For any business, especially for those who present themselves online, nothing is more important than turning their website’s visitors into clients. So, for them, Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can help with that.
In this article, I’ll explain CRO in detail and discuss why it’s essential for any company with a website. Moreover, I’ll also list some techniques which can increase your website’s conversion rate.
Now grab a cup of coffee and prepare for this amazing guide!
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
The process of boosting the website visitors who carry out a desired activity, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, is known as conversion rate optimization, or CRO.
Briefly, using CRO means, making your website work smarter for you by understanding your website’s visitors and matching its content, appearance, etc. to the visitors’ behaviour.
Is CRO important for website owners
Certainly, CRO plays a huge role to boost your brand awareness, reputation as well as your revenue. I’ve listed some of the advantages of CRO for website owners.
- Helps to create a more user-friendly experience for website users.
- Optimises a website's design, content, and user journey to make it easier and more enjoyable for users to complete desired actions on the website.
- Businesses can generate more revenue and increase their return on investment (ROI).
- A well-optimised website benefits both the user and the business by creating a more efficient and effective online experience.
- Grow your business without running out of resources and potential customers
All these plus points lead many websites owners to think more about their conversion ratio.
What is a Conversion on a Website?
Conversion of the website may vary on the business type, objectives, etc., For an instance, the conversions of an ecommerce website is not same as a service agency’s.
To get an idea I tabulate a few conversions based on the type of the website.
Type of the website | Conversion |
|---|---|
School websites | From submissions and registration |
Ecommerce website | Purchases |
A website of a consultant | Online appointment |
A hotel or motel | Bookings |
How to calculate the Conversion Rate of your Website?
Above all, you need to know two key pieces of information, the number of people who visited your website and the number of people who completed the desired action (such as making a purchase or filling out a form).
How to Find-out the number of website visitors and conversions?
To find out the number of people who visited your website, you can use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
But, note that, these will only give a rough value, the real statistics are always more than the given value.
Well, you can also watch the following video, it explains how to get an idea about your website visitors using a plugin.
To find out the number of people who completed the desired action, you can set up conversion tracking within Google Analytics or your chosen analytics tool.
The following video will help you to understand how you can find out the number of conversions of your website using Google Analytics.
By the way, if you’re using an e-commerce platform or CRM system, you may be able to view the number of conversions directly within that system.
Formula to Calculate the Conversion Rate
For example, if your website had 10,000 visitors in a month and 500 of them made a purchase, your conversion rate would be; (500 / 10,000) x 100% = 5%
Which means, your website has a 5% conversion rate for the particular month.
Importance of conversion rate for businesses
In fact, there are many advantages of calculating the conversion rate of your website time to time.
The primary reason is, you can get an idea about whether your website is performing well. If the performance is not as you planned, then you can do some adjustments to its structure, call-to-action, etc. However, it is very important to recalculate the conversion rate once you done any change.
Another plus is you can identify the details such as seasonal factors, different lead generating techniques you can use, etc.
How to Optimize Your Website's Conversion Rate?
I’m going to discuss some of the techniques I use to optimise the conversion rate of the clients’ websites.
Identifying Heatmap of the Business Website
The home page, pricing page, blog and landing page benefit the most from CRO, but where should each web page be optimized?
In that case, “Heat Maps” are important.
What are heat maps of a website?
Heat maps visualise the behavior of visitors on a website, briefly, it shows the areas of high and low visitor activity.
They are created by tracking and analyzing user clicks, taps, and scrolls, and can provide valuable insights into how visitors interact with a website.
There are a few types of heat maps; Click, Scroll and Confetti
Type of the heat map | Features |
|---|---|
Click heat map | Shows the areas where visitors clicked the most on your web page • Most clicked area – Dark colour • Least clicked area – Light colour |
Scroll heat map | Presents how far your website visitor scrolled through your web page in dark colour to light colour |
Confetti heat map | Shows the clicks of different visitors, from which referral source segment or where these clicks are coming to your website. Each segment has dots of a different colour. |
How to generate heat maps?
There are tools such as Hotjar, Crazyegg, and Ms Clarity that you can use to generate heat maps, indeed, for free as well as paid.
I added a video which will guide you to generate heat maps with the tool that I mentioned now.
How to analyse the heat maps?
After generating a heat map for your website; there are 5 main strategies you can use to anlyse your results.
- Are people seeing important content?
- Are people clicking on key page elements?
- Are people confused by non-clickable elements?
- Are people getting distracted?
- Are people experiencing issues across devices?
Based on the results of above five analysis, you can take actions to increase your conversion ratio. If the visitors don’t see the important content; you can check whether there is a bug which prevent your visitors scrolling down/up.
More Tips to Improve Your Conversion Ratio
In addition to the heat maps; there are also few more techniques you can adopt to improve your website’s conversion rays.
- Attention-grabbing call-to-action (CTA)
- Use simple navigation
- Impressively presented quality content and information
- Responsive option
- Use time-limited offers to drive sales
- Allocate space for certificates
- Use fewer form fields on your forms
- Obtaining less personal information when filling out forms
If you own an ecommerce website, I recommend you to watch the following video. It includes 10tips, specially for e-commerce website owners to rise the conversion ratio.
Conclusion
In conclusion, CRO is a crucial concept which influence on the conversions of your website. “Conversions” may vary on the type of your website, for an instance, the conversion for an ecommerce website is the sales, while for a hotel website, it is bookings.
You can calculate your website’s conversion ratio by dividing the total conversions by the total website visits for the given period.
One of the main techniques to improve the conversion rate is analysing the heat maps. There are different free and paid tools which you can use to generate heatmaps; Hotjar, Crazyegg are some popular tools.
Moreover, using engaging Call-to-action, simple and responsive website design, short forms, etc. will definitely help you to improve your website’s conversion ratio.
By the way, I would like to share with you a very detailed webinar which was about CRO. If you are interested, you may have a look.
