Get to know more about this process to improve your business results
Did you ever leave a website because it took more time than expected to load? If this is the case, let us tell you that you are not alone. According to Google, 53% of mobile website visitors abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And what’s interesting is that, although half of the total web traffic comes from mobile, conversion rates on these devices are lower than the conversions that occur on computers.
It is a common mistake to think that if we are not selling much, what we need to do is get more users to visit our website. However, many times the number of visits may be high while the conversion rate is very low. In these cases, what really needs to be optimized are not the visits themselves but the Conversion Rate, so without further ado, let´s dive into Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
But first, what is the conversion rate?
Before we even start to define what CRO is, it is crucial to understand the conversion rate.
In a nutshell, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who have completed a specific action, such as filling out a contact form, subscribing to the newsletter, or buying a product. How is it calculated? Well, you can calculate the conversion rate using the following formula:
Let’s say, for instance, that your website receives a total of 500 visitors per month, and you’ve sold 30 products. In this case, your conversion rate would be: (30 : 500) x 100 = 6 %
Why is this formula useful? Depending on the size of your business, one can think that selling 30 products in a month (one a day) is a lot. However, when we calculate the conversion rate and get only 6%, we observe that we should have more conversions considering the number of visitors. As you can see, it is essential to analyze our website to detect what is happening and why users are not buying our products or services. And as you may guess, once the website analysis is completed, the CRO comes into play.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization consists of carrying out a series of techniques to optimize the website to make it easier for users to perform specific actions, such as purchasing a product, calling the number on the website, or filling out a contact form, to name a few.
As we said before, it is crucial to analyze why users are not contacting us or buying our products, and many different reasons can explain that. The loading time may be too long, or the website is not intuitive enough, making it difficult to navigate. There is also the chance that the payment gateway does not work correctly, the product sheets lack information, or maybe they’ve contacted us by web form, and we have taken too long to answer (or even worse, we may not have even done it). We can only begin working on improvements by understanding the reasons for our unsatisfactory results.
How to improve your CRO?
Once we understand the problem, the following step is to solve it. How? For instance, you can start by improving the design and usability of the website, fixing the payment gateway, modifying and increasing the product data, adding Call To Action (CTA) buttons in critical places, or expanding the customer service team. As you can see, many actions can be done to improve the website, but as it usually happens, the decision depends on the type of business you have or the target audience you are trying to approach.
In addition, besides your target audience, you must optimize the website’s performance so that it loads faster. If you still don’t have this information and want to check how long it takes for your website to load, you can do it here. As we’ve seen before, loading time significantly affects sales. According to Google, just a single-second delay in loading a mobile website can mean a decrease in conversions of up to 20%.
Yes, there is always the possibility that the number of visits to your website will decrease by performing these actions. This can happen because sometimes, by adjusting the website to focus on a specific audience, users who are not really interested in purchasing one of your products will stop visiting it. On the other hand, valuable users interested in what you have to offer on your website are more likely to make a purchase. So if you analyze it, though there are fewer visits than before, these qualified users increase the number of conversions, which translates into a higher conversion rate.
Now that you know the basics, it’s time to make some changes to your website and get those numbers flowing!
