Getting visitors to your website is important, but it is equally important to know what to do with them when they arrive.
Conversion optimisation means ensuring that visitors to your site are funneled toward the objectives you have set out – creating paths through your website which allow users to easily find the information they are looking for, and subsequently perform an action based on that information.
By defining the objectives for your website you can you can design with conversion in mind, however it is only by testing variations and assessing the results that you can be sure you are getting the best from your site.
Measure
If you have defined why it is you need a website, then it is a good idea to also define how you will measure success. Sometimes that definition is obvious, such as the number of downloads, signups or purchases within a certain timeframe. Sometimes it’s less obvious and might revolve around the number of visits to your site, or the number of visits your site sends elsewhere.
Whatever your definition of success is, unless you have defined a way to measure it and assess it you are shooting in the dark as to how to proceed.
Define your goals and how to measure them, I can help you examine your website and identify ways to measure if your website is achieving it’s goals and implement analytic tools to allow for better analysis.
Analyse
With my help we can identify the processes involved in your website’s goals and set up analytic tools to identify any problem areas.
By assessing the flow of traffic through the processes we can see if there are particular pages that result in people abandoning the task and adjust that page accordingly.
Regular analysis of your site’s traffic is vital to identify issues as well as ascertain what is working on your site, and figure out why and how it can be improved upon.
Adapt
Armed with your web traffic goal analysis you can adapt pages to improve your conversion rates – when adapting your pages I can help you implement tools to measure changes against the current version, allowing you to identify which changes improve and which decrease your conversion rates.
Changes could be content, structure or aesthetic design, and each change should be measured for it’s success rate and improvements folded back into the site for further analysis and improvement – which brings us to the final step…
Repeat
There is almost always another improvement that could be made to your process, another incremental change that would bring you further increases in your conversion rate – that even a site that is performing well is bound to eventually require updating to keep abreast of changing behaviour and trends on the web.
If you’re not measuring, analysing and adapting it is inevitible you will fall behind.