Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action.
This can be as simple as signing up for a service, completing a web form, or purchasing a product.
We can calculate this by dividing your number of conversions by the number of your visitors.
We then multiply that number by 100 to get the percentage.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO), lets you make improvements to your web pages and content to get more conversions.
A high conversion rate means that your website is well-designed and appeals to your target audience.
Optimizing for conversions helps to boost high-quality leads, increase revenue, and grow your company.
Conversions can take place anywhere on your websites such as your pricing page, customer acquisition costs, the home page, and landing pages.
With so much potential throughout these areas of your website, it’s best to optimize each location to maximize your conversions.
Physical Stores Have a Higher Conversion Rate than Online Stores
Like online retailers, physical shops need to focus their efforts on converting the store traffic that they receive.
When applied, CRO can be the difference between delivering positive sales or not.
Conversion rates vary across retail categories, but they also vary within the same chain as a result of variations in store format, product mix, geographical location, inventory levels, and store personnel who serve the shoppers.
The reality is, every physical store is unique and to optimize conversion rates, all these facets need to be considered.
How Do You Optimize Conversion Rates?
Goal Setting
Before taking any action, you need to analyze the current situation, set appropriate goals, and measure the results of your activities.
Try to answer this question as honestly as possible: What is my ultimate objective?
Build Your Own Strategy
Start by exploring the best practices in the field and by learning what has worked for other businesses before.
Use these insights to prepare a list of tests, corrections, and features that can improve your conversion rate.
Prioritize Ideas
CRO isn’t a one-way street with defined rules and practices.
You need to determine priorities based on the level of difficulty. For instance, it’s simple to try different variants of call-to-action buttons.
You can also play with colors, dimensions, and copies to find the best solution.
Localize Content
When operating a local business, you need to pay attention to the needs of the local community. You can write about local events, and address small things that may be interesting to your followers.
Beware of Details
There are many conversion factors that influence a company’s potential to increase revenue.
To boost your CRO, you’ll have to work on each one of these features:
Anxiety: If you build a credible website, you can reduce anxiety by making the audience feel more comfortable sharing information with you.
Clarity: Get the visitors to notice the offer within seconds.
Distraction: Adding more than a few call-to-action buttons per page may lower conversions.
Relevance: Always offer content that users are looking for.
Urgency: Most people react to the notion of urgency, so don’t be afraid of using limited-time offers and phrases such as “only a few pieces left.”
Value proposition: Write a web page copy that shows the quality of the offer.
Word of mouth can play a vital role in modern marketing, particularly if you’re running a small company that’s unknown to wider audiences.
With customer testimonials, you can prove your authority and professional reliability.
Improve the User Experience
User experience can be a technical part of website performance, but it has the power to make or break your CRO efforts.
Bear in mind the importance of mobile devices, so you’ll need to ensure simple and intuitive website navigation.
Update Product Pages
Keeping your product page up to date is another way to boost conversions.
Here are a few things to take into consideration when making updates:
Readability: make sure to cut all errors and improve the style of writing wherever possible.
Technical Issues: Are all product-related details precise and accurate
Text Quality: Do you consider the copy to be interesting or too simple and boring?
Page Load Speed
Everyone hates having to wait forever for a page to load — it’s no wonder it’s one of the most disturbing user experience issues.
Website visitors expect your pages to load within three seconds, so it’s important to ensure proper speed if you want to boost conversions.
What is the Conversion Formula?
To calculate your conversion rate, you’ll need to do some quick math.
The formula for a conversion rate is the number of times a visitor completes a goal. This is then divided by the number of people who had the opportunity to complete that goal.
For example, let’s say you run an e-commerce website. A key conversation for this site would be the number of people making purchases.
If 1,000 people visited the website last month and you made 100 sales, then your conversion rate would be 100 / 1,000 = 10%.
What is the Formula of Measurement?
One of the best things about conversion rates is that you can be as broad or as specific with it as you want to be.
Here are a few different ways that you can use data for performance improvement:
Survey Your Customers
To master CRO, you need to know the importance of knowing your target audience.
One tactic to make sure your landing page meets the needs of your target audience is to survey them.
There are different ways to complete surveys.
You can email current customers and ask them questions such as what type of specials would encourage them to make a purchase online.
You can also offer a pop-up survey and gather info from all the visitors on your site. In addition, you can look through past emails, complaints, and chats to learn more about your target audience and how you can meet their needs.
Offer a Guarantee
When a new lead comes to your page, they might not know your brand.
Even if they get recommendations from friends, they may still question if you’re trustworthy.
A sure way to reassure leads that you follow through with promises is to offer a money-back guarantee.
This takes the uncertainty out of the decision to do business with your company for the first time.
