Trying to grow your conversion rate can feel like trying to play a song without knowing the right notes. Especially if you have decent traffic and inbound leads, a subpar conversion rate can be just as frustrating as it is perplexing.
For as long as digital marketing has been around, industry pros have tried to crack the conversion code using all the latest trends, tactics, and tools and their disposal. (In fact, customer journey analysis to boost conversions is in the game plan of 60% of online marketers.)
The good news:
We’ve tapped our highly experienced team of marketing experts to bring you concrete, actionable insights that can help you turn up the volume on your website conversion rate. Alright, enough of the intro: DJ, hit it!
How to Get Started
First things first: Before you try to increase conversion rates, you’ll be better off if you begin with conversion research. This will help you identify what qualifies as a good conversion rate for your company and where the current opportunities lie.
During this process, you can audit your existing program to pinpoint any issues like broken links, homepage hiccups, or usability errors. Once you’ve gathered all the data, you can analyze your findings. Maybe a certain location is struggling with conversions, or there’s a demographic you’re targeting but not seeing much traction from.
Identifying these issues and fixing any errors will ensure you’re starting off on the right foot. From there, you can leverage tools like heatmaps to suss out on-page issues that might be hindering your conversions. This is also a great time to check out your Google Analytics data to help paint an overall picture of where your program stands.
If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is! We know this, which is why we created a system called ConversionIQ to make this analysis process seamless.
128%
We partnered with enterprise-class software company Peer Software to boost brand awareness and drive leads. Through targeted marketing campaigns with an international reach, we were able to help them increase conversions by 128% year over year.
Results Are Everything
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Potential Problems That Affect Conversions
In marketing, as in life, you don’t get a ton of opportunities that would qualify as a “quick fix.”
But when it comes to troubleshooting conversions, there are a few tweaks you can make that can be a big help to your efforts — without being much of a heavy lift — resulting in better cost per acquisition (CPA) and a higher return on investment (ROI).
Tracking & Attribution:
Your tracking and attribution processes should be as thorough and accurate as possible to ensure conversions are tracked properly from the start. This includes importing offline conversions and connecting your customer relationship management (CRM) tool with your Google Ads or other paid search account to keep everything synced up.
With that in mind, we also highly recommend not taking that first top-of-funnel conversion (such as a form fill) at face value. Rather, it’s more important to look at what happens after the form fill as they move through the sales funnel. Not only can this give you more context and insight into your customer journey, but it can help you with lead scoring as well.
20%
Sometimes, conducting a few simple A/B tests (also called split testing) can tell you a lot about what does and doesn’t resonate with your audience. By testing keywords, ad copy, and landing page designs, we were able to help computer application company AppDynamics see a 20% increase in conversion rate.
Audience Targeting:
Are you sure you’re targeting the right audience? Even if the demographics are accurate, there’s a chance you’re levering your ads and campaigns at the wrong time of day, day of the week, or on the wrong channel.
Think outside the box when it comes to the timing and platforms you’re currently leveraging: should you pivot from Facebook to LinkedIn? Are you wasting ad spend on weekend campaigns when your audience is more engaged during a weekday morning? These are easy tweaks that could make a significant difference in your average conversion rate.
44%
If you’ve got a physical storefront or space, then you know local conversions are crucial. We helped audiology practice Happy Ears Hearing Center increase local conversions by nearly 44% by expanding and improving on-site content while updating designs and calls to action for a better user experience (UX) overall.
Driving Traffic, But Not Leads
Getting site traffic, of course, is great. But it’s only half the battle. What matters is what happens once people land on your site. If you’re getting a ton of traffic that is quickly bouncing, then something is amiss. The last thing you want is to be paying for clicks that don’t end up going anywhere.
Zoom out and look at functionality. In particular, analyze elements like your call to action (CTA) and UX on your landing pages. Do the design and messaging match the ad’s message? Is it easy to navigate and free from distractions? Are the CTA buttons eye-catching? What do your site load times look like on desktop and mobile?
For ecommerce stores, it may be time to revisit your purchase funnel. Look to see where shoppers are falling off instead of completing the purchase. Are they browsing but not adding items to their shopping cart? Are they starting the checkout process but then ending with an abandoned cart? This way, you can identify opportunities to improve the likelihood a sale is completed in your online store, whether it’s auto-completing credit card details, having more shipping or payment options, or something more.
Optimizing Landing Pages for Improved Conversions
If you ask us, effective landing pages should always:
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Answer questions
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Reinforce motivation
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Address barriers
These are just a few of the common obstacles that keep people from completing a pop-up form or taking that next desired action that’s considered a conversion. Knowing that, you can create or modify your landing pages according. Think: Adding a brief FAQ section, keeping forms as short as possible, and using direct, emotionally driven language to reel the website visitor in.
Along with a strong CTA, elements like value propositions, feature/benefit highlights, and social proof can turn a “meh” landing page into a mega-successful one that will build trust and garner conversions.
We could go on about landing pages for days, but we won’t do that here — if you need more LP help, hit us up.
You can test different formats on your landing page, even within the same page. Play around with these styles and see how people respond:
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Body copy
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Headline
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Paragraphs
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Bulleted list
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Testimonials
How Content Marketing Enhances Conversion Rates
When it comes to SEO, content marketing is a triple threat. It helps you rise through the organic ranks, positions your brand’s team as expert thought leaders, and allows you to educate and provide value to your target audience straight out of the gate.
Content can help your conversion volume in several ways. One of the first things you can do is make sure your content marketing strategy includes creating content for all funnel stages. This way, you can guide the reader through the buyer’s journey.
It’s also key to focus on messaging that highlights value and offers proof points. To be frank: people aren’t interested in what matters to you, they’re interested in what matters to them. Ask yourself: How am I bringing value to the reader of this content, and how am I showing that value, rather than merely telling?
