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Conversion Optimization

The studies carried out in order to increase the realization rate of macro and micro targets determined on the website are called conversion rate optimization.

What is the Conversion Rate?

conversation rate

Conversion rate is an action taken by visitors in response to your call to action. The goals that can be determined at the conversion rate may vary for each website and sector. The average session time on film-series sites, product/ service sales on e-commerce sites, and clicking on ads on media sites are examples of goals that the visitor can achieve. All the actions taken to increase conversation make up the conversion rate optimization.

Conversion rate optimization studies are carried out on macro and micro targets.

Macro - Micro Targets

The targets set for web site is divided into two categories: macro and micro. While macro targets are directed towards direct transformation, micro targets consist of goals that lead to the macro realization. For example; Signing up for an e-mail newsletter can be identified as a micro target, while selling products for an ecommerce site is the macro target.

macro micro target

Conversion Rate Optimization Processes

Conversion Rate  processes
  • Determining the conversion goals that users can achieve on the website
  • Producing tests to have the experience to increase transformation in macro targets
  • Publishing A/ B tests by produced for a certain period determined on the website and measuring them by artificial intelligence supported software
  • Applying the experience found to increase conversion to your website
  • Determination and testing of micro targets that can improve user experience and visitor conversion depending on macro targets Implementing the experience strategy across the web site that succeeded in conversion rate optimized tests

How to Measure Conversion Rate?

If you want to calculate your conversion rate, you will need two numbers. The first is the number of visitors (or, in the case of email marketing, subscribers). Second, the number of those mobilized or converted. Your conversion rate expressed as a percentage. If you have 10,000 visitors and 500 take action, your conversion rate is 500/10000, or 5%.

How Long Does Conversion Rate Optimization Last?

How Long Conversion Rate Optimization

The duration of A/ B tests varies depending on the number of targets set. These studies lasted for an average of 3-6 months.

What is the contribution of conversion rate optimization to the website?

In order to sell products/ services, you provide traffic to your website through various channels. Conversion rate optimization is the most important stage for users to make a purchase.

rate optimization

Curious About Conversion Rate Optimization

What does conversion mean in marketing?

In marketing, a conversion is the actions taken by visitors, subscribers, or customers in response to your call to action.

Businesses consider many actions to be conversions, but the term is likely to include anything that brings people one step closer to becoming a “customer”.

Generally speaking, marketing conversions include:

  • Subscribing to an e-mail newsletter
  • Download a free e-book
  • Registering a webinar
  • Buying a cheap product with an opportunity price offer

There are also smaller microtransactions like following you on social media. These actions are part of the funnel and are also some of your conversion goals.

Remember that conversions don't always result in instant sales. However, these conversions allow you to build relationships with your subscribers, visitors, and customers you can sell over time.

What is transformation funnel?

A funnel is a way to visualize how people connect with your business or brand from the time they notice you to becoming a customer. The most common funnel encompasses the four main stages of awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA). Awareness is the stage when people become aware of your brand and realize that they have problems to solve.

Relevance is the stage when people start looking for ways to solve their issues, they think your brand is one of the solutions.

Desire is the stage at which people want to learn more when they narrow down their options and actively consider buying through your brand.

Action is when potential customers take the final step and make the purchase.

At each stage of the funnel, you have different expectations from your visitors, subscribers, or customers. These will be your conversion goals (see question 7).

What is transformation funnel

What is conversion optimization?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO), also known as conversion rate optimization, is all about increasing conversions from your existing web traffic. In other words, it means increasing the number of people who take action by making minor changes to the pages. You can also do CRO for email marketing, as outlined in our email marketing conversions guide. As you'll see in this guide, conversion rate optimization involves doing lots of testing, metrics, and incremental changes.

Why is conversionoptimization important?

Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows you to monetize the visitors and traffic you already have. Doing this makes your marketing more effective because instead of spending your efforts on reaching people who aren't interested in your brand, you're directing your efforts at people who already exist and who have some interest in your brand. So you reduce your costs and increase the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing.

What is a good conversion rate?

If only there was a clear answer to this! “What is a good conversion rate?” one of those questions that will give you a different answer every time you ask. Landing page experts Unbounce say the average conversion rate for a landing page in 10 different industries is 4.02%.

