What Are the Steps of Conversion Optimization?
TL;DR
What are the Steps of Conversion Optimization?
Step 1: Make Research & Data Gathering
Step 2: Form a Hypothesis for Further Work
Step 3: Prioritize Your Hypothesis and Ideas
Step 4: Implement and Test Your Hypotheses
Step 5: Learn and Review Results
Many marketers and owners of small businesses spend a huge amount of time working on website traffic and web conversion optimization. And no wonder why since website traffic is highly important as it attracts attention and helps convert visitors into loyal users and paying customers. But whether you are starting a business and writing a business plan or trying to develop an existing one, traffic alone is not enough.
You must actually convert visitors into paying customers. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of data analysis, statistics, and website information to improve performance. Simply put, it increases the percentage of converted visitors to your site. You need to figure out the website conversion optimization potential of your site. Look for what users are looking for and how you can meet their needs to the fullest.
You might have found many tips and tricks all over the internet on how to grow your conversion rate. The thing is that many of those are simply short-term tools that don’t work properly. You should dig a little deeper to rebuild the whole process. In short, you should have a roadmap in front of you to think about smaller conversion optimization tips and tricks that you can try out later.
Table of Contents
1. What Is Considered a Good Conversion Rate?
2. Prioritization of Conversion Optimization Process
3. 5 Steps of Conversion Rate Optimization
4. Conclusion
What Is Considered a Good Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate (or CR) is the percentage of results with a positive value relative to all results for the reviewed period. Simply stated, it is the ratio of the number of site visitors who completed the target action relative to the total number of visitors who clicked on the advertising link.
Many specialists say that 10-25% are high web conversion optimization rates, but if you have 3-5%, it is enough to say that your advertising campaign is successful. Generally speaking, you can’t say whether some numbers are perfect as they change from niche to niche depending on the advertised object. You might have noticed that the more expensive a product or service, the lower the conversion rate, and vice versa.
You can calculate the conversion rate yourself. Divide the number of conversions by the number of total unique clicks of the specific advertisement. Let’s say you’ve had 250 clicks on your advertisement and had 15 conversions, then you can calculate your conversion rate like this: (15÷250) x100%=6%.
Prioritization of Conversion Optimization Process
As soon as you learn about the conversion optimization process, you meet another question that has to be solved: how do you figure out where to start and what to test first?
Prioritization is not only crucial to digital marketing but also for any business that is out there. You can achieve your goals without setting the strategy that helps you move toward them. You know that you can’t test all your website pages at once. It won’t bring you results at all, so please, start with prioritization as it should be a crucial part of your conversion optimization plan.
We highly suggest you not base your prioritization decisions on your intuition. There are specific tools and methods to see where to start and which steps will most likely bring you the desired results.
Optimizing the process is just as important as testing itself. Wherever you invest your energy, setting priorities will give you a significant boost by highlighting the most important pages for your business.
The Three Criteria to Prioritize Pages
Consider the following three criteria for prioritizing the pages for testing and their order: potential, importance, and ease.
Potential
How many pages can you improve? If you haven’t found a page for some improvement, you may not be able to test it all at once, and you should prefer the pages with the worst performance. This should be taken into account when analyzing your web data, customer data, and expert views on user scenarios.
Importance
How valuable is page traffic? The more traffic each of your pages have, the more valuable that page is. So, if you found some pages with poor performance, you should note them and do something about them later. Take care of the best ones as they should be your priority at first.
Ease
How difficult will it be to test a page or template? The final step is to understand the difficulty of running the test on a single page that involves technical, organizational, or political barriers. Remember that the less time and resources you have to invest to achieve the desired results, the better.
5 Steps of Conversion Rate Optimization
When you have lots of work on your hands, it’s hard to start somewhere since it seems like every little bit needs to be worked on. Here, at Claspo, we’ve set 5 steps that will help you work on your conversion optimization. When following step by step, you will achieve your conversion rate goals and will know how to move forward.
If you have questions or prefer specialists to do all these steps, you can contact us, and we will help you with your website conversion rate optimization.
Step 1: Research & Data Gathering
Marketing specialists often copy popular conversion rate optimization strategies that have proven effective for other companies. A lot of such strategies fail and never bring even a bit of the desired result. This happens because things that might have worked for someone else can’t also be good for your business.
That’s why the stage of research and data collection is so important. This step helps you understand how your site reacts and why visitors do what they do. It is better to make decisions based on facts rather than just optimizing or copying conversion rate optimization strategies just because they’ve worked for someone else. Therefore, you need to track and analyze your conversions first and then think about everything else. Here’s how you can do that.
Quantitative Data Analysis
Quantitative data analysis helps see how your visitors respond to your website. Tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc. can help collect traffic source, demography data, CTR, time on site data, bounce rate, and device/browser information.
