CVR tells you is how successful your business is in getting prospective customers to complete an action. It tells you whether you're getting enough bang for your buck (i.e. your investment) or if you need to adjust your marketing strategy. The higher your conversion rate (more on that in a few), the more successful your campaign. Every business, regardless of size, should know its CVR, and we'll take an in-depth look at how to figure out this rate as well as optimize it. After you read through, a simple strategy call with Ampry can help answer questions you may have and get you started.
Why Conversion Rate Is Important
CVR is important for one primary reason: it helps you measure the success of your investment in traffic campaigns, including advertising campaigns. If you don't know your rate, for example, you might keep throwing money away on a strategy that's not drawing the actions you desire — whether it's signing up for a service or buying products. Without knowing your CVR, how can you know how well your advertising investment is working?If you have a good CVR, chances are you won't need to adjust your approach much. However, if your CVR is low, you'll want to boost it as quickly as you can and put your money to better use.
How Do I Measure Conversion Rate?
Measuring your conversion rate is quite simple, even if you're not good at math. The simplest way to do it is to have a solid analytics program at your beck and call.But you can also do some manual calculations. The formula for your CVR is:
Conversion Rate = (conversions/total visitors) x 100
So for example, if you have 1,200 monthly visitors and 30 of them signed up, your formula would look like this:
CVR = (30/1200) x 100 (0.025) x 100CVR = 2.5%
This means 2.5% of your visitors are making some form of transaction. Now, keep in mind that there are different types of conversion rates you can measure, but this is the simplest formula to keep in mind.
If My Conversion Rate Is Low, How Do I Optimize?
In order to answer this question, we first have to take a look at what constitutes a "good" conversion rate. The thing with conversion rates is while it tells you what portion of your traffic is taking an action, it doesn't always tell the whole story. Conversion rates need to coincide with your return on investment (ROI). For example, if you have a 15% conversion rate on customers signing up for a newsletter, but only a 2.5% conversion rate of people buying products, what is yielding you more revenue? If you make money on your newsletters by driving your prospective customers to a blog or news site, you could potentially make revenue through clicks. However, if you sell luxury purses or clothing, that 2.5% product CVR is going to yield a lot more income.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of optimizing your website, whether it's an entire site or just a single landing page, to result in more conversions and making the most from the traffic you already get. It's not about attracting more visitors to your website, though that's never a bad thing as long as they're quality viewers. For the sake of this argument, though, we'll focus on existing traffic. There are a few methods of optimizing, but one of the most important ways to do this is to create one single page that your viewers land on. This is called a dedicated landing page, and it's the one aimed at selling. Make sure your headline is strong and the layout is one that's both eye-catching and simple — the more work your users have to do when they visit to figure out what it is you're offering, the higher the chances they'll navigate away from your website in frustration. Then, you'll need to develop hypotheses. These are guesses as to why you think visitors may not be responding — or converting, if you will. It's a good idea to develop a few hypotheses because you will be testing them in what's known as A/B testing.
A/B testing
It's exactly what it sounds like: testing option A against option B, to see which of them performs better. By pitting two pages against each other in a real-world scenario, you can better identify which is drawing a larger response and implement your strategies accordingly.One way to implement design changes would be to add more color. Skip the black and white, this isn't the New York Times. It's well-proven that specific colors have psychological effects, so why not take advantage of those in your design. You can color code, keeping things orderly for shoppers, or you can draw people in with robust images right off the bat.(Also, decrease load times to make sure visitors aren't clicking away. Check out our 12 Load Time Tips!)
My Website Is Small and Gets Little Traffic. How Do I Optimize Conversions?