However, conversion rates vary widely by industry. Unbounce's research found that the average landing page conversion rate for higher education landing pages was 2.6%. By contrast, the conversion rate for professional studies and job training landing pages was 6.1 percent.

Smart Insights has some interesting data on eCommerce conversion rates. It looks like this:

  • 43.8% of people visit product pages
  • 14.5% of people add products to their carts
  • 3.3% of people buy

What is a conversion goal?

A conversion goal is what you expect to happen after optimizing a webpage or email. This goal is something measurable, such as: 

  • Increasing the time people spend on a web page
  • Attract more email newsletter subscribers
  • Get more people to fill out a lead magnet or sign up for a webinar
  • Increasing the number of free trial registrations
  • Getting more people to add products to the cart
  • Reducing the number of people abandoning their shopping cart
  • Reducing the rate of people leaving your website 
  • Increase purchases or average order value Examples may vary.

For example, if you're browsing books on Amazon, possible conversions include:

  • Customer comment is read
  • Browse inside the book
  • The book is added to the cart
  • Purchase takes place as is
  • One book is bought by creating a package with others or take advantage of the opportunity.
  • Subscribe to Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited

What is conversion goal

How does Analytics help with conversions?

As mentioned earlier, measuring is an important way to improve conversions. That's why it's significant to know what your foundation is before you start conversion rate optimization. Analytics is a significant tool to help you with this.

You can use web traffic analysis tools such as Google Analytics to monitor the behavior of visitors to your website. You can also use the heatmap and click tracking tools to see which areas of the webpage are most successful at grabbing visitors' attention. Once you have this knowledge, you can start thinking about how to improve your core metrics.

You can also create goals and funnel methods in Google Analytics to match your customer funnels and key conversion goals. This makes it easy to see what works and what doesn't. Besides Analytics, you can often get this information through customer feedback.

Email platforms such as Jilt are related to your email campaigns; It includes detailed analysis of actions such as open rates, click-through rates, and attributable revenue.

When you thoroughly consider the metrics around your individual pages and emails, you can start to think about reasons why certain pages or email campaigns aren't converting well. Thus, it will help you in generating hypotheses, which is seen as an important part of conversion rate optimization.

What is the CRO hypothesis and how is it developed?

A CRO hypothesis is basically a running idea about what hasn't changed and how to fix it. This is where the data you collect with Analytics or customer feedback comes from. Once you have this data, you state your hypothesis as follows:

We think that changing [item on page] for [Audience] will [get the desired result].

For example, you could say: We think that changing the text on the call-to-action button for web visitors will result in 100 new subscribers to our newsletter each month.

Success measurement A detailed hypothesis also includes how you will measure success. That means looking at data collected and customer feedback before and after the change to see if the situation has improved.

For the example above, you can look at average email subscribers in the past and see how it has changed after running your conversion tests.

What testing methods can I use for conversion rate optimization?

There are several conversion optimization testing methods you can use. One of the most common is the A/B test, known as one of the split tests.

In this process, your original web page (or email address) is called a "control". You change a single element called a "variable" to create a new version of the page or email. Then you split your traffic or audience so that half of your traffic sees each version. At the end of your test (we'll talk about test time later in the article), the version with the most conversions wins.

You can also run A/B/n tests with multiple variables and split traffic evenly between them. Most professional conversion rate optimization experts recommend no more than 3 or 4 variables for any given test.

A third option is to toggle multiple options on the page at once. This is called multivariate testing. Measuring with this test is more difficult, however, because you can't be completely sure which of the changes you've made leads to higher conversions. Then there's usability testing, where you get real users to take tasks on your site and see how well they're able to accomplish them.

Other than usability testing, these types of testing often require a fairly large audience to produce statistically significant results. If you're just starting out, you may not have enough traffic or email lists to properly practice A/B testing. In this case, it's best to measure the results against your goals before and after a change, and also listen carefully to user feedback.

What are the best practices for conversion optimization?

