In order to optimise your website’s conversion rate, you need to understand what your customers’ needs and wants are when visiting your website. Simply asking your customers through surveys doesn’t guarantee any quality feedback that you could rely on. Instead, taking the data-driven approach using analytical tools, such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, enables you to physically see what is and isn’t working, ultimately preventing your conversion rate from increasing.

What Is A/B Testing?

CRO and A/B testing typically go hand in hand, as optimising a website’s conversion rate requires various testing to be carried out. A/B testing is simply the act of testing two or more variations of pages, content or elements, to help pinpoint what contributes to customers successfully being pushed down the marketing funnel and converting. There’s no correct “one size fits all” way for your website to appear and function to be successful; what works for one company’s website may not work for another. The specific data collected from your visitors is key to understanding where any metaphorical “roadblocks” are along the customer’s journey, enabling you to eliminate them through the process of A/B testing.

But What Data Should I Be Tracking?

Within Google Analytics, the ‘pages per session’ and ‘average session duration’ metrics are good to be aware of but need to be approached with discernment. Having a high average session duration could suggest customers are having to spend more time trying to find what they want which leads to frustration and abandoning the site. To ensure this isn’t the case, view and examine your analytics – when visitors are viewing lots of pages, are they resulting in conversions? If not, it might be an indication that there are too many roadblocks on their way to converting.

The two metrics which are essential to track are Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. If there is a high Bounce Rate on a certain page, you can take that as a good indicator of where to start A/B testing. Once you identify the problem and fix it, your Bounce Rate on this specific page is likely to decrease, resulting in a spike in conversions. After all, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) leads to more completed purchases or sign-ups, depending on the goal, rather than just increasing the traffic that comes into the site.

How Does A/B Testing Work?

Once decided on an A/B testing tool, some of the best being Optimizley, VWO, Omniconvert and Google Optimise, a code needs to be placed into the website in order to gain full control of the site and users’ experience. Now, using any of the website analytical tools previously mentioned, analyse where your visitors appear to be dropping off within your website. Identifying that helps narrow down what pages need reviewing and testing, allowing you to start building the new variations to test against within the A/B testing tool. Having conducted your research prior and identified where your visitors are dropping off, you can build the variations within the A/B testing tool, creating as little as one to as many variations desired.

Tip:

If conducting multiple A/B tests simultaneously, ensure none of them conflicts with one and other. Avoid testing anything which can be viewed at the same time, as although some testing tools do limit each visitor to only see one campaign at a time, others however don’t. Consequently resulting in both test results being contaminated by one and other. So in general it’s good practice to keep the tests separate and prioritise one over the other initially.

The A/B testing tool allows you to decide what percentage of your site traffic are recipients of the test. For example, 100% traffic would equal 50% of visitors seeing the original site, also referred to as ‘the control’, the other half seeing the variant. The delivery is completely random, ensuring there are no biased results depending on external factors.

Before launching the test, there will be an option of setting goals for your tests. This is dependent on what you are trying to achieve. Either increasing conversion rate or something more specific like multiplying click-throughs of a button or being directed to the next stage of the funnel.

Browser cookies track and save whichever variation visitors land on. Though, if a visitor were to delete the cookies’ data before returning to the website or open it on another device, they could potentially view the control or another variation.

Each test should last for a minimum of 1 to 2 weeks, to ensure enough data has been collected and the results have normalised, clearly stating a ‘winner’. Keep in mind that the duration of your test will vary depending on your site’s average number of visitors, especially if you have multiple variations. Low traffic means the test needs to run longer to collect enough data and vice versa. The successful variation needs to be implemented for 100% of traffic until it’s been permanently built into the website.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

When it comes to testing, you’re able to change basically anything that already exists on site which your customers can see. There are some limits though, you’re unable to add net-new pages without adding them to the original website. For instance, if the homepage needed to be completely redesigned, you couldn’t test this without adding the new page variation to the original website. However, using your A/B testing tool, you could redirect a proportion of your visitors to the new page and the others to the original. The other limitation to testing includes the site functions which don’t already exist in the original code. For example, if you wanted to test an ‘Add to wishlist’ function, it would need to be written into the code first, but then be suppressed for a percentage of traffic.

