There are two ways to increase your revenue generation via internet marketing. The first is by increasing traffic to your website, which increases sales; the second is by increasing sales with the same amount of traffic.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process designed to enhance the efficacy of your website or landing page; it eventually helps convert the visitors to your website or landing page into customers. It is a method of optimizing your ads, landing pages and website to increase the rate of conversion.
The Value of Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is essential for internet marketing, as it helps in lead generation and improving the performance of your website.
This approach began when internet marketing experts started to experiment with website design and layout to test what works and what doesn’t in enhancing conversions. They started by tweaking design, text, content, layout, and images to ascertain what generated the desired conversions.
Conversion rate optimization is a great way to augment leads generated by a website and increase sales without increasing the amount of money spent on attracting more visitors. This can be done by reducing the bounce rate for visitors to the website or landing page.
A conversion rate can be defined as the ratio between the total number of visitors to your site and the number of visitors who perform actions that you want them to perform. This could be making a purchase or signing up for emails or newsletters.
There are some analytical methods available that allow identification of the channels that help to convert more visitors, such as headlines, images and content. Split testing, A/B testing, and multivariate testing enable the website owner to determine the most effective elements for converting visitors.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) increases conversion rates by improving sponsored search ads, landing pages, and website content and design. The main aim of conversion rate optimization is increasing the number of visitors who convert by doing you want them to do.
First Step of CRO Is Gathering Data
In order to manage anything, it is important to be able to measure it. One of the most crucial parts of conversion rate optimization is determining what data should be collected and how to go about collecting it.
There are three avenues available for gathering data: the website, the company and the customers. You need to collect both qualitative and quantitative data.
Quantitative data is the fundamental data required for any CRO strategy to be effective. This data can be gathered through Google Analytics; you can employ acquisition analysis to study the main sources that generate traffic for your website, and then move on to behavior analysis to discover what the visitors are doing once they’re on the website.
This gives you greater insights into why your visitors aren’t converting or purchasing, and tells you why you’re falling short of your goals.
If you want to understand how your visitors interact with your website, then you could try segmenting through Universal Analytics. Segmentation makes it easier to understand users and their behavior.
It gives you unique insights and facilitates collection of information on new customers against returning customers, shopping cart abandonment and regular customers who are loyal to your business.
Number crunching doesn’t provide you with all the information. Analyzing bounce rate and quantum of traffic to your site is good, but doesn’t fulfill all the needs for CRO. It is the qualitative data that provides the reasons for and explanations of the numbers.
How to Gather Qualitative Data
Gathering qualitative data can be done in several ways:
- Customer service personnel engaging the customers and providing them with insights and perspectives.
- Reaching out directly to the customers, making them feel special and giving them insights that they feel aren’t readily available to all.
- Conducting surveys to gather information about the quality of your services and performance of your business. Questioning your clients can provide you with invaluable qualitative data that can lead to new ideas to test for CRO
- Analysis of heatmaps provides you with data that helps you identify the elements of your website that are getting noticed and what your users click on. It provides you with information to base action on. This data helps you understand your website better.
- Once you have your hypotheses, you can employ concept testing tools that allow you to easily draft and try out a test version of your website. A wireframe site can help you identify any sticky bits in your website and smooth out any bugs.
- Usability testing enables you to learn about the visitors to your website and identify the reasons for non-conversion.
Data Mining for Actionable Conversion Insights
Just having the data is not enough. You need to know what has to be done for it to be of any use to you. Here you’ll learn how to organize your data and extract insights about customers and customer behavior.
These insights will eventually help you determine your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
It is also essential that you know how to evaluate your survey results to extract relevant information. This will help you distinguish relevant data from irrelevant information, and learn what will help you improve the design of your website.
Surveys are the tool that you can use to identify the factors that prompted customers to make purchases or prevented them from buying. They also tell you how your customers describe your business, products and services.
On-site surveys are even more valuable, as they provide you with information from users who are currently on your website.
Some of these users will convert and some won’t. This gives you better understanding of why conversions didn’t happen. Perhaps the most important information provided by onsite surveys is the objections and confusion that prevented customers from making a purchase.
User tests are another tool that can provide you with deep insights about your visitors. These tests help you understand the real-time experiences of visitors by watching them and discovering what they find interesting or confusing and listening to them as they describe what they find useful or like on your website.
The quality of the data you gather is also very important. Better data gives you greater understanding and better analysis of consumer behavior, and helps you evaluate your performance and identify areas for improvement.
Use the approach described in this article to gather better data, both qualitative and quantitative, and devise a plan to test and optimize your online performance.