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Conversion Optimization 101

By Snap Agency March 20, 2019

Conversion. Optimization. ROI.

We’ve all heard these buzzwords floating around the digital marketing world. Depending on your area of expertise, you may be very familiar with some of these concepts, but in the proverbial dark when it comes to others. One of our specialties here at Snap is helping our customers brainstorm and build digital marketing content that drives traffic toward websites and specific pages. This traffic yields leads and—ideally—sales! The building and implementation process behind those sales is called conversion rate optimization (CRO), and today, we’re showing you what it takes to get your numbers up.

Digging Deeper Into CRO

An ongoing service that all companies should employ, CRO ensures that your website is functioning as optimally as possible. The CRO process typically begins with a website audit from an expert. He or she will assess your site for any faults that may be leading to losses. The audit is designed to uncover those gaps or missing features in your current structure that could be negatively affecting your CRO. Once these gaps are identified, the expert can improve your CRO by modifying existing features or by adding new ones.

Why Does CRO Matter to My Business?

CRO looks different depending on the niche and target market your business serves.  B2B companies usually focus on smaller conversions like form submissions, clicks, or newsletter signups. B2C clients put more effort towards purchase transactions, registrations, and subscriptions. CRO is not about guesswork or blindly hoping you get lucky and improve the right things; it’s about creating strategic solutions that are measured and adjusted over time according to the changes you observe. It’s crucial that you intimately know your customer base and personal brand in order to build a strong CRO strategy geared towards those target audiences.

The most important CRO guiding principles are based on data and UX/UI best practices. By putting yourself in the mind of your primary consumer base and running tests and audits to determine your site’s current conversion rate metrics, you’ll be able to take the guesswork out of success. If you’re currently implementing UX/UI best practices on your site toward your target audience, adding in CRO tactics will complement your already solid efforts.

How Do I Know if My Current Conversion Rates Need Work?

The natural first step in assessing your site’s conversion rate is to look at analytics. Your website’s analytics should allow you to see what pages on your site are receiving the most traffic, how visitors are finding those pages, and what types of products or information they are seeking there. Tracking these analytics will show you what areas of your website are working well and funneling visitors to key points. The numbers also provide indications of areas for potential improvement, where it might be useful to consult an expert or work with your team to internally improve your CRO.

Okay, So My Conversion Rates Could Use Help

Perfect, you’re in good company! Recognizing that your existing website, sales funnel, or strategy is flawed is the first step towards making it stronger than ever. At Snap, we run analytics tests and evaluate a number of key qualities to help boost conversion rates for our clients’ pages and sites. Here’s just a few of the crucial factors we study.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages are created for SEO, email, social media marketing campaigns, and search engine rankings. A successful landing page provides the searcher with the content, product, or result they are seeking in a clear way. If your landing page isn’t doing the trick, it’s time to make a change.

Ecommerce Conversion Optimization

There are many ways you can optimize your product-centered pages to increase consumer conversions. Are your Unique Value Propositions (UVPs) spectacular? Does your copy jump off the page? Are your pages gorgeous and easy to read? If not, it’s time to take a second look at your ecommerce strategy for the sake of CRO.

Heatmap and Click Tracking

A representation of the engagement a website page receives, a heatmap reflects how popular your web page is using the color spectrum. The “hot” sections represent high engagement and lots of clicks, and the “cold” sections delineate low engagement and fewer clicks. If some of your pages aren’t mapping well, take some steps to improve that engagement and get your conversation rates up.

Usability Testing

Run through your website and analyze it through the eyes of a visitor. How’s your page speed? Have you laid out your visual components well? Are you overwhelming visitors with too much content right off the bat? If visitors can’t efficiently navigate through your site, you’re actively driving away potential conversions. In that case, upping the usability of your site and pages is key to improving your conversion rate.

Optimize With Snap

Want some expert help to turn anonymous site lurkers into real, paying customers? The CRO professionals at Snap are standing by, eager to help optimize your conversion rate today. Interested in boosting your entire marketing strategy? We’ve got you covered! Reach out today.