Conversion Rate Optimization (What is it?)
How can you lower your Bounce Rate with Conversion Rate Optimization
If you have decent traffic on your website design, but not a lot of conversion on your site, you need conversion rate optimization (CRO). The first step is to find out why your bounce rate or exit rate is high.
With Brenan Greene in El Dorado Hills, we are going to share some of the things you should consider when trying to pinpoint the problem with your bounce rate.
Bounces or Exits?
They’re practically the same thing, but there are important differences that matter a lot when it comes to troubleshooting your readers’ user experience.
- Bounces happen when people come to your site and then leave without reading, interacting, or clicking on another page within the site.
- Exits happen when people come to the site, read for a bit, maybe click around on a few different sites, and then leave without responding to your call to action.
Exits and bounces can both be created by closing the tab, closing the window, clicking “back,” entering another URL, or letting the session time out.
Obviously, every visitor is going to leave at some point
Your exit rate is a problem if:
- A) Your visitors are leaving without responding to your call to action (buying, subscribing, or whatever it is you want them to do).
- B) A significant number of visitors are leaving from one page in particular.
If you are having an exit rate problem with your eCommerce Website Design, check the page with the high exit rate for offensive content, inactive links, or anything else that might be spoiling the user experience.
Bounces, on the other hand, indicate either that something is wrong with your site in general or that your site is not what your visitors expected when they clicked over.
Start with basic troubleshooting
The first thing to check is what your site looks like and how it performs from the user’s perspective.
- Do the pages load fast?
- Do the graphics fit where they are supposed to?
- Do the links work?
- Is there anything on the site that is malfunctioning?
Check the logic of the page.
- How easy is the page to navigate?
- Is it cluttered?
- Can your users find what they need to find?
- Is there an obvious flow that guides visitors through what you want them to do?
Have a friend help you with this section, ideally someone who does not already know how to use the site. In fact, if you can enlist the help of someone who is hopeless at computers it’s even better, because that will show how accessible your site is even to your least tech-savvy customers.
Direct your assistant/guinea pig to your site and ask them to perform a task – usually, the task that you want your visitors to complete, such as purchasing a product or subscribing.
Ask for feedback on what was easy, what was confusing, what was frustrating, if anything needs to be changed, and how long it took.
Check your calls to action.
You want it to be obvious what you want visitors to your website to do. If you are selling something, put up a big button that says “Buy now.” If you want your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed, put up a big button that says “subscribe.”
Of course, this means that you need to know what you would consider conversion to be. You need to be clear in your own mind what exact actions a successful website visit includes. If you aren’t sure what you want your visitors to do, come up with an answer to this question before you proceed.
For some people it’s painfully obvious but for many website owners it’s a question they have not considered before: what is your conversion? What do you want your visitors to do? If you’re not clear on this your visitors won’t be clear either, and confused visitors are a lot more likely to just leave.
Make sure your ads match your site.
If a lot of people are clicking through on ads but are then leaving immediately, you probably have some inconsistency between your ads and your site. Your ads are promising something that your site is not delivering.
Remember, the goal is not just to get traffic to your site. You don’t gain anything from deceptive ads that get a ton of clicks by promising something you don’t deliver. It doesn’t matter whether you mean for your ads to be deceptive or not.
You need to find where the disconnect is between what your customers expect from your ads and what they find on your site. Be accurate in your advertisements, even if you think they will generate fewer clicks. Besides, you’re paying for those clicks so you want them to be high quality, right?
Let Brenan Greene in El Dorado Hills take care of your Conversion Rate Optimization.
If you are looking for a way to maximize your conversion rate on your WordPress Website Design or Magento Website Design in Sacramento, trust Brenan Greene in El Dorado Hills with your CRO. We will make your site a clean navigation machine, we’ll get your ads optimized to bring in high quality, high-conversion clicks, and we’ll get you up on search engine rankings so customers can find you. All you’ll have to do is sit back and watch the results roll in.
