Most Businesses hire conversion rate experts to get a lift in sales in the short-term. The expert while providing the services forgets to convince the Business Owner that the conversion rate optimization is not a short-term activity. It should be integrated into all Business processes. You should do conversion rate optimization(CRO) to:
1) Learn
Although improving conversion (which increases revenue) should be the goal of conversion rate optimization in the short-term, never forget to document what you have learned from each experiment. The results from each experiment will give you the best practices on creating Ads and improving conversion for your Business. For future experiments, you can refer your CRO knowledge base to start with competitive variations. What happens in most cases is that the Business Owner has a hypothesis and the Expert has another one. They test both the hypothesis. The whole objective of CRO becomes proving oneself right rather than improving sales. This approach is dangerous and should be replaced with a process, where you start with a variation that is better than the original (based on the best practices in conversion). Keep creating variation until you find one that provides considerably (10-15%) better conversion than the original. Now you have a new original page. Always remember that the new found original page is not the best possible variation but a variation you chose according to the improvement in conversion. Understanding the element changes that you made which resulted in the improvement in conversion is crucial in the learning process.
2) Improve Sales
The primary objective of CRO is to improve sales. Whatever changes that would lead the visitor closer to sales generating actions (white paper download, contact form submission, newsletter subscription) should be implemented in your Ad Design, Ad Copy and your content creation strategy. Actions that lead directly to a sale should be given preference to sales generating actions. Test your assumptions. A popular belief among CRO experts is that an Orange coloured Button improves conversion but don't blindly follow such conventions. We have seen red( a colour that signals danger) coloured button performing much better than orange in popular niches. Always be testing.
3) Find Better Variant
Although the primary objective of CRO is to improve sales, you should never forget to strike a balance between maintaining a good user experience and improving sales. This is especially important when you are trying to rank for keywords popular in your domain. Let us say that you own a travel agency in a niche market (Island Tours). The Expedias and Travel Advisor sites don’t have the local know-how like you do. You rank for a crucial keyword "Holiday in Canary Islands" for an excellent article that you have written about the Islands. Your team is getting decent conversion (2-5%) on the page, but you want to maximize the revenue, so you start your CRO on that page. Remember that Google measures the time on the page, the keywords used to reach the page and the bounce rate to determine whether your page is providing a better user experience with the answer than your competitors provide. The User experience and inbound links determine whether your page should rank #1 for the search term.
Be careful while you make changes based on the experiments. Although you might have found a better converting variation, always measure the impact of your change on the search engine results page. There is no point in improving conversion from 5 to 15% when the traffic to your page goes down by 44% with the change.
Conversion Rate Optimization should be incorporated right from content planning to content creation. Don't wait till you have hit a roadblock before you call the conversion rate experts.
If you want us to provide Conversion Rate Optimization service, contact us or you can call us at: India (Ph): +91 9497189032, UK (Ph): +44 (0)20-3371-9976 or US (Ph): +1 650-491-0004
ByteFive provides comprehensive Internet Marketing Services and Training in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (PPC Campaign Creation, Management and Optimization), Developing processes and best practices for managing Web Analytics, Landing page Optimization, E-Mail Newsletter Management, Competitor Research, Content Creation and Content Marketing.