With SEO-driven people like ourselves, the conversation easily revolves around traffic. Getting it, increasing it, making sure it’s high quality – traffic is essential to the success of a business.
But believe it or not, traffic is not the sole component that can lead your business towards success.
Another important metric to focus on is the conversion rate.
When you focus your efforts to get more people to your website, it’s important to also make sure they take the action you want them to, from buying the product to signing up for a newsletter or calling your business on the spot, and more. And you achieve this through the process of conversion rate optimisation.
And there are a lot of things that go into this process, from writing better copy to switching up your targeting to even changing the CTA button’s colour.
To know what needs to be changed and drive better results, a lot of marketers turn to conversion rate optimisation tools. But which tools are the best at helping to achieve your conversion goals?
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What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?
The conversion rate is the rate at which your website can convert website visitors into customers. It’s calculated as:
Total Number of Conversions / Total Website visitors X 100
You establish a particular time frame identical for both metrics and use this formula to see what your conversion rate is. Let’s say that during a month you’ve had a total of 5000 website visitors to a product page. In that same month, that product page led to 300 conversions, meaning 300 people purchased your product. The conversion rate would be:
300 / 5000 X 100 = 6%
Conversion rate optimisation is simply the process through which you improve the consumer journey, and increase the likelihood of them taking the final actions you’re looking for.
You’re basically improving the way you convert website visitors into leads or even full-blown customers. To do it, you have to take a closer look at your site’s conversion funnels, which is the path a person takes to go from a website visitor into a customer.
Businesses can have different conversion funnels based on the products and services they sell, the target audience, location, and more. For instance, the conversion funnels or an auto dealer is a lot longer than those of a clothing store.
And that’s because buying a car is a greatly different experience than buying a shirt. When someone is buying a shirt, they can take a plunge with a much shorter conversion funnel. They can see your link on the Google result pages, see the shirt, and if the page is optimised well (good product photos, descriptions, and reviews), they can make the payment then and there.
Conversion funnels for cars, however, are a different story. The section of the car-buying market that buys cars similar to how they buy shirts is very narrow, so you’ll have a much more generous conversion funnel:
- Lead generation
- Direct contact with leads
- Converting leads to appointments
- The appointment process
- The actual sale (or not)
It can be a complex funnel or a shorter funnel. No matter its size, all conversion funnels can benefit from some level of optimisation.
What’s a Good Conversion Rate?
No business would answer no to the question “do you think your business could sell more?” But how do you know if your conversion rate is good or not, and whether it needs optimisation?
When you look at your conversion rates, how do you know if they’re good, bad, or simply not impressive?
With this question, we enter a fairly tricky aspect about conversion rates: there isn’t a fixed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ value. Conversion rates can vary greatly from one industry to the other, they can depend on the type of product or service you offer or even the target audience.
But, expect low numbers. Shooting for a 60% or even 30% conversion rate isn’t really realistic unless you bring in massive amounts of traffic. The average global conversion rate for eCommerce is 2.58%, while B2B industries score an average 4.31%.
The simplest way to figure out how your conversion rate is doing to search for the average rate in the industry and compare it. If it’s close or higher, congrats! You’re doing as well or better than others in the industry. If it’s lower, then you still have some work to do.
But, conversion rate optimization is a good effort to focus on no matter how pleased you are with your conversion rate.
Conversion rate optimisation tools: which one’s the best?
Conversion rate optimisation tools come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but they can mostly fit into certain broader categories:
- Tools for lead generation
- Analytics tools
- Research tools
- Heat maps
- Testing tools
- Feedback tools
And these tools can help you identify and optimise different elements in the conversion funnel so that your website visitors are more likely to convert. Below, let’s look closely at each type of conversion rate optimisation tool, and what role they can play in your customer journeys.
1. Lead Generation Tools
Before we can talk about how to convert the website visitor, a huge part of customer journeys involves first generating high-quality leads.
Lead generation is not just about getting more people to visit your site. It’s also about collecting some of their information to provide them with either better, personalised offers, or move them through the conversion funnel.
A lead generation tool can help you both track that information (data), and organise it in a way that you know what to do with it. These types of CRO tools can:
- Dive into marketing automation easily, as you set up a few actions to automatically trigger based on user behaviour (such as sending a Welcome email right after someone signs up for a campaign);
- Discover more info on your target audience, which can help you make better, more effective campaigns or even change your conversion funnels based on what they need to convert;
- Identify the major areas to focus more on your selling efforts, based on what your leads respond to.
2. Analytics Tools
These are the type of CRO tools that help you track your website performance, and you’re likely already using one of them: Google Analytics.
You can access data on total website visitors, where they are coming from, most visited pages, bounce rates, and more.
For CRO purposes, these performance metrics can signal whether there’s something wrong with your conversion funnel especially in terms of user experience. For instance, if you have good traffic coming to a page, but that page has a rather big bounce rate, clearly something isn’t right there.
It could be the page load time, if the page takes too long to load, users quit the sessions, and you’ve just cut your funnel short.
3. Research Tools
Research tools help you refine your strategy and answer some questions about your website visitors, the type of content they respond to, how to approach them, and even what sort of keyword to focus your efforts on.
For instance, if you have a landing page for a new product, a research CRO tool can help you develop the content better, where the traffic is coming from, or even provide ready to use templates for quick landing page creation.
4. Heat Maps
A heat map is a visual representation of website visitor engagement with your website or a particular page. It tells you which parts of the page are ‘hot’ and drive a lot of engagement, and which are cold and leave users unimpressed.
Crazy Egg, for instance, is a popular CRO tool that can provide website heat maps. Not only that, but it can also provide click tracking, which essential means tracking user clicks to see where they head to.
5. Testing Tools
Testing is a huge part of any marketing strategy, and CRO tools can help you create anything from click tests to user testing, landing page testing, and more.
The most common type of testing in marketing is the A/B test, which means creating two versions of the same landing page that differ slightly, and see which one works best to lead users down the funnel.
You can test:
- Page navigation
- Page layout
- Content
- CTA
- Button colours, and more
6. Feedback Tools
Everyone knows customer feedback is important, its link to CRO isn’t always evident. Feedback tools can include surveys, messaging bots, or other user testing programs that have the goal of engaging with your audience and encouraging them to share their thoughts with you.
You can:
- Automate customer support through a bot that engages with audiences on social media in real-time
- Add pop-ups to collect live feedback
- Send out surveys for market research
- Easily gather and organise data
Which Tool Is for You?
CRO tools don’t always focus on one of these 6 main marketing pain points – most offer a comprehensive conversion rate optimisation experience.
The secret, however, is knowing which tools best suit your needs, and knowing how to apply its features into your digital marketing strategy. And Australian Internet Advertising can help you refine and implement strategies designed to help you drive better results and increase your revenue.
Reach out to us online, or call us at 1300 304 640 to find out more.
