What is a conversion rate?
The conversion rate is the number of conversions you receive divided by the total number of users, expressed as a percentage. If you receive 5000 clicks a month and 120 sales, your conversion rate will be 2.4%. This means for every 5000 clicks you receive you are likely to get 120 conversions. If you can lift your conversion rate slightly to 3% you would then receive 150 conversions.
How do we measure conversion rates?
We use Google Analytics and Google Ads to measure conversions. To do that you need to have Goals and Key Events set up in each.
Goals, Key Events and Conversions are exactly the same thing.
How important is the conversion rate?
The conversion rate of your website is one of the most important factors that will determine the success of your website, and maybe
your business. If you can double your conversion rate your business will see a strong increase in its turnover, without any additional marketing costs. The good
news is that there’s a number of strategies that can be applied to deliver continual conversion rate improvements. It’s called
conversion rate optimisation.
7 tips to improve conversion rates
Before getting into some conversion tips it’s important to note that if you want to get serious about conversion you should have a
robust reporting system set up. Make sure Google Analytics conversions are set up at the very least and some heat map tracking can go a
long way too. You need to be able to see what’s going on with your traffic so that you can make informed decisions.
1. Keep it simple
As someone who has been in a lot of web design meetings knows, the word ‘clean’ is thrown around a lot during a website build.
Ensuring that the site looks clean and gets the companies message over to customers is a good start. Most new websites today though end
up prioritising a clean and polished look and feel over a functional and straight forward one.
Here’s a question for you. Which one of the following layouts will improve conversion rates? The image below has 3 versions of
the same page on this site. The first contains everything the user needs from the page. Well written useful content if they are there
just to read. If they’re also looking for a company to increase traffic for them there’s also everything they need. Links to service pages,
get in touch links, proof of client base and social proof from reviews.
The second and third designs have all of these elements but they also have pretty pictures. I think the page looks cool once those pictures
are added but do they add anything to either functionality or ease of use? No they don’t. In fact they actually detract from the functionality.
Instead of the blue buttons and links really standing out in the first layout they blend into the layout in the others. When it comes to conversion
blend is not your friend. Also, if you design and build with simplicity in mind you'll be glad later on when you're testing and updating your site.
2. Use colour to show the way
Colour can be used very effectively to signpost to customers where to go next, as well as which parts to avoid. Have you ever tried to cancel Amazon Prime or indeed order
something from Amazon without signing up to Prime? The Amazon site makes good use of colour to highlight the options that lead you to buy prime or not cancel it. It uses bright
greens and yellows as a shorthand for user so that they can go through the ordering process intuitively without thinking. However try to order without Prime or cancel
and you'll find that they've swapped out the colours you'd expect would lead to your goal and instead you're being diverted to the action Amazon wants you to take. I
mention Amazon as they are an excellent example of what conversion rate optimisation can do for a business. Using their site is incredibly quick and easy and they've
put a massive amount or work into making that happen.
Use colour to signpost links and call to action buttons so that users can intuitively find their way through your website, sign up processes and checkouts. You’ll find that
having a white background site will help with this as it will be much easier for your signposts to get your users’ attention.
3. Work on your sales copy
The sales copy you use on your landing pages is the most important element. You don’t need fancy layouts or functionality. You just need a compelling offer that
is communicated effectively to your users.
Try to get all of the most important benefits of your offer spelt out early. Give your customer everything they need to be able to make a decision. Then support what you’ve said
with proof. Customer reviews are very useful for this.
Don’t expect people to read all your copy. Everyone’s in a hurry and nobody reads everything. That is unless you’re great at writing compelling copy that feeds a need. Make sure
your content has lots of headers to again signpost important information. Although you shouldn’t expect your visitors to read everything you write don’t shy away from long form
posts. When people need to figure something out they will read lengthy posts. Also, when people are looking to make purchases they will in some cases read as much supporting
information as you can give them.
4. Make sure you read your copy through from the customers perspective
You should know what kind of customer you’re writing for. What kind of service or product do they want and why do they want it? Read your landing pages from a users’ perspective
to see if it addresses all of the wants that the customer might have. Even after doing this you may find your pages don’t convert well enough. If that’s the case try and get some
feedback from customers who didn’t convert. If you can find out what turned them off you can start to address it.
5. Make the page fast
There’s no excuse for slow sites today. The web is inherently fast as long as you don’t add too much nonsense to your page. Avoid full image backgrounds, full video backgrounds,
uncompressed images, lots of plugins if you use WordPress and complicated functionality that requires lots of scripts.
It’s not that easy to avoid all of that if you’re using a modern content management system but most systems can be tweaked to improve their page speed. Page speed matters for
conversion. If you offer visitors a slow site you’ve got an uphill struggle in converting them.
6. Trial different versions
What your website presents may not match up with what your business offers. I’ve worked on a number of sites where the company’s offering is pretty fantastic but the website
doesn’t get that fact across to the customer effectively. It’s quite easy for that to happen. It can take a few attempts to get the perfect landing page. Even when you’ve worked
up a few options for a landing page how do you decide which one is best? Ideally, you should run tests and let your customers decide.
7. Test with live traffic and listen to the data
This is the fun part. Take a landing page you’ve worked on and set up some ads for it. Set up a second landing page that you think is equally as effective. Then send some ad
traffic to both of those pages. Once you have enough clicks you'll be able to measure the conversion rates and see which landing page is the winner. That is A/B testing in a nutshell.
The hard part comes when a page you think is going to win doesn’t. You may find yourself justifying running the test a bit longer, or giving excuses as to why your favourite
didn’t win. I’ve experienced this before and it can be really difficult to just get rid of a page that you love in favour of one you don’t but just remember it’s not what you want
that matters, it’s what works.
