A lot of our blog posts touch on the topics of generating business, and driving new traffic to your website. This time we thought we would look at it from a slightly different angle…. making the most of what you already have…. or as it’s more often referred to ‘conversion optimisation’.

What Is Conversion Optimisation?
It pretty much what it says on the tin; making sure that you are converting at as high a rate as humanly possible. This may sound like the most mundane task of all time, but conversion optimisation is a pretty exciting topic, because unlike many other areas of digital marketing, the results are almost instant.

Take for example that you run an e-commerce website. The site receives around 20k visitors per month. The conversion rate of the site is around 3%, which whilst not a disaster, could be improved upon. In addition to the 600 people who do checkout every month, around 50 people leave the site from the checkout page. It would be an obvious decision to target this page for improvement.

This kind of data can been seen within your Google Analytics account as follows;

In Google Analytics simply click, Behaviour > Site Content > Exit Pages.  Sort this data by the exits column, and you will see the pages on your site causing the most exits.

Conversion Optimisation is about reducing this figure of 50, and trying to stop people leaving the site. So, why might people be leaving a checkout page;

Perhaps the page is not loading properly on some browsers?

Is it obvious what to do next?

Is the page slow to load?

Does the page make it clear that the payment details are secure?

After investigation, changes may be made to the page to try to reduce the number of people leaving the site. For example, optimising for speed, introducing secure shopping icons, or improving the mobile layout.

Whilst not major changes, they may help to reduce the number of people leaving this area of the site by a significant portion, and thus increase the conversion rate of the site.

Analysing The Data

When you decide to undertake an exercise in conversion optimisation, it is best to first decide which pages you will focus on.  The obvious decision here is to focus on the pages which are causing the most visitor drop outs.  Some common examples include;

The checkout

The basket

Enquiry forms

Try to look first at the pages where the visitor has most likely already decided to contact you or purchase, but for some reason isn’t following through. An enquiry form which doesn’t work, or a badly formatted checkout page are good examples. Look at the statistics within your Google analytics account, and make an informed decision based on not just numbers, but also how quickly you think you could make changes to deliver improvements. Often just a few minutes work can make all the difference.

If you could like us to take a look at your website, and undertake some conversion optimisation, please just get in touch.