What is Conversion Optimisation and Why You Need It?7 min read

If you’re digital touch points aren’t converting, what’s the point?

Every website, digital marketing or any digital activity should be conceptualised with your business goals and outcomes in mind. Your goals need to met to be viable, which is where the term ‘conversions’ come in. A conversion is when you get a successful fulfilment of one of your goals. All businesses should be tracking their goals religiously and always aim to improve conversions on the ones that will positively impact the business.

Goals and conversions

In your digital business, your goals may include:

• Driving leads to your sales team by submitting a form, engaging live-chat, or by calling your sales phone line (lead generation),
• Selling products via e-commerce,
• Building brand awareness,
• Signing up for a free or paid subscription (such as a newsletter), 
• Downloading something (software trial, e-book, mobile app), 
• Micro-goals such as time on site, repeat visits, total pages visited,
• Or it could be a combination of these.

If, say, you wanted people to fill out a form to enquire about a new service you are offering, every person who completes that form counts as a conversion.

How do I calculate my conversion rate?

Your conversion rate is the percentage of conversions per visitors you receive in a set amount of time. Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%. Depending on how mission-critical this goal is you will want to monitor your conversion rates regularly; maybe daily, weekly, or monthly. Ask us about our Business Intelligence (BI) platform to help you do this effortlessly.

When considering conversions, we measure at different levels – micro and macro.

​​Micros-conversions (or micro-goals) are steps or correlated actions that a user takes that can lead to a macro conversion or goal. At the micro-conversion rate level, we measure small wins that can move your audience towards taking definitive action.  For example, how many visitors came to your page, take the next step to complete the desired results. If you’re running an e-commerce website, you would measure the number of visitors to a product page who would click the ‘add to cart’ link. For every 1000 visitors per day, if 200 click on the add to cart link, then your micro-conversion rate is 20% for that day.

A macro-conversion rate marks the percentage of people that complete an order per visitors of the page. Going back to the example of the e-commerce website, if, only 150 out of the 200 viewers who added a product to the cart go ahead and complete the order, then the macro conversion rate is 150/1000 or 15%.

Micro and macro conversion rates work the same for almost all websites that have a call to action (CTA). In some cases, a viewer of a site might click on a subscribe link but fail to fill in email and other details required to complete the subscription; that is a micro-conversion. When a viewer goes ahead and completes all the fields in a subscription form and finishes the process, that is a macro subscription. Same is the case with downloads, signing up for online courses and so on. However, in cases where you are just trying to drive web traffic or get someone to read a blog, a hit to the website is a conversion by itself.

How can we improve our conversion optimisation process?

Now that you have a better idea of what conversion rate is, you need to know how you can improve it. Conversion rate optimisation is that process of increasing the percentage of conversions per clicks on your website. Conversion rate optimisation is a digital strategy that, when executed correctly, can vastly improve the sales, downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, and so on.

Certain practices, when followed, help increase conversion rate optimisation. These practices are tried and tested methods and are being used by the top companies around the world to increase conversion rates. We look at ways of conversion rate optimisation in more detail here:

Evaluating customer behaviour

With the help of micro-conversion rate and macro conversion rate, you can understand customer behaviour a little better. You can determine at which point customers are getting stuck. From this point, you can further investigate what is going on. If you have a high micro conversion rate but a low macro conversion rate, then you know that the problem is somewhere closer to check out. However, if you have a flat, micro conversion rate, to begin with, you need to asses your product/landing page. 

Evaluating what makes customers convert

When macro conversions are high, it is imperative to understand your success formula so that it can be replicated. The different types of factors you need to look at include:

• User demographics and psychographics
• The overall user experience/ journey to complete the goal
• The time of day/month/year you get maximum conversions
• Is this a returning customer, or a new customer?
• Is the product or service new or an old offering?
• Do any particular marketing efforts correspond to the results?

Looking more closely at these areas will help you understand what pushes your conversion rate up.  

Evaluating what prevents conversions

When micro-conversion rates are low, you need to take a closer look at the product or service you are offering. Why do people come to your website but then decide not to buy a product or sign up for a course? Were they expecting something different? Did they find the price too high? Will they complete the order from another device? Find the answers to these questions. 

If you have a high micro conversion rate but a low macro conversion rate, you may need to re-evaluate your product or service or the user experience or journey to complete the goal. Check for things like it being difficult or a poor experience to complete the goal, and bugs that prevent the process from reaching completion. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and test the entire process from start to finish. User tracking software can be especially useful here to record ‘how’ people are using your site.

Improving conversions

Once you know how and why your conversion rate is getting affected, you need to do what it takes to correct the problem.

We often create a set of hypothesis to answer questions to issues and split (or A|B) test the results. Never assume you know, let data show you the way.

Creating great customer experiences that allow your users to achieve your desired goals is more important than ever. People are time-poor, and often find technology challenging, so if you are providing a poor experience, they may choose to use a competitor over you. Asking customer feedback strategically can help you improve your conversions.

Sometimes price can be a barrier to conversions. If possible, test out running a deal or offer a small discount (*but always make sure you understand your costs of sale). There are many other ways to improve conversion rates, some quick and easy, others take time and testing. It’s important to know ‘what’ you are trying to improve and to test scientifically with data speaking as the results and way forward.

Assessing competitor websites

Never underestimate your competitors. If they are beating you at the same game, it might be worthwhile to study what they do differently to you. If you’re going to be assessing your competitors, always put yourself in your customers’ shoes first. Things to observe include pricing strategy, design elements and the customer journey, tone of voice and even their target audience. In effect, you want your competitor’s customers; so, learn how they get them.

Why you need conversion rate optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation is what drives a business. If you are not getting your audience to take the desired action, you will miss your targets. Conversion rate optimisation helps you to assess different areas of your website so that you can fix all areas that are not conducive to driving your profits.

Get in touch with the team at Liquid Digital to optimise your conversion rate.