What is Conversion Rate Optimisation and Why is it Important?
9th June 2020
Conversion rate optimisation is focused around encouraging your website visitors to take the desired action you want them to take on a webpage, website or within a campaign. Conversion optimisation analyses the behaviour of your website visitors to focus on what motivates them to engage with specific marketing elements.
A conversion is a general term for a single website visitor that completes a goal. There are a number of different goals you can choose for tracking your conversion rate optimisation. If you have an e-commerce website for example then your main goal would be for a user to make a purchase. These are called macro-conversions. You can have smaller conversions in place that lead up to a user completing a macro-conversion called micro-conversions.
Macro-Conversions can vary depending on the type of business. From revenue-based conversions to lead and enquiry conversions they should be something along the lines of the following.
- E-commerce order completion
- Paid subscription sign-up
- Member sign up
- Contact form completion
- Phone call
Micro-Conversions are much smaller goals that are still important to track and measure but aren’t the big main goal. For example, you could measure the number of visitors who,
- Email newsletter sign-up
- Blog comments
- Watching a video
- Sharing a blog or page via social media
- Adding products to a basket
How to calculate your conversion rate
It’s a simple calculation to determine your conversion rate. You will need to know the number of times your goal has been completed and your site traffic over a specified date. Dividing the no. of completed goals by the number of sessions.
Unique Orders = 500 No. of Sessions = 5,000
500 / 5,000 x 100 = 10%
Why is conversion rate optimisation important?
While it isn’t directly related to improving a websites organic traffic. Or improving the ranking on a search engine results page. Conversion Rate Optimisation has a number of benefits when it comes to SEO.
Improved customer experience. Conversion rate optimisation provides great benefits for your business. Take advantage of your existing traffic. By understanding your customers’ wants and needs and encouraging repeat business you can ultimately reduce customer acquisition costs.
Enhanced Trust. Once you have improved the customer experience, other goals will start to fall into place. For a user to trust to share their card information, or in fact any sort of personal information they need to trust your site.
Improved ROI. With a lowered customer acquisition cost and higher conversion rates, you’ll ultimately improve your ROI.
To Sum Up
By understanding your conversion rate, tracking and analysing it, you can adapt your marketing strategies to improve results. Start with a solid web analytics platform, such as Google Analytics and add tracking for your conversions.
