Conversion Rate Optimisation 101 - A Beginner's Guide

Aisling Brennan, 23-Feb-2016

On average, 98% of visitors to your website will leave without converting. Quite a staggering statistic, eh?

So, why are you losing 98% of your visitors?

Essentially they’re leaving because your website is not meeting their needs. Your website is not offering the information, or services, they want or expected to see. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an iterative process that looks at where you’re losing customers, and helps determine what those needs are, and what content and offers resonates most so you can better meet these needs.

At the heart of CRO is the concept that the customer is king. The design, copy and call-to-action must be customer led and aligned with your customers needs.

But how do you know what your customers want?

Interrogate your website analytics to see what pages they like most, spend the most time on. Examine how they move through the site. Look at where you’re losing customers. Look at your bounce rates and exit rates of these pages. Then start to change a little at a time. Change the offer, or copy, or graphics, layout, site structure. Experiment with small changes. Some changes will work. Some won’t. Just remember that it’s a process and even small changes can produce significant results.

Create personas and devise pathways that best appeal to these triggers. Impulsive purchasers act differently to Cautious or more Logical buyers. Each persona will respond to different triggers so your website needs to cater for these.

Also remember your value proposition. A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. The customer must believe they will derive this value. You MUST articulate your value proposition clearly and succinctly to as many types of customers as possible.

Lastly include social proof – customers must deem your website to be relevant and often seek validation from peers. Who else has purchased? Are they peers? And are these peers happy with their purchase/service?

Test the different offers, designs, layouts against each other and see which one works best. A/B testing, or multi-variate testing, is used to determine which change results in improvements. A/B is where you test different pages side by side whereas multivariate allows you to test more than one component at once. Given most Irish sites have a relatively small volume of traffic, I recommend starting with A/B testing in order to ensure your test gets sufficient statistical relevance.

Analyse the results, make a change & then test again. And repeat…

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