Did you know that the average bounce rate for most websites falls somewhere between 26% and 70%? This means that up to two-thirds of website visitors only view one page and don’t take any action before leaving a website.
In other words, most of the people who land on a website will not translate into customers. However, there are ways to battle the bounce rate with the help of conversion rate optimisation, or CRO.
What is CRO?
Optimizely defines CRO as the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or mobile app. The word conversion refers to the goal you want to achieve, which includes anything from page views or newsletter subscriptions to buying a product or signing up for a service.
CRO looks at how users move through your site and what actions they take, investigates why they’re not completing your goals, and makes adjustments to improve the conversions.
How to calculate conversion rate
Before you can optimise and maximise your conversion rate, you need to understand how it’s measured. Moz explains that there are two ways to measure conversion rate, depending on your end goal.
The first method can be used if a user can convert every time they visit your website. For instance, if you sell a product, the conversion happens every time a purchase is made. In this method, you look at the number of purchases and divide them by the number of website sessions (meaning visits in total, including multiple visits by a single user).
Here’s an example to help illustrate it. Let’s say you sell dog food, and you have a customer who visited your website three times but only made a purchase during their second visit. The conversion rate here would be 33% (1/3). Even if they bought a bag of food and a collar, it’s still considered one purchase. If they bought the two items in two different sessions, the conversion rate would grow to 66% (2/3).
The second method is used for cases when a user can convert only once, regardless of how many times they visit your website. So instead of selling individual dog food bags, let’s say you sell a subscription to a monthly supply of dog food. Here, each user can only subscribe once, which means that the number of visits someone made to the website doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s important to focus on the number of people (or unique users) who visit a website.
In this case, even if someone visits ten times and subscribes once, the conversion rate is 100% (1/1). With the help of a tracking platform like Google Analytics, you can track sessions, unique users, goal completion and conversion rate.
How to use CRO to increase revenue
There are a variety of best practices to optimise your conversion rates. They include using a strong colour (like orange) for buttons, placing your buttons and calls to action (CTA) above the fold, displaying testimonials, and demonstrating a sense of urgency in your website copy.
However, according to Hotjar, not every tactic is suitable for every company. Instead, it’s better to know your customers and create a customer-centric approach. To help you do that, there are multiple tools you can use.
Collect hard data about user behaviours
We’ve already mentioned how to measure your conversion rate, which is relevant to understanding how successful your website is. Looking at other data points can help you uncover issues and why visitors drop off before they become customers. We’ll divide them by tools:
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Google Analytics, besides what we covered, also includes data points like bounce rate, page sessions, and time spent on each page. All of these can reveal where people drop off the website and help identify gaps in your strategy. Data about which devices visitors use, how they reached your website, and what page they usually land on can also be used to make improvements.
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Contentsquare can be used to create heat maps revealing the areas on your website that are most watched and most clicked. It also shows areas that are completely looked over. Additionally, it records individual user sessions, so you can see first-hand how they interact with your website.
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HubSpot lets you track when someone has completed a certain event. For instance, if they clicked on a specific link, looked at the prices page, or added an item to the cart. Then you can look at drop-off points and even automate actions and try to bring people back into the conversion funnel.
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CRM Analytics allows you to examine data on leads and create specific strategies for each type of lead based on their typical behaviour.
Collect soft data from users
While metrics can showcase trends and patterns, they don’t always tell you the whole story. To build a solid optimisation strategy and truly increase your number of conversions, you should also try to uncover why users behave the way they do. For that, you’ll need to:
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Ask people questions about their customer experience. You can do this with surveys on the website and feedback forms after sales, support, and service calls.
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Perform user testing on your website. Hire an outside QA, who doesn’t know your business, to go through your website and sales funnel. Ask them to look at bugs as well as content, and ask for their honest opinion on improvements.
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Create focus groups with your ideal clients, to hear from them what they like and don’t like about your website.
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Read your reviews on Yelp, Google and social media, to gauge how people feel about your brand.
Perform A/B testing
After you finish collecting all of this information, it’s time to make some changes. At this point, A/B testing can come in handy. This is the process in which you develop multiple page or element variations and test to find out which one is most effective at increasing conversions. HubSpot and Optimizely both offer A/B testing, as do many other platforms.
Still not getting the results you’re looking for? Maybe it’s time to try using a chat on your website. Learn how to increase conversions with chat here.
