As it becomes more difficult to engage online customers, the cost of acquisition also grows. To maximize the revenue from engaged leads, businesses have to convert as many customers as possible. It creates the need for an effective conversion rate optimization strategy.
To push customers through all the conversion funnel stages, companies optimize their websites using web analytics tools. They research user behavior to eliminate bottlenecks, confusing design elements, unnecessary steps, and anything that harms conversion.
This article covers the key conversion rate optimization benefits and mistakes. Read on to learn:
- What is conversion rate optimization?
- How to calculate conversion rate optimization?
- Conversion rate optimization benefits for websites
- How to run conversion rate optimization with Plerdy?
- Examples of site conversion rate optimization mistakes
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a set of optimization measures taken to increase the share of the leads that convert. It is based on creating hypotheses on how specific website elements affect user behavior. Once marketers or UX/UI designers confirm the assumption, they can change the ineffective design or marketing item for optimization. Smooth navigation encourages people to convert.
Conversion is any action that allows you to generate revenue or achieve business goals. There are macro and micro conversions. Macro conversions are a product purchase, quote request, subscription, etc. Micro conversions increase the likelihood of macro conversions and include smaller steps, like account creation, registration, or updating favorites.
CRO research usually requires A/B testing and multivariate testing of elements that influence macro and micro conversions. Such a comprehensive optimization approach allows you to collect quality data and obtain more insights.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is a metric you can measure. It enables you to compare the effectiveness of design changes and improvements over time.
The standard CRO formula is
(conversions / total visitors) * 100%
CRO Variables
The variables used for measuring CRO depend on the type of conversion. Always keep this in mind during optimization calculation.
When customers can convert during each visit
Imagine you run an online store where customers can purchase something each session. To define the purchase conversion rate, you need to divide unique purchases by total visits.
If users made 20 sessions but 4 unique purchases, the CRO rate is 4/20 * 100% = 20%
When customers can convert only once
If you run a SaaS business that offers its product on a subscription basis, your leads won’t convert every time. They may pay once and continue visiting the web resource for additional information. In this case, instead of using the number of sessions, you should rely on the number of unique visitors.
If 2000 unique visitors make 50 orders, you need to divide the orders by the visors.
The CRO rate is 50/2000 * 100% = 2.5 %.
Conversion Rate Optimization Benefits for Websites
Online businesses invest in CRO analytics for a reason. The obtained data allows making more informed choices and reaching business goals.
Make Decisions Based on Data
The CRO rate and user behavior data collected to measure it reflect what’s happening on the website. You can learn what percentage of customers leave/convert at different stages of the funnel. A reliable statistic is essential to avoid the guessing game and make valid hypotheses.
Outrank Your Competition
Since not all businesses adopt conversion rate optimization software, you can use this to your advantage. If your web resource offers better usability than its alternatives, customers will prefer your brand.
Understand Your Customers Better
Conversion rate optimization involves user behavior research. Heatmaps, session recordings, and other website analytics tools reflect users’ preferences and behavioral patterns.
Lowers Your Customer Acquisition Costs
When more customers complete the desired action (e.g., purchase), the investment in customer acquisition pays off. Besides, you need less effort to acquire leads if your website offers quality services.
Brings More Customers
High conversion rates are equal to customer satisfaction. It makes current leads more likely to bring their friends and improves your overall brand image.
Conversion Rate Optimization with Plerdy
Plerdy is a conversion rate optimization platform for website owners, marketers, product teams, SEO, and UX/UI specialists. It combines a dozen tools that collect data about website user behavior and performance.
“If you need to run UX analysis and optimize CRO rates, Plerdy is a perfect option!” (Guillermo C, Marketing and Commercial Director)
“It has many tools to increase conversion rate optimization and helps to improve different sides of a website” (Dmitry C, Chief Marketing Officer)
Website Heatmap Tools
Heatmaps highlight website areas with different colors based on user activity. The more people interact with the website, the hotter the area is. They record clicks, scrolls, hovers, and other interactions. It allows detecting critical website elements that get little attention and vice versa. More about heatmaps.
Session Replay Software
Session recordings present short videos featuring user navigation. They help you test the assumptions about the problems affecting conversion rates. For example, you can see why people ignore the menu, skip the website form, etc.
Conversion Funnel Analysis
Funnels convert user behavior data into visualizations. They show at what point leads leave the website to help you locate and fix the problem.
Event and Goal Tracking
It is another feature for testing hypotheses. It allows tracking specific elements, such as images, videos, banners, forms, buttons, scroll bars, or Ajax. If you think people ignore a critical button (e.g., Add to Cart), Event and Goal Tracking can provide detailed information about the related user interactions for research.
