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So I’ve had a lot of questions lately about Conversion Rates and how to improve your conversion rate. So I figured since I can’t do this in on post I’ll dedicate the next few weeks to discussing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

First of all if you haven’t read my post called “Which is Easier: Doubling your Conversion Rate or your Traffic?” then read that as I think you’ll gain some good insight on why CRO is so important.

I’m going to try and break the posts up in a sequential format that make sense (at least I hope they do) so that each post will build upon itself. So here goes…

Week 1 – Track Everything…

While this may seem like a very basic tip, it’s the cornerstone of effective CRO. If you don’t know the numbers of your business you don’t know anything about your business. It’s virtually like throwing darts at a dartboard with a blindfold on.

There’s a good book (I have to admit that I haven’t read it…yet) called “Business at the Speed of Thought” by Bill Gates where he talks about making Date Driven Decessions and how most companies “guess” and make decisions without knowing the “data”. This is absolutely the wrong way to run a business.

If you’re going to create a business and not just a hobby then you need to start getting used to looking at and analyzing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Do I have your commitment that you wont guess but make decisions solely based on data? Good, I thought so…

Your KPIs… What to Track

Now that we’re on the same page about how important Tracking is now let’s talk about what to track.

Again since the focal point of these posts will be Conversion Rate then I’ll talk about the KPI’s that deal w/ CR.

Before I get into the KPIs you’ll need to have an analytics platform in place. There are several that you can chose from but, I would suggest using Google Analytics b/c it’s free (we like free) and it’s very robust.

If you need info on Google Analytics you can view my post “Setting Up Google Analytics“.

So, here’s the KPIs you should be tracking when you’re testing conversion rates:

1. Traffic (I generally look at the weeks traffic for a good sample size)
2. Conversion Rate (number of orders/actions divided by total visitors)

 

Those are you two top level numbers that you need to know. As you delve deeper into your site you’ll want to look at things like:

1. Exit Pages (you want to know where your customers are leaving)
2. Bounce Rates
3. Time On Site (how long are your customers spending on your website)
4. Click Paths (where are your customers going when they’re on your page)

All these numbers are provided to you when you set up Google Analytics for your website and are very easy to interpret.

Some Testing Tips

Now that you know which numbers to look at we’ll start getting into what to test (that will be starting next week). But before we get to that let me give you some tips to help you as you start testing things on your websites.

1. Keep a journal – you need to document everything (i.e. what headline you used, what color headline, what images did you use on the page, etc.)
2. Use the tools Google provides – Google provides some great tools for website owners to improve their sites conversions. The first tool is Google Website Optimizer which is one of the best free tools that allows you to very easily run split tests on your website. For example, using Website Optimizer you can have two different headlines running at the same time and then can determine which headline was better based on the data.
3. Test One Thing at a time – when you’re first getting started test one variable at a time. If you test too many variables then you don’t know what worked and what didn’t
4. Keep the GOOD, get rid of the Bad - if you test something and it works, great keep it in your site. If it doesn’t work, take it out of your site.
   
5. Be consistent – just realize right now that some of your tests will work while others wont. It may take some time to figure out what works and what doesn’t and that’s totally fine and normal.
6. Watch your competitors – one of the best places to get ideas to test is from your competitors (remember I’m not telling you to copy and paste their content, just their ideas).

We’ll that’s it for today. Next week I’ll get into some specific things you can do to improve conversion rates.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

Related posts:

1. Which is easier: Doubling your Conversion Rates or Doubling your Traffic?

Tags: conversion rate optimization, conversion rates, CRO, improving sales