We think it’s pretty safe to assume you want your business to make as many sales or generate as many leads as you can. Whatever your goal for growth is, you can’t reach it without increasing the number of customers who take that desired action.
This process is known as conversion rate optimization, or CRO. It involves calculating how many of your website visitors take the next step, and then implementing various tests and tweaks to your strategy to improve that number.
Here, we’ll explain how to increase conversion rate and share some motivating examples and best practices so you can improve user engagement and grow revenue.
Here’s a common CRO definition: Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the number of users who take a specific action on your website. These actions you want users to complete are called conversions. CRO strategy focuses on ways to increase the percentage of your audience that converts by improving their experience with your business.
Why is it important to maximize conversions? It’s not enough to simply get users to your website. You’ve determined you want those users to then take specific actions that are crucial to your business's success.
When you convert more of your users, you may be expanding your reach, driving more sales, or acquiring new customers, according to Harvard Business School. Ultimately, conversion rate optimization in digital marketing boosts sales and drives profit.
Let’s back up for a second: Before you can optimize your conversion rate, you need to know what a conversion rate is. And it’s pretty simple: A conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a specific action on your website.
That action can look different depending on your business, industry, use case, and other factors. For example, conversions can include signing up for your newsletter, following you on social media, purchasing a product, enrolling in a free trial or info session, adding a product to their cart, purchasing that product, clicking on a specific link, and more.
No matter what conversions and metrics you’re tracking, the concept of conversion rate will always remain the same.
So how do you calculate conversion rate? There’s a simple conversion rate formula to follow.
Conversion rate = (total number of conversions / total number of visitors) x 100
Divide your conversions by your number of users. Multiply this number by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if your ecommerce store made 100 sales last month and had 2,000 visitors, your formula looks like this:
(100 / 2,000) x 100 = 5%
If, after some ecommerce conversion optimization, you have the same number of visitors but made 120 sales, you will have improved your conversion rate:
(120 / 2,000) x 100 = 6%
A rough ballpark for the average conversion rate is somewhere between 2% and 5%.
But a good conversion rate varies, depending on your industry, audience, and conversion goal.
In fact, that makes comparing conversion rates with other businesses almost meaningless. You’re better off focusing on improving your business’s conversion rate than comparing it to anyone else’s. Keep in mind even small bumps pay off: Increasing your conversion rate by just 0.5% can make a meaningful revenue difference.
The conversion rate optimization process can touch many different aspects of your brand’s website. Here are a few of the most high-impact places to start.
As the entry point for your user, a landing page is designed to convert, so you really want it to be successful. Make sure the most important and enticing information is displayed prominently at the top of your landing pages with clear, eye-catching calls to action (CTAs — more on those below!).
By tracking your users’ engagement with different aspects of these pages and continuously tweaking them for greater success, you can optimize the performance of your landing pages.
Ecommerce businesses need to actively track metrics for conversion rate optimization on these essential pages where sales are the top priority.
Consider:
A content marketing strategy gives you plenty of opportunities to add CTAs to blog posts, thought leadership, and other published content. When you circulate that content widely on various channels, you can convert more new and existing customers.
CRO for blogs usually involves carefully placed and strategically worded calls to action or inline forms that feel organic and natural within the subject matter.
Calls to action, or CTAs, take the guesswork out of conversion: They tell your user exactly what you want them to do next.
CTAs are usually links or buttons prompting a user to add a product to their cart, sign up for your newsletter, get a free sample, or take any other step. Make sure these links and buttons work and work effectively.
Test and tweak the color, location, and wording of your CTAs to optimize conversion rate.
While you likely have less traffic to your homepage than certain high-performing landing pages or even blog posts, your homepage is still a valuable place for CRO.
Like the display window at a brick-and-mortar shop, your homepage gives a user a first impression of your business. It’s also an opportunity to direct them to other pages on your site or even convert them right off the bat. Make sure your headlines, layout, and design encourage visitors through the funnel toward the action you want them to take.
Some users may navigate directly to your pricing page to cut to the chase, so this is another opportunity to optimize the impression you make. You can experiment with how the design of this page affects conversion rate. You may also want to add testimonials, clear information about contacting customer service, and various pricing structures to further entice visitors to convert.
When asking a user to fill out a contact form or other questionnaire, limit the barriers to them completing that action. Optimize by including only the absolutely essential questions and making sure your fields are easy to understand and fill in.
If you’ve done your own CRO audit and you’re ready to start optimizing some of the pages and functionalities above, here are several helpful CRO strategies to consider.
It’s essential to understand the needs and behaviors of your users if you want to encourage them to convert. Knowing their pain points, goals, financial situation, and more can help you optimize your conversion funnel.
You can learn more about who is visiting your site and their perception of your brand through:
Use the insights from this type of learning to hypothesize about which of the other strategies below may be most effective among your unique customer base.
