What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of getting more people who land on your site to perform a desired action such as filling out a form, buying a product, or clicking an affiliate link. You do this by changing some elements on your site such as the layout, the content, or the sales funnel. And then you measure your customers’ response to the changes by using A/B testing tools.

What you’re essentially doing is getting feedback from your visitors. Then based on this feedback, you figure out what they want and how to clearly convey your offers so they act on them.

But the big question is…

Why is conversion rate optimization so important for your online business?

Let’s get straight to the point. Conversion rate optimization is important because it’s the most cost-effective way to increase ROI. Your team may currently focus on increasing traffic or ad spend. But if very few of the people who land on your site convert into customers, then you’re throwing money down the drain.

We’re not saying stop working on your site’s traffic acquisition. What we’re saying is that your business can make more money from the same traffic. That’s what conversion optimization can do for you.

But that’s not all. CRO offers many other benefits to your business, too.

CRO can improve SEO

This may not be the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, many of our clients are usually concerned that CRO will affect their SEO rankings.

We’ve always found the opposite to be true.

When you do conversion rate optimization, you’re also improving user experience. This means that the site loads faster, reads better and answers user intent. Because of this, internet visitors stay longer and engage with your website more. And I don’t need to tell you that these are all features that search engines want.

CRO helps you better understand the needs of your customers

In internet marketing, a useful superpower is knowing what makes your customers buy. Conversion rate optimization hands you this superpower on a plate. Every time you test, you learn more about your customers. Andin the process, you learn how to overcome the technological barrier that stops them from clearly understanding your offers.

How does this help? With insights you take from CRO campaigns, you build your site to fit the things your customers need to make a decision. Every element on your page talks to them and their specific needs. There’s power in that. That’s how you meet your customers halfway. And when customers feel that you understand them, their trust in your company increases.

And on the internet, trust is the currency that builds your business up.

Have we got your attention yet? Good! But I know you’ve got a few more questions like…

What do you do to increase conversions? Can you show proof that it works?

This depends on your goals. But here are some quick conversion rate optimization tips to improve your site’s performance.

If you want to get more quality leads

Let’s see. If there’s one thing you can say about your business, it’s that traffic is not a problem. Your PPC ads team does a great job of getting potential clients to your site. Your SEO specialists send lots of free search engine traffic.

And these visitors that land on your site? They act on your offers and become leads. Awesome! But you have one problem. When it comes to getting them to the next step of the conversion funnel, these leads are very hard work. A properly-executed CRO campaign aims to alleviate this problem by weeding the tire kickers out and drawing the quality leads in.

How do you do this? We find that an important area to optimize is the lead generation form. There’s often a lot of friction in this crucial part of a lead gen site so by optimizing it you can expect to increase conversions in a very short time.

This is what we did to Empire Flippers’ valuation tool which was originally designed as a static form. Here’s a comparison of the original and optimized design.

We “gamified” the form and made it easier for a target customer to fill it out. We turned the form from a 2-step to a 4-step process. We also optimized it for mobile. These changes increased conversions by 51.47% and provided and provided high quality leads for Empire Flippers

If you want to increase sales in an eCommerce site

The first thing you do is identify pages that contribute the most to your revenue. Most of the time, this means the product or the landing page. Why? The customers on these pages are already far ahead in the buyer’s journey. They’re aware of the product or solution and are now on the cusp of buying it. So all you have to do is make it clear why buying from you is better than buying from your competitor.

Have a look at your landing pages. What changes can you make to convince your visitors that you’re the best company and have the best product? Make this clear on your landing page to convert more visitors into buyers.

To improve these pages, you can:

Rewrite the content Improve the layout Improve user experience

For example, we increased justThrive’s conversions by more than 100%+ just by working on their product page. Before we started the test, we delved deep into understanding their visitors. We found that their target customers were usually wary of health supplement claims. So we designed their product page in a way that increases trust in the company.

Here are the changes we made to the page.

These changes increased justThrive’s recurring revenue by 162%!

For increasing affiliate site revenue

Affiliate sites are close to our hearts. It’s where many of us started. The main problem with niche affiliate websites is that the business owners are so focused on increasing traffic – for good reason – that they forget conversion optimization. After everything we’ve seen optimizing affiliate sites, we can, without a doubt, say that this is a big mistake.

To increase affiliate site revenue, you’ll want to focus on these two things:

Getting a higher percentage of visitors to click as early as possible with a comparison table Getting visitors in a ready-to-buy mindset before clicking through to the affiliate site

As an affiliate site, you have one main goal. To get a person to click from your site to the vendor’s. But that’s not all. You also want him to be convinced enough that when he’s at the retailer’s page, he’s not going to dilly-dally and get lost in the many other pages of the site. You want him to be there with his mind made up to buy the product.

Here’s an example of how we did this on the 10Beasts site. First, our main focus was to improve the comparison tables. Then, we did an in-depth look into the specific items they featured on the page. Lastly, we analyzed their Amazon sales data to determine which products have higher conversions so we could push more of those products.

This was one long project with many ups and downs. But in the end, we increased their revenue by 61.4%.

As you can see from these three case studies, CRO works. If you’re itching to do it on your own site, here’s what to do.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

There are 3 major steps to conversion rate optimization.

Do a site audit Improve pages based on the website analysis Conduct A/B or multivariate testing

Do a Site Audit

Never start conversion optimizations without a site audit. This is how you ensure that all CRO campaigns are tailored to your specific audience.

