How to Optimise Your Conversion Rate – Part One

With analytics and specialist metric tools a common occurrence on most websites nowadays, conversion rate optimisation and the process of engaging visitors with your content is more important than ever.
As the first post in a series of blog posts about optimising your conversion rate we’ll discuss the basics of CRO and how it can benefit your business.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) refers to the method of using a mixture of analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. CRO is perfect for improving any specific metric on your website that you feel needs that little bit of a push, whether it’s acquiring new customers or increasing your downloads. It’s all about increasing the percentage of website visitors who have a great experience on your website and choose to buy a product, enquire about a service or download a resource.

Why is CRO so important?

Optimisation of any kind on a website should improve the overall experience of your users and your business prospects. As paid advertising increases its prices and becomes more competitive, identifying any problems you have beforehand is an added bonus that can save you money in the long run. CRO is essentially free as it capitalised on the traffic you already have coming to your website. It’s also great for working out what needs to be changed on your current website.

How Should You Measure Your Current Rate of Conversion?

1. Your total conversion rate is the number of people who have done whatever it is that you’re converting – whether it’s signing up to an email newsletter, making a purchase or getting in touch about a service. This is all very specific to your business and defines what you’re mainly interested in your visitors doing once they’ve clicked onto your site.
2. To get your overall Conversion Rate you will need to divide the total number of conversions by the number of visitors that you receive to your website. (e.g. a site with 3000 visitors and 30 conversions has a conversion rate of 1%).

What Metrics Should You Focus on the Get the Most out of Your CRO?

1. A Bounce Rate is very important when figuring out what’s working (or not working) with your website. It refers to the percentage of people who leave the website after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate means that for whatever reason, people aren’t finding what they’re looking for.
2. You will also have an Exit Rate, a percentage of people who leave after viewing a page. This number lets you know the last page viewers look at before moving on to somewhere else. If you’ve got a particularly high exit rate on a specific page it may be time to rethink your content.
3. The Average Time of Site engagement metric gives you a general idea of how long users are sticking around. This goes hand in hand with the bounce rate of each page. A high bounce rate generally means a low average time on the site which means that people aren’t spending enough time on the page to do what you want them to do.
4. It may also be worth looking at the Average Page Views of the average user before they leave. Although more page views can lead to greater numbers of engagement, it can also mean a lack of clarity in your conversion funnel if they don’t do what you want them to.

Call back soon for more information on optimising your website’s conversion rate.

How do you optimise your conversion rate? Please leave your comments below…