Everything seems right. You’re getting plenty of clicks, all of them from your target audiences. Your website is so beautiful that people routinely come to your site and weep...but there’s just one little problem.
No one is converting.
They aren’t signing up for your email list. They aren’t buying your product. They aren’t reaching out to your business.
Apparently, all people do on your website is weep at the sheer beauty of your designs...and that doesn’t make you any money.
So, you perfect your ad copy, get more involved in social media, optimize your keywords...but no matter what you do on the advertising side of things, you get people to convert regularly.
You begin wondering. Why is this happening?
Traffic Isn’t Everything
Sadly, lots of traffic doesn’t necessarily equal lots of conversions.
If you’re already driving the right traffic to your website, there has to be another problem. Unfortunately, just because they’re on your site doesn’t mean they’ll convert immediately.
The thing is, they may want to, but they just don’t know it yet. Your website’s layout might even be keeping them from converting.
When it comes to websites, beauty isn’t everything—you need a user experience that sells.
Conversion Rate Depends On You
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art and science of perfecting your user experience.
In essence, CRO helps you make the most of your current traffic. In other words, if you can increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you will have doubled your conversions.
That means you can sell a ton more without worrying about trying to reel in more traffic!
Can you see why CRO is such an important part of your online marketing strategy? If you’re not optimizing your site for conversions, you are wasting money.
Luckily, starting CRO is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
1. Use Landing Pages
You should have specific landing pages for any paid advertising you use (paid search, social media, etc. ) so that your traffic ends up on a page that’s perfect for them.
Imagine you click on an ad for laptop computers, but you end up on the homepage of a company that sells a variety of computer parts, computer, and computer accessories.
If laptop computers are nowhere to be seen on the homepage, how likely are you to stick around until you find the laptop page?
If you’re like most people, it probably won’t be long before you hit the back button.
On the other hand, if you end up on a landing page that’s all about the best laptop deals, there’s a much better chance that you will buy!
Making landing pages is the easiest kind of CRO you can do. It’s just making a more specific page for whichever ad brought in your audience.
2. Get Scientific
Scientific testing is at the heart of all good CRO. So, before you start testing your site, you’ll want to come up with a few hypotheses about which site elements have the biggest impact on your conversion rate.
To make sure you’re making educated guesses, here are a few places to start:
- Your Headline. 80% of your audience won’t look at more than your headline. That means your headline needs to catch people’s attention and do it fast. When planning your testing be sure to test your headlines if nothing else.
- Your Offer. Different descriptions of your product may appeal to your audience in a variety of ways. They may not prefer the descriptions you like most, so be sure to test this as well. You might even try playing with the layout of your information and see how that affects your conversion rate.
- Your Call-to-Action. Another thing that will appeal very differently to different audiences is your call-to-action (CTA). Play with a variety of CTAs and button sizes.
- Your Media. Better pictures and videos make your site more attractive, and they can increase your conversion rate. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s way more than people will be willing to read on the first page they check.
When you have all your planning in place—with a hypothesis and some designs to try out—it’s time to get to testing!
3. Perform Your A/B Test
If you’ve got traffic like Los Angeles, you could look into some awesomely complex multivariate testing, but most companies can get great results with simple A/B testing.
Just take a control version of your site, make a variant to test against it and split your traffic between the two pages to see which version performs better.
There are a ton of ways to do this. Some are easy and free; others are extreme and fancy. If you’re just getting started with A/B testing, it’s probably best to start with one of the cheaper options first:
- Google Content Experiments. Guess what? This one’s free. That means anyone can get testing right off the bat. Still, you get what you pay for. Google Content Experiments doesn’t give real-time results, so some of the other options might be better if you need results now.
- Unbounce. If you’re keeping your A/B testing to landing pages, for now, Unbounce is a great option. It lets you make and test a plethora of landing pages with ease.
- Optimizely. Though this option costs more than Google experiments, it has some features you can use to improve the effectiveness of your tests.
- Visual Website Optimizer. With an intuitive interface and a little bit of a lower price than Optimizely, this is one of our favorite CRO platforms at Disruptive Advertising.
Conclusion
CRO is like being able to get your horse to drink once you’ve got it to water.
And, the best part is, CRO just keeps on giving. Once you’ve identified the page elements and variants with the best results, you can use those pages and what you learned to maximize your conversion rate for years to come.
So, if you’re not doing CRO, you’re wasting money.