How to improve your conversion optimization to get more paying customers

Only few internet entrepreneurs are occupied with conversion optimization. Instead, the focus often lies on leading as much traffic as possible to the website. Of course, this can work excellently and we too are in favor of attracting plenty of visitors. At a certain moment however, you will reach a certain amount of visitors that makes it questionable whether this will still lead to more sales. Perhaps you can get more profit out of better utilizing your current visitors. Welcome to conversion optimization!

What is conversion optimization?

Imagine: your website attracts 1500 visitors a month, of which on average 35 place an order. To generate more sales, it can be a tough, time consuming and maybe even an unrealistic job to double the traffic to your website to 3000 at a short notice. And what if you do succeed? Does that automatically mean more sales? No, you don’t have any guarantees. But what if you were able to better utilize your current 1500 visitors and manage to get 70 customers out of it instead of 35? Then you will have already doubled your turnover! That’s a lot more effective, right? You can realize this with conversion optimization: making the process your visitors have to go through when executing a desired action as flawless as possible so they don’t encounter any obstacle.

Optimal ordering process

Placing an order, filling in a contact form and requesting an offer are all examples of conversions. It is very important to set up these components of your website optimally, so website visitors experience an excellent usability. The average concentration of visitors is minimal and competition is fierce. Before you know, visitors have abandoned your website. When someone intends to convert, you obviously don’t want anything to bother him or her so the process can be walked through smoothly.

More revenue immediately with conversion optimization

It’s quite possible that you see the great benefits of conversion optimization and want to start immediately. But where do you start? First, think about possible bottlenecks visitors could experience when surfing on your website. How can you lead your visitor and potential customer as efficient as possible from the destination page to an eventual conversion?

Free conversion optimization tool

Not sure which of your pages qualify for optimization? Google Analytics can support you in identifying the ones that perform badly. When a page has a large amount of people leaving prematurely, the next page in the conversion process will have a lot less visitors. This can of course have several different causes. It could be a form that doesn’t function as it should or perhaps a 404-page is the reason. Also when there are no clear errors to be seen, the page could still be eligible for optimization. Tip: segment on aspects such as browser, device and visitor type (paid, direct, organic) in Google Analytics, because an error can only appear with a particular browser or device. Such errors remain hidden for you when you don’t segment!

Optimizing with heatmaps

For more thorough analyses, the complete Hotjar tool provides a perfect solution. This application gives valuable insights and in an innovative way it enables you to see how visitors navigate through your website. Think about functionalities as Heatmaps that visualize the behavior of visitors, visitor recordings that show mouse movements and clicks and form analyses that allow you to see which fields remain empty and which ones take too much time to be filled in. In the comprehensive Hotjar article we zoom in further into its functionalities and weigh the pros and cons of using this SEO tool.

Choosing optimizations

Okay, let's fast forward. Assume you've used the tools to highlight potential imperfections. Good going, but now the phenomenon of conversion optimization really starts. Because the fact that you know what has to be adjusted, doesn’t mean you know which elements have to be adjusted. You know which pages can be improved, but you still have to determine whether to use more appropriate colors, edit the text, change the layout or show other images. Perhaps optimizing a combination of different elements will bring about a higher conversion.

Do my adjustments lead to a higher conversion rate?

Now, how do you know whether the adjustments you’re about to make will lead to a higher conversion rate? Is it a matter of being patient and after a while comparing the before and after statistic? That method has its drawbacks since you can’t correct for the influence of external variables (such as nice weather or holidays). Moreover, if the adjustment would have a negative influence on the conversion rate, you surely want to reverse the action as soon as possible!

A/B testing with software

Luckily, there is software to help us out in doing some interesting testing. A/B testing to be more precise. With tools like Hotjar you can go live with two versions of your website. The original version of your website will be presented to half of your visitors and the other half will get to see the adjusted version of your website. This allows you to after a while determine whether the adjustment is an improvement compared to the original version or not.

Multivariate tests for testing multiple elements simultaneously

Do you want to adjust and test multiple elements at the same time? Then we speak of Multivariate testing. This can provide valuable insights, but it does result in needing a lot more test subjects (visitors) before having enough data to draw conclusions on.

Our opinion on conversion optimization

We believe that the sooner you start with conversion optimization the better. Lots of internet entrepreneurs are blinded by bringing in as many traffic as possible. Those extra visitors can be pretty expensive and it’s quite possible they aren’t even relevant and therefore don’t contribute to sales. That’s why it can be very rewarding to focus on improving the conversion rate, since it can increase turnover drastically. In practice however, people act on assumptions too much by randomly testing and even randomly making changes. It is of great importance to perform thorough research so you can base decisions on facts. Also don’t forget to perform a technical analyses and segment properly to discover hidden errors. Finally started testing? Then make sure you keep it going long enough, to make sure you have enough data to draw correct conclusions upon.

Perform your first analysis with Google Analytics or check out all the conversion optimization tools that we've used in the past and written a review about!