Offline Branding Strategies
Even though most of your CRO strategies will revolve around online efforts, don’t rule out offline branding strategies that convert visitors into buyers.
Consumers don’t always find your e-commerce site through Facebook or a Google search.
So it’s a good idea to get your brand out there through magazines, a large sign placed outside of your store, or other visual branding strategies.
Another idea is to create a specific hashtag during trade shows that users can share after visiting your booth.
You can then find users and share links to news and special offers.
Add Testimonials
Customer testimonials are 89% effective in grabbing attention.
Sharing snippets of how customers feel about your brand is a powerful tool that shows how real people like and use your brand and product.
You’ve looked at other websites and their return policy while skimming over the reviews and testimonials to make sure that they don’t have serious complaints against them.
One of the most effective ways to show off testimonials is to highlight a few different customers on your About Us page by adding a photo and a quote from happy customers.
Test Your Site
While you add new elements to your landing pages and your conversion funnel, test each change with A/B testing.
Companies that succeed in improving conversation rates ran about 50% more tests than companies with less success in improving conversions.
It’s best to conduct many tests frequently to raise your conversion rates as high as possible.
Create Longer Landing Pages
People need convincing before they give away their hard-earned cash. Longer landing pages allow you to hone in on the questions a first-time customer has.
Long landing pages can gather as much as 220% more leads than short-form pages.
While you might collect a lot of leads with a conceited form, they may not all turn into warm leads, or may not be interested in what you have to offer.
Instead, weed out the browsers who aren’t likely to convert and watch your conversion rates soar as you put your focus on those who are likely to become customers.
Increasing Conversions
To improve your conversion rates, simply follow the six CRO strategies mentioned above.
However, keep in mind that developing your conversions take time and attention to detail.
And while minor changes can make a significant impact at times, it is important to keep testing, tweaking, and trying new tactics to reach your target audience.
Conversion for e-Commerce
A website’s conversion rate illustrates how successfully a brand is able to use its online presence to turn traffic into revenue.
When the conversion rate is low, this means that a business may be losing out on prospective customers and lucrative leads.
This is a huge nightmare for marketers since this is an indicator that an e-commerce site simply isn’t performing as well as it should.
However, a low conversion rate can be corrected, and the solution can be relatively simple.
What is a Conversion?
For e-commerce retailers, the conversion is most commonly known as a purchase.
This happens when someone lands on your website, searches your catalog, adds an item to the cart, and then proceeds to purchase it.
An online store can also have other types of conversions referred to as micro-conversions.
These may include a product review, newsletter signup, creating an account, using a coupon, downloading a buyer’s guide, and more.
What Does Conversion Optimization Mean?
The conversation rate is a metric that all digital marketers stick to.
The main reason for this is because conversion rates are an excellent way to directly measure the impact your website has on your business objectives.
Pageviews and visitors are a good measure of success if your business goals are driven by the number of people reading your pages.
However, if your site has a different purpose, then knowing your conversion rate is much more useful.
Your conversion rate can also help you benchmark success for your website.
If you’ve updated a product description or changed the layout of your site, you can measure the change in your conversion rate to see whether that change has a positive or negative impact on your site.
Finally, conversion rates are a great way to compare the value of different audience segments and channels.
While it’s tempting to just measure success by the total number of conversions generated from each channel, doing so will most likely result in missed opportunities.
How Do You Analyze Conversion Rates?
The first thing to do is to set up a system for tracking conversion rates with the help of the following tools:
AdWords and Google Analytics
These tools collect large amounts of raw data, so remember to set filters and focus on specific date sets to avoid missing important insights related to your goals.
Heatmaps
These tools collect large amounts of raw data, so remember to set filters and focus on specific date sets to avoid missing important insights related to your goals.
Heatmaps
This feature captures the user’s eye movements and clicks on your website, which is information that can identify top-performing or weaker elements on pages to steer your optimization strategy.
Replay and Session Recording Tool
Replaying user sessions shed light on how visitors navigate
Seeing the user experience in action can help to identify bugs that were missed, as well as understand why there have been high bounce rates at specific sections in the funnel, and interact with your website.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
This measures how happy your customers are with your business, and in what areas you can improve.
Focusing on the customer experience is essential for retention and driving more conversations.
What are Other Used Terms for Conversion Optimization?
Here are other commonly used terms for conversion optimization:
Lead conversation optimization
Conversion content strategy
Relationship rate optimization
Why is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?
One thing to keep in mind as you calculate your conversion rate is the quality of your data.
For example, there are pages with a 100% conversion rate — which may seem great at first, until you realize there was only 1 visitor.
If your traffic samples aren’t very big, it can be hard to trust your results.
Having 5% of 20 people convert on your site sounds like a big number at first.
However, one of them might have converted accidentally, which lowers the quality of data.
