The Importance Of Conversion Rate Optimisation
In digital marketing, the conversion rate is the rate at which visitors to your site ‘convert’ into either paying customers or qualified leads. So, if your site had one hundred visitors, and six of them filled out the contact form requesting a call back, your site would have a conversion rate of 6%.
Conversion rate optimisation refers to all the design changes you would make to your website to increase your conversion rate. Page headings, images and call to action buttons are all examples of things you might adjust to see the effect on your conversion rate.
Why Is Conversion Rate Optimisation Important?
Winning traffic to your website is the hardest part of online marketing, whether through pay per click advertising or organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
If you are in a highly competitive industry, you may be paying a large amount for every ad click. That’s why it’s important to get the most value out of the traffic you have. For a paid ads campaign, conversion rate optimisation lets you increase the value of the traffic your site is already getting without having to pay for more clicks.
Improving your conversion rate also increases the return on investment of your future marketing efforts, so it is a good idea to get a conversion rate you are happy with before scaling your digital marketing efforts.
What Counts As A Conversion?
This is up to you to decide. A conversion is the action you want your website visitors to take after they land on your site. If you run an online store, a customer completing a purchase would be a conversion. If you run an accountancy firm, a user filling out the contact form and requesting a phone appointment would be a conversion. Occasionally you may have multiple actions on your site that could be considered conversions.
What Should My Website’s Conversion Rate Be?
There is no single figure that you should be aiming for. Different industries have different conversion rates, and so do different user demographics. What is important is that you know your current conversion rate and are measuring it accurately. You should be tracking this through either Google Ads (for Pay Per Click campaigns) or Google Analytics (for organic traffic).
How Can I Optimise My Website For Conversions?
- Banners/Headings
The banner of your website is the first thing your visitors will see and gives you an opportunity to describe your business and service offering in a few words. Try writing a few different descriptions of your business and see which one performs best.
A good rubric for evaluating a banner headline is whether it passes the ‘5 second rule’. This states that if a user looked at your banner for 5 seconds and then looked away, they should be able to explain what your business is. For example, “Wilkinson’s Double Glazing – Double Glazing Installations Across East & West Sussex” is a good banner headline which probably passes the ‘5 second rule’ for most users. “Wilkinson’s – Our Expert Team Are Here To Help” would be unlikely to pass the 5 second rule.
- Images
Images are just as important as the text on your website. Images can help to convey the products and services you offer, but also your overall brand identity. Images which convey professionalism to some users might seem ‘cheesy’ to others. Ideally, you want to find the images that resonate with the widest selection of your audience and therefore lead to more conversions. Try selecting a few different images and cycling between them to see which one performs best.
- Call-To-Action Buttons
Your site should have call-to-action buttons. This is a button that users can click which will then direct them to where they need to go to complete the conversion. So, the button might direct them to a contact form, or to a product page to make a purchase.
The text, size and colour of your call-to-action buttons can have a significant impact on how likely a user is to click them. For example, if you are trying to encourage a user to contact you, your button might just say “Contact Us”. However, it could also say “Get In Touch”, “Speak To Our Team”, or “Book An Appointment”. Despite these essentially being four ways of saying the same thing, you might be surprised at how different the conversion rates would be for each option.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing refers to segmenting your traffic and sending those different segments to different web pages. This allows you to test your optimisation changes quicker as you can test multiple versions of a website at once.
The simplest way to do an A/B test is to create an updated version of your landing page, and then direct 50% of your traffic to the new one. After you have gathered enough traffic to be able to accurately make observations based on the data, you can see which version had the better conversion rate.
Paid ads platforms like Google Ads have built in tools which can help you set up and customise A/B tests in just a few clicks.
Need Help Improving Your Conversion Rate?
At Carden Digital, we have helped businesses optimise their conversion rates at every step of their digital marketing journey. Our web developers can develop multiple versions of your website’s landing pages to help increase the speed and effectiveness of your A/B testing. Our PPC team have extensive experience tracking conversions across multiple platforms and can help to analyse the data.
Conversion rate optimisation is a key part of our pay-per-click advertising services. We have taken some of our customers’ accounts from conversion rates of under 1% to upwards of 20%. Speak to our team today to learn more.
