You have a landing page. You get new traffic every day. Most of your visitors won’t make the action that you are waiting for. That's usually frustrating and we always want to know how we can make that turn around.

“Conversion Rate Optimization” is the process of systematically improving your landing or webpage to get more leads, sales, or a desired action. This is a demanding but an indispensable need. All your blog content, marketing money, social media actions, usually (and hopefully) should end up on that desired action.

The smartest path to take is to constantly be testing and improving your site. We have a few tips to make that as smoothly as possible.

First, let's look into a possible example:

Imagine that you are the Digital Marketing Manager of Nike.com. Your ecommerce is working just fine, but you got a new challenge: You need to improve the revenue of the site by 8%.

Last year:

  • The average revenue for every sale was 50 USD.
  • You sold 1 million products, for a total revenue of 50M USD.
  • The site had 50M visitors.
  • The Conversion Rate of the site was 2 % (That means that from every 100 users that navigated through the site, 2 made a purchase).

You keep calm and think about your options. After some analysis, you realize that there are 3 main possibilities:

  1. You add new products: it takes a lot of money to produce them, but every user will have more items to check.
  2. You get more quality traffic: that usually costs a lot of marketing money.
  3. You get more sales of the users that are already there, improving the site.

The last one is the smartest. You don't have to spend a lot of time and money, and everything is within reach. You have to start with writing down some questions:

  • Does my site load as fast as it can?
  • Is the content of my site relevant for the specific traffic that gets there?
  • Are my title, copy and call to action as persuasive and effective as possible?
  • Why am I losing conversions? Why are people leaving?
  • Can I track which audience group converts more, and why?

There are a bunch of tools that can help you with that, and you will likely see results fast if you move smart. Let’s start answering those questions.

Does my site load as fast as it can?

In today's internet, speed is king. A slow site is annoying, and people tend to leave if they have to wait staring at a white screen. Porten did some smart and interesting research on how loading speed affects conversion rate:

  • 0 - 4 second load time is best for conversion rates.
  • The first 5 seconds of page load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.
  • Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).
  • Website conversion rates drop by an average of 2.11% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-9).

Data speaks by itself. Imagine you are doing a well-thought, innovative, and really expensive marketing campaign, to lose a stunning 4.42% of your conversion rate because your team didn’t compress the images of your landing page properly.

In order to check the speed of your site and know what to improve, there are some great tools out there:

Is the content of my site relevant for the specific traffic that gets there?

This may seem a little bit obvious, but being consistent with the user interests is key. A good strategy for some businesses is to have more than one landing page, each one for one specific goal. For example, if you are offering a stay in a hotel, you could have a landing page with specific features for young couples, where fun activities are recommended, like near pubs and cinemas. You should also have one for big families that are looking for some social pool time, and so on.

When you start your marketing campaign, your ads should be smart and your landing be the end of a journey for the user. Consistency on your message is key in order to get more conversions.

Each landing could be constantly improved with optimization techniques, offering a more personable experience. You should have a basic template and change some facts for every group!

Are my title, copy and call to action as persuasive and effective as possible?

Here is where we shine! Your landing page has hundreds or thousands of visitors, but you have to face it: maybe your first idea for title and copy are not the best fit for them. Even different calls to action have a different conversion rate, and the difference could be stunning.

At Biotec, a laboratory that does different medical analysis, just a change of color (a violet with more contrast) on the main calls to action resulted in a +41% conversion rate increase (+2.86 percentage points), which translated to over a hundred more bookings on the site. That little tweak made an astonishing improvement.

Moreover, you should try new titles and persuasive copy’s again and again.

The Internet is full of articles on how to write effective texts that covert. A lot of different selling strategies: “Use exact numbers”, “focus on the benefit, not the product” or “write persuasive call to actions” are overall some of them. But everyone recommends to always test to find the perfect combination. On ABtesting.ai, you could do that easily, in a blink of an eye:

Just hit “Add new text” in the top right corner, and start testing different variations.

Why am I losing conversions? Why are people leaving?

Understanding what makes people leave your site is key in this whole process. There is a really intuitive and smart tool to implement in this analysis: www.fullstory.com. To be honest, it’s a little bit creepy, but it tracks the user's exact movements on your site, and brings valuable data: rage clicks, where users leave, duration of every session, among others.

Can I track which audience group converts more, and why?

This is essential to know what is working properly. Please start doing more of that!

The easiest way is with Google Analytics. You should use an UTM maker to label every piece of content that goes on the web. That way all the traffic is marked.

Once you do that, you can analyze which source of traffic is converting more, and with a proper segmentation on your social campaigns, you could gain rich insights.

To sum up

Conversion Rate Optimization is a must. It’s the smartest and cheapest way to get more leads or sales from your existing audience, and also building a site that is well prepared for new visitors. You should constantly analyse different situations to find smart insights, and start new valuable tests.