I recently joined my colleague Anne Tracy, Associate Digital Marketing Strategist, to discuss how to find quick wins to increase your website conversions. Listen or read below to learn how to find the items with the lowest effort, yet highest reward on your website.
Listen to the audio blog:
Summary of How to Find Quick Wins to Increase Your Website Conversion:
Question:
Can you give us some ideas of what quick wins look like? How are they different from something you plan or need more complex testing?
Answer:
When starting a project for improving your website goals there are obviously different stages of maturity that your digital marketing is in. And if your website has not done any A/B testing or really any advanced optimization to improve conversion rates, then there are probably a lot of opportunities out there. If you’ve been online for a while or you’re a successful retailer, you’re at a different maturity level so more than likely you’ve already been doing some type of optimization out there.
To generate quick wins you really understand, when looking at analytics, where there’s an opportunity and start to define which potential opportunities can turn into immediate results (quick wins) which would be an essentially low effort, high impact. Very easy to implement right away and potentially have a large opportunity for immediate return (versus something that may take a lot longer to potentially research, design, develop, and actually get implemented). Really the difference between something that is a quick win versus a long-term opportunity, it really depends on how much time it takes to actually get on your website. So, the quick wins would be those “low hanging fruit” opportunities that really take a small amount of effort and have a high opportunity for return.
Question:
Is Analytics where you first start searching or how do you go about this process?
Answer:
We definitely want to be data-driven and use the analytics and metrics that we have as the foundation for where we are going to focus our efforts; what are going to be quick wins and what is actually going to take a lot longer. And analytics is a loose term because we are not only using numbers and metrics but we’re also using qualitative insight where we’re actually learning about the user behavior (polls, surveys, heat maps, user recordings). So, we’re going to also understand how the user behavior ties into the metrics and then combine that data to form a hypothesis.
Question:
Let’s say that we are in a business that is relatively immature in a digital space. There are probably a lot of different things like quick wins, and lots of improvement to be made. Or on the flip side, you’re a really large company and you have a large website, with lots of different channels going on. How do you start to prioritize? If you’re testing, how do you prioritize those things as well?
Answer:
It really comes down to understanding what your ultimate goal is. Having a set goal and understanding the end in mind is really the key. With eCommerce, the ultimate goal is to get someone to complete a conversion. In this case, you want to start from the end of the funnel and work backward. With eCommerce, you want to get users to hit that last submit an order, and get to the confirmation page. So, if users are having a hard time actually completing the checkout process, that would be a quick win because if you can get more people to complete that checkout process you would get more people to convert.
The problem is that the checkout process is probably one of the hardest places to test in, to develop. If you make a mistake you could potentially lose a lot of money. You have to balance where and what to test to determine if it is actually a quick win or not. If you are having problems with your checkout process, you could use maybe some improvements in design or usability (maybe there are just problems with that).
If you were to fix those problems and more people were to check out that would essentially be a quick win: something that doesn’t take a lot of effort to fix but it has a high potential for maximizing the impact, the conversion rates.
Let me add one thing to that, Google Analytics and Adobe Target, those numbers and metrics really tell us what pages people are really going to and what’s the percentage of those people who are actually converting or not. It identifies bounce rates, average time on site, and action conversion rates, but it actually doesn’t tell us why. You know, why and why not people are potentially converting, in the least actually gives us the metrics. That’s really why we add the qualitative insight to understand real users’ behavior. Once we add that qualitative element we really understand why and why not people are potentially converting on those high-traffic pages. With quick wins, it’s pretty easy to identify where those quick wins are within analytics, high-traffic pages or your top landing pages will tell you the pages that have the most traffic, obviously. But it will also tell you with those pages, what their conversion rate is, what their bounce rate is, and how high their average time on site is. And the top landing pages will actually start to help you define where those quick wins are. Then, you can use the qualitative software to go in there and look at those pages to potentially see why and why not people are converting off of those pages.
View more posts about Conversion Rate Optimization.
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