Your website may have a lot of high-volume keywords or generate a significant amount of traffic, but are you seeing a return on all of the hard work you’re putting in?
If not, it may be worth looking into the different conversion points on your website and seeing where users may fall off and not convert into leads.
Many businesses struggle to turn website visitors into leads or customers, and that’s where conversion rate optimization comes into play. By analyzing user behavior and testing different website elements, businesses can identify the most effective strategies for increasing conversion rates.
In this blog, we’ll go over the following topics:
What Is Conversion Rate and Why Is It Important?
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who complete an action, such as making a purchase, filling out a contact information form, or putting in their email address to set up for a newsletter.
Conversion rate is important because it helps businesses measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns. If a conversion rate is high, that means that a large percentage of visitors are taking action when they visit your website, which could result in more leads for your sales pipeline or increased revenue.
On the other hand, a low conversion rate indicates that users aren’t understanding what you want them to do with the information you’ve provided for them or they don’t see the value in what your company has to offer them. The more you know about your conversion rate performance, the quicker you can make adjustments to your sales and marketing strategy and potentially drastically change the impact of your campaigns.
How Do You Calculate Conversion Rate?
If you want to calculate your conversion rate, you must first define what your conversions are.
Do you want users to make a purchase? Do you want them to schedule a sales meeting? Do you want them to fill out a contact information form? Do you want them to sign up for your monthly company newsletter?
Once you have a firm understanding of what you want users to do with the content you’ve provided for them, it’ll make it easier for you to analyze your marketing impact.
Now that you’ve pinpointed what your desired actions and conversions are, you must set up a way to track and monitor how many visitors come to your website (or a specific page) and how many of them complete the action. This can be done through digital marketing tools like Google Analytics, which provides you with a reliable conversion rate report.
Once you have collected data on the number of visitors and conversions, you can calculate the conversion rate using the following formula:
Conversion rate = (Number of conversions / Number of visitors) x 100%
For example, let’s say that you had 1,000 visitors to your website and 100 of them completed the desired action. Here’s how to calculate what your conversion rate would be:
Conversion rate = (100 / 1,000) x 100% = 10%
This means that 10% of your website visitors completed the desired action.
Not sure what a “good” conversion rate looks like?
Check out this blog by UpLead to explore the average conversion rates of B2B websites.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Definition
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. Overall, the goal of CRO is to increase the effectiveness of your website. This includes identifying and eliminating barriers that prevent visitors from taking the desired action, whether it’s making a purchase or submitting their contact information to receive additional sales and marketing materials.
B2B conversion rate optimization involves analyzing data to identify areas of improvement for your website, such as the user experience, design of the website, and the placement and wording of calls to action. This could involve A/B testing different variations of these elements to determine which ones are most effective at boosting conversion rates, such as swapping button text, color, or placement.
Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization provides many benefits for companies who want to get the most out of their digital marketing efforts. A few of the most common benefits to conversion rate optimization include:
- Increased conversion rates: While this one may be the most obvious, CRO empowers marketing teams to increase conversion rates, whether it’s getting more sales or generating more leads for your sales pipeline.
- Improved user experience: When you practice CRO, you have the opportunity to improve your website’s user experience. Since you take the time to see how web pages are performing, you can explore where users might be falling off or not taking action. This can empower you to make desired actions more clear, improving their experience with your website.
- Data-driven decision-making: Since CRO is a data-driven approach, it allows you to make better marketing decisions that improves conversions. This allows you to learn from past marketing mistakes and only grow your CRO strategy in the right direction.
- More significant ROI: When you increase conversion rates, you can get a more significant ROI. This is because users aren’t just coming to your website; they’re taking action when they visit, implementing themselves into your pipeline.
Continuous marketing improvement: As we mentioned previously, CRO empowers marketing teams to make more data-driven decisions. With more data-driven decisions, marketing teams have the ability to improve their marketing decision-making, which will only grow their strategy without moving backwards. By understanding where your high-quality conversions are coming from, an experienced marketing team can use this to help reduce the sales cycle or generate more qualified leads in other areas of the site.
How to Get Started With Conversion Rate Optimization
Looking to optimize the conversion rates of your company website? Here are some steps to get you started:
Step 1. Define Your Conversion Goals
First thing’s first, you must define your conversion goals. As we touched on earlier, conversions look different based on what you want users to do, whether it’s encouraging users to make a purchase, schedule a sales meeting, or sign up for newsletters or sales and marketing assets.
Choosing your goals depends on the type of website content you’re sharing with users. For example, if content is more general or top of the funnel, you’ll want to present users with lead magnet content such as encouraging them to download a guide or sign up for a webinar to gain more insights. On the other hand, if web content is more mid- or bottom-funnel, the goal should more than likely be to make a purchase to schedule a sales meeting.