E-commerce Sales Performance
Sales Performance automatically measures product purchases, total/unique views by session, unique viewers, and the impact of each element on sales. These metrics are essential to measure and monitor CRO rates.
10 Examples of Site Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes
Most companies detect the same flaws that harm conversion rate optimization. Their websites lack intuitiveness and confuse users. Here we have collected the most frequent issues so you can watch out for them.
Low Page Speed
The optimum page load time is under two seconds. If your pages take over 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will leave. Customers want to solve their problems, and waiting annoys them. Hence, to reach high conversion rates, make your web resource fast. You will need to enable compression, reduce server response time or redirects, use browser caching, and complete CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code optimization.
Unresponsive Web Design
Users abandon websites that are not optimized for smartphones and tablets because of inconvenience. Be sure menus, content, and other layout elements don’t get distorted on mobile. When a person uses a device with a non-standard screen resolution, browsing should be equally smooth.
Main Menu is Not User-Friendly
Users should be able to quickly navigate to all the critical website categories from the main menu. Products, Services, Testimations, About, and Contact are some common main menu sections. If you have a complex website with many categories, make a drop-down selection based on search priorities. Less critical sections should go last.
Unclear Call-to-Action (CTA)
CTA buttons and slogans instruct customers what actions they need to do. Confusing CTAs have no impact on CRO. To make a CTA more engaging, you can create a sense of urgency or make the benefit clear from the start. It’s also important to test different placements of CTA to pick the most noticeable spot.
Low-Quality Images
Stock photos and cliche images don’t work. Modern customers value unique images that match the content. Hence, you should be ready to invest in creative designs and learn the rules of image formatting. Generally, PNGs are all-purpose images, whereas JPGs allow compressing photographic images with high quality.
Overuse of Colors
Excessive colors distract attention from conversion elements. Combine 3 to 4 colors, including your brand color, a background, and 1-2 additional colors. It will create a strong association between the branding elements and provided services.
Unreadable Text
Too long text, small font size, poor style, confusing language, and other stylistic mistakes affect conversion. Users skip such text and doubt your professionalism. To evaluate your content, you can use an SEO checker like Plerdy. It measures scam score, readability score, sentence length, etc.
No A/B Testing
When it comes to website design and performance, you must always A/B test the changes before implementing them. Take time to compare user behavior on your old and new versions. It’s never too late to return to previous solutions if they drive more conversions.
Not User-Friendly Design
Complex designs make a user conversion path too tricky. We recommend using familial menus and categories with intuitive navigation. A hamburger website menu is much better than an unusual icon.
Bad Content
Articles, videos, tutorials, and other content show your proficiency in a specific topic. Low-quality content will repel users instead of promoting conversions. Hence, you should create informative articles based on statistics and industry standards. Always ask yourself Who will read my content? What makes this text useful?
Case Studies: Conversion Rate Optimization
To illustrate how websites deal with conversion rate optimization issues, we want to share several examples from MarketingSherpa. Website analytics with CRO tools helped these businesses boost user activity and conversions.
#1. Conversion Rate Optimization Example
Pet Business Insurance, an insurance services provider, detected that their CTA had a 3.1% conversion rate. Nimbus Marketing ran business and website analysis to determine what wording would trigger more conversions. After it was found that customers, first of all, sought guarantees in case of an accident with their pets, the marketers changed the Get a free quote CTA to Get Peace of Mind. It increased the conversion rate to over 8%.
#2. Conversion Rate Optimization Example
Captain Experiences suffered from low customer engagement on their website. Most users clicked the unclickable word in the main page subheader instead of the search bar. The company used Optimizely to test several designs with different subheaders and see how users react to them. As a result, they changed the subheader and nearly doubled searches.
#3. Conversion Rate Optimization Example
The co-founder and CMO of Happiness Without aced conversion rates with website speed optimization. After eliminating unnecessary website elements and CDN adoption, the 12-15 second load time decreased to 1-3 seconds. It increased conversion by 72%.
#4. Conversion Rate Optimization Example
Card Payment Guru had a template website with a high bounce rate. They used session recordings to watch how visitors interacted on desktop and mobile. After they removed responsiveness issues and optimized the UI, mobile conversions grew by 18%.
Conclusion
There are multiple approaches and tools to run conversion rate optimization. Website analytics software like Plerdy is one of the most effective applications for that. It measures different aspects of user activity and shows pain points directly on website pages. You can learn how each element affects the conversion and optimize it for a more satisfying result.
Discover more about Plerdy capabilities here and check out the pricing plans.
