Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is a technique that deals with how visitors are engaging with your website. This involves tracking and optimising the number of visitors who are taking a desired action on your website. These actions could range from anything such as filling in your contact form, clicking on your calls to action, signing up to your mailing list or purchasing your services or products.
Whilst it’s still crucial to bring traffic to your website, we believe it is more important that you convert these visitors into revenue. Obviously both high levels of traffic and a high conversion rate is the ultimate website goal, but for your website to generate revenue you need to focus on your conversion rate.
Conversion rates are usually measured as a percentage of website visitors who carry out a specific planned action. For example, if 1000 visitors come to a website in a month, and 8 of them fill out a contact form, then the conversion rate would be 0.8%.
In this article we’ll discuss:
- Identifying your top landing pages
- Setting out clear goals
- Analysing what works and what doesn’t
- How to use Calls-to-Action correctly
- Why speed is crucial to conversions
- How to display key messages to your users
Identifying your top landing pages
- Using an analytics platform, you should be able to pick out the top three pages that your users land on when searching for your services. It is key to pick out these specific pages as they provide an opportunity to test techniques and then apply them to other pages in the future.
Setting out clear goals
- You probably have a very clear overarching goal for your website such as to increase contact form leads, increase sign ups, or just generally increase revenue. Other business goals for your website may be to increase brand awareness, provide another form of customer service, or just to be a trusted source of information. It is also key to set out specific page goals. What is each page supposed to achieve? And how does that relate to your overarching business goals?
Analysing what works and what doesn’t
- Data is key to CRO, it is really important to make sure you know how effective your page is at obtaining conversions and by how much any changes increase or decrease that effectiveness. You can work out what works and what doesn’t by split testing changes. Take your original page and make sure you save the results of all your analytics for that page including the conversion rate. Once you’ve modified the element on that page you can then measure those results. You can do these tests multiple times with multiple modifications to that page but make sure you are comparing the data for every change. You must also stick with the modifications that produce the greatest proportion of conversions. This process may feel slow and gradual, but needs to be carried out in small steps, so you can be sure of which specific changes lead to a specific result; change too much at once and you won’t have reliable information that can be applied to other pages.
How to use Calls-to-Action correctly
- When it comes to calls to action there is a delicate balance between drawing the users’ attention without being annoying and distracting users from the main content of the page. Calls to action ask your users to do something, whether that’s sign up for a newsletter, give you a call, sign up for your products, it ‘ the button they press once the trust has been gained and they ‘e ready to commit to your business. Things to consider are: colour, size, placement, and the copy in the call to action. These things might sound trivial to the bigger picture of the website but amazingly small changes to your calls to action can lead to increases in conversion rates. Again, it is crucial you carefully track these changes, so you understand what has worked.
Why speed is crucial to conversions
- We believe that site speed is one of the most pertinent considerations for any website – it plays a key role in search engine rankings, user retention and ultimately conversions. If your website takes too long to load users will not wait, they will bounce immediately causing lost conversions and a dip in search rankings. To ensure that the site is optimised to load quickly on all browsers and devices there are lots of easy things you can do, please read our previous post about how to make your website load faster for more information. Aside from image optimisation, fast hosting, cleaning up unused plugins and files, there are also plugins you can use like WP rocket. Again, do not use guesswork to judge this one, it’s important to track the different speeds for different elements of your website and work out exactly what is causing delays. Pingdom is a great tool for analysing speed.
How to display key messages to your users
- What do your customers want to know? Your website should reinforce their trust in your business, and answer all of their questions. It might seem like there is an art to putting your key messages in the right place to encourage conversions, and whilst there is a lot of research surrounding this subject area, you don’t need to be a UX expert to make some quick wins and start increasing your conversions. Focus on your headlines and titles, these big hero messages are the first thing a visitor sees on your landing page; it defines their first impression of your business and if they like it they’ll continue to scroll and search your site. Focus on the design by checking the font type, size, and colour. In terms of the writing style you could ask a question, address your users directly, or, focus on numbers for example ‘10 ways to…’, or ‘90% of users…’. In every instance keep it short, clear and concise.
These 6 points are a great place to start if you’re trying to increase your website’s conversions. There are plenty of free tools and services out there that can help you get started. If conversion rate optimisation is something you’re really interested in then please get in touch and have a chat with one of our experts. Whilst these 6 points cover a lot there is plenty more you can work on as well, such as navigation, forms (check out our earlier post about forms), and user experience. We’d be happy to help!
