THE DEFINITIVE
Chapter 1
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (and What are the Benefits)?
Is your site as successful as it could be? Is your landing page or website performing at its peak—or are leads and sales slipping away? Keep reading to learn more about conversion rate optimization and how it can help you maximize your online presence.
You learned about the basics of what a conversion rate is and learned a little about conversion rate optimization in our Introduction. But let’s start with a quick review.
What’s a conversion?
A conversion refers to that single, specific desired action you want visitors to take on your landing page.
Keep in mind that while it’s common for a website to have multiple conversion goals, a landing page should only have one.
Your homepage, for example, is tasked with presenting your brand, defining your value proposition, pointing visitors in the right direction, and presenting your most important call to action. However, a landing page should focus squarely and exclusively on a single goal, such as downloading a resource, purchasing a product, or registering for a webinar.
What’s a conversion rate?
The conversion rate refers to the number of people taking your desired action, compared to the total number of sessions (visits) to your page. It’s represented as a percentage. For example, if your conversion rate is 20% that means 20% of the people who land on your page are converting.
We’ll go over how to calculate your conversion rate in Chapter 3.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of altering, changing, and testing your marketing assets (such as your landing pages) in order to increase your conversion rate. It helps you pinpoint specific factors that can be improved or enhanced to get more people to convert.
These factors are as small as changing the color of your CTA button from blue to orange, or as significant as completely repackaging the way you offer your services.
For example, you might have a hypothesis that a more benefit-focused headline will produce a higher conversion rate. So, you create two different versions of your landing page: one with the original headline and one with the new headline. Then you drive traffic to both to see which delivers a higher conversion rate.
What are the benefits of conversion rate optimization?
Obviously, the primary benefit of conversion rate optimization is improving your conversion rate—but there’s a lot more to it than that. Here are a few more reasons why CRO marketing is a great strategy for your business.
Better understand your audience’s expectations
To convert customers, you need to understand them: how they speak, what they want, and what problems they’re trying to solve. Going through the process of optimizing your web pages and campaigns is essentially the same as performing market research. But sometimes it’s even better because you’re asking ultra-specific questions about the sort of language, visuals, and message that best resonates with your customer.
To convert more visitors, you likely need to improve the way you’re engaging your visitors. This might mean you need to change your copy or design, offer a new lead magnet, or make the conversion process easier and more streamlined.
Conversion optimization is an opportunity to create a better user experience from start to finish. When the experience is better, the user is more likely to convert. If they convert, they’re engaging with your brand more. It becomes a positive cycle of conversion and growth.
Increase your ROI
Boosting your conversion rate automatically improves your KPIs (key metrics) without having to go out and find more customers. You’ll get more out of your acquisition costs by converting more of your traffic into subscribers and buyers.
Let’s say that you have a paid ad on Google that brings in about 1,000 viewers to your landing page every day. You want visitors to input their email for a free case study downloadable (this is your conversion action).
Your current conversion rate is 2%, meaning you get about 20 new email addresses daily. You’re paying for 1,000 clicks on your ad and only receiving 20 email addresses.
But what if you focused on boosting your conversion rate to 5%? Now you’d get 50 new leads every day from those 1,000 views. That’s 210 new leads per week, 840 per month, and 10,080 per year, just from improving your conversion rate by 3 percentage points.
Focusing on conversion optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to get the most value for your marketing efforts.
Collect more leads and sales
With traffic remaining the same, a higher conversion rate means more people are moving through your sales process. They’re subscribing to your newsletter, becoming members, and making purchases (or repeat purchases). These conversions are the lifeblood of your business. Collecting email addresses and making sales— that’s how your business stays in business.
Beyond that, having a conversion optimization system is critical as your business continues to scale. It helps you streamline the conversion process, so you’re not constantly chasing leads. Leads are steadily converting, and your conversion rate is steadily improving because you’ve already optimized the process.
Improve your SEO
Search engines love optimized pages. If your page is optimized for conversion, that means it’s:
- User-friendly and easy to use/read
- Full of relevant info and content that speaks to your audience
- Attracting more click-throughs on your site
Google’s algorithm favors each of those factors. When someone is spending more time on your site, they’re taking action on your site. And when your site is easy to use and chock full of good info, it signals to Google that your website is high quality and worthy of a high ranking.
Keep in mind, however, that search engine optimization is not the same as conversion optimization. The goal is to build in both features that are great for SEO and features that are great for conversion.
Conversion rate optimization case study
We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of conversion optimization, but let’s look at a real-life example.
Ashley created some courses and digital products to help businesses with their social media, but her landing pages weren’t getting a lot of conversions. She even paid a developer to create some pages in WordPress, but those still weren’t performing well.
So she turned to Leadpages to help with conversion rate optimization. Because Leadpages’ landing page templates are already optimized for conversions, she simply had to update the content and images and then publish them to the web.
Before, her conversion rate was close to zero. Now, she has conversion rates as high as 80% and has built a multi-million dollar business.
Read Ashley’s case study to learn more about her journey and how you can do the same.