You could test:

• Images or Videos
• Copy
• Call to actions
• Buttons
• Pop-ups
• Navigation
• Forms

If you are just starting out with A/B testing then begin with features that everyone can see! Landing pages typically receive the most traffic, so are a great place to start pushing those new visitors down the funnel and further into your site.

Further A/B Testing Ideas

If your website data isn’t showing you the results you were hoping for in terms of conversions but are unsure of where the issue lies, here are some testing suggestions:

• Perfect your checkout – Your visitors are on the home stretch, ready to make a purchase. The checkout should have as few distractions as possible, to ensure your customers make that transaction. Test removing irrelevant content which could persuade the customer to go backwards in the funnel. Display shipping costs upfront as this can be a surprise expense which sometimes discourages the user from continuing. Simplify navigation, so there’s no confusion. Remember to continue showing any price discounts, original price and the new price. This will remind the customer how much they are saving which will motivate conversions.
• Experiment with major elements – Large blocks of content can be overwhelming so try hiding parts or breaking them up into smaller pieces. Show/hide banners or images which are pushing important content further down the page. Cyber security logos may be off-putting for customers, so test which works for you.
• Auto sort by popularity – Try sorting your product categories by popularity. This may improve the chances of new visitors finding what they are looking for quicker.
• Create clarity – Test any call to actions (CTA’s) that have a lot of text vs a short snappy one. Chances are the short one will generate more leads. Any ad copy, headlines or CTAs should be clear and simple to drive a response.

A/B Testing for CRO Results: How to Identify the Winner?

As mentioned earlier, each test should last at least 2 weeks. Your A/B testing tool will have a reports page that provides key information which contributes to deciding when the test should end and what variation won. There will be a metric called ‘confidence rate’ or ‘chance to beat control’, providing a percentage to each variation whether it’s predicted to be more successful than the original ‘Control’. The percentage has to be above 50%, otherwise, it’s a clear indication it has lost. To consider using any of the variations, they need to be at least 90%. Meaning there is little risk of the variation becoming a failure.

Next, a graph will present all the results. Ignoring the first few days, each line should have flatlined and stayed like that for 10 days or so to be able to stop the test.

Combining each of those points plus a sufficient amount of traffic will indicate a ‘winner’ of the test. If the confidence percentage is good but does not receive enough traffic, then let the test run longer, in order to obtain a fair result.

No Clear A/B Test Winners?

Some tests may be trial and error, not all will result in the variant being crowned the ‘winner’ but that doesn’t mean the test was unsuccessful. You have gained more information about your visitors’ browsing habits, which will help guide future tests. But how can you utilise this information to your benefit now? The best way is to analyse the data and create user personas to paint a clear picture of your target audience, which can not only guide your further CRO efforts but also inform your social media posts or email marketing campaigns.

Building A User Persona

Forming one primary persona and perhaps a couple of secondaries from analysing previous reports enables you to build specific segments within your analytical tracking tool to identify what website elements the target audience is using and where A/B testing for CRO should be implemented. To give an example, using demographics within your analytical tool, enables you to identify both the age and gender of your key persona. At this point, start to build a new segment within the tool including that information. Take a look at your customer interests and narrow down what your primary persona interests are, then add those to the segment too. Also, key information to incorporate is ‘Geo’. Your key persona’s language and geographic location are valuable in order to target specific regions for future campaigns. You can make the persona segment as specific or vague as desired, depending on your website traffic volume or business goals. Now having built the segment, you’re able to see the pages and elements which are the driving factors of your key persona making a conversion. However, more importantly, you’re able to recognise where they are dropping off within your site which pinpoints exactly what to A/B test to optimise your website for your key persona.

How Many A/B Tests Do I Need to Run To See an Increase in Conversions?

