What do you do when you have all the traffic, ranking and yet the leads or sales refuses to come or you want more conversion?
That is where conversion optimization comes in.
In theory, there are two ways to increase your sales or leads. You can either go for more traffic or you can make better use of the traffic that you have.
Most of the time, improving the traffic you have is much better for increasing the traffic you get. This is because every day, website acquisition eg paid channel, organic SEO, Social Media Marketing which is the process of increasing a web traffic get increasingly more difficult and expensive.
So what is conversion optimization and how can you get started.
For the uninitiated, conversion optimization is simply the process of improving a particular outcome towards achieving your business goal.
Most people think of conversion optimization of their website but really looking at our definition, you can carry out CRO which is the shortened version I will be using going forward on any part of your digital marketing including offline marketing.
So you can optimize any part of your process.
One major mistake, most marketers make is thinking of increasing their traffic. So your MD calls you and say we need more sales
The first thing we tend to do as a marketer is seeking to increase our acquisition: Driving more people into the funnel
Unfortunately, we tend to forget that we can squeeze more juice out of the little traffic, you getting already by simply optimizing your process.
You need CRO if:
- You want to meet more of your business goal.
- If your current conversion rate is less than 4%.
- Especially when you are launching a new product or website.
Guess we good so far? So moving on:
I will share two case studies of why and how conversion optimization is important
I once asked a colleague a question.
So I asked “green or red button” which should I use on my website?
And a lot of people went with green.
This is conversion optimization mistakes #1 people make. But I will get into that later.
The second case study I want to share was a particular site I worked on. So we increased the site traffic by over 1000% but mind you, at the beginning, this site was getting less than 200 visitors monthly so don’t get to impressed by the figure.
This is also why numbers lie and why you should not take any number people are throwing around at face value
So moving on.
This site was getting a lot of traffic but little conversion.
On closer look, 60% of the traffic was coming through the blog.
And for most people, you realize that blog traffic tends to have higher bounce rate etc cos this folks are 90% of the time looking for information.
So the approach will be different.
So, let look at some mistakes, we go to tools and then jump into the framework I use for my CRO and hopefully for newbies, you can also take this framework and start improving it to suit your own style and process. Then once done, I will drop a giveaway
CRO MISTAKES
- Having no clear reason– naturally, you don’t change stuffs on your site based on whims of your boss or your emotions.Every changes you make must be based on data, data and more data
- Copying others– so you read somewhere that someone used green button and got 100% improvement, then you blindly change all the buttons on your site to green. This also is wrong
- Not testing enough – You just got to test everything depending on your resources in terms of time and money.Test your headlines, test your button, test your video length, popup etc
- If you don’t have the resources, don’t test too many things at the same time.
Simply do A/B testing which simply is testing one version against another. So you can simply test red button at the same placement against green button at the same placement
Not red button at placement A, then the green button at placement b
Finally, mistakes a CRO should avoid is having unrealistic expectation. There is no silver bullet anywhere. So don’t expect a simple test to skyrocket your traffic. It only happens after enough experimentation and if you lucky
CRO TOOLS
There is a dozen of tools you can use. Again, it depends on your resources and experience but I found two very useful tools for every level. Google analytics and heatmap.
Google analytics will help you analyze your data and for some small businesses, it is simply enough
A good heat map is Hotjar. You can use it to see how people interact with your site. Hotjar even gives you a video recording of how users are interacting with your site
Again, like I said, there are dozens of tools But once you get those two kinds of stuff set up, you good to go
QUICK TIPS
- For Google Analytics (GA), always set up goals. Then set up your funnel journey
The funnel is the steps or pages you expect people to go through before reaching your website goal
- Minimum testing time is 2weeks. You want to make a decision fast. If you have thousands of visitors, then you can shorten this time frame
- If your CRO is less than 4%, then you need to put up your thinking cap
MY FRAMEWORK
So the framework is divided into 8 steps although you can collapse some part of it
Step 1: Identify your business goal – Like I said earlier, don’t test for testing sake. All your goals must be towards your business goal
And 90% of the time, it is about helping your company achieve the website goal either sales, leads, email list collections etc
- Collect your data – This is where setting up Google analytics is important. So configure your goal correctly. If it’s e-commerce or b2b, setup your goal and funnel
- Data analysis– This is where you look at the data you have and then decide which part of the process you need to optimise
So it might be the awareness stage, acquisitions, activation, retention, referral or revenue.
These stages are what is called Pirate funnel. Those unfamiliar with it can read it up
4: Hypothesis– so this is where you simply decide to test different things. Eg you can say
If I change my button colour from red to green, will we get 25% more signups?
5: Design: You design your test.
6: Build it if it’s complex
7: Test your hypothesis
Remember- testing duration is simply 2weeks or less. This is because you need to move fast and can’t sit down all day testing one hypothesis
Finally stage 8: Learning and improvement.
In this stage, you look at your result.
Did it work or did it not work?
This is why having a documentation process and following a framework is important. And you document your result so that other people can learn from it.
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