A site audit includes

Traffic analysis: Analyze your site’s data.Use heatmaps and Google Analytics and analyze conversion rate optimization metrics. By using A/B testing tools, you’ll find out many things about how your visitors’ experience your site. You’ll know things like which pages they visit the most and which parts of the page they often get stuck at. You’ll know at which point they bounce or which links they often click.

Analyze your site’s data.Use heatmaps and Google Analytics and analyze conversion rate optimization metrics. By using A/B testing tools, you’ll find out many things about how your visitors’ experience your site. You’ll know things like which pages they visit the most and which parts of the page they often get stuck at. You’ll know at which point they bounce or which links they often click. Interview customers. Survey or interview your current customers. This can take time and resources. But it’s worth it because it provides a great window into the state of mind of your website’s visitors and what makes them buy from you.

Build new pages/variations based on the website analysis

After running a conversion rate optimization audit, it’s time to apply the insights on to your pages. Here’s how you do this:

1. Decide which pages to work on first

For quick wins, find the 80/20. Identify the top 5-10 pages on your site that have the most traffic or revenue and work on those first. Why? CRO is a big job. And if you’re doing it for the first time, it can quickly become overwhelming. Besides, you’d want to get traction as early as possible.

We’ve found that if you work on these top pages first, you’ll get a noticeable increase in income. And your first taste of a winning conversion campaign will fuel your persistence to keep doing more tests.

2. Identify what changes to make

After you’ve identified the pages to test, decide what to change on these pages based on data from the site audit .

Here are some page elements you can test:

Layout/design

User experience

Conversion funnel

Content/Copy

Image, video and other visual aids

CTA button

Conduct A/B or Multivariate testing

You’ve done an audit and you’ve changed the pages on your site. Now it’s time to put your hypothesis to the test. You do this by A/B testing. That is, you have a variation of the original page (the control) and you throw the same number of traffic to each page. After a period of time, when the test reaches statistical significance, you’ll see that one page will convert better than the other. Hopefully, this is the variation you’ve made changes on.

What next?

If you want to do conversion rate optimization yourself, we have lots of advice on our blog on how you can improve conversions. However, if you’re ready to take this to the next level, hire a conversion rate optimization agency.

Why?

When you work with experts who have hands-on experience, you stop the guessing and the ad-hoc CRO tests.

See. In-house conversion optimizations can be great. Until they’re not.

Many of the companies we work with have done conversion rate optimizations on their own sites. But the results didn’t go where they thought they would. They ended up feeling like it had all been a waste of their internet marketing team’s precious time. Like their efforts were wasted on activities that didn’t lead to desired results.

But when you hire CRO experts, every test will follow a well-thought-through strategy and a process that’s based on thousands of hours of hands-on experience. This means a better chance of increasing conversions in a shorter time.

Why Choose Convertica?

At Convertica, we build a CRO strategy that’s personalized to your audience. We look at your analytics, study heatmaps and analyze the behavior of your users. Then and only then will we build a strategy that will work for your business.

There are many conversion rate optimization companies to choose from. Here’s why we’re the best choice.

We understand your business

We’ve worked with over 400 businesses in different niches. We work with companies all over the world. In any given month, we do hundreds of tests on dozens of sites. You know what that means? We can easily shift strategy based on the industry you’re in. We have data on so many different niches and the experience to utilize this data effectively.

We do it all for you from start to finish

You’ve tried. You have a great marketing and sales team. But you’ve realized that adding conversion rate optimization tasks to their daily workload is too much. You’ve spread them too thin. So you’ve thought about hiring more people. But even that takes a long time. You’ll have to hire not just trained CRO experts. But you’ll also need qualified UX/UI designers, data analysts and web developers.

But when you partner with a conversion rate optimization company like Convertica, you stop worrying about these problems. Our analytics experts will audit your site. Our conversion optimization specialists will build a CRO strategy customized to your website’s needs. The designers and developers will work on the back-end and front-end of your site.

We’ll do it all for you from start to finish. All you have to do is wait for conversions to increase

We understand SEO

This is a concern that many potential clients have. When their search engine ranking is doing well, they are often hesitant to invest in conversion optimization — afraid that it will ruin their organic traffic.

We understand that. We are digital marketers, too. And SEO we hold dear to our hearts. We don’t just have background knowledge in search engine optimization, many of us started in that industry.

What I’m saying is this: We know how important SEO is. How it is the lifeblood of a web company that gets most of its traffic from organic search.

This means we will always make sure that your SEO performance is not negatively affected by any changes we make. In fact, because CRO involves improving user experience, visitors stay longer. And that means Google likes it, too.

We have CRO specialists all working together so that your website gets a higher conversion rate and your business makes more sales

The members of our team are all seasoned by thousands of hours of hands-on experience. We know the theory. But we also know that these theories are only as good as their performance when put to the test.

When you work with us, you’re collaborating with a company that has the foresight and experience to back-up all the tests on your site. And here’s something more. We’re not just experts. We’re perfectionists, too. We don’t stop until we see an increase in conversions. That’s our promise to you.

We deliver on our promises. We will increase your revenue or you get your money back.

Have you seen our no-risk guarantee? Work with us and we will increase your revenue. If we don’t, you get your money back. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Are you ready for CRO campaigns that make a difference to your business?