Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Your Website is a Supermarket.

When you walk into a supermarket, why is it that the fresh milk & eggs are always tucked away at the back? Why is it that there are always magazines & DVDs immediately on your left when you walk in & that you have to go through the fresh vegetables before you can get to anything else?

Quite simply: because customers will spend more on their shopping.

There's nothing new about the science of supermarket layout - The Economist has long since revealed the use of 'Decompression Zones' (Our Magazine & DVD area), 'Greeters' (who welcome you in & make you less likely to shoplift), and all the other psychological tricks of the trade that cause us to walk out with a lot more than we planned each time we visit our local supermarket - even when we make a list!

What is amazing is how little attention is spent on today's supermarket shelves: webpages.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) - the science of improving the effectiveness of call to actions on webpages - isn't new either, but it's only very recently that companies have started to pick up on the massive business benefits to improving page conversion rates.

Typically, most websites can expect to see 4-5% improvements in their conversion rates after implementing conversion rate improvements. If your traffic levels are over 1,000 visitors a month, that's an extra 40 sales or leads a month minimum, for free, every month.

Here's a real world example. A client of ours implemented a suite of changes recommended as part of our CRO & SEO work at the commencement of their campaign. In addition, we revamped their PPC campaign to improve their CPCs. The results?

1. 248% increase in SEO pageviews over course of the campaign
2. Total pageviews over year up by over 4.7 million^*
3. PPC pageviews up over 800% due to improved CTR
4. PPC visitors per month up by over eight & a half thousand, pageviews over same period up by over 50,000 per month!
5. Organic traffic bounce rate reduced by 47.60%

^{*Yes, that's 4.7 million, at no extra PPC cost}

If you'd like us to take a look at your website to see if we can achieve similar results, just drop us a line today and we'll give you a free report.

Using Tools Without them Using You

Fortunately, there's never been a better time to be looking at your conversion rate optimisation, as the web is stuffed full of free tools we can use to increase user conversion by double-digit percentage points.

Google's Website Optimiser is the most obvious tool, allowing you to run sophisticated A/B & multivariate testing to compare different combinations of layouts, colour schemes, ad copy & rich media to best overcome your audience's obstacles to sale.

Unfortunately, it's also equally easy to use these tools as a crutch to avoid spending time on what really makes CRO work: thinking about your service or product & producing compelling content, offers, features or benefits over the competition.

Remember: every company is unique and has its own value-add or service principles that make it the best match for a particular customer. You just have to express it.

And yes, that means listening to your users' voice.

You & Your Market

What works for one company online, won't necessarily work for you.

So while it might be tempting to look at your competitor who already has a fully featured website, with any of the following:

• Service offerings broken out by customer segment
• Multiple routes to purchase (via search, categories, image galleries, or brand)
• Special offer spotlights
• User information retention (newsletters, send to a friend)
• Post sales conversion tools (eMarketing, follow up offers, similar products)

It's not necessarily the best place to start.

Instead, ask yourself some simple questions.

1. What is your USP?
2. What have your clients & customers got in common?
3. Why do they come back?
4. How are you percieved in your marketplace?

If you don't understand what makes your clientbase tick, no amount of multivariate testing will improve their reaction to your webpages.

So OK, My Website is a Supermarket

Now you know what your message is, you need to share it.

If you're delivering a luxury product or experience, you'll need testimonials to back up your position & give a flavour of the service or product quality. If you have any, share reviews - and not just 100% positive ones!

Show you're trustworthy. If you have any accreditations, shout about them. Gone green recently? Tell us.

Engage with your online community (and before you say you don't have a community yet, try searching for terms around your products and services, and look at the review sites, forums, and blogs: that's your community, you're just not engaging them yet).

Be compelling in everything you do in the public sphere. If you don't know how, ask someone to do it for you.

Identify your most important pages. Look at every element on each page and try to improve it. Come up with three or four different variations, and then run multivariate testing.

• When you've improved a page, don't just stop.

Look at all your PPC & SEO landing pages, or - and this is where you really start to see the benefit - segment your users arriving via PPC adGroups to a page against your SEO traffic terms, and match your SERP message to the message served to both traffic sources on the one page, making sure both are visible above the fold.^*

^* So we may have had our tongue slightly in cheek when we said this was going to be easy, but then again, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it!

Once you've completed that process for a single product or service, roll over any learnings to the next group, and keep testing, tweaking, listening & improving.

Be Better Than The Competition

When you improve your conversion rate, your benefit all of your online marketing effort.

Your PPC cost per aquisition drops, making even the most competitive terms profitable. SEO traffic recieves a better experience than your competition, encouraging repeat visits, bookmarking & even - the holy grail - positive reviews & recommendations to their friends.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab your shopping trolley today!