Not every website is being monetized, but if you do monetize your website, then you are most likely using SEO or SEM to drive your traffic. Either way, you would like to know how much of this traffic is being converted. That is, how many visitors become subscribers, make a purchase or click on an ad? As you can see, conversion means different things to different people and depends on how you choose to monetize your website. But eventually, you will want to know what percentage of the traffic is being converted, and one way of knowing this is by using the conversion rate. 

What is the conversion rate?

Let’s say you own an E-commerce website and you use SEM to drive paid traffic to the website. Your goal here is for the visitors to make a purchase on your website. The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who made a purchase. It is an important key performance index and it is calculated using the equation;

Example;

Your website had 1000 visitors in a day and only 50 made a purchase, then the conversion rate is;

(50/1000) * 100 = 5%

Typically, you will want the conversion rate of your website to be as high as possible. The 5% conversion rate used in our example is perfect. In 2022, the average e-commerce conversion rate was just about 3.65%.  Most websites have between a 2% to 5% conversion rate and anything higher than 5% is considered above average. 

What is conversion rate optimization?

For new websites, getting a higher conversion rate is quite a struggle. Even with a good advertisement budget to drive paid traffic to your website, you might still find out that your conversion rate is very low. This is because high traffic doesn’t necessarily mean a high conversion rate. If you’re in this category of people who despite having a good amount of traffic can’t seem to make any progress in conversion rate, then you need to learn about conversion rate optimization. 

In the simplest term, conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the conversion rate of your website. Even though I keep specifying websites, conversion rate optimization is not limited to websites alone, it can also be applied to apps as well. So generally, everything you need to do to get a higher conversion rate whether on your website or app is referred to as conversion rate optimization. 

Why is conversion rate optimization important? 

More than 200,000 websites are created daily and are all competing for attention. If you own a website to monetize it, then you have to compete not only for attention but also clicks, subscriptions, and purchases. Otherwise, your website can easily get lost in the shuffle. Although it is quite easy to get attention, especially if you’re using SEM, getting people to perform an action that is usually required to complete the monetization process is not easy. 

Another reason why conversion rate optimization is important is that it helps to lower the cost of acquiring a new customer. This is known as customer acquisition cost (CAC) and it is defined as the amount of money it cost you to get a customer to pay for your product or service. Naturally, you’d want to keep your CAC low. To do this, you need to ensure your conversion rate is high. 

Finally, even if you’re having a reasonable conversion rate, there is always room for improvement. Remember I mentioned that most websites have a conversion rate of 2% to 5%, but this is nothing compared to what you would see on Amazon where the average conversion rate is about 10% to 15% and about 74% for Prime members. As you can see, it is always possible to have a better conversation rate so why not go for it?

Here is how the numbers add up;

Using the previous example, an e-commerce store with a conversion rate of 5% is only able to convert 50 out of its 1000 visitors in a month. If the store is able to optimize its conversion rate and achieve up to 6% conversion. That means it is able to get an additional 10 visitors to make a purchase. A 7% conversion rate equals an extra 20 visitors, and an 8% conversion rate means 30 more visitors get to purchase an item from the shop. At this point, the store has only achieved a CRO of 3% from its initial conversion rate but earned 30 more customers. You can see how a little increment in the conversion rate can dramatically improve the profit margins of this e-commerce store. 

Conversion rate optimization in 3 steps

So you want to optimize your conversion rate but you are not sure of where to begin. In this section, I will guide you through the entire process. The first step is to;

1. Know your conversion metric 

The conversion metric as used here refers to the goal of your website. What do you use to measure the success of your website? This can be the number of page views, email sign-ups, newsletter subscriptions, products purchased or deals closed. It all depends on your niche. An e-commerce website will probably measure success based on the number of purchases made. 

A B2B company will be interested in the number of leads generated, and for a travel agency or resort booking it could be the email sign-ups. At the same time, a media website will be looking for more page views. After you’ve established the conversion metric for your website, it is time to move to the second step of the process. 

2. Identify areas that need needs to be optimized

Now that you know what your conversion metric is, you will need to identify the areas that need to be optimized. To begin, let’s talk about the conversion funnel. This is a four-step process that shows the journey of a consumer from the moment they encounter your website to when they take an action like making a purchase or subscribing to a service. Each part of the funnel is an area that can be optimized starting with;

Awareness ‍

If you are using paid ads then the ad copy is the first thing your audience will see. The ad copy informs your audience about your business. You have to analyze your ad copy and see how well it’s performing. Is it attracting the kind of traffic your website needs or not? If the ad copy is performing well, then the problem could be in the next step of the funnel.

