Moving Conversions to the Next Level
Testing to optimize conversion rates is an essential part of post-click marketing.
When online marketers look to grow their businesses, much focus frequently goes into the area to driving new traffic to a website. Getting more “eyeballs” to a domain will likely grow sales and increase brand awareness, and this is what marketers usually concentrate on. In the hyper competitive online landscapes that exist today however, traffic generation is not easy to do profitably and in a manner that truly scales the business.
Businesses rely on Adwords to drive traffic and many times turn a blind eye to the ROI metrics that paint a dismal story as it relates to returns. Instead of focusing on traffic generation, progressive marketers are focusing on the practice of conversion optimization – generating a higher ratio of web users to take the desired action you wish for within your website.
All too often the conversion metric is forgotten and just assumed to be not able to be optimized. Frequently businesses have the same conversion rate for years at a time as site designs and user processes stay constant and stagnant. What online marketers need to embrace is the Japanese philosophy of “Kaizen”.
Kaizen is management process that is focused on creating a state of never ending improvement, as stakeholders are relentless to always extract incremental value out of varied location in the value chain. This same type of approach needs to be taken with your website if you want to reach your potential within your marketplace. Your business needs to be proactive to the experimentation opportunities and technologies that exist in an effort to increase your conversion rate.
Where do you begin? Start with a few projects to help you identify the leaky parts of your wheel.
First conduct a usability test. A usability test is crafting a plethora of task based scenarios that are administered to live respondents within a lab based setting. This does not have to be overly scientific or extensive, nor do you need any fancy or expensive equipment. Craft a discussion guide to assist the moderator in waking the respondents you recruit through the test. Ask questions as the user goes through these processes while recording screen movements of their clicks and interactions. Recruitment can be done online at varied classified sites, screen movement software is fairly inexpensive, and the most time intensive portion is the analysis of the data and formulation of your findings.
Your goal in this process is to find the “friction” within your website. Which sections trip up users when they are trying to go through your processes? After identifying these areas, the next focus is to look within your web analytics.
Your web analytics will provide data to the primary research that you extracted in the previous stage. Look at the progression ratios within your key processes, such as a shopping cart or application form. Identify the pages that perform and the ones that don’t. Look at your bounce rate metrics to see which pages are lagging when users land on the site. These metrics will tell you what is happening and the user test data will tell you why it is happening. Together this information helps you in crafting your site optimization roadmap for executing your conversion improvement and testing efforts.
The next step is executing tests on your website that correlate to these areas. Free testing tools like Website Optimizer by Google make it inexpensive and fairly seamless to execute. Try not to conduct all your tests at once, but rather work with one section of the user experience at a time. This way your efforts are more focused and your data will not be skewed.
Test a variety of things. Try testing imagery, messages, colors, button sizes and colors and if you have the ability from a technical standpoint try testing alternative layouts within your most paramount pages. Follow your data closely, and look for your learnings when your tests reach statistical validity.
Best of luck with your conversion optimization and site testing efforts. Remember that in every test something is learned and more often than not those learnings will help drive efficiency within your website.
Craig Smith is the founder and CEO of Trinity Insight, a leading eCommerce consulting agency that provides multivariate testing.
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