The first test won’t magically increase your conversion rate overnight. A/B testing for CRO is an iterative process of removing both big and small issues throughout your conversion funnel, creating a seamless experience for customers. Removing a stumbling block in the middle of the funnel won’t automatically make the entire journey clear too. It will take several improvements throughout the funnel until you start seeing your conversion rate increase.

It’s vital to regularly track your website’s data through analytical tools, in order to identify more testing opportunities. Through constant tracking, you will begin to spot behavioural patterns within your data. Completing one test and observing the subsequent data could potentially reveal another page which is now in need of testing. That new issue that arose as a result of a recent improvement proves how necessary observing your website’s data is at every step of the testing process. For example, improving an element on one page and successfully increasing the click-through rate will inevitably lead to more traffic being directed through to the next page. Consequently, the following page to which you have successfully boosted traffic levels, may not have previously received sufficient data to identify any testing opportunities. However, as a result, you may now be experiencing a high drop off rate, clearly showing the need for this case to be tested and optimised to increase conversions.

Here at WifiMedia we continually analyse the data we are tracking to spot patterns and testing opportunities, which in turn help us to optimise our website and offer a seamless experience for our visitors.

Common CRO Mistakes to Avoid

Now, if you are sitting there feeling slightly overwhelmed or confused after reading the entirety of that information, let’s take a step back and recap. Conversion Rate Optimisation is an ongoing process that involves tweaking elements of your website in order to improve user’s experience and as a result generate more conversions, whether those are sales, form submissions or email newsletter subscriptions. By working on your CRO you can generate more leads via your website as your visitors will come across fewer roadblocks.

One of the best ways to improve your CRO is through A/B testing – the process of testing new variations of pages or elements on a website against the original. To decide what to test, use a website analytical tool to figure out where most of your current traffic is dropping off or start with landing pages that typically receive the most traffic. Some of the metrics that may indicate areas or pages worth testing include the Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. Run your tests for a minimum duration of one to two weeks and allow the results to normalise – you know which version is your winner when you see one with at least a 90% success rate.

And finally, don’t forget that not all A/B tests you do will have the goal of increasing your conversion rate, especially in the beginning. You could set the goal to measure the number of times a specific element that’s being tested is clicked and therefore pushing those users closer to making a conversion. Furthermore, not all tests will have a clear winner but the data you collect can still be utilised to build a primary persona. This data can help you to understand who your key customer is and constantly ensure any A/B tests are increasing the conversion rate within that segment.

Conclusion

Just like with any optimisation efforts, it is important to strike a good balance between not responding to the data and doing too much to try and fix the issues. Every visitor wants a simple and easy browsing experience. So when it comes to optimising or redesigning your website and completing A/B testing for CRO, here are some mistakes you should try to avoid:

• Over personalisation – Personalised shopping experiences may be the latest trend but that doesn’t mean a customer’s experience should be 100% personalised. It can be off-putting sometimes for a customer to see actually how much information you know about them, resulting in potential losses. Test what performs best, do visitors want to see suggested items based on what they’ve already viewed or view new products that they may not have considered before?
• Having multiple navigation methods – You want to ensure a streamlined experience. If adding new navigational methods, ensure it is easy for a customer to use or give hints on how to use new features.
• Obsessing over colour – Of course, some colours are more eye-catching than others but overall it’s not an element to spend too much time worrying about it. Fix substantial problems before testing little details.
• Carousels vs Static Images – Carousels that are especially featured on landing pages can bring the site to life and make it instantly more engaging, however, users typically click on the first slide, therefore missing the rest of the information. A/B testing will determine which works best for your users.
• Don’t test without any data to back up your decision – This is a waste of time. Randomly testing elements to see if they work better is very time-consuming too. Figure out what content needs to be tested using your site’s data. You should A/B test new content before adding it to the original site in case it damages your conversion rate.
• Focusing too much on the landing page – Yes, the landing page is very important! But if you know there are bigger issues further down the funnel, test and fix those first before driving more customers into the funnel.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying any of our A/B testing for CRO ideas on your website? Request a callback to get free advice about how you can improve your conversion rate.

