So you’ve had a new website built, it looks great (especially if we made it!) and now you can sit back and watch the conversions flow, right? Wrong! Regardless of whether your site is new or old – there’s rarely ever a situation where more conversions is a bad thing. So striving to squeeze more out of your site should be a main priority.
The practice of encouraging your site visitors to fulfill your business goals is not an exact science. There’s heaps of best practice advice on ‘conversion optimisation’ but the simple truth is that every industry, every company and every customer is different.
So how to work out what’s best for you and your target market?
The answer: Test, test and test again.
Of course blindly testing different page layouts and text variations without research or a plan is usually a waste of time. So here are a few tips:
Pick the most important pages
This might seem obvious, but it’s important to identify pages that make a difference to your conversion rate based on real data.
Use Google Analytics to see which pages users navigate the site via to reach your conversion points. For example these might be checkouts or enquiry pages. Statistics such as bounce rate, average time on page and exit rate are all indicators of page performance.
Define target personas
Any well planned marketing activity is based on a clear understanding of who you are targeting. Their wants, needs and desires and how they behave during the buying process. Get a clear picture of who they are and look at your pages through their eyes. Do your pages meet their needs?
Plan your preferred user journey
Cramming all the detail your target personas need on one page will lead to information overload. Users often want to view more than one page to get a better feel for your business and whether they want to interact. Plan your user journey after they reach your landing pages and use that plan to lead your customer to the conversion pages.
Use the Navigation Summary and ‘In-page Analytics’ sections of Google Analytics to find out if users are moving on to the desired pages and which links they are following.
Once you’ve gathered your data and made your plan, start small and work on a few pages at a time. Use the ‘Experiments’ feature in Analytics to test one page variation against another.
Analytics will test the pages long enough to make a statistically significant choice as to which page performs the best. Review your results and test again…and again…and again.
We’re pretty good at conversion optimisation. We’ve even got a few extra tools up our sleeves to help us make even more informed decisions. For help and advice, just give us a call – 01202 684 009 or contact us online.