You should have a clear understanding of and way to track your KPIs throughout the customer journey. This way, you can easily identify where users are getting stuck. This kind of funnel analysis can help you eliminate barriers and improve conversion rates. Triple Whale’s Funnel and Path Analysis can help!
Tracking the way your visitors engage with your website can look different depending on your brand. Some of the conversion rate optimization tools you might want to experiment with are heatmaps, session replays, and analytics tools that measure KPIs like bounce rate or session duration.
Heatmaps are visualizations of where users click or hover on a given page of your site. Note where they are most active and consider moving a CTA there or strengthening the CTA that’s already there. Note where they are least active, too. Theorize about why that might be, and make some changes to see if you can improve engagement in that area.
Session replays provide similar insight but in a video-like reenactment of a user’s time on your page. These can be especially helpful in identifying barriers to conversion.
Triple Whale can help you build the ultimate analytics dashboard with plenty of personalization based on your business and goals. Metrics like bounce rate can help you determine the stage of the funnel when users leave your site. Session duration can give you insight into how long they are contemplating a conversion and inspire you to try some of the other techniques on this list that might inspire them to take the leap. Other measures of engagement can help you pinpoint where you may be able to improve your user experience.
A/B testing involves collecting data on two different versions of an element on your website—like a product photo or a landing page headline—to see which one performs better.
Try A/B testing all sorts of pages and features of your site, such as CTA copy and placement, headlines, offers, product images, form questions, homepage imagery, landing page design, and more. The data you gather through this process will help you implement the highest-converting strategy in the short-term and help inform your creative approach going forward.
A call to action tells your visitor what you want them to do next in no uncertain terms. That means it’s really important that the link, form, or button actually works. Test and retest this functionality and closely monitor it for any bugs or issues or you’ll miss out on conversions.
CTAs should also be written in clear, concise, yet compelling language. CTA wording is a prime area for A/B testing so you can make sure this short-and-sweet messaging is working hard for you.
You can also A/B test placement, design, and format of your CTAs. You might want to consider in-line, text-based CTAs in your blog content, for example, as your audience may have banner fatigue from pop-ups, CTA buttons, and other visual elements.
Channel your customer for a moment: How annoyed are you when a webpage you’re trying to make a purchase on simply won’t load? Slow load times increase bounce rate and hurt conversion rate.
Tools like Google’s Lighthouse can help you quickly assess your website’s load time. Site speed is also a factor Google considers when it comes to search engine ranking, according to Moz, and improving your search engine optimization (SEO) also improves your CRO (more on that below!). Compressing large image files is one straightforward place to start if your site isn’t loading fast enough. (Ideally, pages should load in fewer than 3 seconds!)
Similarly, it’s a problem when a page isn’t set up in a way that’s easy to navigate, read, and shop on a mobile device. Carefully consider how images, text, and CTAs appear on phones and tablets and make the necessary adjustments to make these experiences more user-friendly.
About two-thirds of online retail purchases occur on mobile devices, according to Statista data. It’s no longer possible to get away with considering the mobile experience as an afterthought if you want to improve conversion rates. If you really want to see success in your ecommerce business, your approach should be mobile-first.
Search engine optimization (SEO) makes it more likely potential customers find your website when they’re searching online for a solution to a problem. Essential SEO practices like working specific search keywords into your URL, page title, meta description, and body copy play a big role in whether a search engine surfaces your brand toward the top of a search results page or lower down where users are less likely to click on it.
But so do factors related to CRO practices, like user experience and page load speed. That means CRO and SEO are inextricably intertwined. The best practices of both are ultimately about driving more sales.
Featuring glowing reviews from loyal customers can help build trust and encourage conversions among potential new customers. Consider featuring testimonials or case studies on product or landing pages where they can inspire sales, according to SCORE, a non-profit partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration. This is often a low-cost (if not free) method of conversion rate optimization!
Similar but more streamlined than testimonials, a simple but prominent customer rating—i.e. showing 4.9 out of 5 stars on a product page—can also encourage conversions among hesitant customers. CRO tools and platforms can help.
For example, Yotpo can embed these ratings on your pages and Fomo can bolster social proof by sharing real-time purchases from other users.
While you don’t want to overdo it on pop-ups, which can turn off some visitors, there’s no denying these tools are eye-catching and effective. Add a pop-up to high-performing pages or program one to be triggered when a user moves to leave your site, per SCORE.
The content can vary, depending on the action you want the user to take. It might highlight a sale, promote a newsletter sign-up, or offer an opportunity to chat with a sales rep, for example.
Embedding a relevant video on a product page or an intro to your brand on your homepage or other landing page is an opportunity to increase engagement, authority, brand awareness, and time on page among your users, according to SCORE. Improvements in all of these areas can in turn lead to an increase in conversion rate.
