Conversion Rate Optimisation

Congratulations! You have a great website with persuasive design, engaging copy and your strategic use of Paid advertising, Social Media advertising and refined SEO are driving excellent volumes of traffic to your site. Unfortunately your visitors are not converting, that is completing the goal that you want them to. Whether it’s purchasing a product or app or signing up for a newsletter, the point of your website is to convince visitors to complete an action. Your ‘conversion rate’ is the percentage of visitors to your site that complete the goal you set for them.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion Rate Optimisation, or CRO, is when a visitor to your website completes an action that you wish them to. This might be something as simple as making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, creating an account, or downloading an app. These visitor actions are measurable and are what you aim to optimise on your website. The sole purpose of CRO is discovering the reasons your website visitors are not converting and fixing the problems.

The conversion process is often referred to as a Conversion Funnel. This describes the process of attracting traffic, converting them, and extracting value from those customers or clients for the lifetime of your relationship. We attach several elements to each of these steps, and each of them has a continuous cycle of their own. It is not a case of completing one, moving on to the next step and then neglecting the previous. For example, to generate regular traffic you need to continuously improve your site’s SEO, focus on building your brand and audience via social media and advertising, and encourage third party referrals. Imagine each of the sections being cogs in a finely tuned machine. If one of those cogs fails to rotate and produce results, it will impede on the effectiveness of the subsequent cog.

The team at StewArt Media possess the analytical tools to examine all these factors. We will gauge your current conversion rate, identify problem areas, and enact a plan of action to counter the problems. Our analysis will display the key areas of your website, including:

• Your Total Conversions – the number of people that did what you wanted
• Your Conversion Rate – the number of conversions divided by your visitors

The numbers we gather can help us identify problems in your site. Some of the most common problems are:

• Bounce rate – the percentage of people who leave your site after visiting only one page. Not a good thing as it means they are not finding what they are seeking easily.
• Exit rate – analysis can display which specific pages visitors are leaving. If a regular page is being displayed this shows something is inherently wrong with that page.
• Average time on site – this measures visitor time on your website. If it is coupled with a high bounce rate then it shows a lack of interest in your site, which damages conversions.
• Average page views – this displays the average amount of pages a visitor sees before they pass out of the site. Many page views might mean an engaging site, but it can also reflect a confusing website with no clear conversion system.

Why do you need Conversion Rate Optimisation?

The team here at StewArt Media have faced down many of the myths that surround Conversion Rate Optimisation throughout our years of optimising client websites. Simplistic solutions to solving the myriad of problems an under-performing website may face when failing to convert visitors to sales are still prevalent in the industry. Here’s what to avoid:

• Don’t copy others – Mimicking a successful opposition website will not result in higher conversions. It may result in you presenting a more aesthetically pleasing website, with a stronger layout, cleaner copy and brighter colour scheme, but it won’t address the underlying problems. If the existing problems remain, such as mistrust of your site’s security, confusing copy and a broken conversion funnel, then conversion rates will still be slow.
• Being simplistic – Changing the colour of buttons and hoping for the best will not solve anything. Effective CRO comes from crunching data, strategic testing and general hard work.
• No guesswork – Avoiding analytics because you think you know your customers without asking and being confident of success due to having a better looking website than your competitor’s is a pointless approach. Hunches may work in law enforcement, but optimisation comes down to asking your customer’s opinions and testing results.
• Copy-cramming – Many site owners attempt to condense all their copy ‘above the fold’ as they believe readers have limited attention spans and prefer not to scroll. Nothing could be further from the truth. Visitors requiring as much information as possible before purchasing products will read engaging copy that is succinct, clear, and grammatically correct.

What StewArt Media can do for your CRO

At this stage it might be fitting to use the motor engine analogy. Think of your website as an engine that you designed and constructed. The engine works fine, it ticks along but isn’t performing as well as you intended. At some point you will have to hook your engine up to diagnostics equipment. That’s where StewArt Media come in. We will check your engine design, iron out any kinks and tune the combustion mixture to ensure optimal performance.
For each stage of your marketing funnel we will optimise the opportunities available using the following proven strategies:

• Analyse your website to calculate conversion rates and identify barriers in your conversion funnel
• Based on those statistics, formulate a hypothesis
• Implement a focused strategy including A/B and multivariate testing
• Take those test results and form new hypotheses
• Instigate regular, structured testing to monitor progress

So if you feel StewArt Media could create a Conversion Rate Optimisation strategy for your business, contact us today for a free consultation.