UNDERSTANDING THE NUMBERS BEHIND YOUR WEBSITE is an important step toward conquering the conversion problem.
However, too many companies jump into conversion optimization without a real plan or a methodology to identify promising areas for optimization. A simplistic process won’t help you to understand why customers abandon the sales funnel.
A client recently came to us after working with another landing page optimization company. That company looked at conversion from a very linear perspective: pick a single landing page, test 32,000 different designs of that page, and one of these designs will be bound to convert better than the original. Predictably, that costly and time-consuming approach did not produce any results for the client. Who would have thought that none of the 32,000 combinations would beat the original design?
Conversion rate optimization takes a more sophisticated approach, requiring the following two elements:
Identifying areas of the sales funnel that should be optimized
Following a repeatable process to optimize these areas
Without these two elements, your optimization efforts are destined to fail. Regardless of the approach you follow, you will ultimately pick an area to optimize. The question becomes: what should you modify in that particular area or step? If your prospecting during the sales process is weak, what changes should you make to it to ensure that you are able to convert better? If you are looking for consistent results, your answers must move beyond the random guessing game of changing too many elements and hoping that one of the changes will increase conversions.
Most websites have more than one conversion goal. The primary goal of an ecommerce website is to capture orders. Forgetting other conversion possibilities, though, will hurt the ecommerce website in the long run. If you do not persuade a visitor to place an order during her first visit, getting her email address and sending her regular email promotions will increase the chances that she will come back to your website and eventually convert. Macro conversions refer to overall or ultimate conversions on a website. In contrast, micro conversions refer to the smaller steps or conversions a visitor must take to achieve a macro conversion.
Conversion optimization starts by pinpointing the conversion goals for your website. Typical conversion goals for an ecommerce website include:
A lead generation website might have some of the following conversion goals:
Capture visitors’ information as sales leads.
Allow visitors to call into a business.
Allow visitors to download a white paper.
The next step is to identify a value for each of these conversions. It is easy to place a numerical value on a customer placing an order with an ecommerce website. But what is the value for getting an email address? If an ecommerce site allows visitors to use a store locator to find the store nearest to them, it is important to track the number of offline conversions that take place at the specific store compared to the number of leads sent to it. If within a 30-day period, 2,000 website visitors use the store locator functionality to find a store within a specific zip code, you should answer the following questions:
How many of these visitors actually made it to the store?
How many of those who visited the offline store actually ended up buying an item?
What was the average order value these customers placed?
Some of these questions are more complicated to track than others, and they will all require some form of integrated online and offline system to find concrete numbers. Ultimately, your goal is to assign values to the different macro conversion goals on the site. Since these goals generally compete with each other, assigning values will help you find the right balance among them. Let’s take an example of a website that has two conversion goals. Conversion goal A has a $30 value. Conversion goal B has a $5 value. Consider two different designs that lead to different conversion rates for these two goals:
|
Conversion goal |
Conversion rate for first design |
Conversion rate for second design |
|
Goal A |
0.18% |
0.25% |
|
Goal B |
0.80% |
0.33% |
Which design should we choose?
Assuming that each design receives 1,000 visitors, let’s calculate the financial value for each. For the first design:
|
Conversion goal |
Conversion rate for first design |
Number of conversions |
Value per conversion |
Value of design |
|
Goal A |
0.18% |
1.8 |
$30 |
$54 |
|
Goal B |
0.80% |
12 |
$5 |
$60 |
This calculation shows that the first design generates a total of $114.
For the second design:
|
Conversion goal |
Conversion rate for second design |
Number of conversions |
Value per conversion |
Value of design |
|
Goal A |
0.25% |
2.5 |
$30 |
$75 |
|
Goal B |
0.50% |
5 |
$5 |
$25 |
This calculation shows that the second design generates a total of $100. Based on the assumptions we stated, the first design will generate more value.
With a standalone landing page, such as a page designed to capture leads only, we recommend that you have one macro conversion goal for the page. Many clients struggle with this recommendation. Since visitors are landing on the page, these clients would like to take the opportunity to allow visitors to navigate to different services. This approach causes a lower overall conversion rate.