A Gartner Group research concluded that more than 50% of web sales are lost. Would you not like to capture this audience to double or triple your revenues?

Conversion rate is the most important metric to track but is often ignored. In the absence of active tracking and corrective measures, websites fail to convert at the desired level.

In this newsletter, which is the concluding part of the website conversion optimization series, we will answer questions pertaining to conversion optimization – questions that each website owner should ask themselves.

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not straightforward. What would qualify as a good conversion rate for us may not necessarily be a good conversion rate for you. The answer is subjective to the industry you’re in, the target market, the customer segment being targeted, the effectiveness of your website, etc.

The best performing retail websites have double digit conversion rates. Amazon.com, for example, has a conversion rate of 23.7% (source: Nielsen Online, Megaview Retails). If you are in the retail segment you can use this as a reference to set your baseline goal. However, benchmarking your data against a wider source (industry vertical) is a more appropriate way of doing it.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to get your hands on conversion rate statistics for each industry vertical. However, there are a few sources which provide industry benchmarking data.

Google analytic offers benchmarking service that helps you to compare your website’s performance against competitors’ websites. Fireclick index is another web analytic service that provides conversion rate benchmarking data.

Knowing how you're website stacks up against other websites will not only help you assess the performance of your website, but also help you to identify problem areas.

In the offline world, knowing why visitors leave your shop is easy. You can talk to them, hear their objections, and act in real time to try and stop them from leaving.

In the online world, people may come and leave your website without giving a clue as to why they left. The reason could range from website usability to low visitor engagement quotient.

If you want to better the conversion rate, you would have to understand why visitors abandon your website. In a nutshell, you will need to track, analyze and test.

Mentioned below are a few tools which you help you in accomplishing the above tasks.

1. Google Analytics is a free and simple to use analytics tool. Despite being free, it offers sophisticated features which can help you to effectively track visitors and analyze your website.

   

   Apart from helping you to benchmark your data, it also helps to track traffic sources, goal conversions, landing page performance, bounce rate, visitor navigation, advanced segmentation, custom reporting and many more. In short, it is an apt analytic tool for most websites.
   
   Stat Counter is another free tool which is highly effective and user friendly.


2. Crazy Egg takes you a step further with features like heat map and confetti.

   

   Heat map helps you in seeing parts of page that are getting most attention, and track the links clicked by users to navigate from that page. Most importantly it will show clicks even if that particular section is not clickable. You can also see clicks based on referrers via confetti.
   
   Based on these inputs, you can move call to action elements to sections which get most attention, and carry out other rearrangements. Click Heat is another tool that helps you study the heat map of important web pages.


3. Click Tale puts an end to the guessing game by helping you record live video of user actions. You see how they scroll, what they type or delete; every bit of action they perform on a web page. In addition to this it offers advanced features like form and link analytics.

   

   Form analytic helps you to assess the performance of web forms (order form/shopping cart), and see a detailed conversion report. Based on these findings, you can simplify/modify forms to decrease abandonment rate.


4. Click Density assists you in easily identifying usability and design issues with your website, which otherwise would go unnoticed. The tool is packed with features like heat and click map, hover map and page stats.

   

   You can also try out Userfly, a simple and free way to test your website’s usability.

The above tools would help you to track and analyze. However, the changes done on the basis of this analysis would need to be tested, so that further corrective measures can be initiated. The whole exercise would go in vain if you fail to take corrective measures and test it.

Google website optimizer is a great tool to test important landing pages. As you can see from the screenshot below, it helps you to clearly see what is working and what is not.

It should be remembered that a website can double or maybe triple its revenue, without any extra efforts, by just increasing conversions. All it takes is some insight, continuous tracking, analysis and testing, testing, testing.

Do let us know if you found this information useful. We would look forward to hear from you.