11 steps to increase the conversion of your site | Crealeon 2022

Everyone wants his site to be visited by as many people as possible. But attendance is not the main indicator of success. Conversion is much more important: it is what determines the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. We have collected 11 steps that will lead to the cherished increase in website conversion rate and revenue.

What is conversion?

Conversion is the percentage of site visitors who take a targeted action. A targeted action is not only the purchase of a product. You can track registrations on the site, subscriptions to the mailing list, requests to make a call, and much more. Conversion analysis allows you to understand whether there is a return on the money invested in the site and advertising. You can use it to identify vulnerabilities and growth areas that need attention in order to increase profits.

Conversion work tactics

1. Be clear about the goals of your site

Before you begin conversion rate optimization (CRO), set website goals. These can be any specific action a visitor needs to take on your site to create value for your business.

Here’s a list of the most common targeted actions:

• page visits,
• filling out forms,
• clicking on links,
• clicking on items.

Formulating a clear goal will make it easier for you to track metrics and look at conversion rates.

2. Collect and analyze visitor data

When it comes to CRO, it’s best to avoid making assumptions and rely solely on accurate data. Constantly monitor and analyze your website’s key metrics to learn more about your visitors and their preferences. This information will let you know where to focus your optimization efforts.

A list of metrics to monitor to understand and anticipate the actions of your visitors:

• Traffic Sources.

It’s important to know where people are coming to you from. Clicked on a link from a targeted ad in Instagram? Or maybe they found you in the rankings? Understanding the sources of traffic allows you to focus on the most “fruitful” channels and helps you to avoid investing in the development of inefficient ones.

• Demographics and geography of users

In order to correctly interact with your audience, you need to know basic information about it: age, gender, interests and region. This will allow you to pick the best tactics that will work exactly for your target audience, encouraging them to make an order. You’ll be able to predict your customers’ specific pains and focus your site content on offering solutions to their problems. This is more likely to lead to conversions.

• The user journey.

How does a potential customer come from point A (login to the site) to point B (purchase, aka conversion)? By monitoring the user path, you’ll see the weaknesses of your site and understand at what stage people are leaving you.

Statistics show that the most vulnerable point is checkout – on average, 69.23% of buyers abandon their carts here. The solution to such a problem could be an e-mail newsletter, which would remind the user of the unfinished purchase and suggest placing an order.

When analyzing, it’s important to find similar points of growth for your site and throw your energies into their development.

NPS (Net Promoter Score).

In Russian, it’s a customer loyalty index. It’s a metric that measures how satisfied customers are with your products or services. Users answer a simple question: how likely are they to recommend your brand.

The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who answered the question with a score of 6 or lower (known as “dislikes”) from the percentage of customers who answered with a score of 9 or 10 (known as “promoters”).

Given the available range of -100 to +100, any score above 0 is considered “good” because it indicates that the company has more promoters than detractors.

The NPS of first-rate companies is usually 70 or higher. If you now think that’s unattainable for you and only big brands can do that, take a look here: in 2018, Netflix had an NPS of 64, PayPal 63, Amazon 54, Google 53, and Apple 49. Each has room to grow. And it’s cool that feedback helps companies see specific points of growth.

Once you’ve collected quantifiable data, use it to create a perfect portrait of your user. You need to isolate all the valuable information about your potential customers, including their interests, likes and dislikes, goals and pain points.

3. Conduct regular competitor analysis

To have a competitive advantage, you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. This will help you highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) and greatly increase the chances that a potential customer will choose you. In an abundance of offers in the market, it is important to be able to stand out.

Competitive analysis is one of the most extensive stages. There are many methods and tools to conduct it, which we talked about in the article “How to analyze competitors in search”. Follow the link, you will find a lot of useful information there.

4. Optimize the layout of important pages

If your conversion rates aren’t improving despite repeated efforts, it’s a sign that it’s time for a radical site change. Try changing your design and layout based on visitor data and best practices to see if it affects your conversions. Tools such as gaze tracking, scroll maps, mouse tracking and click maps can give you a clear picture of user behavior on your website. Use them to create a page that visitors will love to interact with.

For example, you can use any of the many tools to generate a “click heat map.” It visualizes statistics on the most clickable places and elements on the site. It helps you visually see what visitors click on more often, what interests them, where their attention is directed, and it also helps you understand what elements of the site are distracting users from the conversion forms you want.

5. Delete unnecessary form fields

Have you ever had the intention of filling out an online form, but became uncomfortable with the sheer number of required fields in the process? This is a common situation that unceremoniously lowers your conversion rate. Feel free to remove all unnecessary form fields, leaving only those necessary to achieve your goal.