When you know the goals of your page, you can start creating more realistic conversion goals.
Step 2. Analyze Your Current Set of Data
Before you can optimize conversion rates, it’s important to see what you’re starting with. This step involves collecting data about website traffic, user behavior, and current conversion rates. This can be used with digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can identify areas of your website that need improvement and generate hypotheses for testing.
Step 3. Develop a Testing Plan
Once you analyze your current conversion data set, it’s time to start developing a testing plan. When developing a testing plan, you should create a timeline and identify the resources required as well as the KPIs needed to measure success.
Step 4. Test Different Variations
Now that a plan is in place, you can start implementing and testing different variations. This includes testing different website elements such as page design, headings, meta data, call to action (CTA) wording, CTA location, etc. to determine which ones are most effective at boosting conversions.
Step 5. Monitor and Adjust as Needed
Remember that timeline we talked about in step 3? This is the step where you follow up with your different testings to see what impact it’s had on conversion rates. If conversions have increased, great! You’re on the right track with CPO. However, if they’ve decreased, this is the time to explore what may have gone wrong and see why less users are converting.
How to Get Started With Conversion Rate Optimization
If you want to see the best results from your CRO, it’s important that you follow these conversion rate optimization best practices:
Make Conversion Points Align With the Goal of the Page
If you want to see more of an impact from your CRO strategy, it’s important to make sure that the conversion points on your web pages and blog posts align with the goal of the content.
Let’s say that you have a web page that’s more of a top-of-funnel piece that provides users with generation information regarding a topic, product, or service. If you have CTAs within the piece that are only focused on making a purchase or scheduling a sales meeting, you’re more than likely not going to get a lot of conversions because you’re not meeting buyers where they are in their buying cycle.
Similarly, if you have a mid- or bottom-funnel piece that only has CTAs encouraging users to read another blog or subscribe to your company newsletter, you’re missing the mark on high-converting sales opportunities. When you align conversion points with the intent of the piece of content, you have the opportunity to either ease in new leads into your sales pipeline or convert users into ready-to-buy sales opportunities.
Write Clear and Compelling Calls to Action
As you write CTAs, it’s important that you make them clear, compelling, and easy to identify. Call-to-actions should include action-oriented language that gives users insight into what they’ll get from completing the desired action.
For example, let’s say that you want users to sign up for a webinar. The CTA should state exactly what the webinar is about and what they can gain from signing up and attending this webinar. The more clear the CTA is, the more likely a user is to submit their information.
Use Conversion Rate Optimization Tools to Monitor Web Pages
There are many content rate optimization tools on the market that empower marketing teams to see a user’s journey through their website, whether it’s a blog or service or product page. These CRO tools are great for monitoring content and exploring when and where users are converting themselves into leads.
While you can scope out the general user’s journey through your website with Google Analytics, there are some more in-depth tools your marketing teams can use to optimize conversion rates. For example, conversion rate optimization tools like Crazy Egg allows marketing specialists to see what sections users are spending more time on and where they may be clicking most to go from one page to another. Additionally, Crazy Egg also has the capabilities to see an individual user’s journey on your website because it records their session without providing any personal information.
Keep Your Website Simple and Easy to Navigate
The simpler your website layout is, the easier it is for users to navigate and find what they’re looking for. If you want more users to convert into leads or sales, it’s important that you keep your website as simple and streamlined as possible so users can quickly find what they need and spend less time searching. This increases the likelihood of users having a positive experience with your website, and ideally, your business.
Develop a Mobile-First Website
As more and more users are accessing websites from their phones than desktops, it’s important that your website has a mobile-first layout. With a mobile-first website, you have the opportunity to further maximize a user’s experience with your website, increasing the likelihood of converting them from users into leads or sales. Additionally, Google indexes websites on a mobile-first basis, meaning that if you build your site in this way, you’ll obtain a higher value in SEO rankings.
Keep Load Times Quick to Reduce Bounce Rates
A slow-loading website can negatively impact the user experience and increase the likelihood that visitors will leave without taking the desired action. Before making significant adjustments to your web design, headings, CTAs, etc., be sure to check your website’s health and speed to make sure it’s not a bigger problem with your website.
Key Takeaways
Conversion rate optimization is essential for converting website users into leads, and ideally, leads into customers. Without analyzing your conversion rate, you’re missing out on significant opportunities to generate more revenue from your digital marketing efforts. While you may have a lot of high-volume keywords or traffic being driven to your company website, it means little to nothing if users aren’t doing anything with the information provided for them.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our inbound digital marketing team is well-equipped to help small to medium-sized businesses create content that brings in users and encourages them to submit their information to become leads in their sales pipelines.
When you’re ready to increase the conversion rates of your website, contact the digital marketing experts at Abstrakt.
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