To improve CTR, bounce rate, and other KPIs, you can use the interactive landing page or any other interactive content format. It features interactive tools for your visitors, such as quizzes, calculators, and more, and allows users to interact with the page directly and learn about experiences that usually create a qualified lead. Since such web pages require more actions, you can be sure that the user will stay there longer. It will help improve crucial KPIs like time spent on the page, bounce rate, conversions, etc.
There are plenty of tools on the internet that can be helpful to get some insights for your web conversion optimization strategy like:
Heatmaps
A heat map is a graphical representation of the cursor movement on a certain web page for a specific period of time. Popular and unpopular spots are represented by color scales from red to blue. If you run a conversion rate optimization campaign, heat maps can help you identify the most unpopular areas of your page, that is, where users do not go. Therefore, you can avoid placing your CTA in such areas and put them somewhere where users click more.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps represent the same information as any other heat map but show how far users scroll. Make sure to place your CTAs and USPs in the most popular part of the page.
Click Maps
This tool shows where users click on a web page: button clicks, links, video clicks, and more. You can use it to track user interaction on your page.
Qualitative Data Analysis
It is best to start with quantitative data analysis, but it is not enough to get a broad picture. Quantitative data analysis does not answer the “why” question, and to succeed, you should consider working with qualitative analysis.
It is a subjective approach that answers why your users behave in a specific way. To conduct this analysis, you should consider running polls, surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This will help you find out what people like and what they don’t like, what devices or browsers they use, why they pick your products/services, etc.
Step 2: Hypothesis
Based on the information you’ve gathered during the first step, you can now form a hypothesis for further work. The hypothesis for conversion rate optimization is something based on the information you own that will help you achieve your goals. Based on such assumptions, you should run an A/B and multivariate tests to see what will work and what won’t. And don’t forget to prioritize this step as well. Write down the order you will do tests and understand your goal.
Step 3: Prioritization
To focus on important things and run the right tests, you have to prioritize your hypothesis and ideas. There are plenty of different tools, but you can start with the most popular framework — PIE Framework. It takes into account three factors: potential, importance, and ease.
- Potential. Rate your poor-performing pages from 0 to 10 using analytics and customer reviews.
- Importance. After evaluating poor performance, you should figure out which of the pages are the most important. To define it, check the volume and the traffic — the pages with the highest numbers are the most important. Use the web analytics data to rank the selected pages.
- Ease. To understand where to start, see the page that is the easiest to start with. Rank pages based on how easy it is to test them and begin with that. If there are lots of obstacles to a test, it is better to do it later and start with the pages that don’t have extra barriers.
The PIE framework prioritizes your low-performance pages with important traffic and ease of change.
Step 4: Implementation and Testing
This is one of the most important steps of the conversion optimization process. Once you are ready with your data, hypothesis, and prioritization, it is time to test and implement. Testing of your hypotheses can be done primarily in three ways.
A/B Testing
During A/B testing, you can check two variants of the same page and see the users’ reactions to it. For example, variant A can have a CTA that is on a small black button, and variant B can have a CTA on a big green button. After finishing the test, you’ll see which option works best and will be able to implement it on a regular basis.
Multivariate Testing
Multivariate testing is performed when you need to make several changes to one page and then test each combination separately.
To run A/B testing and multivariate testing, you need to have some tools up your sleeve. Start with using Google Optimize — it is quite easy to understand and enough for basic requests and tests.
Step 5: Learning and Reviewing
After running the tests and receiving the results, you can see if your hypothesis of conversion optimization is right or not. Generally speaking, if the test results are positive, marketers usually implement the changes immediately. But if the results are negative, they return to form a new hypothesis.
However, even if your guess is right, you still have to go further. See if the cost of such implementation is worth the fuss. Check your wrong hypothesis for additional mistakes and loopholes as there might be some that gave you the wrong result. And if so, analyzing one might give you some thoughts on the new hypothesis or signal you about an issue that you haven’t seen before. Review your test results and research data before moving on to another hypothesis.
Again, the best way to get initial and accurate information or feedback on any changes you make is to ask your customers directly how they feel about it. Conduct polls or interviews to find out the answer. Put yourself into your users’ shoes to see if it is convenient to answer such polls or leave feedback.
Conclusion
Web conversion optimization is a strategic and infinite process, but there is always room for improvement. You will never finish testing as you work on your website constantly. Conversion optimization allows you to gain momentum by attracting more customers in a short period of time without spending much on marketing.
Conversion rate optimization should be one of your business development priorities. It helps you improve every aspect of your product, service, marketing, and sales, and every little improvement can increase your conversions tenfold.
Do conversion rate optimization the right way, and do it consistently. If you have any questions left, or you want to hire a professional team to optimize the conversion rate, contact Claspo. We will do everything for your business to grow.