If you’re worried that by reducing the number of fields, your sales team won’t get the detailed information they need to track leads, then remember: your signup rate can be very high, but what’s the point if the percentage of transactions is negligible? Try to find the right balance between getting important information about potential customers and keeping form fields to a minimum. Just make sure each field is crucial. If not, remove it.

6. Work out the CTA buttons

CTA stands for call to action, which translates as “call to action. On websites, these buttons usually have the following content: register, buy, order, book. But inconspicuous standard wording will not give you the best conversion rates, and a few minutes spent on improving the CTA-button will allow you to rip a small score.

Short calls to action with strong verbs are best. They appeal directly to the user. Instead of weak call-to-action words such as “click here,” use more specific words that speak directly to the desired result:

• Get a cost estimate to your e-mail.
• Book your next adventure.
• Book a free handyman call.

When planning a CTA button, 3 factors are key: location, design and text.

7. Gain credibility with reviews and testimonials

Few people want to be the first to use a product or service for the first time. Remember yourself when you are choosing between two identical products on Ozon, but the more expensive counterpart has at least a dozen reviews, and the other more budget-friendly one has none at all. Whom do you give preference? Most will choose the first option, because it seems more reliable. People are willing to overpay for their peace of mind.

If your potential customers don’t trust you, they won’t convert. Nothing will make them make a purchase. To gain trust, tell the truth about yourself. Show honest opinions about your product or service from other customers.

Numerous studies have shown that visitors who interact with a review are 58% more likely to make a conversion. This proves that you can get a huge advantage and a spike in sales if you simply add a few reviews of your products to your web page.

8. Recommend similar products

Cross-selling is one of the most effective marketing tools. The customer is offered to buy, along with the main product, also related products. For example, when buying airline tickets the traveler is offered to book accommodation, rent a car, buy tickets for excursions.

This is a great way for the site owner to increase the check, and for the customer to feel a show of concern for him. Often it is this factor that becomes an additional incentive to make a purchase, especially with a little price reduction on bundled items.

For example, the site has as many as two such sections: “Similar goods” and “With this product people buy”.

9. Make site navigation easy and smooth

Visitors come to your site for a specific purpose, and your goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to find the information they want. Make sure that the navigation of your site is intuitive and user-friendly to drive conversions. You need to remove any obstacles in the user experience and make it so that visitors can intuitively understand how to buy a product.

Adding a search function to your site is a great way to navigate easily. Visitors who use internal site search tend to make much higher conversions than those who don’t. This is because these customers already know the product or service they want and have a high intent to buy. You don’t want these visitors to leave your site because they just couldn’t figure out the buttons, do you? Then consider implementing search.

10. Reduce page load time

Web pages that take too long to load are quickly lost by visitors. Such immediate abandonment can have a big impact on your conversion rate.

Studies show that the optimal page load time is 2-3 seconds, and the ideal time is 0.5 seconds, which is equal to the user’s reaction time. Clearly, the shorter the time, the better for conversions. Increasing the page load speed ensures that fewer impatient visitors will abandon you before the site loads.

In addition, long loading times negatively affect rankings. Both Yandex and Google give preference to fast resources.

How to increase the loading speed of your pages? There are many ways, for example, you can work with the format of images on the site:

• GIF is a good option for animated images,
• SVG is ideal for logos,
• JPEG is great for detailed images with lots of color, like photos,
• PNG is what you need when you want to put a high quality image on a web page.

Another interesting way to increase the loading speed is to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. With it, the site is displayed as stripped-down content. With a weak connection, additional elements – widgets, feedback forms, ads – are not loaded, thereby reducing loading time.

11. Check the effectiveness of changes

One of the most methodical ways to optimize your pages is through testing. When you make changes to your site, you should evaluate their impact before deciding if they are really good for conversion rates.

A/B testing allows you to compare your hypotheses with the original version of the web page to find out which one positively affects conversions and which one does not. The essence of the method: you create page A, copy it and change some parameter, such as a header, button, image, and get page B. Then you show one page to half of your site visitors and the other half, and see which of them reach the goal (order, purchase, subscription) more often, i.e. which page has a higher conversion rate.

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The more website visitors you convert, the greater the impact of existing traffic on your revenue. These 11 tactics are a great way to get started with conversions. That said, keep in mind that some of them will work better, some will not be as effective. It’s important to define your goals and continually run objective tests to understand what resonates best with your target audience.