Answering 7 Common Conversion Rate Optimization Questions

Transcript: Hi, my name is Dan Shaffer. I’m on the WebFX marketing team and today I have a lot of questions on CRO…basic questions that we have here. And we’re gonna go over a couple of things that will help you and your visitors convert better on your website.

So you may be spending a lot of time and energy getting highly targeted traffic to your website, but if they don’t convert into buyers and customers, then what’s the point in that? That good traffic is just going to waste. CRO is basically the process of finding better ways of getting that wasted traffic to turn into paying customers.

Rather than work harder, writing more content, or spend more on advertising to get more traffic, you likely already have a lot of things you can improve on your website that could help your overall conversion rate. It’s one of my favorite strategies as it’s a digital marketer because it forces you to think a little more creatively on how to make that process easier for the people on your website. Let’s dive into those questions.

Let the games begin.

How do you measure the success of a CRO test?

So you’re gonna have a couple of versions of your test where you direct the traffic to those different versions.

At the end, maybe after a couple of days, or even a couple of weeks, hopefully not longer than that, you’ll see a winning version that has a higher conversion rate, or a higher engagement rate, whatever it is you’re trying to test for. And that’s the one you should implement on the rest of your site.

What are some common CRO mistakes, and how do I avoid them?

Lots of different mistakes can happen and it is going to happen.

You’re gonna find a lot of different things that don’t work and that’s just as valuable to you and your visitors and how you’re creating pages that convert for them. Now, as far as getting the test to actually run, a lot of the tools that you might use require like scripts to be embedded and different things that are technically more difficult. We see a lot of areas where you can improve the process just by making it easier with things like Google Tag Manager or something like that, but there’s a lot of plug-ins that help to figure out if you have a test set-up right.

  Another mistake is just letting a test run too long. If you’re not testing things that are risky enough to find a result quick enough, you’re actually wasting time that you could be testing other things on your site. You also don’t wanna be testing too many things at the same time, ’cause you wanna remove any variables as much as possible.

    So say you’re testing your contact form, you don’t wanna test like three different versions of that contact form, that might mean different things for your users. You wanna just test one piece of it, so test like that first form field or test just the button and all your variations should only test that one element. Don’t add other variables into your tests.

Why is CRO important?

CRO is so important because you’re taking traffic that may not convert at all, or it may not convert well, and you’re turning that into actual revenue for your business. You know, if you get, say you get a thousand visitors a month on your content and 1% of them convert, you’re getting 10 conversions a month. If you can double your conversion rate, you’re ultimately getting twice as much conversions on your site, you’re getting twice as much revenue to your business overall and you haven’t done anything to improve the traffic, or you haven’t increased advertising to your site.

You’ve only improved the conversion rate of the traffic that you’re already getting. Next question, upside down.

What is A/B testing and what are some good tools for A/B testing?

So A/B testing is you’re creating two different versions, or more—you can do A, B, C, D, E, whatever—and you’re creating those different versions of the same element or the same page on your site.

So version A might be contact page one, version B might be contact page two. You may have tweaked just a little, tiny piece of that on each one. Version A is often your control or your original page.

You always wanna be testing against your original one as well. And then after a while, you have results come in. You’re sending traffic to each of those pages.

Most of the time you’re just splitting that traffic. If you get a lot of traffic, you might just split a small portion of that traffic.     And then after a while, you’re gonna measure the conversion rate of both and see which one was better.

Some tools that do that for you are Google Optimize, that one’s free, I like to use that one and it integrates well with Google Analytics. Others like Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely.

What are the steps of a CRO test?

A good way to put this is like the scientific method in like elementary school.

I’m trying to think about the steps of the… one second. So the steps…scientific method…Google this.

Call a friend…phone a friend.

1. Make an observation.
2. Ask a question.
3. Form a hypothesis.
4. Make a prediction.
5. Test that prediction.
6. Iterate.

So think of it as like a scientific experiment really. You’re finding those different pieces of your website that could perform better or perform differently, or in a way that you want them to, but you need to think critically and try and find what those things are. And then you test.

Run the test. Use different tools. Find a winning version, or find a failing version.

You could find a lot of things that you learn about your website in a failed CRO test. And then you just do that whole process over again. Eventually, you’ll have a much higher conversion rate just based on those tests that you’ve done.

You’ve learned a lot about your content and the people visiting your content and then over time, you’ll have a really, really high conversion rate that was better than before, when you weren’t doing any CRO at all.

What is a conversion funnel?

So if you think of a funnel that you might pour a liquid into, you have the high, big opening at the top and it’s directed down to a little part at the bottom. And your website is a funnel in itself, your conversion funnel.

So you have a lot of traffic going in at the top and hopefully, they’re getting to the bottom where your conversion process is. So that could be your contact page, your quote form, your “buy now” piece of your ecommerce set-up. Your goal is to get more people through that entire funnel.

Right now you have a leaky funnel. There’s just holes all the way through it, people are leaving at different times. They’re confused.

They’re just out of time. They might just get distracted and your goal is to figure out where those things are and get people going all the way through your conversion funnel and generate revenue for your business. Next question.

What are a few CRO best practices?

So, I think I mentioned a few of these before, but only test one thing at a time. If you’re testing your contact page, only test one element of it. You don’t want multiple tests going at the same time that could have overlapping features and that will just like muddy your data.

You won’t know exactly what is helping or not helping and if you can eliminate those different pieces, you’ll know exactly what to do on the next step. Another best practice, test some crazy stuff. Try doing risky things and things that will be…things that will have an obvious result over a short amount of time.

If you figure out something that works really well in a short amount of time, you can implement that and then test again something just as risky in the same amount of time as you might test something not so risky and not have a higher result. You can learn a lot from failed tests and risky tests in a short amount of time.

Thanks for watching this video on conversion rate optimization and the questions you might have about it.

If you have any questions, we’d be happy to help out.

If you’re ready to get started with CRO on your website, give us a call. Contact Our Team Contact us. We’d be happy to help you there as well.