These banners, usually displayed across the top of a landing page or homepage, are also called notification bars or welcome bars. They’re typically used to attract a visitor’s attention fast because they appear at the top of the screen. You can use this real estate to announce promotions, sales, and other enticing offers that encourage conversions.
Welcome bars aren’t the only place you can encourage conversions with deals. Any opportunity you have to promote a limited-time offer is worth exploring. Deals and sales with clear end dates entice customers and may encourage conversions based on a visitor’s desire not to miss out on the opportunity.
Imagine a visitor arrives at your website from social media. They saw you offer a product they’re interested in, but it’s not immediately visible to them on your homepage. Naturally, they’ll turn to your search bar.
Make their hunt as seamless as possible with predictive functionality that suggests product results as soon as they start typing a few letters. Ease in finding what they’re looking for keeps users on your site longer and may encourage more conversions. Otherwise, they might get frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for and close the tab.
Speaking of avoiding frustration: Considering adding a live chat function to answer users’ questions in real time, especially on high-performing pages. This way, you can encourage and support conversions with stellar customer service exactly where they might otherwise leave the funnel.
One barrier you might uncover in funnel analysis is issues with checking out. If links don’t work properly, pages load slowly, certain payment types aren’t accepted, or users can’t easily adjust product quantity, for example, they might leave instead of completing their purchase. Avoiding abandoned carts is part of CRO!
That said, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to prevent all abandoned carts. But tracking them and following up gives you another opportunity to make a conversion. Create automations that send abandoned cart emails to users who left before converting.
Research from Baralliance suggests the open rate for abandoned cart emails is close to 50% and almost 19% of users will convert!
Even if a user didn’t abandon a cart, you still have a chance to recapture their attention after they leave your site. Track users who visit your site, especially your highest-converting pages. Then serve them ads for your products on Facebook, Google, and other platforms as they browse other online sources.
If the list above feels daunting, don’t worry: There are tons of easy-to-use CRO tools that can help you implement many of these changes. The goal is to automate wherever possible, but at the very least, simplify the CRO process. CRO tools often offer analytics, heatmaps, session replays, and more.
Triple Whale offers comprehensive conversion rate optimization via web analytics paired with AI tools for ecommerce CRO that constantly scan your site for opportunities to optimize, including funnel analysis, page speed monitoring, site search analytics, and more.
Here are some other top-rated tools for CRO:
You don’t have to take our word for it, though. These conversion rate optimization examples show just how much your brand can benefit from a little concerted effort.
Triple Whale provided data clarity and accuracy for this Italian beauty company’s expansion into new markets, including visualizations of the customer journey, product purchasing behaviors, and lifetime value data. This dramatically improved conversion rate: EcoBio Boutique saw 55% growth in YoY blended ROAS and 311% increase in YoY net profit.
The basketball team tapped into Triple Whale’s detailed data analytics to make improvements in their lifecycle marketing funnel approach. This funnel analysis resulted in more conversions among past purchasers, encouraging third, fourth, and even fifth purchases.
Landing page optimization platform Unbounce shared a case study about working with the travel company Going. A/B testing two versions of a simple CTA—“Sign up for free” vs. “Trial for free”—ultimately led to a 104% month-over-month increase in conversions.
You can often see several CRO strategies employed at the same time on the websites of major retail brands like Sephora. Hello bars announce current promotions to users arriving directly to their homepage. Pop-ups share opportunities to join the brand’s community forums, which provide the beauty retailer with opportunities for social listening and customer feedback. And customer reviews and ratings are featured prominently on product pages.
An often-cited example of CRO success is the story of Walmart’s first responsive website. Responsive sites render themselves optimally for whatever device a visitor is using, like a tablet or smartphone. Walmart.ca was the first responsive retailer site in Canada. Optimizing the mobile experience early and effectively led to a 20% increase in conversions, according to digital marketing training company Digital Vidya.
Different strategies above will work better for different businesses and brands. But there are a handful of conversion rate optimization best practices anyone can start with.
Try not to undermine your own success! Avoid these common CRO mistakes, otherwise you may compromise all your hard work.
If you’re concerned you could be making some of these or other common missteps, Triple Whale’s web analytics and Moby Agents can help make the CRO process less daunting.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the number of visitors to your website who take a specific action, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter or free trial. Landing pages, product pages, and homepages are all valuable places to start with CRO strategies like A/B testing CTAs, improving the mobile experience, implementing SEO best practices, shortening page load time, sharing social proof, and following up on abandoned carts.
Increasingly, brands are turning to AI to further streamline the process of CRO. AI can interpret analytics about your customer much faster than marketers, drawing out essential insights for you to iterate on in a fraction of the time. AI can make product page copy, CTA wording, and headline language more engaging. It can also improve the user experience in the form of chatbot support—and it’s already a built-in part of the CRO experience with Triple Whale.
Our web analytics highlight the metrics that matter, and our AI agents constantly look for conversion opportunities so you can optimize faster. Learn more and book a demo today!
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