The post A/B Testing for CRO appeared first on WifiMedia.

The first thing you hear when you start a business is that you need a website. But what is the point in having a website? One thing that is pretty consistent with businesses, whether you are selling something on your website or simply have it up there for informative purposes, is that you want it to be able to help you convert potential customers to paying customers.

At WifiMedia, we understand that in order to generate leads online, you need a website that converts web traffic into customers. Understanding the importance of CRO is the first step in the process. After all, the higher the number of ‘converters’ in relation to web visitors, the higher your conversion rate is. You may have thought to yourself in the past:

“I get a lot of visitors to my website but I haven’t got any enquiries from them.”
“My website is just my online business card.”
“I get all my business from referrals, I don’t need a website.”

This reminds of a saying from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”. I mention this because all the people who believe their website is not there to generate their business more leads are probably right! And the reason for this is most likely that they are unaware of their conversion rate and the ways to optimise it. If the website wasn’t designed with the purpose of convincing people to convert then it’s not likely that potential customers will convert, or even having anyways their customers can ‘convert’ in the first place.

Firstly you’ve got to start asking yourself, what do I want my website to do for me? You may want to sell more of your products, increase subscriptions to your mailing list or get people to enquire about your services. What is the point in having a website if it’s not working to achieve the goals you’ve set for it?

What Is a Conversion?

A conversion is a point at which a visitor on your website completes a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out an enquiry form or subscribing to your email newsletter. The conversion rate of your website is, therefore, the percentage of web visitors that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

Micro Conversions vs Marco Conversions

Macro Conversions

Your ‘Macro Conversion’ is the end goal that you are looking to achieve after your website visitor goes through the different levels of your marketing funnel.

It is important to note that this ultimate goal looks different for every business. An e-commerce website will be looking to get a purchase from its visitors. However, a service provider may wish to focus their efforts on getting visitors to request a quote for one of their services.

Micro Conversions

To get to a ‘Macro Conversion’, the visitor may take a series of smaller steps which can be defined as Micro Conversions. These can then be further split into categories, known as Process Milestone and Secondary Action.

Process Milestone

As the name suggests, a process milestone is a significant step on your potential customer’s journey where they take an action that brings them closer to a macro conversion, i.e. your ultimate goal. Some examples of process milestones include a visitor inquiring further about your products and services via live chat or adding products to their wish list.

Secondary Action

Secondary actions are still desired actions taken by the user but are seen as more distant from reaching a macro conversion. An example of a secondary action is a user coming to your website and downloading any free resources you are offering by entering their email address, commenting on your blog posts or signing up to your newsletter. Your website managed to get their attention and create some interest, but it may require a bit more nurturing to bring this particular user to a macro conversion.

What Does Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Mean?

CRO is an umbrella term used for all of the tools and methodologies digital marketers use to optimize their sites and campaigns. In this article, we’re talking specifically about website CRO and things you can do on your website to improve your conversion rate.

Traffic may be coming your way via an effective SEO, paid search, social or content strategy, which is great! Unfortunately, the people visiting your site aren’t achieving the goal you actually intended them to achieve in the first place. They’re not converting. It’s time to think about conversion rate optimisation.

Digital marketers track the percentage of web visitors that are converting (conversion rate) in order to assess how well your website is getting web visitors to perform your goals (completing a conversion). Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete that specific action.

This continuous process of tracking the user browsing behaviour and adjusting the website elements accordingly, to get an increased percentage of users to perform your desired actions is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

Every business has a marketing funnel in place. This is essentially your customer’s journey with you, and it usually includes the following steps: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

Converting a lead will mean something different at every stage of the marketing funnel and so each stage may need a different CRO strategy.

Furthermore, CRO strategies vary from business to business but there are some best practices we can offer you today that can help optimise the conversion rate of your website.

As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue.

10 Website CRO Tips – Our Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

Understanding Your Customer & Adding Value

Develop and express empathy for your target audience. Walk a mile in their shoes during every interaction and step, but go further. What brought the potential customer to this specific page? For the visitor to convert you need to show them you fully understand them. You, as the business owner, most likely do. But your website, as an extension of the business, needs to translate that understanding.

