Why Do Visitors Leave My Website?  Part 4

In our first article in this series on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) we looked at how to approach  CRO if you don’t have a lot of traffic flowing to your site.  Then in our next article we took a bit of a detour to offer you some help in increasing traffic to your site.

The third article looked at the astonishing relationship between CRO and revenue. If you double your conversion rate anywhere in the funnel, all things being equal, you will double your revenue.  If you’ve got that far, congratulations! 

Today, we’re going to assemble the people and the tools and we will give you a lot of links that we have found useful in our own journey to get you going on your own CRO journey.

And, as ever, if you need help or just a word of encouragement – get in touch – we’ll be glad to support you.   

Principles

Before we start there are some important principles to understand which will guide your CRO journey. HubSpot, outlines these 4 principles which help to explain what conversion rate optimisation looks like in practice.  Emphasis is ours:

CRO isn’t a magic fix.

CRO focuses on improving the website experience of your visitors. It’s not a magic formula to getting more customers. Even if your website experience is stellar, you still have to work on showing the value of your product/service in order to get customers.

Assumptions don’t matter.

CRO is all about data, and that is the only information you should rely on. No matter how many years of experience your web developer or UI designer might have, they can’t always know what’s going to work with your audience. CRO is all about using data-backed insights to make improvements.

Best practices and hacks don’t always work

You may find a lot of advice or quick tips to boost conversions online. Keep in mind: what might work for one website in a certain scenario might not work for your business and vice versa. The best conversion rate optimizers take best practices with a grain of salt and use their own data and insights to make decisions.

CRO is a continuous process

At a strategic level, CRO is an ongoing practice of learning and optimizing. To achieve sustainable growth, make sure you continue to practice CRO regardless of initial results. One positive change this month might not ensure optimal conversion practices overtime 

CRO: assembling the ingredients

Now let’s get on with assembling the ingredients.  Think of this as an elaborate festive CRO gateau.  Before starting a CRO project you will need:

A tasty team

You are going to need people to do this – either in-house or external and probably both.

It always starts with analysis. This is as important as the flour and eggs in your cake mix.  Lots of people think they can skip this step and it always ends up wasting time and money.  Please do this right!

Make sure you have someone on the team who is tasked with understanding the landscape and getting a handle on how people are engaging with you at the moment – and of course why they sometimes don’t.

You will also need copywriters to create the content you will use to attract your prospects and someone who can optimise your website design and content.  But do this as baby steps, incremental changes to the website are easier to measure and take less work.  CRO is a commitment over time not a single event.

Sharp tools

Now the chefs are in place, you need to gather your batterie de cuisine – your tools for the job.

If you’re not already using a suite of analytical tools here is a shortlist of ones we like.

• Google Analytics is an obvious place to start for any organisation serious about understanding the customer journey on your website.
• We use WebsiteGrader to keep an eye on your website performance – loading speeds, security, responsiveness and so on.
• We use SimilarWeb to compare your results with your competitors
• SEMRush is a great SEO tool to help discoverability – also has strong competitor analysis
• HubSpot is our favourite marketing automation tool plus it includes a variety of full funnel analytics systems that connect directly to the CRM allowing more detailed user-behaviour tracking than is available in Google’s free offering
• Some kind of way of implementing A/B testing for elements on your website. This will differ depending on the technology stack that you’re using but HubSpot offers this out of the box on their Marketing Pro tier and Google Optimize is also a good option for running experiments.
• We have also used Unbounce landing page designer. It also offers easy A/B testing facilities good design features for landing pages.

You may already be using others – it doesn’t really matter as long as they work, and you are familiar with them and ready to use them to analyse your data in this CRO endeavour.

I hope you found this list of tools useful.  The good news is, we’re nearly there!  Next week we’ll deal with a few key areas to understand: Conversion Path journey; A/B Testing and Strategic Focus.  The following week will be the last in this series.  We’ll conclude with a case study and some frequently asked questions.

That’s it for now! Don’t hesitate to get in touch if want more information.