Make every click count: CRO Strategy for Legends.

Imagine this.

There is a game where you stand 20 feet away from a glass.

With nothing but gut feeling, repetition and learning you have to throw a ￡1 coin into the glass to win a ￡40 prize.

Everytime you throw your quid, it’s lost to the game. But, on average, every 40 times you win.

That 2.5% chance is actually the average success rate, in this game and across e-commerce generally. It almost doesn’t seem worth it right? You’re breaking even.

If there was the opportunity to triple your chances of winning by widening the radius of the glass with a funnel would you take it? For the same ￡1 throw - every 40 punts would result in 3 wins.

That's a cool ￡120 for only ￡40.

It’s a no brainer really. What an excellent glass upgrade. I love you funnel.

Your glass upgrade is the overly simplified analogy i’ve come up with for Conversion Rate Optimisation. The concept, as simple as it is, is so often overlooked in the digital world.

What exactly is conversion rate optimisation?

SEO, PPC, UX…in the world of digital marketing, you could be forgiven for drowning in initialisms. Just to add to the fun, here’s one more for you: CRO, or conversion rate optimisation.

To get a better understanding of conversion rate optimisation, it helps if we break the phrase down:

• Conversion: a particular goal your website/other digital assets need to achieve
• Conversion rate: the number of goals achieved divided by the number of users
• Conversion rate optimisation: making edits to your website or app to increase conversions.

So, how might we track our website conversions?

Sales

We’ll start with the simplest conversion to track. If yours is an ecommerce website, you might track financial transactions via Google Analytics ecommerce tracking or your own analytics platform, like Shopify.

Enquiries

Service-led businesses don’t always have a tangible product to sell, in which case, they may rely upon enquiries. For example, a cleaning service will generate leads through online enquiries. You might track these enquiries using a contact form, or recording visitors to a thank you page.

Downloads

Perhaps you have a piece of gated content that’s at the top of your funnel. This is particularly pertinent for B2B businesses. For example, if you want to convince users to invest in a piece of software, you might invite them to download a PDF whitepaper.

This is extra helpful as it’s also a lead generation tool. Often, users have to enter their email address or company name to find out more.

Personal KPIs

You might have other goals that don’t necessarily relate to sales or lead generation. For example, Google Tag Manager can track ‘events’, such as website visitors watching a video. Similarly, you might want to get a better idea of website engagement. You might consider tracking a custom metric, like number of users who visited three pages or more.

For even more granular analysis, you might track conversions based on acquisition, for example, sales through social media advertising campaigns.

Working out your conversion rate

Conversion rates are calculated as a percentage. Keep in mind that they vary enormously based on the customer acquisition method, number of visitors, and your industry. For example, the average conversion rate for all industries is a minuscule 2.5 per cent.

That sounds bad on paper, but if you’re selling a ￡2,000 software subscription and have 60,000 website visitors per year, that might look like this:

5,000 visitors per month x 2.5% = 125 customers. 

125 x ￡2,000 = ￡250,000 per month or ￡3 million per year.

How to optimise your website for conversions

So, how can we turn those website visitors into cash buyers? Like everything in digital marketing, it starts with a little research.

Analysing user drop-offs

You can use tools like Google Analytics to look for any trends in user drop-offs, for example exit pages. If you notice a certain page always leads to a customer exiting, look at the page itself and test. Does it run too slow? Is there something in the way of the conversion, like an element blocking a call to action button?

Run through a transaction journey yourself

Get yourself into the mindset of a user. You’ll want to start this test from various pages to mimic real-life customer journeys. For example, if a user came to your site directly, then you would start from the homepage. But if they came to your site via an organic blog post search result, then you’d start from that page.

Analyse individual pages for the next natural step in conversion. Ask yourself:

• Does this content page answer my question?
• If not, does it link to a broader category page that might answer the question?
• Is there an obvious link to a contact or help page?
• Is there a call to action through to a transactional page?
• Are calls to action obvious enough, with clear wording?

The last point is particularly important. We want to follow the ‘don’t make me think’ principle here. Rather than a meaningless ‘click here’ message, all calls to action should highlight the benefit, like ‘download your free whitepaper’.

Run A/B tests

Sometimes, we don’t always know which kind of content will make a user tick. That’s why we have A/B testing – essentially, serving two different versions of the same content to different users.

We can apply A/B testing to any number of variables. For example, we might want to measure which of these is more effective:

• Pronouns or no pronouns in calls to action
• Colour of call to action buttons
• Pricing or no pricing on service pages

A/B testing presents different variants of content at the same time. We can then track this and determine which version leads to the biggest number of conversions.

Using CRO to complement your digital advertising

If digital advertising gets your users on-site, CRO is what happens when they land. There is no point investing hours into a great campaign only to deliver a useless landing page.

To optimise for conversions, track your user activity from these particular acquisition sources. Again, you can look at user flows to see who dropped off. You might identify a slow landing page. Alternatively, the page might not deliver the exact content that was advertised.

What tools can I use for CRO?

To give you a well-rounded arsenal for conversion rate optimisation, try these tools:

Google Analytics

This helps to inform how users got to your site, as well as bounce rates (number of people leaving after viewing one page). Install ecommerce tracking to get conversion data, and look at exit pages or behaviour flows to understand the customer journey.

VWO

This specialised CRO tool features A/B testing and click analyses or heatmaps to help you identify exactly where users are clicking on your site.

Google Lighthouse

You can identify any barriers to conversion, like slow landing pages or elements blocking buttons, using this developer’s tool.

Alternatively…leave it to us!

For the best insights into improving your conversion rates, contact The Growth Guys.