Some of the most important conversion rate best practices relate to:

  • Making sure the tests done correctly
  • Ensuring that the tests last long enough
  • Checking whether the test results are reliable

There's also the issue of testing the right pages or emails, which we'll cover in the next question.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) test setup
So what does it mean to set up your CRO test right? In most cases, it's like testing likes with likes. For example, comparing traffic and conversions on Black Friday with traffic and conversions on an ordinary weekday is not a test of likes and dislikes.

Instead, make sure you work with similar audiences, time periods, and conditions when testing, so you get reliable results.

CRO test time It's significant to test long enough to get useful results. The ideal test time will vary depending on how many variables you use. Here's a helpful chart that will show you how long you need to run your tests and give you an idea of ​​how long your conversion needs to be before you can see if the changes are working.

Traffic also plays a big role, because in low-traffic areas you'll have to test longer to get the minimum number of conversions needed. Here's a tool developed by VWO' that helps you figure out how long your test should take.

CRO test reliability
Finally, you want to know if your test results make any sense from a statistical point of view. In other words, are the results large enough to actually impact your sales or other business metrics?
A good way to check this is to enter your visitor and conversion numbers into this handy tool for tests and variables. You get instant information about your conversion rate and the statistical significance of your results.

Copied tests
One more warning for you. There are lots of conversion rate optimization case studies out there, be sure to consider case studies and research that will point you in the right direction. However, avoid trying to copy other people's tests while doing this. Every website and business is different. Apple.com's tactic that increases sales conversions doesn't necessarily work for Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand. If you want your conversion optimization process to be successful, you need to design your own tests with your own data, with your audience in mind.

Which pages should I test first?

While you're trying to improve conversions, you might want to test everything, but it's not a good idea. Instead, it's better to use your time, effort, and budget to test pages or email campaigns that directly or indirectly affect your revenue.

Some of the pages that need to be optimized for an e-commerce site are:

  • Payment page
  • Add to cart page
  • The page where the purchase was completed or the thank you page

People on these pages have probably decided they want to buy (or, if they're on the thanks page, the purchase has already happened), so tweaks made here can directly help generate more revenue.

For e-commerce sites, the performance of the home page is also important. This is where many people start their product searches. Therefore, improving navigation, search and other functions will help people start their buying journey.

On the email side, start by trying the campaigns that have the largest audience and generate the most revenue. These campaigns may include abandoned campaigns, bounced e-mails and product announcements that have reached the shopping cart.

What items should I test?

Here are some of the elements you can test on your pages:

  • Content: headings, subheadings, headings, bullet points, call-to-actions
  • Images: size, quality and type
  • Email registration forms: number of fields, field labels, form validation
  • Navigation organization and tags
  • Search Boxes
  • Videos: length, genre, absence of autoplay option

Remember, focus on the elements that will make a difference in conversions. E.g:

  • Changing the wording on the call-to-action may affect how many people click on it
  • Changing titles can affect how many people choose to read the text
  • Using pictures of real people can make a difference in how many people view the page content
  • Shortening your forms can help more people complete them and get more leads

With email, you can test similar items: content, images, call-to-action text. You can also test for email-specific items such as personalization subject line, sender's name, send time, or audience segment.

How can I interpret my CRO test results?

At the end of the test, you should be able to see if there is an increase in conversions. Potential outcomes include:

  • Your hypothesis was correct and you can now apply the change to improve conversions
  • Your hypothesis was wrong and you need to find a new reason to explain the low conversions
  • If unsure, then return to draft and retest.

Some of the most successful companies are constantly testing and fine-tuning until they achieve their ideal results.

What are some of the best conversion optimization tools?

There are many tools for conversion rate optimization and testing, how do you choose the best one to use? Here is a short list to get you started:

  • Crazy Egg provides heatmap and click tracking analytics
  • Google Analyticsa offers powerful web traffic analysis
  • Allows you to A/B test Google Optimized web pages
  • Hotjar helps you visualize visitor movements on your site
  • Jilt helps you send and test e-commerce emails
  • Optimizely is the all-in-one conversion experiment platform
  • VWO is the all-in-one conversion optimization platform Still need more? Browse the lists created by Convert.

Now that you know conversion rate optimization in all its details, you are ready to create your own hypotheses and tests and get more conversions. However, if all this is intimidating, you can start with just the small details and then work your way up to more.

Are you ready to rise?