Conversion Rate Optimization 101 - Part I: Getting Started
Background
Why CRO?
Converting visitors into customers is the most important but often most neglected aspect of Internet marketing.
Take a look at your own marketing organization and see how much time and money you have dedicated to web traffic generation (organic SEO or paid advertisement) versus web page optimization. No wonder that we had to describe the current state of the online marketing affairs as 'the cart before the horse'.
Statistics provided by FireClick speak for themselves:
Considering tremendous ROI potential one would logically ask why everybody is not using CRO. Well, we can provide at least two good reasons:
learning to do and it is logical that the first things were done first. Up to now a focus
was on creation of quality websites and their promotion.
- CRO is a non-trivial marketing discipline. Before introduction of Google's Website
Optimizer and our own Hiconversion Pro, conversion rate optimization (often called
multivariate testing, or Taguchi testing) were available only to a limited number of
large e-commerce organizations who could cost justify expensive technology
and associate professional services.
Art or Science
Conversion Rate Optimization was introduced first as a new marketing art. The pioneering companies, like FutureNow, have evangelized persuasive copy writing and the best practices in landing page design. In the Internet business this was equivalent to gold digging. The optimization expert will play few ideas hopping that he will strike 'gold'.
We all know that during the gold rush digging gold did not make real money. Instead, the big fortunes (Herst family for example) were made in silver mining. At that time very few people were able to build a silver flotation facility capable of processing large volume of dirt to extract a small percentage of silver. And those small percentages of silver, produced on consistent bases, have created an immense reaches.
Traditional multivariate testing solutions are equivalent of the Internet silver mining facility. By being able to effectively process a large number of page variations and consistently find a small percentage of better performing versions, these tools are turning the art of 'gold digging' into science of 'silver mining'. Similar to the gold rush era, where silver mining was exclusive to 'big boys', the traditional multivariate testing tools are only available to high volume and deep pocket Internet players.
A new emerging trend in CRO is created by new breed of solutions, like Google's Website Optimizer and our own Hiconversion Pro. These tools are removing adoption barriers and bringing benefits of this technology down to masses.
What pages to optimize first?
Before deciding which page to test first, it's best to create a page importance ranking.
Most web pages will be used to receive traffic from multiple sources—such as a combination of banner ads, pay-per-click ads, co-registration, print ads, direct mail, public relations, link building, etc. Some of the web pages are organic, i.e. pages that are part of your website navigation structure and some of them are dedicated landing pages only used in marketing campaigns.
Typically, dedicated landing pages tend to be the most valuable optimization targets. Their traffic usually comes from paid online campaigns. However, do not ignore the organic pages, such as home page or topic/product pages.
Know your traffic and conversion rate stats
Before starting with CRO initiative it is always a good idea to know the basic page statistics. You will be surprised about percentage of who have no idea no idea about real page statistics.
The most acute problem is the conversion rate measurement. Even a large percentage of companies who are versed into using web analytics tools are not correctly tracking their conversion rates. One can blame current generation of analytics products that originated in the counting 'eyeballs' era of the Internet. They will tell you everything about you web traffic but you have to work very hard to figure out the number one metrics of your website: conversion rate.
The good news is that you have of a choice of a lot of free web analytics solutions that are surprisingly sophisticated, and is sufficient for most websites. Let us mention few:
Recommended Resources
- ROI Revolution is a Google-Authorized Consultancy that offers excellent training and
consulting services for Google Analytics.
- If you want to become better at web analytics, we recommend you read
Occam's Razor, the blog of Avinash Kaushik and his book,
Web Analytics—An Hour A Day.
- If you want to do anything really fancy with web analytics, we would recommend Neil
Mason at Applied Insights.
Do you homework
In preparation for your optimization test it is a great practice to revisit your key marketing components:
- Who are your visitors? Knowing who is entering the site, who your target market is,
and if you are really appealing to them is key to a successful landing page.
- How good is your page layout? How visible are key messages and call for actions. If
you page has a poor design then optimization may not make sense. Instead you have
to develop a new layout that complies with basic landing page design practices.
