You are missing out on extra sales! So, my awesome team at SEOgadget have crafted up a handy infographic for you on how get started in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO, and that's "optimisation" over here in the UK) to get the best ROI from your hard earned traffic.
We've developed and applied this methodology to help struggling businesses out of financially difficult situations all the way to adding hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue, per day, to become some of our largest clients.
We believe there are two paths to Conversion Rate Optimization. When we see companies fail in CRO, it’s because they’ve adopted random testing, guesswork, “best practice” changes and most fundamentally, they’ve chosen to avoid proper testing. We call this the bad path (queue Darth Vader’s Death March Theme…).
To get good at driving real change, you’ve got to define a CRO methodology. The real trick to improving your conversion is pretty simple: identify, and target the core barriers to conversion and then, scientifically test the changes. This is the good path (queue The Star Wars Force Theme) and the path that we advocate for all inbound marketers to follow…
Here's A Spiffy Step-by-Step Infographic
Check out our beautiful step-by-step guide in glorious technicolor. Would you like to see it in even more super-glorious HTML-O-Vision?
Check Out The Full Guide in HTML Here!
Embed this infographic on your site
So, What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Just think of CRO as detective work. It’s a lot like using a fine comb to pick off the weak points in your site’s conversion funnel, while building on its strengths. At the heart of conversion rate optimization is the notion of removing barriers to conversion. These are the forces stopping your site from converting visitors into sales.
Barriers to conversion can include usability errors, weak persuasive techniques and often, page relevancy issues. By learning about your customer’s objections – “barriers to conversion” you’re addressing the real reasons why people don’t convert. The most important part: CRO is a scientific process of diagnosis, hypothesis and testing. Why bother guessing when there are tools to really help you learn about your customers?
Why doesn’t guesswork, work?
Let’s say you own a store on the high street. You’re keen to increase your sales, so you paint the front door a different colour. That’ll improve things, right? Of course not! You’re not addressing the real reasons why customers aren’t buying your stuff.
The same applies to websites, changing the colour of your buttons will have no effect if people find your website lacking in credibility. Targeting the root cause with security logos and social proof (for example, reviews, accreditations, and associations) is a much better solution.
So, here’s how we do it at the GadgetPlex:
Step 1 – Set up Funnels
Setup your funnels and analyse the points where your users enter, until the point they exit. Try to identify the “missing links” or barriers to conversion. Find out where they abandon and create benchmarks for improvement. Tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture and Kissmetrics are great for creating conversion funnels. If you rely on phone conversions then tracking phone calls is pretty important. Tools such as ResponseTap (formerly AdInsight) and Mongoose Metrics are pretty comprehensive at phone tracking.
Step 2 – Analytics
Find out what’s actually happening when people land on your site, analyse what they do, what keywords they discovered you for and where they land. Obviously, tools such as Google Analytics are great at telling you this, but think about digging deeper. What browsers are your visitors using? What screen resolutions are most popular?
Usability tools such as ClickTale are also great for funnels and their form analytics reveal where users drop off along your forms. CrazyEgg is another simple and effective tool that we use for click density analysis. Usability testing tools such as Usertesting and Whatusersdo are a great way to see videos of people using your site and where they hit conversion barriers. Ethnio is handy at recruiting your own site visitors to participate in usability tasks.
Competitive data tools such as Hitwise and comScore can be really useful but come at a cost.
Step 3 - Barriers
To identify barriers to conversion, you’ve got to build up a profile of people’s objections and opinions.
Tools such as Kissinsights (Bought out by Catchfree, who are awesome), Pop-Survey, Kampyle are really good for page level surveys and pretty simple to setup. Live chat tools such Olark and LivePerson are useful for dealing with user problems instantly. Other survey tools such as 4Q survey, Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are really useful at discovering what your users are saying.
When it comes to using these tools we’ve found that all you really need is one question. Allow users to really express themselves by asking them an open-ended question. Acquire their email address (optional) for those that want their feedback to be responded to. Collecting an email address and promising a follow up really improves response rates, which allows you solve any objections early on.
Step 4 – Go Offline
If we know our target then the objective becomes easier. Study your website and understand your customers.
Speak to sales staff to learn the likely barriers they face when they sell and use the site. Your sales team deal with customers every day and uncover objections and seek to solve them in order to close the deal. The first time we did this we were surprised at just how useful this can be for exposing problems on your site.
Become a secret shopper and create scenarios i.e. rude customer vs. extremely polite vs. technically challenging - test how your staff deal with each scenario.
