When you’re attempting to increase the visibility and popularity of your brand, you should be able to create an effective marketing campaign that brings in new site visitors while also helping you increase your conversion rate. If you find that your marketing campaign isn’t boosting your conversion rates as much as you had anticipated, you might want to think about using conversion rate optimization, which is a simple and straightforward process that involves altering a marketing campaign to better increase conversion rates.

To accurately calculate conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the overall number of visitors who reach your website. Once you obtain this number, multiply it by 100 to arrive at your current conversion rate. Website conversions occur with actions like subscribing to a site newsletter, purchasing a product, or downloading a PDF. To understand just how effective CRO is at helping with conversion rates, the average ROI when using CRO tools is right around 223 percent.

The CRO process is designed to help website owners alter their website alongside the customer journey, which will hopefully increase the possibility that the site visitor fills out a form, subscribes to a mailing list, or completes a purchase. The things you measure as successful conversions depend on the goals that your company has.

This article offers some tips and guidelines on how to effective use conversion rate optimization with your website.

How Does Conversion Rate Optimization Work?

Conversion rate is a percentage that indicates how many visitors to your website completed a desirable action like subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product that you offer. Conversion rate optimization involves improving your website and the content within to increase conversions. If you have a relatively high conversion rate with your website, this means that the website is likely easy to use, aesthetically appealing, and highly functional. When you optimize your conversions, you should be able to increase revenues, obtain better-qualified leads, and grow your business.

To better determine how you want to measure the success of your website and the amount of conversions that are made, you should know how your business measures KPI, which refers to key performance indicators. KPI is a kind of measurement that can be used to ascertain the success of a business in meeting performance objectives. If you are getting ready to use CRO to improve the conversion rate for your website, you can set the KPI to any percentage that you want, which will allow you to measure the overall success of your CRO efforts.

You should also have a better understanding of the purpose of your website. Do you want to sell services or products? Maybe you want to offer information in the form of a newsletter or blog. The conversions that you set for your website depend on the exact type of website that you’re running. If you manage a blogging website and offer a newsletter, you could measure conversions by the number of site visitors who sign up for your newsletter. For eCommerce sites, conversions tend to occur from customers who create accounts and purchase products. Once you have identified the types of conversions on your website, you can improve conversion rates with CRO.

There are a variety of things that you can do to optimize your conversions with the CRO process, the most important of which involves improving the sales process throughout your website. Customers need to be able to get from your home page to a conversion page in a simple and intuitive manner. If you want to properly optimize your conversions, you must first identify the main areas of improvement for your website. Make sure to use an analytics tool to gain a better understanding of how your website can improve.

Use Heatmaps to See Where Visitors are Spending the Most Time on Your Website

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A very effective method that you can use to see where visitors are spending the most time on your website is to use heatmaps. This tool provides you with a graphical representation of site data, which will allow you to visualize click and scroll behaviors throughout your website. When using this tool, you can ascertain what aspects of your site are attracting the most clicks and attention. You can also see when users decide to leave your website and the areas where they might have had issues completing actions that would have resulted in conversion. This tool can be invaluable when you’re trying to optimize your website for conversion rates.

There are any number of issues that you can identify when you use this tool. For instance, it’s possible that a form on your website is too long or that the checkout area isn’t easy to get to. Maybe users are having difficulties creating an account on your website. In the event that your website is difficult to navigate, visitors might be getting lost on their way to a conversion. Heatmaps can help you discover the exact route that visitors take throughout your site.

The Different Types of Heatmaps

If you decide to use heatmaps with your website, there are several different types that are available to you, which include:

  • Mouse movement
  • Click
  • Scroll
  • Form tester

Mouse movement maps allow you to determine how users move the mouse when on a site page. The data is represented with visuals that are situated all over the page. Areas with the brightest colors are ones where the mouse is located the most. This particular heatmap is particularly effective with A/B testing for eCommerce sites. It can tell you if the “Check Out” and “Add to Cart” buttons are being selected as much as you want them to be.

Click maps show the areas of a site page that users click on the most. If users aren’t clicking on a call-to-action button, this could indicate that the button is difficult for visitors to notice.

As for scroll maps, these maps should help you understand where your users start scrolling and where they end when on a page. If users rarely scroll down to a call-to-action, it’s possible that the content on the page isn’t as engaging as it should be. This particular type of map is ideal for site pages that are relatively lengthy.

Finally, form tester allows you to analyze user interaction and behavior with the forms on your website. With this tool, you can identify where users decide to leave your website, which could be the result of too many fields on the form in question.

What is A/B Testing and How Can It Help With CRO?

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A/B testing is a useful technique that allows for the comparison of two versions of a site page to identify which one provides a better performance. A/B testing can assist with your CRO efforts when you create two versions of the same site page and provide them to two separate groups of site visitors. Once these groups have received the two pages, you can determine which page provides you with higher conversion rates.

After you decide to use heatmaps, consider what aspects of your website could be a barrier to conversion. Maybe your website is too difficult to navigate or your call-to-action buttons can’t be reached easily. It’s at this point that you should create a hypothesis, which is a way of estimating how changes to your website will result in a better conversion rate. For better conversion rates, the UX will likely need to be changed in some way. If your website is too cluttered, simplifying and modernizing the design may push site visitors to conversions.

When completing A/B tests, you should identify what you want to include in your website variations. The changes that are made to your site should be included in the B test that you provide to another group of individuals. You can test many variations before you land on a page that provides you with the boost in conversions that you’re looking for. It’s possible to perform many A/B tests, which is why you should establish how many tests you would like to run.

What’s the Difference Between CRO and SEO?

CRO and SEO are both highly important tools to use when you want to grow your brand and make your website more successful. Certain aspects of CRO will directly affect your SEO, and vice versa. If your website doesn’t have the right keywords, your CRO will be effectively worsened. When a website has been poorly optimized for search engines, it’s very likely that the site won’t bring in much traffic, which will result in lower conversion rates.

Both of these tools also rely on data from web analytics tools to properly monitor and improve the situation. You won’t know how effective your optimization is unless you monitor the results. Bounce rates are another highly important metric for both SEO and CRO that will allow you to identify the areas of your website that are causing users to leave at a high rate. It’s not enough for your search engine optimization to be perfect and provide you with a high ranking on search engines like Google. If your site doesn’t provide value to visitors, you’re wasting your marketing and SEO budget.

These conversion rate optimization tips and guidelines should give you what you need to improve the conversion rate percentage throughout many facets of your website. If you want to grow your brand, optimizing your website for conversion rates is among the best ways to do so. When a website has been fully optimized, it should bring in more visitors, increase customer conversion rates, and bolster your revenues.

Bryan Miller of Bryt Designs Long Beach Web Design, Development, & SEO
Author
Bryan Miller

Bryan Miller is an entrepreneur and web tech enthusiast specializing in web design, development and digital marketing. Bryan is a recent graduate of the MBA program at the University of California, Irvine and continues to pursue tools and technologies to find success for clients across a varieties of industries.