30. hello@impression.co.uk
Hypothesis!
Changing X into Y will get you Z
X = What your analysis indicates as a problem
Y = What change you think will solve that problem
Z = What will have this effect on your KPI
A conversion is the general term for a visitor completing a site goal. A conversion can be a purchase, newsletter sign up
Your site's conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by your site traffic
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.
The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what's stopping them from completing your goals.
So firstly, what are the benefits of including CRO within your marketing strategy
Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you'll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs.
Conversion rate optimization looks at finding the right customers for your business. Acquiring more people doesn't do your business any good if they're not the right kind of people!
While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers.
Audiences aren't infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you'll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site.
By taking what works and expanding on it, you'll make a better user experience.
Users who feel empowered by your site will engage with it more
One of the most important reports you can look at in Google Analytics for CRO insights is the funnel visualization
Homepage will usually have the biggest leak because they generally get traffic with a greater variation of intent. Not everyone who comes to the site comes to buy.
But once they’ve entered the more targeted, linear stage of the funnel, where’s the biggest drop off? You can identify the areas
Funnels aren’t just for e-commerce
The benefit of this is that you can view the funnel across almost any dimension, like Browser, City, Device, etc. It allows you to slice up the data in many more ways that the traditional goal funnel visualization.
It’s the one that most easily translates directly to conversion insights as it clearly shows you which landing pages need work
There are a few different ways to approach this. First, you can look at conversion rates by landing page. Second, you can look at proxy metrics (like bounce rate) to get a different idea of site behavior on landing pages.
This shows you all pages on your site, but it’s likely that you’ll want to get more granular. For instance, if you have product category pages, you can narrow down and see the Bounce Rates of only pages in that category
It’s almost always the case that visitors who use site search tend to convert more
If you find, for instance, that not too many users are using site search, but those that do are vastly more likely to convert, it could inform an experiment to get more users to use site search.
depending how your report looks, search may be an area in which you may want to experiment.
When you’re able to see where your best converting traffic is coming from, you can make smarter decisions when it comes to acquisition investment.
And if you find that some channels are lacking, perhaps you need to treat them differently via targeting rules or work on a different messaging strategy to better align with that channel’s intent.
You need to be able to trust your base line data and validate this. Removing bot traffic will be great as it could be skewing your data.
If a certain device represents a substantial portion of your traffic, yet a bug makes the UX horrendous, there’s a huge opportunity in fixing that bug.
Does any particular browser convert much lower than all the others? If so, you can click on that browser to drill down on versions to see if there are any specific versions bringing the aggregate conversion rate down.
Page speed is an area that we’ve invested into a lot at Impression, not only for user performance metrics but it’s also considered a ranking factor within Google’s algorithm
. People have shorter attention spans so websites need to be quicker.
Google’s pagespeed and Pingdom allow you to run tests and grade your website.
They will also give you reccomendations that you can action yourself or you can send over to your web team
Heatmapping allows you view how users navigate and interacte with your website
All it requires a piece of code on your website, and you can view your audience a set period of time
It’s a more visual than working with analytics, you may see certain areas not being interacted with and these need to be considered
Hotjar offer a free 30 day trial, VWO also offer the same.
A/B allows you to compare multiple versions of your landing pages allows you to refine your call to actions and selecting the best converting layout
NEXT
A/B testing is focused on highlighting the statistically better-converting web page, which means you can frequently run this on your high traffic pages to improve conversion rates.
But before ever testing, I would reccomend always having a hypothesis
In order to understand how much traffic you need to run an
In order to understand how much traffic you need to run a a test optimizely have a sample size calculator
VWO have a calculator where you enter your Google analytics data and what lift you want to see, and it’ll give you an estimated timeframe
There is never a bad tie
discuss with your brand team on what you’re able to change.
You may have experienced issues such as not having resource to build complex tests, not having resource to apply test winner
Speak to your development team and get them onboard and part of the project
Begin collecting industry conversion rates. Plenty of companies such as Smart insights publish global conversion bench market reports ever year.
VWO say 1/7 win, a loss is a valuable as a win as you get that data. Win, lose or draw, always ask your yourself why you got that result.
failed test is a success as you learn from it.
Don’t spend lots of money on tools if it’s not required, you may have issues such as site speed or device issues
Understand that a testing is a lifestyle, Your website is never finished and there is a never a bad time to start testing.
Identify where your website might be losing traffic, if you’re able to fix these issues straight away, great.
If not, look into split testing. Start winning and losing but most importantly, start learning more about your audience
