Increased Conversions

When I review websites, I ask people about their #1 business goal – the main action they want people to take on their site.

Why? You can only evaluate a website against a goal – how effective is it in achieving it? If you don’t have a goal, there is no way to improve the site. You can only improve what you can measure.

Some people tell me their goal is for people to “read about their products.” No. That is not a business goal. A goal you should go after is an action other than reading:  sign-up, purchase, clicking something, ordering something.

If your goal is for people to read the text on your site, you need a new goal.

If you want to master conversion optimization and analytics, enroll in CXL today. If you want to know 13 things you can do right now, here you go:

1. Do A/B testing

In real estate it’s about location, location, location. In conversion optimization, it’s testing, testing, testing. Experimentation is the best way to mitigate risk in decision making while allowing your creative teams room for innovation and exploration of new opportunities.

Your goal should be to have at least one, and preferably several A/B tests running at any given time on your site. There’s no such thing as “perfect” when it comes to marketing, your website, or product design, and the only way you learn about what works and doesn’t work is to continually test.

Deciding what to test

Marketers usually guess what factors to concentrate on and mess around testing things that have little or no impact on users or conversion goals. What you should do instead is use the data available to you to spot the most important projects to focus on.

Depending on the stage of your company and the structure of your organization, you’ll have a varying level of data available for use. Some companies are swimming in data and don’t know what to do with it all. Others are struggling to implement Events in Google Analytics.

To help you decide what tests you want to do, consider the potential revenue each test may bring as well as the resources required to get it live, and rank tests accordingly. There are many prioritization models out there, but we created the PXL model specifically for CRO projects. It puts empirical data at the center of any prioritization and scores on a binary model (it either is or it isn’t). This removes a lot of subjectivity. 

It’s important to test one hypothesis at a time – otherwise you won’t know which change made the difference.

Some elements on a webpage tend to have higher effects on average than other elements. If you’re just starting out, in addition to what the data tells you, direct your attention towards these things:

• The headline. You should have a strong, convincing and believable headline that promotes the main offer. The legendary ad guru David Ogilvy once said: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.  It follows that, if you don’t sell the product in your headline, you have wasted 80% of your money.“
• Page layout and navigation.
• The offer. What is it that the customer is getting for their money (how is it all described and laid out).
• Different media: test adding a video to communicate key points.
• Radical change. Sometimes you want to compare two totally different approaches.

What to use for testing

Many entrepreneurs spend money buying expensive testing software before they actually understand how to implement a conversion rate optimization process. You don’t need to spend much.

• Google Optimize is free. The downside is that it’s got limitations, like no device category targeting and only 3 concurrent tests among other things.
• If you’re mid-market to enterprise sized, check out Optimizely or VWO says it’s the easiest. They’re priced similarly.

• f you have the traffic for it, you should test. If you don’t have enough traffic, it’s probably not worth your time because your results will be questionable. Still, there are things you can do for conversion optimization with low traffic.

  Testing should also never end. As soon as you have a winning page, try to build on that and test something else.

  Incremental positive changes lead to substantial growth.