A short guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation

A conversion is a desired action performed during a user journey by somebody visiting your website.

Conversion metrics differ from business to business. There are main goal conversions (macro) like a purchase or a quotation request, and micro conversions like a newsletter subscription or a general enquiry submission.

Visitors are 'guided' through a path to conversion. Within any journey there are macro and micro conversion points. These are measured using the practice of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

CRO is all about tweaking your website to achieve the maximum number of actions resulting in new leads and/or online sales.

Activities like AB/Multivariate testing and content and UX enhancements will, with the right approach, increase the number of conversions. In addition to more qualified leads your overall acquisition and resourcing costs can also be reduced.

It's important to consider that there are various factors that influence CRO. They can range from your website's design, divining visitor intent, poor content, privacy concerns, poor or lacking reviews, or all the above...

The key is to understand your audience so you're in the best position to deliver a positive experience that leads to increasing conversions.

But how do you go about increasing your website conversion rate? This short guide aims to help your business improve CRO in three simple steps:

1. Determine your goals

2. Crunch your data

3. Test and repeat

1. Determine your goals

First thing's first. What are you trying to achieve?

As mentioned, every business is different. The type of business you have will determine your goals. If you run an ecommerce website for instance, your macro goal would be to generate as many sales as possible.

To help the visitor, and allow you to measure engagement, whilst gaining their trust, you should place micro conversion points along the user journey, before committing the visitor to carry out your main/macro conversions.

2. Crunch your data

Making sense of the data is the key to knowing the intricacies of your website's performance. Use the appropriate tools at your disposal such as Google Analytics, Matomo Analytics, Hotjar, Siteimprove, SEMrush etc. to analyse your data.

For instance, look at your high traffic pages. Are they generating the types of journeys and conversions you want? Are your website visitors spending too long (dwell time) on a page and aren't converting? Are they bouncing from pages?

As well as quantitative data, use qualitative data too. Send surveys to your audience asking about the user experience etc.

With your data crunched, you'll be able to make informed decisions about what to do next. Think of various scenarios you could test for. For example, what do you want to happen should a visitor leave a page without clicking on a conversion point?

3. Test and repeat

With your qualitative and quantitative insights, you can start testing your priority pages. Whether it's split or multivariate testing, you should be mindful that testing requires additional content, which must be produced. This takes time.

Run the tests. Learn from them. Measure your content marketing efforts and KPIs.  Make necessary changes and then repeat to improve your conversion rate optimisation.

Working with Codehouse

At Codehouse our analytics team has helped many customers get the best from their Conversion Rate Optimisation. Our expert guidance and delivery ensures that your CRO aligns with your business objectives. Get in touch to find out more.