A conversion is determined by actions that visitors to your website take such as form fills, subscriptions, clicks on a button, downloads, sales and more. A conversion rate, on the other hand, is the total number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors to your website. For example, if you are running a website that receives 5,000 visitors a month, and acquires 500 sales for that particular month, then the conversion rate would be 10% (500/5000). You may then be wondering, what is a good conversion rate? Is it 3%, 5%, 7% or even 10%? This varies across different websites and marketing ads, but ideally you should aim for a conversion rate of 4% or higher. Boosting the website’s conversion rate is one of the top concerns for most businesses today. You might have good traffic, but it will all be for naught, if the traffic is not converting into meaningful revenue. There are many variables that contribute to whether a visitor converts or not so, let’s take a look at three ways you can improve your website’s conversion rate.
Focus on your Call to Action
One of the key components of your website that you should focus on, is the call to action (CTA). A CTA is usually a clickable button or text link with phrases like “Subscribe Now” or “Get your Copy Today”, that encourages a visitor to execute an action on your website. If your CTA does not create awareness, engage visitors’ interest, motivate them to consider your product, and inspire them to convert, then you need to fix it. A simple way to enhance your conversion rate is by testing out various types of CTAs. You should not only vary the position of the CTA on your web page, but also try new CTA texts or icons on the button as well. Whenever possible, try to add text with action words rather than non-action ones. For example, making a simple change on a CTA button text from “Get Started” to “Test It Out” may lead to a greater increase in your conversion rates on your website’s homepage or landing page. The rationale behind this is that the words ‘Test It Out” send a clearer message to the user to try something immediately, and not have to undertake a long, tedious process. Always remember to test out different types of CTA and determine which ones are the best to improve your website conversion rates.
Experiment and Test
Have you heard of A/B testing? It is simply an experiment where website owners run two or more variations of the same websites’ pages such as the homepage or product pages. The key difference is that the second variant has a minimal of one different feature from the original variant. This helps to determine which variant is more user friendly for visitors to navigate through your website’s content and ultimately, increase conversion rates. You can begin by monitoring metrics on web pages that are popular with your users. Determine if there is content that needs to be altered, different CTA links to play around with or even redundant form fields that should be omitted.
While it is important to test variants of the same web page, it is equally as important to apply these tests to actual website visitors, since different visitors behave differently. For example, visitors from organic search usually browse through more website pages, spend more time on each page and have smaller bounce rates, as compared to visitors from ads or pay per click (PPC) campaigns. In addition, visitors that return to your website may browse through different components as compared to first time visitors. You should take these different factors into account before making updates and executing A/B tests. This will help you determine which ones are performing the best and also, to improve the overall user experience and website conversion rates.
Data Drives Decisions
Free analytic tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essential in providing you with key user metrics like sessions, pages hit, bounce rate, visitors’ time on page, and conversion rates. As such, you should ensure that these analytic tools are installed on your website, so that you can gain more detailed insights into your website’s traffic. Take the time to understand how users are navigating across the website, and analyze them as they are progressing to the conversion point. Then rectify any issues that you discover and make necessary website changes to enhance your users’ navigation which in turn, will lead to better conversion rates.
The amount of traffic and visitors are essential for any website to grow and gain popularity. However, if your website traffic does not convert into revenue, you will not be able to sustain your business in the long run. As such, always ensure that you take the necessary steps to improve your website conversion rates for better degrees of success.