It doesn't matter if you have millions of visitors to your site every month or hundreds, you can still optimize your conversion rates. And what's more — you should. Size never matters when it comes to CRO—what matters is increasing your income and you do that by increasing your CVR. The main challenge with smaller websites and less traffic is a lack of data. So for smaller companies, it makes sense to take different approaches than a larger website with a sizeable data subset.One of the first things you can do is track micro-conversions. These are small aspects of a prospective customer's behavior. For instance, pinpoint at what stage are people navigating away? Are they abandoning a cart with products in it, or are they not shopping at all? These behaviors can help you determine which actions to take. By focusing on smaller behaviors — aka your micro-conversions — you gain better insight.That said, don’t be afraid to A/B test variations with bigger changes. With a smaller amount of traffic, you can afford to make bigger changes.
How Do I Optimize for Phone, Desktop, and Tablet?
Most of today's customers, whether looking for goods, services, or purely just information, do so on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. The layout is significantly different on these devices, with less screen space to view content on. You end up trading screen real estate for enhanced functionality for your users.Additionally, conversion rates are typically higher on desktops vs mobile devices. Therefore, it makes sense that optimizing for these devices is a bit different than optimizing for a desktop computer. The conversion rate optimization methods we discussed earlier work very well on a desktop, but you'll need more strategic approaches for a mobile device.
Mobile Devices
When you're working with mobile devices, you have to take into account the smaller screen size and the person's propensity for getting distracted — which is very easy to do on a smart device.Don't make your customers look for the route to take an action. If they have to look too hard, chances are they'll get frustrated and navigate away, which is much easier to do on a phone or tablet. Make sure that action — whether it's a sign-up form for their personal information or access to a buy-now button — is right in front of their faces. To do this, put yourself in the prospective customer's shoes. If you were on this website navigating, can you easily find what you're looking for? If the answer is no, you need to optimize better.Every business must collect leads, it's a simple fact of survival. Your leads are prospective customers, and the way to collect their personal information is to create a sign-up form. The easiest way to do that on a mobile site is to put it right in front of their face — at the top of the website landing page, where they can't miss it.You've heard of cross-selling, right? In addition to increased sales, it's an excellent way to increase conversions, too. Whether you sell products or services, it's always a good idea to have a "you may like this, too" recommendation. Sure, it takes a little time to put together, but it's worth it in the end when you see sales increase. You're basically doing the work for the customer and providing some personalization to the user experience. The end reward is more money in your pocket.Finally, it's always a good idea to use your space to sell. And what sells on mobile sites? Images. Pictures will always draw a visitor in more than any text you can create. Make your mobile site product-centric, even for services — visuals will always help boost the sale potential.
Why CVR/CRO Is More Important Than ROAS (“Return on Ad Spend”)
As a website owner, chances are you've heard of return on ad spend (ROAS), even if you weren't quite sure what it meant. ROAS is a good measurement to track, for sure, because it tells you how much value you're getting from what you're spending and if your advertising campaigns and relevant adverts are worth the investment or need tweaking.But here's the thing. ROAS is dependent on you driving more traffic to your website, rather than focusing on the traffic you already have. And, there's no telling if you'll be able to turn new visitors into conversions, either. So, in the long-term, focusing on CVR and CRO is more important than ROAS, simply because you're not splitting your attention trying to drive traffic to your site, you're optimizing for the traffic you already have.In short, it's better — and less expensive — to cater to your current audience than draw in new traffic sources.
How Will CRO Work Without Third-Party Cookies?
Third-party cookies are a tool that tracks and stores a user's action on a website, to avoid repetition in either displaying ads or performing tasks. They're useful for website owners in that they create a personalized web experience for visitors. However, Google has decided to do away with third-party cookies, in what's known as the "cookie-pocalypse."The main impact this will have on CRO is when it comes to A/B testing. Since the cookies won't be tracking which testing page (A or B) the user has seen, it can't track and store the impact. However, there are ways to circumvent this, but it requires more effort on the server side, in what's known as server-side tagging. In this method, the changes are made on both ends — the web server and the user's browser, rather than just on the user's side. Ampry can help users with their CRO in preparation for the eventual disappearance of the all-too-helpful functional cookies. While there's a lot to know about CVR and CRO, Ampry can help break it down into actionable advice through a strategy call. Contact us today and let us help you increase those conversion rates.