Conversion Rate Optimisation: A Beginners Guide

At every point in your customer journey there are a number of opportunities to make their paths shorter, choices easier and their experience more enjoyable. Through testing and analysis there are a number of ways you can alter and improve your website in order to create the best shopping experience for your audiences and ultimately improve your conversions.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your website in order to generate more traffic and to increase the percentage of conversions your business gets. CRO typically involves making changes to elements of your site such as call to actions, buttons and even your copy, and testing them against each other in order to discover which is the most successful in increasing conversions.

Why Does Conversion Rate Optimisation Matter?

Conversion Rate Optimisation matters because it allows for your business to get more value out of the visitors and customers you have using your website, as it’s more likely these visitors will convert, increasing your revenue, growing your business and you go. CRO is all about getting the most out of your website traffic by optimising your website in order to perform better.

Without the right amount of traffic, you’re unlikely to see any real result and might struggle to gain any real insight into how your customers are using your website. While CRO doesn’t always work for every business, for those generating enough traffic to carry out testing and analysis, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be looking at CRO, here’s why;

Room For Improvement

Even the best designed website needs to improve somewhere, just because you’re generating sales and driving traffic to your website, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking to stand out even more. By leaving room for improvement and making the relevant changes to the conversion process, you can always find new opportunities to stand out.

Cost Effective

In order to avoid CRO you might think it easier to use paid advertising to stand out from your competition, particularly if you’re pushed for time, however it’s important to remember that CRO let’s you work with your existing site, letting you identify what problems you might have and allowing changes without having to pay for extra resources.

You Get ‘Ideal’ Customers

By testing what it is your customers really love and what works best for your website, you can discover how effectively your website is targeting customers, offering the majority of your customers an experience they genuinely enjoy, targeted people perfect for your business.

Conversion Optimisation Tips To Grow Your Sales

Conversion rate optimisation requires plenty of time and resources and isn’t something you can perfect over night. With hours of testing and an understanding of what you need to do to achieve the best results, you can soon find yourself maximising the chances of potential customers converting, helping your business not only bring in a larger profit but also expanding your business growth.

Optimise Call To Actions

Your Call To Action needs to be clear to all your users, letting them know exactly what it is you want them to do and what action you want them to take. Not only should your Call To Actions be clear but they should also be the most appropriate colour and in the best placement for the best results. By adding CTAs to all of your pages, not only your homepage and landing page, you are much more likely to generate more conversions.

A/B Split Test

A/B testing is simple, you take an element of your website and make a second copy, changing it slightly, such as it’s placement or the colour and compare the performance of the two elements with one another. By split testing these elements you can work out which one is performing the best, ultimately deciding which element is best to use on your website to boost conversions. A/B testing is one of the most valuable tools your business could have so it’s important you understand exactly how it works and look to implement it in your Conversion Rate Optimisation strategy.

Analyse Visitor Behaviour

By using tools such as heatmaps, scroll maps, analysers and other tracking tools you can gain an insight into how your customers are behaving and how exactly they are using your website, where they might be going wrong and where their interest gets lost. Using these tools can allow for your business to discover which key elements aren’t working or are being ignored by your visitors, let’s you work out which elements are distracting and also helps you generally observing how your audience use your website across web pages, all of which can help give you idea of what customers want.

Multivariate Testing

Larger, high traffic websites have more time and larger budgets to put into their Conversion Rate Optimisation efforts, giving them more steps to produce more desirable results. Multivariate testing allows for changes across multiple elements of your website at the same time, rather than simply one or two elements like A/B testing, providing more valuable data than the likes of split testing. Unlike A/B testing, multivariate testing allows for you to put together a lot of elements, comparing this to a completely different view of your site, letting you know which combination of things works best.

You don’t need mass amounts of traffic to generate sales, you just need an optimised website that appeals to your target audience and helps increase your conversions, helping you achieve the results you want! While CRO can be quite simple and straightforward, there’s still plenty to learn, if you’re looking to optimise your website for conversions and need some helpful advice, why not speak to a member of our team today?