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Understanding and optimising website conversion rate is essential for businesses seeking to maximise leads or sales and drive revenue.
If a business is investing in digital marketing to drive traffic to their website (via channels such as PPC, ads on social media, or investing in SEO), the website needs to then convert that traffic to leads or sales in order to provide a positive return on marketing investment.
Improving conversion rate involves a variety of strategies and businesses may even invest in a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) specialist to help maximise the return of their website traffic. In this blog we’ll discuss some of the CRO considerations businesses should be looking at first and foremost.
What is website conversion rate?
Website conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, booking a demo call, or filling out a contact form. It is a crucial metric for assessing the effectiveness of a website in achieving its goals.
By continuously monitoring and optimising conversion rates, businesses can refine their online presence to better resonate with their target audience, increase engagement, and ultimately drive more meaningful actions that contribute to their bottom line.
How to calculate website conversion rate
To work out a website’s conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of website visitors and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
For example, if a website receives 5000 visitors in a month and 250 of them make a purchase, the conversion rate would be 5%.
A higher conversion rate indicates that a larger proportion of website visitors are completing the desired actions, which ultimately translates to increased sales, leads, or other key performance indicators (KPIs).
What is a good website conversion rate?
A good website conversion rate varies across industries and depends on specific goals. However, generally, a conversion rate of 2% to 5% is considered average, while rates above 8% to 10% are exceptional.
Factors influencing conversion rates include industry competitiveness, target audience behaviour, and website optimisation efforts. Reviewing your own website’s conversion rate on a regular basis can help determine benchmarks and set realistic goals for improving conversion rates.
How to improve website conversion rate
Converting website visitors into paying customers or leads is the ultimate goal, and there are numerous strategies you can implement to improve your website's conversion rate. Here are 11 effective tactics to enhance your website's performance and drive more conversions:
1. Optimise Website Speed
Ensure your website loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices. Slow-loading pages can lead to high bounce rates and decreased conversions. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix speed issues.
2. Create Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons
Make your CTAs stand out by using contrasting colours, clear and action-oriented language, and placing them strategically throughout your website. Experiment with different CTA designs and placements to find what works best for your audience.
3. Improve Website Navigation
Streamline your website's navigation to make it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for. Use clear menu labels and logical page structures to guide users through your site smoothly.
A nice added extra is to use ‘you may also like’ add-ons on product pages to help users quickly navigate to similar or complementary services and products. This can also help increase cart size and order value.
4. Implement Live Chat Support
Offer live chat support to assist visitors in real-time and address any questions or concerns they may have about purchasing or handing over their contact details. Personalised interactions can help build trust and encourage visitors to take the desired action.
If live chat isn’t an option for your business right now, providing a thorough FAQs section can also help website visitors during their journey to conversion.
5. Optimise Landing Pages
Tailor your landing pages to specific audience segments or marketing campaigns. Ensure they are visually appealing, relevant, and contain persuasive copy that highlights the benefits of your products or services.
6. Utilise Social Proof
Hearing from happy customers goes a long way in persuading users you are the right business for them to hand over their hard-earned money to.
Display customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies, as well as any trust badges or certifications your business holds, to establish credibility and reassure visitors about the quality of your products or services. Social proof can significantly influence purchasing decisions and boost conversions.
7. Simplify the Checkout Process
Minimise the number of steps required to complete a purchase or sign-up. Offer guest checkout options, eliminate unnecessary fields in contact forms, and provide multiple payment methods to reduce friction and improve conversion rate.
If you are an ecommerce business selling a higher-value product you could also consider offering your customers buy-now-pay-later options such as Klarna or Clearpay.
8. Optimise for Mobile Devices
We are in a mobile-first world, particularly if you are a B2C (business to consumer) business. It's crucial to ensure your site is mobile-responsive and provides a seamless experience across all screen sizes. Test your website on various devices to identify and fix any issues.
9. Create High-Quality Content
Develop informative, engaging, and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. This could be product or service guides, product or service comparisons, ‘how to’ videos, listicles - anything that your customers will find informative, useful, or inspiring.
Quality content not only attracts visitors but also increases trust by positioning you as the expert, encourages them to stay on your site for longer, and take action.
10. Implement A/B Testing
Continuously test different elements of your website, such as headlines, images, CTAs, and layouts, to identify what resonates best with your audience and drives higher conversions.
A/B testing can provide valuable insights for optimisation. For advanced testing there are a whole host of CRO tools on the market, but if you are just starting out with measuring and optimising conversion rate then Google Analytics is a great start (and free!)
11. Track and Analyse Data
Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 to track user behaviour, monitor conversion metrics, and identify areas for improvement. Conversion rate may differ between traffic sources (for example, Google Ads traffic may convert at a higher rate than Meta Ads), which can inform your strategy for individual channels and campaigns.
Regularly analyse data to understand user trends, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions to optimise your website for higher conversions.
In Conclusion…
Remember that improving conversion rates is an ongoing process that requires experimentation, monitoring, and adaptation to evolving user preferences and trends.
Conversion rate is also dependent on the quality of your traffic. For example, if you run Google Ads campaigns which are driving lots of poor-quality and low-relevance traffic to your website, even the best website in the world won’t convert those users with a high conversion rate.
If you'd like to improve the conversion rate of your Google Ads campaigns to drive more leads and sales, check out PPC services from Elevate PPC or book a discovery call with Becky.