Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation? How You Can Improve Yours?
- May 8, 2019
- , 8:57 am
The internet combined with social media + other digital marketing channels such as Google Ads have made it considerably easier to drive traffic to your website.
This is great and more traffic to your site can often correlate with more conversions, but with the playing field starting to level out and the cost per conversion rate gradually increasing, you’re going to have to be a bit more savvy with how and where you distribute your money.
Unfortunately it is not as simple as just driving more and more traffic in the hope of increasing conversions.
WHAT IS CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION?
Conversion rate optimisation is a system that enables people to make an action when they visit a website or landing page. By testing and modifying certain aspects of a page such as the call-to-action button (CTA) or headline, a business can increase their chances that the traffic coming to their site converts into a lead or a customer.
To give you an idea of the results a simple change of colour can make to a CTA button, Google increased their revenue by a reported $200 million by experimenting with 40 different shades of blue for the links on the results pages.
HOW DO YOU CALCULATE YOUR CONVERSION RATE?
Calculating your conversion rate is using done automatically by digital marketing channels such as Facebook and Google.
If you want to work it out for yourself then you can calculate it by dividing the number of conversions a web page generated by the number of people who visited that page.
Number of Conversions / Number of Sessions = Conversion Rate
SQUEEZE MORE OUT OF YOUR EXISTING TRAFFIC
We briefly mentioned at the start of this post that it isn’t as simple as increasing traffic to increase your conversions.
For example, you may get 1,000 people visit your site in traffic which creates 100 leads. Out of those 100 leads, you get 10 customers and this would equal a website visitor to customer conversion rate 10% (a very high conversion rate).
Now, in order to increase that conversion rate even higher you could add more traffic and double it to 2,000 people visiting your site.
You may get more leads or you may get lower quality of traffic by doubling your website traffic to 2,000.
However, if you have a leaky bucket, you’re better off patching a few holes up by improving your landing page for example which will help more in the long run than adding more (more) to the bucket.
There may be more work at the beginning when you’re optimising your landing page, CTA or headline, but once it’s done it’s done.
You want to squeeze the juice out of the lemon you already have and then pursue other alternatives such as increasing your traffic.
HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONVERSION RATE
1) - KEYWORD OPTIMISATION
One of the best ways you can start to improve your conversion rate is to identify your high & low performance keywords.
Chances are, you’re probably wasting a lot of money on certain keywords and not making the most of your best performing keywords.
By optimising your keywords you also improve your ROI and reduce your cost per conversion.
Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner or a more advanced service such as Opteo.
2) - TEXT BASED CALL-TO-ACTIONS
Hubspot ran a test where they included text based CTA in their blog posts rather than using a button for a CTA.
Why?
Because people are becoming immune to these big buttons that say “Sign Up Now”, “Get Your Free Ebook”.
By including your CTA in your text, you make it look more authentic and are inserting it in an area where it makes sense that will help the reader.
What did their test results show?
“In HubSpot’s limited test of 10 blog posts, regular end-of-post banner CTAs contributed an average of just 6% of the leads that the blog posts generated, whereas up to 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone.”
That’s a huge difference and it just goes to show that the majority of customers don’t like the hard sell.
3) TEST YOUR LANDING PAGES
Landing pages are perfect for conversions as the visitor is going there for one reason, to convert.
Whether it’s an email sign up or a purchase, you will want to use landing pages and most importantly, test them until you’re blue in the face.
Here are aspects of your landing page that you can test:
Headline
Text of CTA
Colour of CTA
Colour Scheme of The Landing Page
Content Included on The Landing Page
And with tools such as leadpages, it has never been easier to A/B test the smallest of details.
CONCLUSION
The above is just an insight into the world of conversion rates and conversion rate optimisation.
There are many other ways you can improve your cost per conversion that the list really is endless and the great thing about optimising your CPC is that you can always look for things to tweak.
However, it’s important that you don’t get bogged down in the minutiae and instead take action.
If you’re looking to optimise your:
Blog Posts
Landing Page
Facebook, Instagram or Google Ads
Then get in touch with one of our team today for a FREE, no-obligation chat and we’ll figure out a way to help you 🙂