Finally, try actually phoning your own customer service number and see what happens. Test your customer services aggressively, as they can be the difference between retention and people going to your competitors. A 5% increase in retention can have an uplift of around 25 – 85% in profitability (Treytl 2002).
Step 5 – Prospect for Missing Links
It’s all about wheeling and dealing, discovering those hidden gems within your company and using them to grow sales.
When you apply for a job and have to send a CV or fill out an application, the employer knows nothing about you other than what is on that piece of paper or application (unless they’ve checked you out on Facebook). If you don’t sell yourself and mention all of your achievements, they won’t easily learn about you. The same rule applies for websites.
If you have loads of testimonials and expert reviews but don’t shout about it, then how will your potential customers know? Treat your website users like they’re the employer and impress them, tell them why they should buy, making the value proposition crystal clear.
Study your website carefully and consider what you’re missing. For example, showing expert reviews, customer reviews, testimonials, or even taking the time to build a community (just look at SEOmoz for inspiration).
Prospecting is really about selling your site to your users and using clever mechanisms to grow conversion rate and sales.
Step 6 – Strengthen Average Order Value (AOV)
There are so many ways to strengthen your AOV, which Fabian covered beautifully in this blog post.
As an AOV strategy, bundles work amazingly and it doesn’t even matter if you’re not strictly a retailer. Look at Unbounce for inspiration. They offer conversion bundles on their products joined with offerings from other companies which is a clever technique to offer a cost saving and acquire additional sales.
(Unbounce use “conversion bundles” as way to boost AOV and get more leads)
SEOmoz have a Pro Perks store (check it out).
Not all competition is competition, strategic partnerships can be a great way to grow and gain maximum exposure especially for start-ups.
Step 7 – Wireframe the Solutions
As soon as you’ve got a plan, list and prioritise the main conversion killers and derive solutions on how to fix it and increase conversion.
We use tools such as Balsamiq and Cacoo to wireframe the solutions and then prepare hypotheses for testing. Test scientifically, the most important thing to take away from testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t and to keep building structurally to increase conversion rate. No guesswork!
Step 8 - Testing
“One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions” - Admiral Grace Hopper (Wikipedia)
We love this quote because it really captures what testing is all about, forget about guesswork, opinion and egos (think: HIPPO) and instead, test your variations accurately.
We primarily use Google Website Optimiser (which is now becoming content experiments) and Visual Website Optimiser. There’s loads of split testing and multivariate software. But remember: it’s not the testing tool that increases your conversion it’s the ideas you put into it.
What we’ve learnt is don’t test too many things, instead create a clear structured hypothesis. Attach CrazyEgg or ClickTale to your variations to monitor the difference in click density and interaction between your pages. If you’re optimising forms then applying ClickTale to your variation pages is really useful.
Try running page level surveys on the variations and original page, ask the same question, and monitor the difference. Always test your variations in multiple browsers. Browsershots are pretty good for this. For mobile testing we use Mobile Moxie’s excellent phone emulator, which is really handy at testing across different phone operating systems and platforms.
Step 9 - Review
Review your test, analyse the analytics, click density and form analytics (ClickTale) and compare it to the original page, check the difference.
Tracking AOV and revenue is so important when testing. Structure your follow up tests and build on your success, or failure. Failure doesn’t always mean the test was wrong, it means the original is doing something really well, so learn and iterate. Apply your winning test candidates to other pages on the site (we always like to test these usually via a multi-page multivariate test), and then consider applying your learnings to other media channels such as magazines, adverts and brochure ware.
Step 10 – Rinse & Repeat
Repeat the process and keep building successful tests. Each time you test and find winning variations, you build up a portfolio of increases. Conversion rate optimization is an iterative process, which builds on the success of the previous test.
Follow this methodology and it will be extremely hard not to increase your site conversion. That’s how to get more happy customers and more happy customers equals more bang for your buck.
I hope you enjoyed our epic guide! Do check out the full HTML version of our infographic - and, in the meantime I'd love to hear how you're working CRO into the inbound marketing process! I'd like to say a special thanks to Fabian for his hard work on making sure this post happened, follow him on Twitter here!
Kudos Richard (and Co. at SEOGadget) for this great checklist-step-by-step-infographic.Because yours is not just an infographic, but a brilliant reminder of the correct flux of CRO (love the the scissors and dash lines detail).
Apart the description of the process, I consider that the other main value of you infographic + post is how you underlining how you are pointing out clearly that CRO it is not just a question of buttons' colors, but that it is all about knowing how your users are really using your site in order to realize a conversion, hence optimizing the process.