It is a good idea to go back to your buyer personas and make sure you understand who your ideal customers are, what their pain points are and how your product or service solves that issue. This reminds me of when I used to work in telesales (please don’t judge me). Every prospect I spoke to had sales objections, or reasons they’re hesitant to buy the product. If the buyer didn’t have reservations about the price, value, competitors, product fit, relevance to their situation, or their purchasing ability, they would have already bought it. To be successful in sales, reps must learn how to both discover and resolve these objections. This is exactly what you have to do to optimise the conversion rate on your website! These objections could be organised easily in a FAQs section, where you list common objections in a question format and responding in a way that changes their mind or alleviates their concerns.

Once you refresh your understanding of your customers, visit your website as a potential client with a specific problem in mind and observe how easy it is for you to find what you need, and how convincing and encouraging is the value proposition on your website.

Note the places within your marketing funnel where perhaps you could add more value. Would your potential customer appreciate a free downloadable PDF with your ‘Top 10 Tips on how to…[input your expertise]’? Or perhaps showcasing some case studies of how your product or service helped someone else could help you win their trust?

Harness Web Analytics & Behavioural Analysis Tools

To fine-tune these strategies you need real data. You may have a good understanding of how your customers browse your website but gathering data with the use of tools such as Google Analytics will give your CRO efforts more precision. From this information, you can begin to learn about the target audience segments that convert the most. This information helps us to modify the content and user experience to improve the conversion rate for the buyer personas you attract.

You can analyse user behaviour with snapshots, heatmaps and recordings with platforms such as Hotjar or CrazyEgg. This helps you to understand at which point a specific type of customer drops out and can even show you how customers interact with your website. This information will help you rethink your content, web design and how you add value.

Copywriting

Before you even think about changing the design of your website to optimise the conversion rate, you need to focus on your copy. It will be your words that will evoke the emotions needed for the lead to convert. Therefore, catchy headlines are vital to capture their attention fast. You can use a headline analyser to see how those headlines will appear to visitors – many people only read the beginning and end of a headline!

Remember to always start your SEO copywriting with the end goal in mind. What is it that you want the user to do on this particular page? This will make your content more structured and will reveal where you should be putting your ‘Call to Action’ buttons.

You should also always lead with the benefit in mind. How is your product or service helping them to solve a problem? How is it addressing their pain point? If you are still unsure what those pain points are, you should go back to Tip #1.

Optimise for Mobile & Page Load Speed

Each year the number of people visiting websites from their phones vs desktop raises. The percentage went up from 16.2% to 53.3% between 2013 and 2019 and is predicted to keep increasing. What this means is that your website needs to be mobile optimised. You need to make sure the user experience on mobile is just as effective as it is on the desktop.

What’s more, pages on your website need to load fast on mobile and desktop. Slow websites frustrate visitors and negatively impact your conversion rate. A study by Soasta showed a decrease of 20.5% in conversion rate on mobile pages that had 1 second slower experience. That one second could be very costly when is comes to your conversion rate.

Pop-Ups

In the digital marketing world, pop-ups are overlays that appear on your screen and draw your attention to something different than you have been looking at on the website. For example, they are often used to get the visitor to sign up to an email list.

Many people find pop-ups annoying but there are many different pop-up types. Some appear the moment you open the site, others after a few seconds and then there are exit pop-ups that would only appear when you’re about to leave the website.

This latter type is considered as one of the most effective ways to keep your visitor happy whilst they’re browsing the website, yet capture them and make a micro-conversion when they’re about to leave.

When considering adding a pop-up to your site, make sure you:

• Make it relevant to the page on which it pops-up
• Make it easy for the visitor to close the pop-up
• Make the design consistent with your branding
• Use a compelling CTA
• Use cookies. This way you’re not showing the pop-up to those who already signed up or to those who always close the pop-up without reading it.

