What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Here’s a fascinating stat:

Studies have shown that removing the navigation bar can increase conversions by up to 100%. However, 84% of landing pages still use navigation bars.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. By removing the navigation bar, you’re removing all the clickable actions on the landing page, putting the focus on what matters the most: your call to action. When there are no more distractions, people are more likely to click on your CTA and take the desired action.

One simple element, such as the navigation bar, can make a significant difference in your conversion rate. But, to understand why some things work and others don’t, you need to understand first what drives your audience.

That’s where conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can come in handy. In this article, we will explain what CRO is, why it’s important, how to calculate, and how to implement some best practices.

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What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can be defined as the practice of increasing the percentage of visitors who perform a certain desired action once they’ve landed on your web page. The desired action can include:

• Subscribing to a service;
• Clicking “add to cart;”
• Creating an account;
• Purchasing a product;
• Downloading a document;
• Subscribing to your email list.

While this definition is pretty clear and straightforward, our problem with it is that it focuses too much on the number of visitors who’ve taken a certain action rather than the reasons that they did (or did not) convert.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with analysing your percentages and averages. But, when you obsess too much about the numbers, you tend to forget that behind those clicks there are actual individuals. So, a better definition would be to think about CRO as the process of understanding what drives and motivates your audience to click on your link and convert. Once you become aware of the reasons behind their actions, you can take the right actions to increase the number of conversions and ultimately grow your business.

Here’s why we think this approach is better. Not everything can be explained by numbers. A code error that makes your landing page load very slowly or not load at all is easy to identify and fix. But, what if your landing page works well and your ads seem to be doing well too, but people aren’t converting? Then, you will need to look beyond the numbers and find out why your audience isn’t taking any action after clicking on your ads.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and then multiplying the result by 100 to get the percentage of users who took the desired action.

For example, if the landing page your set up for your food processor had 50 sales and 2,500 visitors last month, then your conversion rate would be:

50 divided by 2,500 (0.02) multiplied by 100 = 2%

Now, that may seem like a low conversion rate, but the average across industries is about 2.35%. Wordstream has an excellent article where they present the average conversion rates for Google Ads, social media ads, and mobile ads in various industries and the numbers are quite fascinating. You should check it out.

Why You Need to Focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation

One of the major benefits of conversion rate optimisation is that you can get more customers for the same amount of website traffic. While this concept is quite clear, the process of setting up a conversion goal isn’t as simple as saying: “We want to double the number of customers in the next month.” As we’ve explained earlier, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who converted and is calculated based on how many people have visited your landing page. So, your focus should be on increasing the number of conversions for every x amount of visitors who land on your web page.

Here’s an example.

Let’s imagine that your web page has 5,000 visitors and 50 customers per month. That would mean a conversion rate of 1%.

What if you would like to get 100 customers per month. You could try to increase your website traffic to 10,000 visits hoping that with more visitors you would also get more leads. That could be possible, but there is also a high chance that you would compromise the quality of your content and get leads that aren’t qualified (meaning you would just waste clicks without anything to show for in the end.)

But, by focusing on increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, then you don’t risk compromising the quality of your traffic and increase the chances of doubling your customers.

How do you do that?

Strategies for Increasing Your Conversion Rates

Here are some strategies that could help you increase your conversions:

Include Text-Based CTAs in Your Blog Posts

Imagine that you go on a website to read an article about how to take care of your roses during winter. There’s a banner right under the headline and a CTA to purchase some fertilisers at the end of the article, but you don’t notice them because you are too focused on reading the content.

Web users have become really accustomed to ignoring pop-up ads and banners, so you might miss a lot of opportunities by placing your CTA buttons at the end of the page. Not everybody scrolls to the bottom of the page and even those who do might still ignore your call to action.

Instead, you could include a text-based CTA within your blog post. HubSpot did a case study with this type of CTAs and got a staggering 93% leads compared to only 6% from a regular CTA posted at the end of the page.

A/B Test Your Landing Pages

The landing page is an essential part of the conversion funnel. Your ads may be catchy and enticing, but if the landing page fails to deliver, then that’s a missed conversion right there. Split testing allows you to see what landing page design and content performs better. You can use it to see what CTA buttons convert, which type of content is more engaging, and what headlines are more likely to make your audience click.

Multivariate Testing

You can also use multivariate testing, a method through which you try to determine which combination of variations performs the best out of all of the possible combinations. For example, you can test the image and headline in combination with a baseline and one variation for each element. That way, you would get four variants to choose from.

The difference between split testing and multivariate testing is that the first only tests one variable at a time. With multivariate testing, you don’t need to run several A/B tests on the same page and with the same goal. Instead, you can run multiple variations in a short time and see all the elements that need to be changed to improve your conversion goal.

Check Your Analytics Diligently

To increase conversions, you first need to know how people are finding your landing page (through social media, search engine results, referral links, etc.,) what they are doing once they land on your page, and how fast they are leaving. Google Analytics can give you valuable insights into your audience’s profile and behaviour. Use this information to get into the shoes of your audience and try to understand what their pain points and goals are and what you can do to persuade them to convert.

Over to You

Conversion rate optimisation is essential to growing your business. But, to be able to leverage it to its full potential, you need first to understand what it is and what it can do for you. And, that can take time. You cannot expect to increase your conversion rate overnight. You need to dig deep to find out what drives your audience. And then you need to experiment to find the right combination of elements that will get them to convert.

If you need help with all that, then we here at Australian Internet Advertising are ready to lend you a hand. Contact us now at 1300304640 if you are ready to talk about how you can grow your business.