Finally, as once told you privately, let me share one note about users and reviews. One of my clients (an educational classified portal) noticed how their users, when a course has reviews and they are positives, tend to stay less time on page and click faster to the contact form, as if they were instinctively convinced of the goodness of the course itself.
You hit it right on the head, Gianluca. As a general rule of thumb, reviews are a great way to increase conversion. Using Amazon as an example, if you're looking to buy a product but it has no reviews, there is a level of "uncertainty" about it which may make you reluctant to buy it. However, if the product has 100 reviews and a 90% 5 star rating for example, it looks extremely credible and you can be more confident in your purchase.
Great infographic Richard and co!
This is the awesome sauce
Yet another fantastic post from the guys at SEOgadget. This is easily one of the best CRO post's I've seen on SEOmoz, fantastically indepth and very well presented.
Have to agree with Gianluca with regards reviews. They are great way to add crediblity and give users confidence in the site.
Thumbs up from me. This really is a credit to SEOgadget. I feel that it's great to reiterate the point of A/B testing as there is a relatively large amount of folk that don't do ANY and I find that shocking, it's so simple!
Totally - without A/B, CRO is crazy useless. Get the big wins tested and live with A/B, and then iterate on the winning candidate via MVT. I read recently "not to bother with A/B testing". I was almost paralysed with shock. :-)
I'm always wary of giving anything remotely like constructive criticism on here, because I always feel anyone that does so gets drowned out by the nauseating sycophantic responses from a certain group of regular commenters here.
However, I'm going to go for it today regardless. In my opinion, that inforgraphic wasn't particularily useful. You've tried to convey far too much information on a subject which needs to be kept simple in the first instance if it is going to be done properly. The thing is there is good advice in there, and in the post, but it is in my opinion incomplete and surrounded by too much non-essential information. I totally agree that a clear hypothesis after conducting research is the foundation of a good split test, for example.
"Build a community, create a platform for gamification". That kind of statement is the kind of language which makes a great sound-bite but is ultimately, in my opinion, meaningless. Not only is that exceptionally difficult to do, it is hardly a pre-requisite for accurate testing or indeed CRO in general. Yes, you can argue that this and other points in sections 5 and 6 are all just suggestions but since you've created the infographic in the style of a flow chart it implies you can't do any testing until you've covered off all these points previously.
I also don't find it particularly useful to suggest over 20 different tools to use in one post. Keep it simple, just recommend a couple, so that people don't get bogged down in researching tools rather than actually doing the work.
When it comes to testing you've also missed out fundamental advice as to the length of time a test will need to run for, and the variables which will affect this.
Richard, I saw you present last November at the Conversion Conference in London and I'm sure you would agree with me that if people want to really learn about CRO then they need to check out Bryan Eisenberg in the first instance.
Hi Big B,
There are some terrific article ideas in here, thank you for your comments.
Gamification is something we've written about and implemented extensively already - and as it's of interest to you I'm pretty sure you'll be aware of Thomas Høgenhaven who you should definitely watch in the coming months.
Regarding the required test length - and specifically the statistics behind calculating the real value of a test outcome is a massive topic. The model we use is proprietary to our company, but I'm sure we could put something together in the near future.
We have nothing but praise for Bryan, and the countless other practitioners in this part of the industry that make a truly valuable and noteworthy contribution.
Richard, first, I think your team created a very useful introductory guide for the community, and should be commended for that. More people will begin to work on CRO as a result, and that's all for the good.
However, I do agree with Big-B that more mention should be made of the importance of establishing a statistically sound DOE (design of experiments). And the bad news is that, while very achievable, you'll have to achieve buy-in for a test that runs until you've gathered a statistically significant data set. With multi-variate testing, especially, this can take several weeks, if not months, depending on the number of variables you're testing.
All this is to say, you need to make a sound business case for testing first (which is usually the easy part - the economics for CRO tend to be overwhelmingly positive). But then comes the more complex process of getting buy-in from all the necessary parties (execs, engineering, design, marketing, etc, and there will often be some bruised egos among the bunch who are convince the current site is "great"). Finally, you need to get enough budget and timeline to run a sound test.
Knowing the tools is certainly helpful, but the real work in CRO is creating a compelling business case and present it persuasively.
OK - that's totally cool.
When we're planning a CRO campaign, aside from the process described above, we also spend a lot of time and effort on the business model. We plan out a series of scenarios over a 12 month period with top line revenue incurred from additional conversion outcomes. This often occurs after an initial investigation into the funnel - in case we can see a "quick win" scenario early on.