- How good are your headlines? Headlines are one of the first things that pop out to a
visitor as they land on your page. The headline needs to grab their attention securing
them for at least another 20 seconds on your page.
- How good is your content? A sticky site is one that will engage your visitor and get
them to stick around longer raising the chance of conversion. There are several
different methods that you can use to make your site "stickier", and some include
persuasive copy, reviews, videos, etc.
- Study your competitors. The objective here is not copy what your competition are
doing but instead to find your unique voice and unique positioning.
Set proper expectations
We are sure that you have seen advertisements that claim 3x-20x improvements of the conversion rate. While numbers might be truthful they are a pure hype.
Each web page has its unique problems and its realistic potential. Therefore, it is wrong to apply somebody's one time extreme success to your individual case. Even worse, since we are talking about relative results, such extreme numbers may speak more about how horrible web page was, rather then how good job a particular optimization provider has done.
In our experience we have never seen a website where with the right amount of time, energy and resources we couldn't get at least a 30% improvement in conversion, but for less patient ones 10% is a conservative bottom line number.
The 10% Increase Rule does not mean that you should not get better than 10% increase. Instead, you should use this rule as your risk management policy. If you are getting a positive ROI after only one month of optimized page use, then ongoing use or any other increase beyond 10% increase are a pure profit.
To give you some benchmarks while avoiding touting our own horn (in general, we are achieving much higher increases) we used numbers reported by an industry leader FutureNow:
- Increased client's overall website conversion rate 10.5%, resulting in $250,000
additional revenue annually.
- Optimized a checkout page to increase conversion rate by 6.25%, leading to $150,000
additional revenue annually.
- Increased overall conversion by 27.5% with an A/B test on the product page.
- Doubled the number of sales with a Shop with Confidence assurance test.
- Achieved an 8% lift in sales from redesigned product page.
- Increased overall conversion rate by 51.49% over a 3 month program.
- Redesigned homepage and category pages to increase overall sales by 6%.
- Helped client realize a 108% increase in sign-ups for an e-course.
- Making one change to the flow of a client’s checkout process increased shopping cart
conversion by 6.5% leading to an estimated increase of $55,000 monthly revenue.
- As a by-product of our conversion recommendations increased organic traffic
visits by 19.91%.
- Improved conversion on a client site by 24% simply by changing product page layout.
- Increased a client's funnel conversion rate by 24.40%.
- Increased visitor registrations by 12.5% by recommending changes to landing pages
and the flow of the sign-up form.
- Increased overall website sales conversion rate from 3% to 7%, that is 133%, over a
quarter long engagement for an online jewelry retailer.
Should you do it yourself?
Conversion Rate Optimization is a new Internet Marketing discipline. A new breed of optimization solutions are making it easier, but, if you are doing it for the first time this can be quite daunting task.
We are writing this tutorial driven by desire to encourage every online marketers to establish optimization testing as one of his best marketing practices. You should not be afraid of doing it yourself. However, we firmly believe that it is much more effective to get a service provider to jumpstart your program. There are many specialized service providers that can help you with your project, our company included:
- AlexDesigns.com – one of the pioneers of the landing page optimization; pricing
not disclosed;
-
Hiconversion.com – offers flat rate turnkey conversion rate optimization services with
10% increase in conversion rate guarantee; prices start from $995/test;
- WebsiteOptimization.com – offers a broad range of website optimization services;
pricing not disclosed;
- SiteTunners.com – offers flat rate turnkey services with 5% increase guarantee; pricing
not disclosed;
-
WiderFunnel.com – one of the Google’s Website Optimizer premier partners; pricing
not disclosed;
I just first heard this term, CRO, today while reading Rand's blog over at SEOmoz. I am beginning to pay much more attention to the practice myself, because it does directly affect a firm's bottom line. Things like lead generation, market research and page architecture and layout are now being seen as more important than they once were. Very good article.
Posted by: Eric Bryant | July 02, 2009 at 11:14 AM