Conversion rate optimisation is the cost effective way of driving leads and maximising profits through your website. It’s the process of testing the converting power of every piece of content to determine how even minor changes can have a significant impact on the number of visitors taking action. Essentially, it measures your visitors’ motivation.
But other than a greater number of leads, how can you measure the success of CRO for your firm?
The bounce rate is the number of people visiting a page on your website and then directly navigating away from it. The higher the number, the more people are not finding what they expected… or maybe they found everything they wanted and felt they didn’t need to convert to learn more.
A high bounce rate of over 70% means your page is either not relevant to the search performed by the visitor, or the quality of the page or its content did not appeal. There are, of course, other reasons for a high bounce rate such as slow page load time, overloading visitors with advertising, making visitors work to reach your content, filling your landing page with typos and more. Essentially, these all disappoint visitors, and CRO can fix that.
Conversion rate optimisation allows you to test variations of a page and offers metrics on the people bouncing. Reducing bounce rates means your site is engaging visitors, sending them towards gated content and down the sales funnel.
A higher bounce rate on landing pages means visitors are not completing sign up forms to access your gated content. Testing and optimising each landing page will result in a higher number of downloads and therefore greater exposure of your content.
You put a lot of time and effort into producing great content, putting it behind a sign up form is risky. After all, you’re expecting visitors to complete two actions: discovering that they want your content, and handing over their contact details in return for access. But some visitors might be put off by your landing page and decide they don’t want to sign up to another mailing list.
Therefore, CRO on landing pages is critical: you don’t want prospects bouncing away from your content or mailing lists. Optimising using A/B testing is a sure fire way to grow those downloads.
Once your downloads increase, so will your email lists. Larger lists mean more prospective clients.
Since they’ve visited your site, interacted with your business and gone as far as to hand over their email address in order to download your content, you can assume they’re interested in your industry, your content, your services and potentially a future relationship with your firm. This might not happen overnight, but adding them to a mailing list is the first step into the sales funnel.
On the sign up forms themselves, it’s useful to ask for more than just their email. This data will better inform your marketing campaigns. Ask for the industry they work in, their company size, their location and job roles.
You can hire an award-winning design agency to create a stunning website showcasing your business, but if your design and messaging are not aligned with your audience, your conversion rate will suffer.
Remember that your website exists to drive conversions, and it’s important to keep design and messaging focussed on that goal. This can be tricky as you balance your subjective design tastes with the converting power of a landing page. CRO is about finding that balance; cracking it will pay dividends.
Years ago, guessing how your visitors will interact with your website might have been ok. But in the age of Big Data, you’ll find a lot of software specifically designed to help you track and understand user behaviour, and therefore track the effectiveness of your conversion rate optimisation.
Google Analytics, Hotjar and Google Optimise are just some of the tools that offer significant statistical observations of conversions and bounce rates. They help you make informed decisions when redesigning your website, thus removing guesswork and giving you the confidence that the changes you make will pay off.
The success of conversion rate optimisation comes not only from the cold, hard number of visitors landing and converting through your website - success also derives from having happy (and returning) clients, higher revenue and greater growth.