On the other hand, if 5% of 10,000 people convert and 5 of them converted by accident, your conversion rate drops from 5% to 4.95%, which is still dependable data.
Because every traffic source has a certain amount of natural randomness (such as accidental conversions, random periods of high or low conversion rates, people who meant to convert but didn’t), the only effective way to analyze our conversation rates is to use a long time frame.
Like many other conversations related concepts, there is no “right” time frame for every business.
Many marketers use a month as their usual time frame, but if you manage a big site such as Walmart, then you may only need a few days’ worth of data.
If you only get a few hundred visits a month, it may take up to 6 months to get a feel for your conversion rate.
What is a CRO Strategy?
The reason why you should have a conversion optimization plan in place is to establish the right methods, tasks, and goals which will help you make the most out of your website and turn it into a conversation machine.
Without a plan, it’s easy to lose focus and waste your time on things that aren’t important or don’t matter.
This is about setting your priorities and identifying what the problem is and how to solve it in the most effective and efficient way possible.
Although changing a few elements is a good starting point, your planning needs to evolve and cover different areas of your sales process, as well as your business in general.
Here is a step-by-step process for creating your own CRO strategy:
Collect Data
There’s a saying that people don’t buy products, but instead buy better versions of themselves.
This perfectly sums up why you need to have a deep understanding of your customers, as well as their needs, issues, interests, and how they see your website.
Knowing all these things can help you optimize your conversions
Having the right data is essential for gaining valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t.
This is the most critical step for helping you see where you stand and what assets you have.
Create a Hypothesis
After gathering all the data you need, it’s time to put them to good use.
You’ve probably identified a couple of issues on your website that needs to be solved.
There are two options when it comes to testing a page that returns poor results — you can either build it from scratch or you can change a couple of elements.
For example, if your data shows that the CTA button isn’t genetic clicks, then you can introduce a number of changes in the font, colors, and even the copy.
Test Your Hypothesis
While implementing a new design and testing it may seem like a complicated task, there are useful tools that can significantly simplify this process.
First, there are a few things to keep in mind:
Make sure that your new design is displayed properly across all browsers before it goes live.
Choose how much traffic you’ll direct to your test pages. If you have a lot of visitors, then this step will help you control possible risks in case your design fails and conversion drops.
Don’t neglect the average order value — although your conversion rates might be low for the pages you test, the average order value might go up.
Set all these things up before you launch your tests if you want to get accurate readings.
It’s also a good idea to enlist the help of experts from a trusted web design agency if you want to run your tests effectively and efficiently.
Review Your Results
At this stage, you should be ready to review your results and see if your hypothesis was correct.
But before you get down to work, it’s important to establish if you reached anything statistically significant.
Fortunately, for those who aren’t familiar with statistical significance, most optimization tools give out this information.
If your hypothesis turns out to be correct, then implement these design changes accordingly.
However, it’s still important to keep track of your metrics closely to see if everything will work as expected.
On the other hand, if your hypothesis is wrong, make sure to save all the data from unsuccessful tests and try out another hypothesis and do it over.
It is vital that you save the results from the failed tests, as these can be gold lines of data that can be used for later.
These 4 steps can help you get to the bottom of a CRO plan that everybody can understand and implement eventually.
How Do You Calculate a Conversion Rate?
The conversation rate is calculated by: page divided by the number of people who visited your site multiplied by 100.
As an example, we’ll use a website that had 100 conversions out of 1000 visitors for the whole month.
=100 (conversions) divided by 1000 (visitors)
=0.1 multiplied by 100
Conversion rate=10%
Areas to Experiment With for Conversion Rate Optimization
Design of the website, such as length of form, CTA button colors, fonts, etc.
Supporting images on the website, along with links, headlines, social proof, and testimonials.
Any copy on or surrounding the conversion opportunity.
What is Conversion Rate SEO?
Conversion Rate Optimization (sometimes known as Conversion Optimization) is a branch of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
It is an important KPI for commercial websites.
The conversion rate is often used in order to measure the efficiency of advertising or SEO activity.
A conversion can happen in many ways, such as a purchase from your online shop, or a registration for your newsletters.
Types of Conversions in Online Marketing
There are various types of website conversions. It doesn’t have to refer to the conversion of a prospect into a buyer.
The conversion of a visitor into a prospect can also be referred to as a conversion. Here are other examples:
Conversion from the user of a search engine into a website visitor: this happens every time a website is visited through browsing.
Conversion from being a visitor into a newsletter subscriber.
Conversion from a newsletter recipient into a buyer.
Conversion from an occasional customer into a regular customer.
Conversion from a visitor into a prospect: this happens when the conversion overlaps with the lead, which is a contact initiation for a potential buyer.
