Website optimisation - the missing channel you need to invest in

The most important metric every Head of Marketing should be measuring to understand the success of their paid media campaigns is on-site conversions. That might be transactions, form completions, subscriptions - whatever your business needs to generate revenue and ultimately grow.

While the importance of an optimised, targeted media acquisition machine cannot be over-stressed, your business’ success will fundamentally be driven by the number of users who end up converting on your website.

Without a exceptional on-site experience, you could be losing those valuable customers your paid media advertising works so hard to acquire.

Also with much higher emphasis placed these days on customer lifetime value, it doesn’t bear thinking about the longer term opportunity of customer engagement, retention and future purchases that will have disappeared with the eye roll of a frustrated customer.

In this article I'll focus on the short-term objective of how to improve your website’s conversion rates using data and insights. I'll also share an example of how implementing these strategies improved conversion rates for a household-name charity by 6.4% overnight.

The most powerful tool to improve website performance is a strong Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) program. As Hotjar explains “Whether you own an ecommerce site or manage online marketing or SEO (search engine optimisation), CRO will constantly be a top-of-mind topic to help your organisation grow.”

CRO is the process of continuously improving your website’s user experience, to make it easier and more compelling for users to complete desired actions. This, in turn, improves your conversion rates and helps drive growth for your business.

Successful CRO programmes integrate data and insight about your users’ motivations and your site’s performance to understand what drives and blocks users from converting. By identifying these drivers and blockers, you can generate ideas for site changes that make a difference. You can then validate if these ideas work through A/B testing.

Let’s say your website’s main landing page has a conversion rate of 2% and receives 5,000 visitors a month. In its current form the page is generating 100 conversions per month.

After reviewing user behavior data you uncover that users are unlikely to scroll on mobile. Equipped with this insight you decide to test the impact of moving the main call to action button into the 1st mobile screen. A version of the page that moves the call to action button is created using A/B testing software, and users are randomly shown the original version of the page “the control” or the new version “the variation”.

The A/B test variation proves to be more successful, and the conversion rate is improved to 4%! By improving your user’s experience on this page the number of conversions would jump to 200 per month.This would in turn drastically lower the cost per acquisition for all of your media channels. What a win!

We recently worked with Shelter, a charity that helps millions of people struggling with inadequate housing and homelessness each year. The goal was simple, to increase donations and drive the donation amount up to help Shelter achieve its business targets.

We started by identifying opportunities for improvement through a deep dive audit to understand traffic, audiences and paths to conversion which would identify conversion drop off points. This work highlighted that a key page for optimisation was the donation landing page. We looked to use A/B testing to address value propositions, and remove anxiety and content gaps. Some of the specifics that we looked at included positioning of donation amounts, the mechanics of the donation form, and customizing the description of impact for each donation amount.

After successful completion of this first experiment, Shelter were able to report:

It’s not enough to direct customers to your website. Their expectations are high and if you disappoint them with a poor user experience they are unlikely to forgive you easily.

For your business to survive, with customers constantly seeking more for their money, you really have to understand website optimisation and deliver an exceptional digital experience, striving for continuous improvement.

The great news is proving optimisation works for your business is simple, and measurable. From as little as £10,000, we can demonstrate the value of optimisation in both incremental sales and revenue - with provable ROI.