos
- Make the initial step really easy, sign up in three simple steps
- Strengthen your CTA call to action within your site copy
- Add live chat to your site if you want a direct line to your customers
If you’re interested in more ideas for CRO, we recommend reading through HubSpot’s blog post.
The mystery of CRO may feel like it’s never-ending, but the more you optimise your conversion rates the easier it will be to adapt your strategy in the future.
Speak to CRO experts
At My Bright Digital, our CRO experts have optimised strategies for a variety of clients including B2C and B2B companies. We understand the bug-bears of CRO, and are here to help you avoid any painstaking obstacles that could lead to time-wasting or pulling your hair out!
There is always room for further optimisation as people’s behaviour changes and further conversions are introduced. At MBD, we have the experience to help guide you through the minefield of CRO whilst also explaining our methods. We believe in empowering our clients by growing their own knowledge of digital marketing and are always on hand to answer any questions they may have.
CRO Advice From The Experts
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