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How To Set The Scenario To Improve Your Website Conversion Rate
Website conversion rate
by Steve Jackson
Do you have great numbers of well qualified traffic coming to your website but disproportionately
low numbers of sales? How about paid registrations? We have worked with a number of customers
who have the same issue. Upon reviewing their websites there doesn´t appear to be anything wrong
at first glance. The sites look professional, have nice graphics, seem to load well and work the
way they´re supposed to. The copy is well thought out, the content is well targeted and the sites
| Website conversion rate |
| Huge traffic doesn't mean good sales. The problem is
that your site can have low conversion rate. |
have good unique selling propositions. On top of all that the offers are backed by 100% guarantees
along with testimonials from satisfied customers smattered throughout the pages. So what on earth
is wrong? Why do we see websites with ridiculously low sales conversion rates at often less than
0.5%?
Getting higher than 0.5% sales conversion rate
A well thought out website might hit 0.5% or higher anyway without any extra work. More often
than not however problems exist within a process which forces the majority of visitors to work
harder than they want to. It really is that simple.
| Website conversion rate |
| Low website conversion rate may be caused by making
visitors work harder than they need to, in order to complete your target action. |
If you want to improve your conversion rates
you need to find out which processes or steps are causing the problems before people can actually
convert i.e. buy or register. By measuring how people use your website in particular the common
scenarios and paths they follow then you can start to figure out what your problems are.
Introducing the web scenario
Most decent web measurement systems these days allow you to set-up a scenario that is
likely to be frequently used by your website visitors. Take a typical shopping cart scenario.
Your visitor might arrive at your campaign landing page then add one of your products to his
| Website conversion rate improving scenario |
| You can improve your website conversion rates by
establishing action-to-action scenario for your visitors to follow. |
shopping cart. After this the ideal scenario for you is for the visitor to continue by filling
in his credit card details and confirming his purchase. This means you might have a scenario
which follows this path through your website.
Page 1) product_landing_page.php
Page 2) add_to_cart.php
Page 3) review_order.php
Page 4) add_details.php
Page 5) purchase_success.php
| Reasons of low website conversion rate |
| Website conversion rate may be low because your
scenario may not be quite clear and your visitors abandon it. |
What typically happens is that people arrive in large numbers at page one but only a small
percentage end up at page 5. This is a process and it´s what needs to be measured to find out
where people are leaving from the website. If you can determine where and how people leave your
shopping cart process (also called shopping cart abandonment) then you can attempt to do something
about it.
Shopping cart abandonment
Let´s assume that you have a similar process to the one described above and you have a
measurement system that allows you to see how many people visit each page. In two of our recent
cases we have seen statistics which resembled these figures.
| Measuring website conversion rate |
Measuring the number of visitors to key pages in your scenario
may help you identify bottlenecks by studying abandonment rates on each step.
Learn about website conversion rate tracking software.
|
Step 1) product_landing_page.php ´ 10,000 visits.
Step 2) add_to_cart.php ´ 8000 visits (20% abandon)
Step 3) review_order.php ´ 240 visits (97% abandon)
Step 4) add_details.php ´ 120 visits (50% abandon)
Step 5) purchase_success.php ´ 40 visits (66% abandon)
Let´s examine those figures in a little bit more detail. Firstly 10,000 visitors arrive at the
landing page. About 20% of those visitors leave from the landing page without adding anything to the
shopping cart. From the remaining 8000 who added the product to the cart only 240 have gone one step
further and reviewed the order (3% of the remaining 8000). After that a further 50% left the process
when you asked them to give you their credit card details and a further 66% have bailed out at the
last point. This means that from a potential 10,000 purchases you have only 40 buyers. A pitiful 0.4% conversion rate.
Examine the biggest bail out rate
Suddenly you can see why even though large numbers of traffic have arrived at your landing page
only a small percentage buy and the biggest problem is because of one part of the process between
step 2 and step 3. If you can reduce the number of people leaving at this point to lets say 50%
(very doable by the way) then your figures would now look like this:
Step 1) product_landing_page.php ´ 10,000 visits.
Step 2) add_to_cart.php ´ 8000 visits (20% abandon)
Step 3) review_order.php ´ 4000 visits (50% abandon)
Step 4) add_details.php ´ 2000 visits (50% abandon)
Step 5) purchase_success.php ´ 660 visits (66% abandon)
| Website conversion rate |
| Measuring your website conversion scenario is crucial
for improving your conversion rates.
|
That would mean a fantastic increase in the numbers of buyers. Instead of a 0.4% conversion rate
you now have a 6.6% conversion rate. You basically have the same advertising spend to drive the same
numbers of traffic but you have a much improved return on your advertising spend. This is one reason
why measurement is so important because without measuring the scenario you would never know the problem
existed.
So how do you improve the scenario?
| Improving website conversion rates |
| Ask yourself a question if your website is damaging
conversion rates by making visitors' actions unnecessarily difficult and where it is likely to happen.
|
That´s the million dollar question and in some case we´ve worked on it really can be worth a
million dollars or more. The follow up article to this one is going to show one such improvement
in detail however it´s impossible to say why people might be leaving your site in similar numbers
without a detailed study of the problem pages. We´ve found it´s usually because the website is
making things un-necessarily difficult for the website visitor. They might have scary looking
forms to fill in, or moving from the shopping cart to purchase page might not be obvious. The
point is that web analytics systems can point out these problems so that you can attempt to
figure out what is wrong.
In summary web analytics does 2 things well
| Website conversion rate |
| Using web analytics tools
can help you identify problem areas and increase conversion rates. |
Using web analytics tools allow you to establish facts and begin developing scientific tests.
Firstly you should establish the facts so you may find out where your problems are as we
illustrated in this article. Then once you have determined where your problem areas are you can
begin working on improvements. If your improvements make it easier for your visitor to move to the
next step of your purchase scenario (in this case) then your next test should try to improve the
next step and so on until you have the abandonment rate as low as possible.
| Our credits to the source/author of this article:
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