Interest

This step involves captivating the audience's attention and you do this by providing a very relevant landing page. A poorly designed landing page will only drive your audience away. How do you make your audience interested and hungry for more? Do not sound salesy, this is a huge turn-off. 

Although the idea is to turn visitors into customers, you wouldn’t achieve this goal by sounding like a typical salesperson who only cares about selling their products rather than listening to the customer. Instead, try to address the pain points and provide as much relevant information on your product to help them decide if it is what they need or not. 

Throw in proof of expertise. These could be reviews, positive feedback, and even recommendations from others who are deemed trustworthy. 

Decision

‍There is one aspect of marketing that every customer will always stop to ponder on and that is the price. At the decision stage, the prospective customer is trying to find out if the price you are offering for your product or services is worth it and if they can have a better offer. So always make sure you give your best offer. You can offer discounts, free shipping, or even an extra product if they purchase a certain number of products or spend a certain amount. 

Action

If your offer is compelling enough, then the prospect will become a customer by making a purchase or subscribing to your services. If not, then they may leave. There is little optimization you can do in the action stage because if they get to this stage, then they have been won over. But your job isn't finished just yet. From here on, you should focus on customer retention. Ask yourself, how do you stop this from being a one-time purchase? The simple answer is by earning your customer’s loyalty. Here are simple ways to do that;

1. Show appreciation
2. Ask for feedback on the product as well as their experience in general
3. Provide after-purchase support
4. Invite them to join your community or sign-up for your newsletter

Note, you wouldn’t win back every customer who makes a one-time purchase 100% of the time, but by following these steps you will have a reasonable number of loyal customers over time. 

3. Experiment

After identifying the areas you need to optimize, there is one more step left and that is experimenting with different ideas to see which one works best. From step 2, you already have a good idea of where you should implement your CRO strategy. If not, let me break it down here; The ad copy, landing page, pricing page, blog, and of course the Homepage. 

If you use Google Adsense, then you will receive an instant feedback on how your ad copy is performing compared to others with the same keyword. To learn more on this then see our article on how to Search Engine Marketing (SEM). 

Also, blog posts are more of a long-term strategy for converting visitors. But despite being a long-term strategy, you shouldn’t neglect it. This is why we have provided a comprehensive guide on Search Engine Optimization to help you rank at the top of the SERP with any keyword. A high-ranking blog means you deliver contents that are relevant and have value. This will bring traffic to your website. 

Now we are left with the landing page, pricing page, and Homepage - these are the main reasons why this section is all about experimentation. I will talk about one important test to carry out on each of these pages to optimize your CRO. This is known as A/B testing or Split testing.

What is A/B Testing?

This is an experiment where two (or more) different versions of a landing page are compared with each other by randomly showing them to users to determine which one will have the best results. This method can be used in optimizing any aspect of the consumer funnel by making slight changes to the  homepage, ad copy, landing page, and blog.

For example, if you notice that your prospects never go beyond the landing page or a high number of them happen to leave the landing page and do not click on the call to action button. You want to know why this is happening. So you come up with some theories such as - the landing page is not relevant enough, the color scheme is off-putting, copy is too lengthy, the loading time is too long or there are too many pop-ups and redirects. 

Next, you test these theories either one by one or all at once to see if you are right. Let's assume the problem here is that the text on the landing page is too lengthy. Then all you need to do is create a different landing page (the variable). After doing these, both the control page and the variable are shown to the viewers and the result is tracked to see which one performed better. 

If the result shows a higher percentage of viewers click on the call to action button on the variable page as compared to the control page. Then your assumption is correct. All you need to do is shorten the length of text on the landing page and you will have a higher CRO. That is it. There are a good number of platforms where you can run the A/B testing and among these are Optimizely and Hubspot. 

Final Note!!!

Do you have traffic on your website but no action? Or you are one of those who find it easy to convert customers but hardly get a reasonable amount of traffic? Whichever category you find yourself in, knowing how to optimize the conversion rate of your website will get you the results you need. 

You can start your journey by identifying the results you want to see and the relevant metrics for measuring these results. Then you identify the areas that need to be optimized and finally test different theories to see which ones will give you the results you need. Did you find these helpful? Then check our blog for more articles like this.