Unlike an offline medium such as print, your website holds a wealth of knowledge, in the form of server logs and website analytics. But we can go further and actually see what they're doing, too. CRO helps us improve your website.
How do you improve your website's conversion rate?
There are many factors that go into getting more leads, sales, form fills, etc.
Again, as we like to say, strategy before tactics.
But it starts with getting clear on what you want to measure first.
What does success mean to you?
Before we can even begin to improve your conversion rate, we need to start collecting data. After all, you can't improve if you don't know what your "standard" baseline is.
It's a little like trying to lose weight without weighing yourself first. How would you know?
Website analytics help us to understand and answer :
- How many visitors came to our website today?
- What pages did they visit? How long did they stay?
- What products are popular? Top sellers?
- How many users are using a mobile browser?
- How many visitors came from social media?
- What percentage of people opted into our newsletter?
- What is our e-commerce conversion rate and can we improve it?
- ... and many more.
However, what they don't tell is why someone didn't buy from you.
... Or even click the Add to Cart button.
... Or whatever it is you want them to do.
Oftentimes we all know what success means but we have different ways to get there.
So, if you want to improve some metric, you need to first define what you're trying to improve—more sales, more contact form inquires, etc.
After we've done that, we take steps to improve that metric on your website—also known as Conversion Rate Optimization.
Analyze this
The real power of analytics comes when combining those simple questions together to make better decisions:
Did anyone on a mobile browser buy one of our products who came from an ad placed on Facebook? Which marketing channels are actually giving us the best leads?
Those questions can be invaluable at determining a website strategy, yet more difficult to answer, unless your analytics package and your website are setup properly to support such features.
Data can also play a huge part in how we redesign a website.
In an e-commerce store, we might consider promoting or deemphasizing certain pages or products, based on website analytics and user data to help improve a website's conversion rate.
This is typically known as Conversion Rate Optimization.
Make sense of the data
Mark Twain (among others) popularized the phrase: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
In the case of analytics, one can flip this quote around about making the wrong assumptions.
As an example, many businesses still refuse to put much emphasis on a mobile website because their website analytics tell them their traffic won't benefit from it. However, a company's website can easily end up becoming a vacuum: nobody visits the website on a mobile browser because it's not mobile-friendly.
That faulty assumption can be costly. Over 1/2 of website traffic is now coming from mobile with many industries seeing the majority of their traffic. How would you like to give away 30-60% or more of your traffic to your competitors?
Many marketers fall into this trap of not seeing the big picture—don't let it be you!
(Let this be your public service announcement.)
Marketing with Data
Based on the activity from your website or clicking links in an e-mail campaign, marketing automation platforms can even kick off drip e-mail campaigns or help salespeople follow up with prospects.
Professional advice
So you can see how powerful understanding your website's statistics can be. And then, more importantly, making improvements to benefit your website in meaningful ways. It takes a set of experienced professionals to help you analyze these results, by using common industry trends, and savvy business sense.
As your trusted partner, Ritter Knight can help you not only select an analytics package—including HotJar, Crazy Egg, KISS, MixPanel, Google Analytics, etc.—we'll help you set it up on your website, integrate it properly into your commerce or marketing automation solution, and we can help you get the most out of it.