How would you design a website to optimize for conversions?
In chapter four of this guide (How Can I Improve Conversion Rate On My Page?), we’ll go in-depth with specific tips and tricks that will help you with website conversion optimization. For now, let’s give you the basics of how you can improve your conversion optimization on a macro level.
1. Track and measure what matters most
A conversion rate isn’t a standalone number. You want to look at all the variables that could influence your conversion rate. Here are some metrics to keep track of:
- Where/how are people first entering your site? You want a visitor to land on a conversion-optimized webpage. For example, if your audience tends to find your blogs first, you want to make sure those blogs have a CTA to sign up for a newsletter or get upgraded content.
- Where is your traffic coming from? You want to emphasize those traffic avenues that bring in the largest amount of qualified prospects (people who would actually be interested in converting).
- Which pages and features do visitors most engage with? Try to understand where you’re already seeing the greatest (and the least) success on your site. Take note of similarities between the pages that currently convert the best.
- Which devices are they using to find you (mobile vs desktop)? This helps ensure you’re compatible and streamlining the opt-in or checkout process.
- What are your visitors’ demographics and interests? You want your visitors to look like your ideal customer. If the traffic coming in doesn’t match your customer audience, your conversion rate will suffer.
- At what point do users abandon your conversion funnel? Determine the moment when people are most likely to click away as opposed to make the conversion.
How do you find these metrics? Start by checking out Google Analytics. If you use Leadpages, we also have advanced tracking and analysis to help you understand where your conversion rate is coming from.
2. Ask your audience for qualitative feedback
You have the quantitative data, but now you need the insights and understanding behind the behavioral data. You want to know why some visitors are leaving as opposed to converting. For that, you’ll want to go right to the source.
Ask some of the following questions to get a better idea of how your visitors are interacting with the page:
- What about this page or offer appealed to you?
- Why did you decide to visit our site or page?
- How would you describe our offerings?
- Why did you choose not to opt in/make the purchase?
How do you get this information? User testing and satisfaction surveys are the simplest way. If a visitor is about to click away, you can have a survey pop up to ask them about their experience. If you notice a lead didn’t convert, you can send a follow-up email inquiring why.
Don’t be afraid to ask where you’re falling short of your customers’ expectations. More often than not, customers want to give you their input so you can provide them with an improved experience in the future.
3. Answer their demands and make changes
You’ve got the data about what’s going wrong—now make the necessary changes. You’ve also got the data with what’s going right, so emphasize these areas.
For example, your metrics show that a lot of your visitors land on your blog content, but they leave right after reading your blog. The qualitative data from surveys say that these visitors like your content, but they didn’t notice any other way to engage with the brand.
You can conclude that your call to action (that asks visitors to subscribe to your blog) is too subtle. You might want to try placing more “subscribe” moments throughout the blog or redesigning the button to be bigger and bolder.
4. Run A/B tests and split tests
One of our best conversion rate optimization tips is to test and experiment. You won’t know how to boost your conversion rate until you make a change and try something new. Keep in mind that if the change doesn’t work you can always switch it back.
Change one small variable at a time. You might swap the color of your CTA button or rewrite the headline or add a picture of your product or offer. Make one change, and then see how it impacts your conversion rate. If your conversions go up, stick with the new variable. If they’re not moving or going down, it’s time to run a different test.
You don’t want to guess what your customer wants. That won’t get you anywhere. You want to consider the full picture of quantitative and qualitative data in order to run different tests. Learn more about A/B testing in Chapter 5.
Tip: Want to easily run A/B tests and split tests without getting caught up in code? Leadpages offers unlimited A/B tests that you can set up in a matter of minutes.
Conversion rate optimization is a strategy
Conversion rate optimization is a process and a strategy. It’s about figuring out what your customers want and then designing content that will engage them and compel them to act.
We’ve given you the basic steps and benefits of conversion rate optimization and where to start. Now let’s really dig into it. Time to calculate your baseline conversion rate and define your goals, so you can take your pages to the next level.
Frequently asked questions about conversion rate
What factors affect conversion rate?
Several factors can influence conversion rate, including website design, user experience, content quality, call-to-action clarity, page load speed, and the relevance of your offer to the visitors' needs.
Can I have different conversion rates for different actions?
Yes, you can and should track different conversion rates for different actions. For instance, you might track the conversion rate for email sign-ups separately from the conversion rate for purchases. This helps you understand and optimize each step of your customer journey.
How does traffic source affect conversion rate?
Traffic source can significantly impact your conversion rate, since visitors from different sources often have varying levels of interest and intent. For example, visitors from organic search might convert at a higher rate than those from social media because they are actively seeking information related to your product or service. Understanding which sources drive the most conversions can help you focus your marketing efforts effectively.
What’s next?
Now that you’re familiar with CRO it’s important to know how conversion rate is calculated. This makes it easier for you to track your results and gives you a better understanding of why your conversion rate is higher or lower than you expected. Continue to Chapter 2 to learn how to calculate your conversion rate.
