You may have heard of the term website conversions, but you may not fully understand what it means. In this article, we are going to uncover what website conversions are and why they are important to you and your business.
What is Website Conversion?
Website conversions occur when a website completes the desired action, also known as the call to action, on your website. The desired action could be purchasing one of your products, signing up for the weekly newsletter, filling out a survey, or even giving a donation. Whatever the desired action is, website conversions show when your website’s viewers become customers, clients, or actively engage with your call to action. If you are a business, your website relies heavily on conversions. Website conversions come in two forms, micro and macro conversions.
Micro Conversions
Micro Conversions are a step toward the end goal of conversion. They are things that give your potential customers a taste of what you offer by giving them a sneak peek. Micro Conversion encounters include when someone signs up for a newsletter, downloads a free ebook, or watches a product video. All of these are steps in the direction of a macro conversion and can help the potential customer make up their mind on whether or not your product or service is worth their time.
Macro Conversions
Macro Conversions are when the end goal is achieved and the website viewer has turned client or customer. These kinds of conversions include instances where you have made some sort of sale, you gain a new paid subscriber, or someone has completed a contact form on your site.
How do I Find Out my Website Conversion Rate?
Calculating for your website conversion rate is fairly easy. All you need to do is divide the number of conversions which represent the desired action taken, by the total number of visitors. Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage value. Let’s say that your website had 23 sales and 400 visitors last week. So you would divide 23 by 400 which would give you .0575. When you multiply this value by 100 you get 5.75%.
Is my Conversion Rate Good or Bad?
After determining your conversion rate, you may be wondering if it is a good or bad one. Well the answer depends on a few factors. For one, the industry you are in. For example, businesses in consumer goods and finance might have differing standards for their conversion rate because they offer different things. Your audience demographic is another factor. Demographic data includes age, income and occupation which are all factors that create different website conversion rates standards. The third factor that can determine how good or bad your conversion rate is is simply your conversion goals. These can include ad clicks, checkout competitions, and newsletter subscriptions. With all these factors in mind, a typically good website conversion rate ranges from 2%-5%.
Look into Behaviors
Although you can easily look up industry averages to compare to your website conversion rate, it is much more helpful to thoroughly look into your website users behaviors and look out for things that could potentially be hurting or helping your website conversion rate.
How do I Improve my Conversion Rate?
If you find that your conversion rate is poor and you are looking to improve, learning more about your site’s users is a great way to start. You need to know who they are and what they enjoy or don’t enjoy about your site. A low conversion rate might make you believe that your users do not find your product or service valuable enough to purchase, but there may be underlying issues that you haven’t considered. Oftentimes, the people who visit your site are already vaguely intrigued with what you have to offer, they wouldn’t have clicked otherwise. So, it may not be that they do not find your products valuable, but that they need more clarification or explanation as to what the benefits are. Your site may not have answered all of their questions which left them skeptical. Your website could also be faulty or slow and this might cause people to become irritated and frustrated with navigating it.
Site Surveys
A great way to get a clear answer as to what your customers are by creating an on site survey. Include a tactful mix of both open and closed ended questions to really get the sense of the problem. You can also include an incoming feedback widget which allows customers to provide feedback on visual elements. These include pictures or videos that are blurry or will not load. This way, the customers can highlight specific parts of the site that they are having trouble with.
Be Specific
You may also come to find that certain pages on your site have higher or lower conversion rates than others. Look through your site’s data and see if you can highlight the elements on your site that are drawing your users or attention and what elements that they are straying away from. This way you can see if there are any technical issues that might be resulting in a lower conversion rate.
How do I Increase my Website Conversion Rate?
When it comes to increasing your website conversion rate, you may be surprised to hear that a few minor changes can actually go a long way. Making some aesthetic changes such as tweaking the color of your call to action button, utilizing a larger or more intriguing font, or having fewer fields in your contact or sign up forms are all small things you could do to help improve your website conversion rate. Start off with these small changes and see how things go. You may find that it is all that is needed. However, if these don’t work you will need to think of the bigger picture and consider what your website users really care about.
Ask Questions
Firstly, think about what drives people to your website. You need to understand what their needs are and how that leads them to discover your page in the first place. Placing a survey on a page on your site that has a lot of traffic. Ask them to describe what they are looking for in their own words. Allowing the customers to phrase their answer themselves will give you a far more authentic and useful response. In addition, asking different questions at different stages of your user’s shopping experience is very helpful in getting a sense of which pages are doing better than others. Having good content is key.
Provide Proof
Secondly, add some reviews and testimonials if you haven’t already and if you have done so, make sure they are easily identifiable and attractive looking. When purchasing products online, many people flock to reviews right away. It is important to people that others have tried and loved the product that they are interested in. Reviews and testimonials are a great way to not only prove your product or service is effective but also relieve the customer of any concerns they may have. They are also a great way to build trust with new or skeptical website users who have just been introduced to your product.
Create a Sense of Urgency
Thirdly, create a sense of urgency. When a sense of urgency is created, it automatically triggers the customer to think of your product or service with high value. It creates in them the need to purchase before time runs out by making your product seem exclusive and a hot commodity. You can easily do this by creating a countdown timer on the landing page or limited offer sign.
Remove Distractions
One reason why your conversion rate may be low is because the consumer is becoming overwhelmed with information with no clear direction. You want to make sure that your website is clear, concise, professional, and most importantly: easy to navigate. If you do not believe that something on your page is an essential feature, it’s best to drop it immediately. Less really is more. Stick to basic features such as headlines, testimonials, and intriguing visual content. You can use heat maps to help you determine what parts of your site are more distracting and then make any necessary edits.
Make Things Simple
In addition to removing unnecessary or distracting elements of your site, you need to make sure that you keep things fairly simple for your customers. If your call to action uses a form or survey, don’t bombard with too many fields. Avoid complicated questions, or asking for taxing or unnecessary information. Get to the point and get the information you need from them but in a simple and easy way. When it comes to the internet, anything that seems too complex or that will take too much time is immediately put off to potential customers. Making sure that you can be both tactful and concise will make a world of difference to your customers.
FAQs
- How do I improve my conversion rate?
- How do I find out my industry average website conversion rate?
- Can I hire a professional to increase my conversion rate?
- Should I use a survey on my website?
- Is there such a thing as a conversion rate that is too high?
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