“Holy click through Robin. Looks like I’m sending loads of traffic to this website, but only 2% are buying. What can we do?”
“Don’t worry Batman, I’m on my way.”
We all know the power that good quality search engine optimisation has in terms of driving traffic to your website.
However, when you dig in to your Google analytics account and look at the conversion rates you soon start to discover that only a small percentage of your visitors actually convert and perhaps 98% of them do nothing.
“Holy cow. That’s incredible!”
Yeah, yeah Batman, I know. But conversion rate figures change from one industry to the next and although we can use these figures as a guide or even a target we have to make certain changes to our websites in order to increase the conversion rate to achieve a better return on our investment.
“That’s a great idea. Where do we start?”
Well Robin, if you’ll stop chirping for a minute I’ll tell you. When it comes to conversion rate optimisation the best place to start is to think about confidence.
“I have loads of confidence, after all I’m Batman!”
Not you, your customer. Think about it. Your customer is sat at home with their laptop and their credit card in hand, having a cup of coffee and browsing your website. They see something they like and they want to buy, but something is stopping them. If any of you have used live traffic statistics you can see people dropping off your website right at the point of checkout. It’s so frustrating. You have to give them confidence to make the purchase from your website.
Small changes make all the difference.
Think about what turns you off about a website. Is it the design or has something gone wrong and the use has seen an error message? It could be a missing image replaced by the dreaded red X symbol. Whatever it is we need to find out so let’s visit our analytics.
Bounce rates and Exit Pages can tell a story
Start by identifying the pages with high bounce rates and the exit pages of your website. If you find pages, specifically product, add to cart and checkout pages that have a high exit rate there are probably things you can change to improve their effectiveness. When you’re analysing these pages, ask yourself two questions.
- What can I do to improve confidence?
- What’s in it for the customer?
A risk free purchase
If the customer believes that the purchase will be risk free your conversion rates will improve. If you offer it, ensure you add big statements at the top of the page near the navigation that say “Free Delivery and Returns” and “5000 satisfied customers and growing”. Adding testimonials and reviews in a prominent area can also help to boost conversion rates.
Provide a Call to Action
Make it easy for your customers. Let them know what you want them to do. If a customer gets to a certain point in the checkout process and gets confused as to what they need to do next you’ve lost the sale. Use slightly larger buttons with a good call to action to tell them what to do.
Engage with your customers via surveys and emails.
When you can’t identify what the problem is why not try asking your customers the question. There is a lot of software solutions available either free or low cost that can help you with this. Remember if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Test your conversion techniques.
Google website optimiser is a simple but powerful way to see the results of your conversion testing. There’s a little set up in terms of adding some code to your website but there’s plenty of documentation around to help you out.
You have to have Big Kahuna’s like Batman
Conversion testing can be a scary time. Be patient though and let the conversion tool show you a definitive winner before you revert back to what it used to be. If you don’t test things you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.
Conversions have always been an issue on my blog. Getting people that I want to see my message has always never been a problem. But finding the right offer at the right time is proving to be a little cumbersome. But I keep testing and then testing some more so in time everything will come together. Thank you for the information and your thoughts.
Ouch, Martin.
I once thought traffic was all I needed. Now I spend so much time refining conversions that I almost forget about traffic.
By the way, you gotta see how many of my students spend ALL of their time (or 99%) getting traffic, and almost forget about conversion. What sense does that make? And that’s after all my valiant efforts to point out that a well-converting readership of 100 is exactly 100x better than a zero-converting readership of a million.
Thanks for the great advice on improving conversion (and tracking!).
Thanks for the article Martin. Have you seen any evidence that posting your social account widgets (i.e. 348,000 people like Example Company on Facebook) somewhere in the checkout process helps increase conversions?
Martin, this is a truly great article. Thanks for the tips. I’m going to start paying attention carefully to the exit points and bounce rate locations on my blog. I appreciate your experience and value packed article!