Knowing what stage you’re targeting can help inform the type of content you create as well. Think outside of the blog – depending on your industry and your offering, you can also publish:
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Gated, downloadable content docs like templates and guides
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Product pages meant to drive demos
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White papers or live (recorded) demos
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Case studies that highlight various features
Something else to think about: content for remarketing. Once someone goes through the various stages, what do you want to present to them after knowing they’re interested? If they download a white paper, for example, how do you want to go about remarketing to them, now that you know what they’re interested in?
How to Leverage Online Reviews
If you’re seeking inspiration when it comes to highlighting value and proof points, check out your existing reviews. This practice, sometimes called “review mining,” involves going through customer reviews on places like your social pages, third-party review sites, and Google Business Profile.
This is also an excellent opportunity to see what people are saying about you on social media. Consider setting up notifications so you know when someone mentions your brand on a social platform in real time — you can potentially use this user-generated content in your own marketing efforts.
There’s plenty to glean from both positive and negative reviews. Identify what people say they love about your product or service, what stands out to them, and what pain points they mention. You can even look at negative reviews for your competitors and see what others don’t like about what they offer.
You can get great ideas for messaging through conversion research. Read through your pre-sales chat transcripts from your sales team, if possible, to see what questions people are asking before they make a purchase. Knowing what people are saying about your company will make it easier to craft effective messaging on landing pages and in ad copy.
How SEO and PPC Can Work Together to Grow Conversions
We’ve written before about how paid search and SEO are a match made in marketing heaven. And seasoned pros won’t be surprised.
Not only can search ads help you determine which keywords to highlight through content marketing, but they can both offer lots of helpful data about your target audience. Along with that, they can work in tandem to help you dominate the search engine results page through organic and paid results.
Now, back to ecommerce conversion rate for a second: it’s worth noting that Google Shopping offers free listings along with ads. As the search engine explains, “Free listings allow customers to see product results from your store across Google, such as on the Shopping tab, YouTube, Google Search (.com), Google Images, and Google Lens.”
Since your team is already working to optimize your SEO titles and product descriptions on your ecommerce site (right?), this makes it easy to push this info into your Merchant Center for a more optimized feed, which can help your product listing ads (PLAs).
Using SEO and PPC tactics in tandem, we were able to help the Swimsuits Direct apparel brand increase its Google Shopping conversion rate by nearly 20% while doubling year-over-year revenue.
Best Practices for Keeping Conversion Value High – From Our Team of Experts
Not to burst your bubble here, but getting higher conversion rates isn’t a one-and-done deal. Once you get there, there’s still plenty to be done to keep it that way. Luckily, there are strategies.
With changes to online data practices, digital privacy concerns, and the eventual demise of third-party cookies, collecting first-party data (
Another reason to make sure your tracking is set up accurately is that it can help you understand how each person in your CRM found you: what channel they came from, and what pages they looked at. If you don’t collect that info in your CRM, it will be harder to remarket to those people. This is another reason it helps to publish gated content: to grow your lead base for first-party remarketing.
PRO TIP
While targeting capabilities for marketers are still in flux with changing privacy and data regulations, you still have tools at your disposal. For example, pixels can be leveraged on sites like Amazon and Meta (formerly Facebook) to gather data about actions someone has taken within a certain time frame after viewing or clicking an ad.
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How ConversionIQ Can Help
If you’re not familiar with how to gather all this information, don’t worry. We created ConversionIQ as a unique marketing technology that makes your data and key performance indicators (KPIs) easy to view and analyze. While a tool like Google Analytics is a great place to start, we recommend a more advanced, robust analytics platform to give you an edge over competitors. Quality will always beat quantity when it comes to your potential customers, so when it’s conversion volume you want to increase, then a thoughtful approach focused on qualified leads, not just the amount of leads overall, is crucial.
Moving Forward With Better Conversion Rate Optimization
When you make big changes to your strategy, it’s wise to wait a decent amount of time (at least a few weeks) before you analyze the data.
Once you’ve put your new conversion rate tactics in motion, you can come up with a plan for how often you want to analyze performance metrics: this could be monthly or quarterly, depending on your ad spend.
After you’ve garnered a significant amount of lead and traffic data, you can see how your load quality and volume are measuring up. You can also audit your leads to dive into location and demographics, and see if a certain campaign or ad group is driving unqualified leads.
Lastly, don’t forget to A/B test for CRO purposes as well. After all, even if things are going great, there are always things that can be improved. ABC: Always be testing.
The Takeaway
Here’s the bottom line: for conversions, just like with site traffic, it’s all about quality over quantity. Tons of traffic may seem great, but if you’ve got sky-high bounce rates and sub-par conversions, you’re not operating at full capacity.
It’s all about getting a handle on your customer journey, targeting at all stages of the conversion funnel, and setting up your data so that it’s organized and easy to analyze.
That’s exactly why we created ConversionIQ. We’ve helped companies like Nike and Verizon, along with all the others mentioned above and more, fine-tune their campaigns and strategies to target the right customers at the right time. Want us to take this task off your plate?
Conversion Volume Checklist
- Conduct conversion research
- Make sure tracking and attribution are set up properly
- Double-check your audience targeting
- Optimize landing pages
- Create content marketing for all funnel stages
- Leverage online reviews
- Make paid search and SEO work together
- Collect first-party data (ideally with a CRM tool)
- Regularly monitor and measure performance
- A/B test with CRO in mind
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No BS, just results. Average clients see a 4.5x ROI
- Dramatically improve ROI
- Outperform the competition
- Increase conversion volume
- Better track ROI
- Reduce cost per acquisition
- Improve lead quality