Our test designs are based on the evidence base we build in the first few steps. They're also based on our understanding of persuasive design techniques - more on that later.
It's rare we'd launch straight into a MVT, for the very fact that you've pointed out - an outcome would take months. Why would we do this if the initial gains were obvious and achievable after studying our customers and, available within days of launching a test (and, yes - we do CRO on clients with 1,000's of transactions per day so a winning outcome can be achieved in days)
Yes - persuasion is one important and obvious tool in designing a variation. An understanding of decision architecture, behavioural economics, persuasive design are interesting fundamentals - the sort of knowledge that separates beginners from experienced practitioners. The list is quite extensive and acquiring that knowledge takes years of soaking up scientific papers and academic studies).
With that said, you can acquire a hell of a lot of real world CRO experience simply by listening to your customers!
Your last sentence sums it up perfectly. I don't disagree - in fact we often get invited to pitch to clients who to date, have achieved little if any uplift at no confidence whatsoever simply because they don't know what to test. In that case I often point out that all the tools in the world won't help if you don't know what to test.
I'd love to see your write up on presenting a viable business case and how this ultimately creates a successful conversion outcome.
Great post guys and great infographic as well! This is definitely something that every CRO should have posted to their door.
You should expect something extra ordinary from the superman of SEO like Richard Baxter…and he will do that. This is an awesome guide to Conversion Rate Optimization.
In the era where SERP rankings are not the ultimate goals of the businesses (few years back it literally was) a proper and complete guide to CRO was really needed.
I really like the idea of being a secrete buyers and test your staff to see how they react and deal with different kind of buyers who are coming to the website.
A special thank to Richard for bringing on board the list of quality tools for CRO!
P.S. without a second thought info-graphic is fantastic!
Wow, I'm chuffed and honoured! Don't forget this one is a team effort from my guys - so you need to shout the whole @SEOgadget team. Thanks so much for the kind words!
So this is what I call a great infographic!
The comprehensive guide is really a kick in the back to make it the right way. I have to confess we sometimes only stuck to the "bad path" and thought this was CRO - you just tought us the contrary.
Infographic will be printed out and pinned.
We're placing it all around the Marketing Department.
Nice article Richard. Thanks. I shared it on my Visual-Bookmarks page: https://pinterest.com/ezsteven/visual-bookmarks
I like the good visual graphics here at this site. Kudos.
All the best to you, SEOmoz, and your readers.
Steve Hotelling
"I wish ALL sites would 'Get more VISUAL' with icon-buttons & icon-links. They're Easier & Faster for the mind to find & follow than having-to-read text links."
Great concept Richard!! This guide is truly very helpful. I am really amazed by the great tips that you have provided and I do appreciate that. Thanks for the share!!
Great article! Just a quick fyi: (Bought out by Catchfree 404, who are awesome) seems to be a broken link.
Also, you mentioned a few great CRO services like ClickTale, etc..., and thought I'd mention one more. Teledini is a click to communicate service (think click to call, chat, and video), great for removing as many barriers between a client and the customer as possible.
^ unintended SEO broken link strategy in action (kind of)! Ha many great articles on that in the SEOmoz community, but seriously, Teledini is a good service as it no longer requires any installs for the site visitors to click right through to a live call with your sales/support people, worth a mention.
Now that's what call i a brilliant post on Conversion Rate optimization, like the whole post and enjoyed while reading, superb information shared by you, thanks.
Agreed. But the trick is to inform readers (us) a convenient way and Richard did it the best. (Thanks for infographic)
Nice and insightful. Talking about creating funnels, I discovered how I can use Google Analytics to monitor and know what's preventing visitors from converting and how to fill in those missing points, coupled with call tracking by Ringostat.
An epic guide! Brilliant job.
Refreshing to read something like this and a welcome break from posts listing advice like "make your buttons bigger. Make 'em green and, umm, yeh, get em shiny."
I am very happy to read this. This is the type of details that needs to be given and not the accidental misinformation that is at the other blogs. Appreciate your sharing this greatest doc.
Great Work! I just started following the SEO Gadget RSS feed and I have to say I am very impressed!
I love the part of the infographic about what not to do! This is really what is posted in many forums across the web by inexperienced SEOs, so it is awesome to have a pro SEO resource to finally prove this wrong.
All the best,
Nick B.
Aw, thanks Nick - appreciate that a lot.
For a newbie like me the process looks scary. But it is a wonderful guide and I will try my best to make the most out of it. Cheers Seomoz!
