Conversion rate…it might sound like some sort of religious metric, but in reality, it’s one of the best ways to measure the performance of your advertising campaigns. Conversion is a key element in your paid search strategy. If you’re not actually turning lookers into buyers at a high rate, what are you advertising for?
In this article, we’re going to discuss what the conversion rate is and how to improve it.
Unlike click-through rate, conversion rate tells you what percentage of your traffic is actually doing what you want them to do. You can buy all of the clicks you want, but if those clicks don’t convert…something is wrong.
Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, you want to break into the top 10%. To put it simply, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or landing page that convert. Depending on your business goals, a “conversion” could be almost anything, but here are a few common types of conversions:
- Making a purchase
- Submitting a form
- Calling your business
- Engaging with you ronline chat
- Signing up for a subscription
- Registering on the site
- Downloading something
- Using something (software, app)
- Upgrading their service
- Engaging with your site in some way
Knowing what a conversion rate is and how to track it is one thing, but what do you actually do with your conversion rate data? More importantly, how do you improve your conversion rate?
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your landing page and website to produce more conversions from your traffic! If you’re going to pay to get traffic to your site, you want to send them to a page that is designed to sell. Insanely focused and strategic landing page optimization brings 3-5x the conversions and improves lead quality.
1-Testing Your Site
Create A Dedicated Landing Page
In order to create well-designed website, first area you should look into is landing page. You can make small but effective changes in front type, spacing, button color, image, etc. You will see they can seem more impactful than they really are.
Come Up With a Hypothesis
We had to think outside the box and come up with something different and unique; something more tangible and compelling. All good CRO tests start with a hypothesis.
But, to put your hypothesis together, you’ll have to make some educated guesses about which site elements have the biggest impact on your conversion rate and profitability. Here are a few areas you can look at first:
Headline: Your headline needs to sell and sell hard.
Offer: Your audience isn’t you, so they don’t always respond the way you think they will. Try different descriptions and layouts to see what resonates best with your prospective clients.
Call-to-action: Like your offer, the right call-to-action(CTA) may take a few tests to discover. Try more descriptive CTAs or different button sizes.
Media: Sometimes a new picture or video can make all the difference.
Once you’ve got a hypothesis and two page designs to assess, all you have to do is get your test running
A/B Test
A/B testing is the easiest and most effective way to to start doing CRO. To run an A/B test, all you have to do is set up two different variants of a page and split your traffic between them. Half of your traffic goes to variant A and half goes to variant B.
Testing Your Traffic
In addition to testing your website, another great way to improve your conversion rate is to test your traffic and to get meaningful data. This is important, because the wrong traffic won’t convert…even on the perfect page.
So, how do you make sure you’re sending the right traffic to your landing page?
You should first take the time to do a little research on your target audience.
The content of your marketing material should match the content of your landing page.
The more audience-specific you can make your ads and landing page, the more likely they are to convert.
Create a testing budget for exploring new traffic or targeting opportunities and focus most of your budget on known winners.
Finally, you should learn to use “Remarketing” as a CRO Tool. On average, 96% of the people who visit a website will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale. Remarketing helps you get in front of these people with targeted, relevant messaging as they take part in other activities around the web, like email, watching YouTube videos, using social networks or searching for information.
