Increase conversion
Increasing conversion can be accomplished in two ways. You can increase traffic to your website, for example, through search engine advertising or search engine optimization. Or you can work on improving your conversion rate, so that you can realize more conversions from the same amount of traffic. We call this conversion optimization. This blog article discusses the latter way and explains in steps how you can achieve this.
Step 1: examine where the biggest disconnect is
Start by properly setting up a Google Analytics 4 account. So that you measure all the important conversion points on your website and also have insight into the previous steps. Then you can do a funnel or flow analysis on the website. The image above is an example of a flow analysis for an e-commerce website and consists of the following steps:
- Start of a session
- Viewing a product
- Add to basket
- Starting the checkout
- Purchase
The analysis provides the following conclusions:
- The biggest disconnect on the website is between the product page and adding to the shopping cart.
- The steps after that also show a large drop-off of almost 50% per step.
This analysis gives you some focus on where the website can be improved.
Tip: Do the analysis by device as well to identify any differences.
Step 2: analyze pages via heatmaps
To get a good understanding of the behavior at key disengagement points on the website, the advice is to look at heatmaps. You can collect these heatmaps by using tools such as Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar. You can get the following insights from heatmaps:
- How far do visitors scroll on a page and are all the important elements seen?
- What do visitors click on and what exactly do they not click on?
This provides insight into page behavior and can provide additional direction as to why visitors are dropping out on these pages.
Tip: do the analysis based on a longer period of time so you have more data.
Step 3: view various session recordings
After doing a flow/funnel and heatmap analysis, you know where the main abandonment occurs on your website. However, you don’t yet know why these visitors are dropping out here. That is why qualitative data sources should be used to map this out. A qualitative data source that can be used for this are session records, this gives the following insight:
- Insight into how individual website visitors go about the website.
The advice is to filter session recordings by where the biggest drop-off occurs. Look at 10 to 20 of them and make notes of the behavior you see. The disadvantage of session recordings is that you can’t make direct contact with your Web site visitors to ask why they show certain behaviors. The following steps will help with this.
Tip: also check out recordings with angry clicks on Javascript errors.
Step 4: run an exit survey
Survey tools such as Hotjarof Informizely have an option to run surveys on the website. To ask questions to website visitors based on certain behaviors. A commonly used survey is the exit survey. Where the questions can be as follows:
- Is there anything stopping you from contacting PureDigital?
The response rate to such surveys is often between 1% to 3%. This makes it very valuable for websites that get some volume of visits. Based on the responses, you get more insight into why visitors drop out of certain places on the website.
Tip: trigger the exit survey on desktop on exit intent and on mobile based on X number of seconds on the page.
Step 5: do a small-scale user test
The most valuable qualitative resource that can be deployed is a user test. This often consists of the following components:
- Briefing respondent
- Carrying out assignment
- Interview afterwards
The big advantage of a user test compared to other qualitative data sources is that you can interact directly with your target group. This allows you to question certain behavior that takes place during the user test.
Tip: Do a user test on the device most often used on your website.
Step 6: start optimizing
The combination of the previous steps ensures that you know what is going wrong on your website and why this is the case. You can then use these insights to optimize your website and thereby increase the conversion rate. The advice is to always optimize your website in a data-driven way. The options for this are as follows:
- Testing optimizations through A/B testing
- Doing a time over time analysis
Our advice is, whenever possible, always test optimizations via an A/B test. This is the only way to reliably say what the impact of an adjustment is. Don’t have enough data to A/B test? Then do a time over time analysis where you also use other data sources to show a difference in behavior. Think of a heatmap, user test or session recording.
Conclusion increase conversion
From our conversion optimization experience, we know that substantiated hypotheses are more likely to succeed. In this article we have explained to you in 6 different steps how to optimize your website. Still need help optimizing your website? Then feel free to contact us for a no-obligation analysis.
