The goal of most websites is to rank among the top results on search engines and gain a consistent flow of traffic.
But it doesn’t end there.
How successful will your business be if none of those visitors make a purchase quickly?
This is where conversion rate optimisation comes in.
Conversion Rates Explained
What is a Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of website visits or users that result in a predefined action, such as a purchase, enquiry or newsletter signup.
The denominator must remain consistent. Ecommerce platforms commonly calculate purchase conversion rate using orders divided by sessions. Shopify’s current explanation specifically distinguishes sessions from users.
The desired action could be different depending on the type of business or website you have.
For example, an eCommerce site would likely consider a conversion to be a sale.
However, for a blog or recipe website, a conversion might be a user signing up for a newsletter. The conversion rate is presented as a percentage of the number of visitors who ‘convert’ to a sale or sign-up.
Conversion rate is one of the most useful digital marketing KPIs for understanding whether your website is achieving its goals. Monitoring it over time can also help you identify unexpected changes and investigate potential problems.
How to Calculate Conversion Rates
You can calculate your conversion rates with a simple equation.
Are your palms already starting to sweat from sudden flashbacks to high school maths lessons?
Don’t panic.
This one is easy peasy lemon squeezy and nobody is going to penalise you for using a calculator.
First, take your number of conversions and divide this by your number of visitors. Then multiply your answer by 100, and voila, that’s your conversion rate.
For example, if 250 people downloaded your e-book in November and your website received 10,000 visitors during the same month, you would divide 250 by 10,000, which equals 0.025. Multiply this by 100 to get a conversion rate of 2.5%.
You can get more specific with your conversion rates, depending on the conversion you’re calculating.
For a more accurate calculation, you may want to include only visitors who had the opportunity to complete the desired action. For example, if the e-book was available only on certain pages and 3,000 visitors viewed those pages, you would divide 250 downloads by 3,000 visitors. This gives a conversion rate of 8.3% for those pages, compared with 2.5% across the entire website.
What is the Average Conversion Rate?
There is no universal “good” conversion rate. Results vary considerably depending on the industry, product price, device, traffic source, audience and action being measured.
External benchmarks can provide useful context, but make sure you are comparing similar businesses and conversion types. Your own historical performance is often a more meaningful benchmark because it allows you to measure whether your website is improving over time.
Average conversion rates can work well as a starting point for comparisons against the performance of your own website, but don’t get hung up on trying to match average conversion rates.
Success looks different for every business.
What Affects Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate can be affected by any number of factors, including SEO issues such as slow loading times.
Conversion rate should be reviewed alongside other indicators, including bounce rate, to understand how visitors engage with different pages and where potential problems may require further investigation.
For example, if conversion rates suddenly plummet this may indicate a problem with your site, such as a broken form or a product page that won’t load.
Conversion rates can also be affected by website design decisions that create a poor user experience, such as confusing navigation, unreadable content or intrusive pop-ups.
More commonly, conversion rates are affected because your site simply isn’t offering what the visitor was looking for. This is why you must get to know your target audience inside out, so you can give them what they want.
CRO vs SEO
SEO is the process of optimising a website to help it attract more traffic through search engines.
CRO is the process of improving a website so that more visitors complete a valuable action, such as making a purchase, submitting an enquiry, booking an appointment or joining a mailing list.
While both strategies are designed to improve your website, the goals here are slightly different.
Conversion rate optimisation can benefit websites at any stage. A/B testing generally requires enough traffic to produce reliable results, but lower-traffic websites can still improve their performance through customer feedback, usability testing and the removal of obvious barriers.
SEO and CRO should ideally be considered together. SEO helps attract the right visitors, while CRO helps ensure those visitors can easily find what they need and complete the next step.
For established websites, CRO and SEO work hand in hand.
You can use one without the other, but a broader marketing strategy that combines traffic acquisition with conversion improvements is likely to achieve better results overall.
CRO and SEO also have some crossover. Optimising a website with SEO is going to improve the user experience, which in turn can make visitors more likely to stay on your website long enough to convert.
How to Improve Conversion Rate
Improving your conversion rate is known as conversion rate optimisation, or CRO. It is an ongoing process rather than a collection of one-off website changes.
Begin by defining the action you want visitors to complete and checking that it is being tracked correctly. Next, use analytics, customer feedback and usability research to identify where visitors encounter problems or leave the website.
These findings can then be turned into potential improvements or hypotheses. Where sufficient traffic is available, different versions can be tested to establish whether a change genuinely improves performance. The results should be recorded and used to inform the next round of improvements.
Understand Your Audience
Knowing your audience and what they are looking for is crucial for increasing your conversion rate.
Gaining an understanding of what is preventing your visitors from converting is one way to get to know your audience better. You could find out vital information from visitors using feedback forms or create a test panel to try out your site and offer opinions.
To explore how identity, values and social context influence buying decisions, read our guide to consumer culture theory.
Use Analytics and Behavioural Data
Analytics platforms such as Google Analytics can show how visitors move through your website, where they leave and whether important actions are being recorded as key events.
Analytics usually shows you what happened, but it may not explain why. For example, if many customers leave after delivery charges appear, this suggests that the delivery stage is creating friction. However, it does not automatically prove that the charge is too high.
You could investigate further through customer feedback, usability testing or an experiment that presents delivery information earlier in the buying journey.
Add Calls to Action
Calls to action can guide visitors through your digital marketing funnel by making the next step clear, whether that is downloading a guide, booking a consultation or making a purchase.
Consider adding calls to action to blog posts on your website, as well as your pages with the greatest amount of traffic.
For a practical example, the Charlemont Arms Hotel website redesign combined clearer navigation with more prominent booking calls to action, making it easier for visitors to explore the hotel and move towards a direct reservation.
Consider Testing a Chatbot
A chatbot may help when visitors regularly have questions that are preventing them from taking the next step. However, a poorly timed or intrusive chatbot can also interrupt the customer journey.
Review your existing enquiries to identify the questions customers ask most often. You can then test a chatbot on relevant pages and measure whether it improves enquiries, sales or customer satisfaction before introducing it across the entire website.
Test Newsletter Sign-Up Prompts
A newsletter sign-up prompt may help attract subscribers when it appears at a relevant point and offers something genuinely useful, such as a discount, guide or early access to new products.
Avoid displaying a large pop-up as soon as someone enters the website, particularly on mobile devices. The prompt should be easy to close, clearly explain what the person is signing up for and obtain the appropriate permission for future marketing emails.
Make Important Actions Easy to Find
Make the most important next steps easy to recognise, whether that means viewing a service, requesting a quote, booking an appointment or completing a purchase.
Calls to action should use clear and descriptive wording, appear at appropriate points in the customer journey and work properly across mobile and desktop devices. They should also be visually distinct without relying on colour alone, as this may create accessibility problems for some visitors.
This involves both UX and UI. UX considers where and when the next step appears within the customer journey, while UI determines how the link or button is presented visually.
For online stores, our ecommerce website development service can help implement improvements to product pages, navigation and checkout.
In the End
Anyone with a website has an action they want users to perform, whether that’s downloading an e-book, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.
By optimising your website with conversion rates in mind, you can effectively increase the percentage of your users who carry out these desired actions, therefore making your website more measurably successful.
Need help removing barriers that may be preventing visitors from converting? Explore our web design and development services or reach out for a chat about your website.