Strategic CTA’S

Congrats! You’ve attracted a visitor to your website – we could say this was one of your micro conversions, as if you have a Facebook Pixel, you can use remarketing to show them relevant ads to get them back to your website and to convert in the future.

So they’ve landed on your website, now what? What are you trying to capture next? Perhaps it’s their email address. How and where on the page will you entice them to do that? To lead them through a series of micro-conversions towards a macro conversion you will need to use visible, clear and effective ‘Call To Action’ buttons (CTAs).

This is why the strategic placement of your CTAs is so important. Think about your micro and macro conversions and the behaviour patterns of the visitors in the different stages of your marketing funnel. If they’re not yet at the stage of requesting a quote from you, what else can you do to stay connected with them?

Consider using the language of the prospect and including multiple CTA’s to speak to different audiences at different points in the funnel. Make the CTA buttons stand out by playing with their design, as well as the copy. Benefit-oriented copy, such as ‘Get my free eBook’, ‘Request call-back’ or ‘Stay connected’ perform better than a button that simply says ‘Click here’. And remember to split test your CTAs. Monitor what placement, design and copy work the best and adjust over time.

SEO Your Inner Service Pages

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps people find your products and services online from search. However, time and time again I see businesses ‘SEOing’ their homepage for their services and giving very little effort put towards their inner services pages. A customer is a lot more likely to convert if they are displayed the service information they’re actually searching for. Here’s an example:

The customer searches “web design Ipswich” into Google and they click the first link. The website displays the homepage of the digital marketing agencies website which shows all of their digital marketing services, including; SEO, Google Ads Management, Social Media Marketing and then finally has a link to their web design services. In finding this link to the information your potential client was initially searching for, half the amount of searchers may have given up and chosen one of your competitors.

This is why it is important to pay just as much attention to your inner product/service pages as your homepage when it comes to web design and SEO. We pay close attention to getting service pages to rank higher than the homepage for service related searches, to improve the conversion rate. Someone searching for ‘web design’ may have different pain points as someone searching for a ‘digital marketing agency’, so your inner service pages need to reflect this.

Build Authority & Credibility

One way to increase the conversion rate is to build trust with your potential customers. In order to do this, you can add qualifications or trust stamps your business has, such as a high number of good reviews. This helps to build authority and makes you stand out against your competitors.

People trust other customers who took the time to review your products or services. Showcasing testimonials that relate to a particular service or product when the lead is in the ‘Consideration’ stage of the marketing funnel could convince them to move towards conversion. As with almost everything on this list, you can split test the effectiveness of your trust stamps, qualifications and testimonials to optimise your conversion rate.

Live Chatbot

One of the things that can kill your conversion rate is visitors not being able to get the information they came to find. If they become frustrated they will simply leave your website. To keep them from doing this, you could provide extra support with a Live Chatbot plugin.

Adding a live chatbot to your website makes your website visitors trust you and give them an impression that there are real people behind the chatbot 24/7, ready to support them with their queries. It is a cost-effective way of improving customer service.

Providing that extra reassurance is not only convenient for your website visitors when requiring extra information, but could also help them make a decision on whether they’d like to try your product or services. Live Chats are the most popular way for customers to request support. We recommended LiveChat or ChatBot, depending on your need for automation.

A/B Testing

Now let’s not get CRO and A/B Testing mixed up. CRO is about using tools and methods to optimise the number of conversions from your website. Testing is about verifying these tools and methods.

A/B testing is used throughout digital marketing. The glory of digital marketing, after all, is data. It is especially used effectively in paid media campaigns, by showing different variations of an advert to determine which gets the best click-through rate.

For website CRO, A/B testing is a popular method of comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same website, by showing different content or designs to visitors and analysing the data in order to find out the version that brings the most qualified leads. It helps you identify what works and what doesn’t.

We have ended our ‘10 Website CRO Tips’ on A/B Testing to show you that with testing, conversion rate optimisation is never-ending and you can constantly test different variations of every one of our CRO tips to get the best results from your website.

The post Website CRO Tips | Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide appeared first on WifiMedia.