A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Have you ever really thought about why you have an online presence for your business? Why have you invested time, energy, and money into creating and maintaining content for a website, a Facebook page, an Instagram profile, and more?

The answer is simple: the more visible your business is online, the more opportunities to capture leads and make sales.

In the digital marketing world, this is known as a conversion. A conversion occurs when a lead finds your digital content and interacts with it long enough to eventually become a customer.

Conversions are related to a specific action on your website. This action could take many different forms – simply filling out a contact form on the website or maybe checking out with a product in a cart. Whatever your interaction goals are for your website, that’s how we define a conversion.

You may have more than one conversion goal, but the most important thing to remember is that the conversion process has to be optimized so that you collect quality leads. 

How do you know you’re getting quality leads? By looking at your conversion rate. Conversion rate can be calculated by dividing your number of conversions by the total amount of visitors to your website. If your conversion rate is high, your website’s content is likely useful and the conversion processes are simple and easy to navigate. A low conversion rate is a good indicator that your website requires Conversion Rate Optimization.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving your website to increase conversions across the whole of your digital presence. Like any other aspect of digital marketing, the overall goal of CRO is to improve sales and increase revenue. Any business, regardless of their current conversion rate, can benefit from conversion rate optimization. But where do you start?

Call to Action (CTA):  Ask Them to Act

A Call to Action (CTA) is exactly what it sounds like – it calls for a user to take a specific action on your website. They usually exist as a button, link, or even some other type of graphic in which a user can interact. For example: “download our e-book,” or “contact us.”

CTAs are indisputably one of the most important aspects of a digital marketing strategy. Creating an effective call to action can be the difference between attracting a dozen leads or a hundred.

How do you create an effective Call to action? Follow these simple rules:

Contrast: the CTA should always stand out from the rest of the website so that visitors are more inclined to take the intended action.

Clarity: CTAs should be short and to the point, every user on your website should understand what action you want them to take.

Value: The CTA must demonstrate value for the user – how will users benefit from taking this action?

Design with Conversions in Mind

Have you ever been to a website where you couldn’t easily find the navigation bar? Did you spend your precious time and energy looking for the one page of the site you were interested in or did you leave and find another source to fulfill your search needs? 

Our guess? You left. Why? Because in the Information Age, there are hundreds if not thousands of websites that come up when a user searches for a specific term. If a potential customer can’t easily find the information they’re looking for on your website, they know they’ll be able to find it faster on another. As a result, design has a huge influence on conversion rate. 

Your website’s design and content exist for the purpose of increasing sales, so it’s important to think about your conversion interactions and how easy it is for a potential customer to complete a conversion on your site. 

When optimizing the design of your website, you should think about:

Navigation: Think about what your customers are looking for when they arrive on your website – make it easy for them to locate the information they need and provide an effective CTA to complete the conversion interaction.

Mobile Responsive: With more and more people using their phones to search for content, your website should not only be easy to navigate on a desktop but also on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. 

Images: Images are powerful because they tell stories. Think about what story you want to tell on your website and use meaningful images to help tell that story.

A/B or Split Testing: What Isn’t Working?

There are a lot of different components to a website that can contribute to a low conversion rate – content, images, links, CTAs, buttons, etc. Sometimes, it can be a single element on a page that isn’t converting for a business. How do you figure out which elements convert and which don’t?

A/B or Split Testing is a process that helps businesses to identify what’s working on their page and what isn’t. Running an A/B test pins one page or interface element up against another version of the same thing. For example, does a green CTA button lead to more conversions than a red CTA button?

Testing specific components of a website helps marketers identify the most effective version of that particular asset in hopes of boosting conversion rates.

Not sure what to A/B test? Start with elements on your homepage. Why? It likely gets the most traffic. Statistically speaking, gathering data from pages that get more traffic will be more accurate. You could then use this data to make informed decisions throughout the whole of your website. 

Interpreting Your Data

Conversion rate is not the only way to measure whether or not your conversion optimization efforts are working. To get a complete view of how your website is performing in response to changes, you should look at Bounce Rate, Exit Rate, Average Session Duration, and Pageviews. 

Since Conversion Rate Optimization is an enormously profitable undertaking for your business, it should be a top priority. Just a single component of your website out of hundreds could be hindering your conversion rate. Running tests, interpreting data, and isolating low-performing website elements can be overwhelming, especially for a beginner.

If you think your website could benefit from Conversion Rate Optimization, the web experts here at Creative Click Media have been designing, testing, and optimizing websites for nearly a decade. We know how to signal boost your brand, improve website traffic, and increase your conversion rate. To see how we can optimize your website and generate more sales for your business, contact us today!