Whenever someone visits your website, you should have a desired action in mind. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, marking a purchase or downloading an app, the action will depend on your business and its goals. Your ability to achieve these business goals depends on a visitor completing the action, known as a conversion.To ensure successful conversions, you need to optimise your site. By measuring your Conversion Rate through key metrics, you will be able to reveal the percentage of your site’s total traffic completing a specific action. Then using Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) you’ll be able to use these insights to improve the performance of your site.Here are our top tips on why CRO is critical to your overall marketing strategy and how your website can reach optimum conversion levels.

1. Identify Sore Spots

There’s always ways to turn visitors into customers and it simply starts with identifying the problem areas in your website. The most effective way to evaluate your website performance is by studying your website traffic data.Using any popular website analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you’re able to track engagement metrics such as bounce rate, exit rate, average time on site and average page views. These metrics will help you to gauge how long people are spending on your site, which pages they’re visiting and much more so can you guide your optimisation efforts more effectively.You can further analyse the data through your website’s conversion funnel and recognise the specific web pages that are losing customers. For example, pages with high exit rates show that people are reaching the page, but are dropping off and pages that attract a lot of traffic, but have a high bounce rate show that people are not finding it relevant enough. These insights are important because they can tell you whether it’s a case of bad copy and design or if you’re simply attracting the wrong traffic.Don’t be afraid to delve deep to find poorly performing pages, as these are the first ones that should be optimised. Remember, to fix what’s broke, you need to first identify what’s broken.

2. Implement Optimisation Opportunities

Once you’ve identified the problem areas in your website, the next step should be to seek ways to optimise them. Find the elements of your website that stop visitors from completing a conversion, using visitor behaviour analytics tools.Employing heatmaps, scrollmaps, form analyser and other tools on your website will help to identify exactly where users are losing interest. It will also help you to identify and rectify your website’s shortcomings better and gain an edge over your competitors.Some insights include:

• Discovering elements on specific web pages that are being ignored by visitors
• Finding elements that are distracting users away from the main content
• Observing the depth of fold across different pages

These first changes don’t have to always be the biggest ones. Start with the small problems and you’ll see how this can have a huge effect on your conversion rate. Look for the basic issues first that are hurting your conversions and tackle the bigger problems later once you’ve gained some CRO experience.

3. Instil Effective Design Principles

They say to never judge a book by it’s cover, but when it comes to websites, unfortunately, the same rule doesn’t apply. In fact, visitors don’t take much time forming a first impression of your website, with some studies even saying that visitors take as little as 50 milliseconds to decide if they like your website’s appearance or not.So to make a good first impression and a lasting impact on your visitors, you must deliver high quality copy and design. To ensure a positive user experience, some design features to consider include:

• Big headlines: The focal point of your landing pages should be the titles, so it would make sense that this is the first thing they see. Make sure the font is clear and large enough to draw your visitor’s attention first.
• Less is better: When it comes to web design a cluttered web page is never a winner. Make sure the content is simple and easy to read.
• High-quality images: Avoid stock images at all costs. Make your images are unique to your website and like your headlines, the bigger the better, as they will draw your user’s attention and has greater conversion power.

4. The Job is Never Finished

CRO never ends. You need to practice CRO consistently to ensure your business goals are achieved. So if you want to keep customers coming back as well as keep new customers coming in, CRO should be at the top of your priority list. By constantly tracking conversions and keeping with a consistent CRO strategy, you’ll see an instant improvement in your website’s performance and an automatic boost in your desired conversions.At Bang, we are passionate and experienced in conversion rate optimisation and have a great track record of helping our clients achieve their business goals through CRO. Get in touch with the Bang team and we’ll have your website optimised in no time!