Conversion and Conversion Rate Optimization?

Let’s say you are running a retail store. You have people coming in and going out. Some may make a purchase while others just leave without spending money. To maximize your sales, you may make some changes to your store, like improving: The store layout, inventory levels, merchandising mix and more.

Now apply the same idea to an eCommerce website. Similar to the retail store, you have visitors. When one of these visitors makes a purchase, it’s called a conversion.

Broadly speaking, a conversion is every time a website visitor completes any desired action.

The desired action can be buying a product, signing up for a trial, applying to your school, When your conversions are low, just like you can imagine a store making changes to their layout or merchandise, you can make changes to elements in your website. This way, your visitors feel more comfortable spending money and more people convert. And that is basically what Conversion Rate Optimization is.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your overall website design to raise your conversion rate. In other words, the goal is for the highest possible percentage of visitors on your site before diving into the world of CRO and all that it has to offer, let’s understand the basics. Site Goals Conversions are visitors taking a desired action and these actions are called site goals.

Site goals are website actions that align with the overall business objectives of the company. For instance, for a website like Amazon that sells products, an obvious site goal would be the sale of one of its listed products. A sale is a primary site goal in this case. However there are other actions a visitor can take on the website, which may eventually lead to a sale, like signing up for an email list or downloading an ebook. This is a secondary site goal, because it doesn’t directly result in a sale but this helps you promote the product at a later date.

Micros and macros:

When a visitor achieves a primary site goal, it is called “Macro conversion” and when they achieve a secondary site goal, it is called “micro conversion”.

Let’s consider Amazon again. A sale, which is the primary goal of Amazon, is considered a macro-conversion. On the other hand, if the visitor doesn’t make the purchase but chooses to add a product to a wish list, which is the secondary goal in this case, then this is considered as a micro-conversion.

Keep in mind that the achievement of the secondary goal or micro-conversion is also really important because even if your visitor is not ready for macro-conversion right now, they might be in the future.

And that’s why conversion rate optimization involves optimizing your website for both macro and micro conversions. Is there a checklist of items that every website can do to optimize for conversions? Every website is different with different objectives. Amazon sells products; a magazine company might sell subscriptions. The buying behavior will differ so figure out your business objectives and identify your unique site goals.

Will CRO affect your bottom-line that much?

There are lots of ways in which employing CRO techniques will positively impact your website and business.

Understanding your audience: As you optimize your website to see what works and what doesn’t, aside from increasing the number of conversions, you also gain valuable insights about your audience like their behavioral patterns – what do they like and dislike, what they most engage with, and more!

Acquisition of new customers: Once you understand your key audience, you can start using relevant content to attract them, which will drive up the number of visitors to your website who are then more likely to convert.

Identify blockers to conversion: CRO techniques take the guesswork out of design, development, and content decisions. While websites are designed with the best intentions in mind, these intentions are not always communicated effectively and could send the wrong message to users. This could well mean the difference between a conversion and a drop-off. CRO identifies these spots with actual data, and helps you find solutions.

Focus on existing customers: Turn your one-time audience into repeat customers by giving them a customized and engaging platform. Identify the drop-off points and enhance the experience there. Even the smallest tweak to an existing element on your website can have a significant impact, and thus is an excellent way to maximize conversions.

What are the typical barriers to conversion?

There could be any number of reasons why someone chooses not to convert on a website.

Lack of trust: Increase of fraudulent websites online has caused customers to be wary of them. Consider the psyche of someone shopping online, and evaluate your website from their perspective.

• Does it convey trustworthiness?
• Are there reviews from other customers on your website?
• How do they know you’re not out to con them?

Address these questions with adequate communication, and with a transparent security policy.

Poor communication: Make sure that all the critical information about your product or service and your company is available and easily understandable. For instance, when purchasing a physical product, most customers would want to know the shipping policy in place.

• Is shipping extra?
• What countries are serviced? And so on.

Leaving out this information would most likely result in a missed conversion, so get that in check.

Bad design or UX: Have a responsive website design that looks neat and seamless on both a desktop computer and a mobile device. Not having so can create a frustrating experience for the customer which can result in loss of conversions. Similarly, offering a poor user experience can also affect website performance. Make the buying process as crystal clear as possible for the user with minimum distractions.

Conversion Rate Calculation? How to measure conversion rate?

If a user can convert each time they visit the website:

Imagine you own an ecommerce site — Digitalyze Me. A user could make a new purchase each session. You want to optimize so they make as many purchases as possible. If a user visited the website three times, that would be three sessions — and three opportunities to convert.
Let’s discuss at your user’s three sessions and how they behaved:

• Session 1: No conversion — user was familiarizing themselves with the website and around.
• Session 2: User bought a new T-shirt. This is a conversion!
• Session 3: User came back and bought a new set of socks and a shoe — another conversion! Even though they bought two items, this is a single unique order and thus counts as a single conversion.
  To find out your conversion rate, you should take the number of unique purchase orders and divide it by the total number of sessions.

For your imaginary user, they converted two out of three times they came to the site:

To find out the conversion rate for your website, you’ll look at all unique orders divided by the total number of sessions.

If a user can only convert once:
Let’s suppose you owned a second website — Bloom’s Weekly Flower Subscription Box. Your site sells a subscription for a weekly delivery of flowers. A user could come back multiple times, but once they purchase a subscription, they won’t convert again.
Let’s look at an example of a user’s behavior:

• Session 1: User came to the website for the first time to explore the service. No conversion.
• Session 2: User subscribed to your service -“this is your conversion!”
• Session 3: The user came back to read blog articles and poke around.

Your users here can’t convert each time they visit the site. So instead of looking at the number of sessions, you need to measure conversion success by the number of visitors:

To figure out your website’s conversion rate, you should take the number of unique orders and divide it by the number of unique users.