When was the last time you looked at your conversion rates and thought ‘we can do better’? Did you actually do anything about it?
Well, you’re not alone.
Econsultancy recently ran their annual optimisation survey in conjunction with RedEye, some of the highlights of the report included:
22% were quite satisfied with their conversion rates.
So the obvious question – what are the other 78% doing about it?
It’s good to see from the research that only 27% of companies had no one responsible for optimisation, indicating that optimisation is definitely growing in importance.
Lack of resources was cited as the biggest barrier to improving conversion rates (57%).
It makes me think they must be busy pumping out traditional campaigns, landing pages and new functionality without regard to optimising the user experience. Surely that has to be a far more expensive proposition than making what you have perform better?
Most popular things to test?
No real surprises here. Of those that were testing, 80% did it across buttons and call to actions.
A whole suite of other things were also listed including layouts (74%), copy (67%), navigation (56%), and images (50%). What I found surprising was the percentage using navigation testing – it can be quite hard to test.
Top things that drive success?
Something near and dear to our hearts – structured testing. Things aiding success are having proper testing goals and objectives (85%), test prioritisation (72%), and testing plans (55%). Again, not surprising was the fact that the choice of software didn’t drive success (22%).
89% had a decrease in sales because they lacked a structured approach to testing.
This comes up time and time again. A structured approach to testing means that you have clearly defined goals. You can develop hypotheses to test, you have proper test plans, you prioritise the tests, you run them until they get statistically valid results, then you document the results and share them with the organisation. You’ll be running multiple tests so it’s important that you understand how they work together and how to run them concurrently etc.
You shouldn’t just run a test because you can. More than likely, that’s not going to help in the long run.
Top methods that produced the best results?
- A/B Testing
- Structured approach
- Customer journey analysis
- Copy optimisation
- Cart abandonment
- Segmentation
The maturity curve.
Obviously you have to start somewhere. The best results are seen from companies that have a strategic approach to optimisation. They have a structure for testing, a number of people are responsible for conversion and they’re using segmentation (to target the testing first).
Will you start in 2015?
Conversion rate optimization really isn’t about optimizing web pages – it’s about optimizing decisions – and the page itself is a means to an end but not an end in itself.
Michael Aagard, Content Verve
Getting started isn’t hard. But if you truly want to succeed, think about it with a long term view. Putting the processes, structures and frameworks in place will support your cultural shift to successful optimisation, and help you become part of the 22% satisfied with their conversion rates.
