Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices

Increase conversion rates

We get quite a few questions surrounding conversion rate optimization best practices so today we thought we would address some of tips and tricks for improving campaigns.

First, you must understand that conversion rate optimization is more than just a/b testing or multi-variate testing. It actually starts with user experience and user behavior and how your visitors interact with your site, where they are falling off, and what is holding them back.

Once you understand that you can then make the improvements starting with the advertising all the way through to repeat purchase opportunities.

In our company when working on new campaigns we typically start off with 5 points in our conversion rate optimization best practices arsenal. We follow this plan to better understand the customers and prepare for a conversion rate optimization plan of attack.

1. Analyzing existing analytics, heatmap, and click maps.

This allows us to see what areas need the most focus, where visitors are falling off, and what the visitors are paying the most attention to.
An example of a recent campaign we found out that visitors were paying more attention to a secondary path and putting more emphasis and focus on that path on site allowed for a dramatic reduction in bounce rate which was a big objective for our client.

2. Survey the customers and user testing

It is important to ask your customers what they thought of their experience. You may not always want to know their answers but it can help you deliver a much better experience. You can also use tools like usertesting.com to get feedback and find problem areas within your site and process.

3. Competitive analysis

Use spy tools to find out what competitors are doing. What they are doing right and what they may not be doing so well which can provide leverage in your efforts. An example was we found a prominent brand had 40X less impact than their nearest competitor on a certain ad channel. The nearest competitor was actually a reseller partner so with this less impact the major brand was giving up some serious profits just by the way they were positioning their offer in the marketplace.

4. Leverage and low hanging fruit

We take all the data and then look at your own site and process for low hanging fruit. The quick wins where we can start testing to see a big initial impact.

5. Split testing and improvement plan

Once we have all the data, the leverage points, and gathering data needed we can roll out our improvement plan and begin cutting and testing on-site and within traffic campaigns to improve the overall process.

There you have it… some conversion rate optimization best practices to help you achieve some improvements in your campaign.

If you have questions, need help analyzing or critiquing a campaign, feel free to reach out to us as we are happy to help.