As more and more businesses enter the digital race to maximize their marketing strategies, whether it be through the organic methods of search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click campaigns (PPC), one important factor hanging on the mind of any business savvy individual is: What do you do with the data tracked by your analytics program, and what are the benefits for using such data?
At the end of the day, page clicks and website traffic can only get any business—big or small—so far. What matters most is that visitors to your website are taking the actions that contribute to your business goals and bring in an overall return on investment (ROI). In that context, what do those actions look like? Here are a few examples:
– Requesting a quote
– Purchasing a product
– Purchasing a subscription to a specific service
– Signing up for newsletters
Actions such as the above which align with your business goals or contribute to your overall ROI are also known as conversions. While you can multiple site goals and your short term or long term site goal doesn’t necessarily have to be the purchase of a product or a service, essentially one conversion equals to one desired action taken by the website’s visitor. Therefore, a conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who perform desired actions on your website versus the overall number of visitors who stream through your business’s website.
In this article, we’ll go over not only conversion rate optimization but also its benefits, dissecting all the tech lingo in a simple and straightforward manner so even the new business owner can be up to speed with the latest practices in digital marketing, and most importantly, with their digital competitors.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
You may be wondering: How does one calculate the conversion rate of their website? Despite the heavy usage of buzz words in the digital marketing industry nowadays, the equation for calculating your website’s conversion rate is relatively direct: simply divide the number of times users fulfill a desired action on your website with the number of overall visitors. The number you have left is the conversion rate for that specific action.
Conversion rate optimization is exactly as it sounds: optimizing the conversion rate for a specific action on your website. The goal of optimizing this conversion rate is to improve the desired results for your business, regardless if it’s having more folks register for your service or attracting new customers to a recently released product.
While the breadth of conversion rate goals may seem large, if not intimidating to those learning the ropes of digital marketing, we suggest focusing on goals that match your business’s needs, and if needed, taking some goals one step at a time. Like SEO and when it comes to analyzing any type of data, conversion rate optimization and increasing website conversions takes time as it is only with the passage of a span of time that you can notice trends, dips, and fluctuations in conversion rates, and thus appropriately assess the next step for your business to take.
What Are the Benefits?
Now that you’re more familiar with website conversions and how to calculate conversion rates, you might be wondering: what are the benefits to conversion rate optimization? What makes it so important that I should allocate time and energy to analyzing and using this data?
To make it easy for you, below we list out the top six advantages of conversion rate optimization and why you might want to consider it in the next marketing debrief with your team or when fine tuning your business’s website.
- SEO Boost
As a form of free advertising, SEO is valuable to all businesses but especially for starting business that have a tighter budget and are not able to invest in long, drawn-out PPC campaigns. By optimizing your conversion rate and polishing your websites in the areas that need it, you essentially work towards making a website that is more user-oriented and therefore more user-friendly.
Considering how Google’s algorithms focus on bumping up websites in search results that aim to be the most beneficial to the needs of search engine users, conversion rate optimization provides data which helps you take the actions toward this result.
- Improve user experience
While we’re not going to toot the debunked and often misquoted statistic that over 65% of individuals are visual learners, however, we do believe visually engaging users is important due to the rise of video marketing and the mass production of graphics in the past decade. Given the rise of these two mediums, it’s important to not just create a visually pleasing website—it has to be one that sticks out from the crowd and engages its visitors. Conversion rate optimization can lend a hand in keying business owners in terms of what pages might need a makeover and what pages are producing desired results.
- Customer Insight
What works? What doesn’t work? Both of these questions are key to any business practice, and in the context of driving your business’s digital marketing efforts through its website, conversion rate optimization helps in gleaming the ins-and-outs. With conversion rate optimization, you can especially note the language, graphics, and messaging that works in drawing in conversions and of course, the language, graphics, and messaging that don’t draw in conversions and might need some elbow grease later on.
4. Build Your Customer Base
No matter if you’re promoting your product on a local, national, or international scale, the Internet provides a market of millions and millions of users. Especially for businesses that wish to branch out and expand, this market has an untapped potential. Using conversion rate optimization, not only are you able to retain current customers by tracking purchase trends, but you’re also able to gain future customers by examining how users find your website and what products/services attract them to your business.
5. Keep Returning Customers
Consider this statistic from KPMG: 30% of consumers prefer to purchase products/services from a website they’ve bought from previously. When it comes to returning customers, not only is it customer loyalty but also customer feedback that makes returning customers valuable to any business. That’s why when retaining your current customer base, it’s important to not only produce new products/offer new services to rope in potential customers but also to create new products/services with your current customer’s needs and wants in mind. Conversion rate optimization is simply another tool you can use to gain access to useful data that points out these trends.
6. Polish Your Personal Brand
In the realm of digital marketing, many articles and content creators will often talk about your competitors and gaining the upper hand in the digital marketing foray. However, one issue with this is that competition is relative.
How one business performs in one specific industry won’t be the same as another business, even if that other business is in the same industry. This is because every business strives to promote its branding—among all the other businesses in a specific market, what is special about their products? What makes their services unique and stand out? What is it about their brand that brings in new customers and also maintains returning ones?
One key point to polishing your personal brand is to never adopt a strategy that another business is using simply because it’s what the competition is doing. Though it is important to know about the strategies other businesses in your market are employing and the general trends, focusing on what your business needs and its priorities are far more important as this is your brand, not another business’s brand.
This is where conversion rate optimization comes in handy: it’s a holistic focus of your business’s practices, but specifically in the context of your business. In reality, a business isn’t only just in competition with other businesses in its industry—it’s in competition with itself. While it’s true that a number of factors, many uncontrollable, can affect the desired results of your business, it’s only practical to focus on the factors that are in your control, regardless of whoever is analyzing the data, whether it’s you the business owner or a member of your team who specializes in digital marketing.
In the end, data is just data—an organized method of interpretation in tidy numbers. However, what makes data the most powerful is its potential: how it’s analyzed, how its interpreted, and how one makes the effort to react accordingly based on the information collected.
The same goes for conversion rate optimization. Simply calculating your conversion rate won’t necessarily give your business a head start in the game, but it can most certainly give you the springboard to make improvements to the language, design, and layout of your business’s website.
We hope with this article helps you to not only know more about conversion rate optimization on a deeper level but to also feel empowered to take the course of action your business ultimately needs in the digital marketing race.
