What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Would you be shocked to discover that on average 50% of visitors to your website leave within seconds of arriving?

More often than not, website owners are focussed on increasing the traffic to their site in order to increase sales and revenue.

Social media, PPC and SEO are all valuable ways of increasing your traffic – but you could be missing a trick by not optimising your website for your existing visitors.

What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?

Briefly, CRO is the art of increasing the percentage of visitors to your website that take action and convert into customers or leads.

Essentially, in order to drive traffic and optimise conversion rates, every visitor will have a problem which your website needs to solve.

Website conversions can include:

• Purchase
• Download
• Sign up
• Register
• Logins
• Request a callback

CRO involves improving a website to provide a positive experience for the visitor, who will hopefully stick around long enough to consider converting to a sale or a lead.

Why should you improve your conversion rates?

CRO is just as important as your SEO and online PR strategy.

Ideally, every website, not just e-commerce and transactional sites, should possess conversion paths to marketing outcomes that help the business to grow.

However, if an average of 50% of visitors to websites will leave within seconds, it is clear that many are not getting what they want.

If you can work out exactly what it is that your visitors want and give them a good experience as a result, they might just stick around. This extra time allows your website to do what it needs in order to increase conversions.

5 more reasons why you should be improving your conversion rates

• If your competitors aren’t doing it already, they soon will be.
• Your visitors will thank you for answering their questions directly, and there’s a better chance they will stay for longer.
• Even a 1% increase in conversion rates can have a dramatic effect on the profitability and health of your business.
• If you’re doing it right, increasing your conversion rate will make your website more appealing to visitors, so other sites are more likely to link to it.
• Remember, by taking the time to improve your website, the 50% of visitors who left within the first few seconds might just stick around long enough for you to convince them to convert. That’s essentially FREE traffic, and you haven’t had to spend a penny more on advertising!

So how do you do it?

There are a number of tools which allow you to implement basic CRO techniques, though before you get started we recommend speaking with an expert.

CRO requires an understanding of data, user experience (UX) and development. A CRO expert will be able to develop a bespoke strategy to get you started with improvements.

This can start with an examination of your Google Analytics data (or any other tracking data), or by implementing a heatmap, or something similar, onto the page you wish to optimise. Once sufficient data has been gathered, you can begin to construct an hypothesis which can then be tested.

This includes:

• Is our call to action clear enough?
• Is our copy persuasive enough?
• Could our product images be letting us down?

All these things can then be put to the test using an A/B format. This means that you have two versions of a given web page (version A and version B), which have slight variations between the two.

This variation can be anything – perhaps you change the copy on your purchase button from “Add to Cart” to “Buy Now”, or you change the colour of the button from blue to something more noticeable like red.

Once these tests are running, you can track the performance over weeks and/or months. The difference may often only be single digits of percent – but increasing your conversion rate from 3% to 4% can mean hundreds or thousands added onto your revenue.

These incremental changes and improvements can then be rolled out across your page templates, at which point you can start optimisation again.

We’ve seen great success from this – we increased conversion on one of our clients’ pages from single digits to nearly 30%.