Conversion from a user who is looking for a phone number and calls up.
What Makes a Bad Conversion Rate?
Your Site Makes a Bad First Impression
A common reason for low conversion rates is that people don’t like what they see or are uninterested with your site.
Even worse is that they can’t find the information they’re looking for.
While it’s important to have a site that looks good, it’s even more critical to have a functioning website that offers usability, so people can get the information they need and get to their desired action without any hassles.
Common reasons for low conversion rates include:
Poor Search Function: If you have a search function on your site, make sure that the results match up with the information people are looking for. If visitors can’t find an item, they won’t be able to buy it.
Poor navigation: Ensure that most of the popular items are easy to find.
Poor Sorting and Filtering: Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many options. They should be able to filter items efficiently so that they only get choices that meet their needs.
You Don’t Know Who You’re Selling To
When working towards improving your conversion rate, it’s wise to consider whether you have a clear idea of who your customers are.
If you find that you’re not marketing to the right people, you’ll notice that you probably have low conversion rates as well as declining sales.
This is why a key step in addressing eCommerce conversion rate issues is to find out what your customers want.
Look into web analytics to see how people behave on your site, along with social analytics to find out what they’re sharing.
Pay special attention to online reviews and customer interactions through your helpdesk and messaging apps.
Customer surveys can also provide you with useful customer information that will help you know them better.
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate stands at 2.35%, however, the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher.
This means that if you want to break into the top 10%, you’ll need to have a conversion rate of 11.45% or higher.
According to Google Ads, accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spending are converting at a rate of two to three times the average.
So ask yourself this: Do you want to be average, or do you want to perform exponentially better than others in your industry?
Through the analysis of this massive amount of data on landing pages and conversion rates, we are able to identify the common traits among the top-performing pages.
Believe it or not, there isn’t much standing in the way between you and conversion rates that are double or triple of what you have today.
What Can Help You Analyze Conversion Rate Optimization?
Traffic Sources
While people may be surprised that the first metric mentioned here isn’t traffic, it’s not actually the important factor when it comes to conversion rates.
What really matters isn’t the number of people who visit you, but how well those visitors help you achieve your goals.
Understanding where these visitors are finding your site is the key. There are three primary sources of traffic:
Direct visitors
These are visitors that come to your site by directly typing your URL in their browser address bar.
Search visitors
These site visitors find you through a search engine, usually Google.
Referral visitors
These visitors click through a link to your site from somewhere else, such as another website, a social media page, or an ad.
New Visitor Conversion Rate
There’s a big difference between how a new visitor interacts with your site compared to a returning visitor.
To improve first-time visitor conversions, you’ll need to isolate this metric from the conversion rates of your loyal/returning customers. Look at what new visitors are interested in when they visit your website and how you can improve that experience.
Return Visitor Conversion Rate
When you look into the conversion rates for your returning visitors, you need to ask yourself these two questions:
Why did the person return?
Did the person convert the first time around? If not, how can you convert them the second time they visit your site?
Keep in mind that even if someone didn’t convert as a new visitor, you made enough of an impression to get them to come back.
This means that the conversion process on the return visit will be much easier than the first time around.
As with a new visitor, you’ll need to isolate the return visitor conversion rate and figure out how to increase it.
Interactions Per Visit
Remember that even if a visitor doesn’t convert, all is not lost — you can still keep an eye on their behavior on the site.
You’ll be able to monitor exactly what they’re doing, how you can get them to do more of it, and how you can influence their behavior into conversions.
For example, if visitors are looking at a lot of different pages, spending a bit of time reading those pages, and are leaving comments and reviews, then they’re still interacting at a high level. Even if they’re not converting yet, your goal is to increase their interactions.
You can use various tools online to help you understand where your visitors are clicking and how they interact with your content.
The best thing you can do in this case is to figure out how you can leverage those interactions into increased conversions, whether in the form of subscriptions, downloads, purchases, or others.
Your CRO Journey: Practice Makes Perfect
The bottom line is that the more you practice CRO, the better you can get at identifying the potential areas that can make a big impact on your site’s ability to generate revenue.
Whether you have a local business website or an e-commerce site, CRO should be viewed as a lifestyle that strives to constantly make a current system better at functioning.
Once you develop the CRO mindset to identify certain problems or other strategies that can be included, you’ll be able to instinctively point out what needs to improve.
If a solution seems clear enough but isn’t backed by data, you can never be 100% certain.
However, while there aren’t a bunch of best practices that will magically make your site convert better, there are a few things we found in common between successful eCommerce sites.
Take these as your guideline and follow their examples to get you started towards your optimization journey.
Get started with CRO process for your business and website with Infintech Designs.
Our team implements the best CRO practices for all client sites whether for a small business or e-commerce.
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