Conversion Optimization Tips

Great skit from Google, with the 2 minutes if you're in charge of your site's checkout process - have you actually bought something from your site?

The full post is here.

Conversion optimization is often synonymous with “increasing sales” which - while exciting - isn’t the complete picture.

Even if we ignore the impact conversion optimization on things like lead generation and customer interaction, increasing sales is just one part of the equation. I’ve mentioned it in other tips and articles: Conversion rate optimization is simply giving the visitor what they want, when they want it.

A great way to bring this to your attention is by using the Buying Decision framework covered in the great book Always Be Testing.

The Buying Decision

This framework represents the steps your visitors go through, and the different factors you will have to deal with when making the sale to your visitors. They apply even if you sale isn't excatly a "sale" (eg. getting their email address for a lead, etc). The steps of the Buying Decision are:

1. Identify the problem: If your product or service is going help you visitors, they need to know they NEED help in first place.
2. Search: Very few people make their decision based on the first possible answer they see. Most of your visitors want to find out their options before parting with their hard-earned money.
3. Evaluate: Once they’ve found a few options, your potential customers will want to compare the pros and cons of each. An simple example is price vs trust: Do you go with the cheapest option you can find and risk getting burned, or the most trusted but expensive (and lose one of the main benefits of shopping online) option?
4. Decide: Exactly what your visitor decides will depend on what kind of person they are. You should try to appeal to as many different personalities as possible (more on that in another post).
5. Purchase: Finally! Once your visitor has got all the information they need, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to purchase with you.Substitue your specific goal (eg. lead generation, time on site, etc) here.
6. Re-evaluate: Even after you’ve made the sale, your involvement with the customer shouldn’t stop. This step includes your (now) customer purchasing again from you, or recommending your product/service to someone else. 

You can see that the actual sale (step 5) is just one of six steps in the Buying Decision. It doesn’t matter how good your web page might be at selling, if you can’t get your visitor through the first five steps, you won’t ever get a chance to. The more people you can help through the earlier steps, the more will be available to you once you get them to actually making a purchase.

You also want to consider the benefit to your reputation/brand in helping your visitors through the non-purchase steps. Your visitors are going to feel much more comfortable and trusting with the business that helped them evaluate and decide, compared to a business/website which just wants them to make a purchase and move along. For many of your site’s visitors, trust will trump price.

By optimizing the non-selling based aspects of your site, you also avoid coming across as spammy or pushy. Your call to actions should be obvious enough to help your visitor and no more.

Agree? Disagree? Like to have your call to action IN ALL CAPS AND BLINKING? Share your best line in the comments.

You’re a small online business owner, and have heard about conversion rate optimization as a way to make more more sales through your website.

As a one-(wo)man shop, your biggest issue is your lack of resources. You don’t have the time or background to become an expert, so there’s no way you can benefit from testing or experimenting, is there? It’s probably only for businesses with dedicated IT and Marketing teams, right?

Well, no. Conversion rate optimization is for all businesses, and especially for small businesses. As a business owner, you benefit from something consultants (and a lot of bigger firms) don’t have - you know your customer.

If you’ve built your business from the ground up and have gotten to a stage where you’re selling your products/services online, then you know more about your customers than almost anybody else. This is a huge advantage for doing your own conversion optimization since you will know better than anyone what your customer wants, and when they want it. You just need to make sure you use that information (yet another reason to test and experiment with your site, right?).

While there are plenty of tools out there to help you increase your conversion rate, the biggest benefit will come from changing your attitude to one of testing and improvement (backed-up by data, of course). 

Best Practices... Maybe

Don’t fall in to the trap of just putting in the “best practices” on your site, and then sitting back and resting on your laurels. If best practices were the only way to succeed, they wouldn’t be called “best practices.” They’d be called “the only way to succeed.” Anybody who’s become successful knows to use what works, and discard what doesn’t. If you can prove what you’re doing is working, then it doesn’t matter what other people think you should do.

Do it. Do it now.

The biggest gains for conversion optimization come when you go from NO testing, to SOME testing. Just making the switch to think about improving your website, and being able to identify the cause of the improvement, is a huge jump in maturity for your business. 

Getting Started

If you’re just getting started, I would recommend Visual Website Optimizer. I think it’s the easiest to get up and running. It has enough functionality to keep any small business owner busy for years, and their trial means you’re not out of pocket if you don’t like it. I'll have a specific guide for VWO soon on the Guides page shortly.

If you have access to your site’s files, it shouldn’t take you more than a couple of hours from start to finish. The hardest part is usually setting up the goals correctly. Make sure you test your conversion goal by starting the experiment and walking through it yourself, then clear the test by clicking on “flush data” in the test report page.

If you want a free version, then you should obviously go with Google Website Optimizer. It's got all the functionallity, but the setup is a bit more technical/involved. I will have a Guide for that soon too, and there are plenty of others out there if you do a search.

Then you get to sit back and wait for the data to come in. At the end of the experiment (once you’ve got enough data - which I will cover in another article) you’ll know for sure which was the best way to do things, THEN you can rest on your laurels.

Agree? Disagree? If you’re a small business owner who’s mastered conversion optimization, share your story in the comments.

Here’s a quick and easy way to see your site through the eyes screen of your most common visitors. You should use it when considering what you want your visitors to see when they arrive on your page, and what you might want to save for later.

As usual I’ll be using Google Analytics (GA) to demonstrate this, but all the major analytics packages should have the same functinoallity. In addition to GA, I will be using Fold Tester, which is a nifty free tool.

First you need to find your screen resolution report in GA. I’ve included steps for both the new and old GA versions, so follow along with your particular preference.

Hello and welcome to ConversionOptimizationTips.com!

I'm still getting a few things sorted out, but articles will start appearing automagically soon.