Great article Richard, and I liked that you linked to so many useful tools :-)
Hi,
thanks for the great post, Conversion is the basics of all the work we do, but sometimes we forget to improve the ROI due to sufficient conversions. But it is quite necessary to always check for the improvements. From now on I'll try to keep my eyes on on further improvements. What I always miss is rinse and repeat, but now I'll never miss that.
Thanks again to remind me for this.
This is an awesome guide on improving conversion rate. Getting tons of traffic is not just the solution. Lack of conversion means either site has not interesting content for engagement or missing the elements including the placement of call to actions items on landing page. I am writing on this topic to my blog and would like to share this post there.
nice to get all the things in one area
An excellent read Richard. One of the most innovative and informative infographic on this subject. Great work by other SEO GADGET members.
Hundreds of reason can be cited why a customer don't buy, or for that matter, don't convert on a website, like price, insecurity, uncertainty, non-availability of preferred payment mechanism, shipping cost, deferred purchase decision, negative reviews, non-optimised checkout process, lack of discounts/gifts, distractions, social/peer pressure, lack of strong ties with the website, and so on. However, crucial to success is the ability and focus to monitor, test, identify and optimise area's of conversion cycle which seems to be weak and "leaking out" customers.
Would really appreciate to see similar infographic on "Retention Optimisation".
+1 GREAT infographic!
Great indepth content as always mate.
This of course applies across the board regardless of source, but as I'm now expanding my area to include PPC, even more relevant.
Great post! Like the additional information you added at the bottom. When people do info-graphics I find they tend not to do that, which to me is equally important.
Very informative, thank you. Can't stop reading this nice guide
WOW. Can't believe I read all that so fast. Superb knowledge base right there. Thanks!!
So very difficult to get a final result. We should work more....
Thanks for the post
by: https://www.itarticle.net
Phenomenal post Richard, some excellent and truly actionable tips in there - and a great infographic! Well done to everyone at SEOGadget : )
Thanks! Hope you like the HTML chop :-) *Makes ninja swooping noise*
Really amazed with this great tips! Big thank you guys(Baxter,SEO Gadget team and SEOmoz) for sharing this awesome tips.
Let see how much conversion we can increase for our clients!Once again thank you!
Any tips on explaining to an employer that if you have 1000's of visitors a day, and a 0.5% conversion rate, that SEO isn't necessarily the problem?
Ask him what the other 99.5% are doing...
Amen to that...
I sit down with a calculator and total up what that traffic cost to acquire. Then I just look at him / her, with a very worried look in my eye.
:-)
Yep, nothing speaks to executives like some clear, concise metrics. Work up a quick spreadsheet that inputs average order value, and then models different fractional increases in conversion rate. When they see all the money they're NOT earning off of the traffic they're already paying for, you tend to get their strict attention, quickly ;)
I'm going to put my objectivity hat on here ( I'm an academic), and make some observations, and a personal gripe (not your fault).
A common thread in your commentary is "removes guesswork". Not the only one, but one that is important to me. I spent a big chunk of my life researching how to determine exactly what causes loyalty, word-of-mouth referral, and conversion. The result was Webreep (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webreep_Model). My gripe? It frustrates me that Webreep never gets a mention in these types of articles, despite being so much more advanced than toys like Kampyle and Kissmetrics.
You might feel the need to delete my comment here because you think I am advertising. Not really, I don't need anymore advertising. I'm just frustrated that articles like this choose the most well-known tools instead of the most effective tools. In my experience, most of the ones you mentioned are just toys.
But don't get me wrong -I do like your article, and I am grateful for you imparting your knowledge. Thank you, and well done.
Brent.
We're always looking for great tools, I will definitely check your tool out.
Keep in touch,Fabian
Hi Brent :-) I checked out your toolset (webreep) and your site, and I was very impressed. Why haven't I heard of this tool? It looks awesome! Easy to use (I like the way you laid out your pages explaining how the tool works), and not expensive. I will try it out soon.
Just one word “awesome”
+1! Great job Richard!
Thanks guys! Loving the response we've had to the HTML version of this too, I reckon there'll be another post on how we did that quite soon.
This link no longer appears to work, any suggestions? (link to html version, or larger image)
Wait, what? That's weird - it should be working now?
yeah it is working now
Best post ive ever read this year, all info in 1 place, all printed and its on my whiteboard;)
Ditto!!!!!!!!!!
That's so obvious and basic. Not much value reading it. Gotta do it.
it's one of the least understood processes to put a website through! are you avin' a laugh.