As a small business owner, you have two goals: make more sales and reduce your cost of acquiring new customers. There are many ways to improve both of those metrics, but conversion rate optimization is one of the most powerful strategies to do so. With CRO, you can improve your click-through (CTR) rates, your conversion rates, and your return on investment (ROI) by analyzing your customers’ behavior.
You want to have a high conversion rate, but not quite sure on how to achieve it. After all, conversion rate optimization is more of an art than a science, right? Well, maybe not. In fact, there are a number of actions that can be taken to increase conversion rates… that’s exactly what we’ll discuss in today’s post.
Funnel Tracking
While A/B testing is widely used to increase conversion rates, it can only take you so far. For example, if you run a test and A wins by 2%, you can then apply the winning design to your landing page. But what if, after a few weeks, you see the winner is starting to pull away from the loser? If you want to keep improving your conversion rates, you need to use funnel tracking to monitor which pages in your conversion funnel are actively converting. This will enable you to make adjustments to the non-converting pages, resulting in more conversions overall.
It is a well-known fact that e-commerce websites track the conversion rate of each page of their website, from the home page to category pages to product details pages. But a lot of marketers and web designers are discovering the benefits of tracking the conversion rate of their marketing funnels (i.e. the click path from a landing page to a conversion page, such as a checkout page). The benefit of funnel tracking is to help marketer know which part of the funnel needs improvement, so that they can concentrate on the areas of the funnel that need more attention and better conversion techniques.
User Behavior Recording
More and more websites are realizing the potential for improving their site’s conversion rates and overall user experience. There are many ways to approach CRO. One of the most effective is simply to watch how users interact with your website, so you can identify ways to make it more intuitive and easier to use. The most important part of a data-driven conversion rate optimization strategy is monitoring user behavior. To do this effectively, you need to be able to capture data at every step of the user experience.
User behavior recording is one of the best tools to improve the overall user experience on your website. It’s also a great way to improve conversion rates. User behavior recording helps you watch user interaction with your website. It lets you see exactly how people interact with your website, and usage patterns on specific items. This helps you identify the areas where users are having trouble, or where they may need extra guidance.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a highly visual way to review your website’s performance. They represent the mouse movement and click patterns of your visitors on your site, and allow you to see exactly what they were looking at. This data, which can be quite complex, is presented as a visual “heatmap” with different colors plotted on a grid to show you the data.
Heatmaps are a powerful tool to help you get to the bottom of why your visitors are doing, or not doing, what you want them to do. Are they reading your copy? Are they looking at your carousels? Are they clicking on the main call-to-action? Are they using the search bar? As they are such an effective means of understanding your visitors you can be confident that using heatmaps will help you better understand your visitors, and therefore help you improve your conversion rate.
Final Thoughts
Heatmaps, user behavior recording and funnel monitoring are three types of data visualizations that can help you make sense of customer data and identify areas for conversion rate optimization. Each of these has its place in your analytics toolkit, but they each have their own unique benefits and limitations.
CRO uses a process of testing, tracking and analyzing to help companies improve their sales, their product pages, and their websites. This is done by analyzing site visitors behavior, their clicks, and the time spent on the website. This data then helps companies make informed decisions on how to improve their website, and ultimately their sales.
