What has more value: more guests coming into your store or more guests purchasing items? Almost every business owner would say getting more sales holds more value than visitors. The same holds true for your website. Your website shouldn’t be a place where visitors simply click around and leave. You want action! You want conversions and a good website conversion rate!
Website Conversion Rate
What are conversions? Conversions are specific, tracked actions that visitors take while on any page of your website. Conversions can be sales on an ecommerce website, email newsletter sign-ups, watching a video, donating toward a cause, or any action that you are trying to get the guest to take.
Now that you know what conversions are, why should you track your website conversion rate? Tracking the actions visitors take on your website lets you know what your customers like to read, what information they are seeking, and what information they dismiss. It also allows you to see if your marketing efforts and website design are effective in getting potential customers to act.
A website conversion rate is simply the number of conversions divided by the total visitors multiplied by 100. For a more in-depth explanation for analyzing your website conversion rate, check out HubSpot’s guide.
If you have a low conversion rate for a specific action, you will want to optimize to get visitors to take the action you want.
We are going to break down a few simple ways to improve your website conversion rate and we’ll even break down the importance of mobile vs desktop conversion rates.
4 Ways to Optimize Your Website for More Conversions
1. Track how visitors interact with your website.
Platforms like Google Analytics are particularly important in calculating your website conversion rate and seeing how visitors interact with your website. See how many visitors come to your site and where they go while on it. From this data, you will also see where they aren’t going.
Analyzing metrics like high bounce rates and low average time spent on a page tells you that there may be some broken links on pages or that the page has slow low speed. We know it can get very technical amazingly fast. That’s why we offer our clients these services and provide monthly digital reports detailing website traffic page performance.
2. Design your website with user experience in mind.
The design and navigation of your website holds a lot of value. It’s your voice to visitors who may be seeing your brand for the first time. Therefore, your website should be continuously updated and modernized. That’s why website redesign is vital.
When updating your website, make sure to communicate your value to the customer as soon you can. This means that if you want a customer to buy something from your ecommerce website, you should communicate WHY that customer needs to buy something from your site. The WHY should be communicated on the landing page they are taken to whether that be the home page, or the link attached to a digital ad.
On your home page, you should give visitors a statement that positions you as different than your competitors and shows them why they need you. You may even want to implement proof of this statement throughout the home page or other pages on the site through reviews, testimonials, or even reports and case studies.
89% of consumers check online reviews before making a purchase, which means your visitors are more likely to make a purchase on your website when online reviews encourage them to buy. Positive reviews are listed as one of consumers’ top three purchase influencers too!
ADsmith also offers website development services if you are looking to create a new website or optimize your current site for better user experience.
3. Optimize your website with, you guessed it, user experience in mind.
Once your website is up to date and your messaging is flowing, you will see an increase in conversions when you start optimizing your website with more engaging content and updating for better performance.
Including video and photos on your website pages keeps visitors engaged and interested. This will help improve your website conversion rate because you will hold the viewer’s attention long enough to direct them toward the conversion you want to make.
Improving your website’s performance will also help increase conversions because slow load speeds on pages and multimedia won’t stand in the way of getting your guests to click a button, take a step, or make a purchase. Let’s face it: people have extremely low attention spans. In fact, if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of people will abandon it and move on to the next thing.
Load speed can be improved by continuously updating your website content and any plug-ins (if applicable). You can also clear cached data so that your most up to date website is most accessible to visitors.
This is even more true when we look at mobile vs desktop conversion rates. It’s important to optimize for mobile viewing apart from conversions anyway because you should want your viewers to have a valuable experience on your website. You should want them to be able to search and find information on your site while they’re on the go.
Even more so, you should want viewers to be able to sign up, donate, make a purchase, etc. while on the go! Website performance becomes even more important in our mobile-first world. If mobile viewers have as little as a one-second delay in page response, your conversions could decrease 7%.
Avoid these mobile conversion killers by making images and videos smaller and compressed and optimizing for better load speed through SEO tactics. If website performance and SEO make your head hurt, we can help you!
4. Start testing and analyzing what will get you the most conversions.
The last, most practical tip we have for you is to do A/B testing with different website elements or pages to see which designs, layouts, or messaging encourages your visitors to complete a certain conversion. The page layout, element design, or messaging with the most conversions is the winner!
Smaller businesses will need be a bit bolder than larger corporations when implementing A/B testing. You’ll need to change more than just a few headlines or call-to-action buttons. Try out new page designs and layouts, move elements around the page to see what is going to attract viewers’ attentions the most.
Get bold with your messaging too! What tone of voice or personality do your customers react to better? Serious and sophisticated or goofy and relatable? Don’t forget to implement this tone across all marketing channels after you discover a fan favorite.
It may surprise you, but we can also help you with this area as well. We conduct focus groups for our clients to test different creative, messaging, and even website designs and layouts to make sure we are reaching our target audience and keeping their interest.
If you are interested in discovering what your target customer has to say about your brand and the marketing initiatives you are taking, we are ready to develop questions, test creative, and analyze the results to create an action plan for your website and more with our focus group services!
Analyzing Website Effectiveness
You may be wondering, “What is a good conversion rate?” or “How do I know if these steps are working?” A good conversion rate truly depends on the industry you are in, the amount of traffic your website sees, and the conversion for which you are tracking.
What matters for your business is an increase in conversions from where you were before optimization. An increase over time will tell you how effective your efforts were.
ADsmith Marketing & Advertising is a full-service agency, equipped to help you improve your low conversion rates, develop websites, and analyze website traffic. Contact us today and we will show you how all our marketing services combine to create the ultimate conversion rate optimization service offering.
