What is Conversion Marketing?
Most of us tend to spend a lot of time on driving traffic to our websites. But what we don’t do enough of is looking at what happens to that traffic when it arrives. How long are they staying on your landing page? Are they clicking around, and if so, where are they going? What pages are they exiting on?
Conversion Marketing makes a lot of sense, and most importantly… financial sense. Think of it like this: If you’re driving 100 people to your website each day, and only 1 of those people are converting, you’re looking at a 1% conversion rate. Let’s say your goal is 2%. It makes the most sense to optimize your website/landing page so that you end up achieving 2% conversions on those 100 people.
Why not just drive 200 people to the site to achieve the 2%? Well, because that costs you money. You might be thinking, “Well Megan, my lead gen is 100% organic. It doesn’t cost me anything”. Well okay. It may not be coming out of your pocket in ad spend, but you can bet it’s going to come out of your bottom line and your earning potential, as you’re now having to spend significantly more time doing prospecting just to get those extra 100 people visiting your site. You could have utilized conversion marketing, which would have allowed you to spend that time growing your business in other ways.
A lot of folks tend to think that conversion marketing is complicated, so I’m going to try to give you a straightforward explanation & easy implementation techniques to help you get a little more from your website and/or landing pages.
Goals Are Important!
Regardless of what platform you’re using (Facebook, GoogleAds, etc…), you need to establish goals to compare your metrics against. Having data is useless if you aren’t able to successfully measure progress.
Examples of goals may be:
Signing up to an Email List
Making a Sale
Downloading a Guide
Booking a Call/Demo
You’ll want to set up your tracking URL or Pixel on the “Thank You” page. This tells Google or Facebook that you’ve successfully achieved your goal.
There are other purposes for tracking outside of just conversions. As an example, with Google, an alternative to these “URL destination” triggered goals are to look at “Time on Site,” “Number of Pages,” or “Bounce Rate,” all of which can help you set a threshold level. This makes the assumption that if a visitor has seen a certain number of pages or stayed for a certain period of time that they are engaged with your content and could be a warm lead.
Bounce Rates and Exit Pages
Bounce rates and exit pages can tell you where your site is not working. A “Bounce” is when somebody arrives and leaves on the same page of your website. This tells you one of two things. Either the page they landed on has fulfilled their need from your site (maybe they just wanted your telephone number) or, and more likely, the page wasn’t right for them and they left to go somewhere else. The pages with the highest bounce rates are the pages that we can focus our efforts on improving.
Exit pages are the pages where people are leaving your site. By simply trying to improve these pages you can reduce the amount of people leaving your site before they carry out your desired action, or, have suitable engagement with your content. What you now need to do is work out how to improve these pages, and this is where Google Website Optimizer comes in
Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer (GMO) is yet another free tool from Google that can help you improve your website. GMO allows you to version test your webpages and do something called multivariance testing (kind of like split testing). This essentially means you can try multiple versions of your webpages, and see which version ends up getting people to complete your goals. It’s particularly good for testing different versions of copy, headings and images, but not for completely different page layouts. You will need some technical knowledge to set it up, but the site has step-by-step instructions.
A couple of things to bear in mind about variance testing are:
That the more variances you are testing, the more visitors and data you need to get any meaningful results, and;
You actually need some decent versions of your content to do any testing. For example, if you just test a load of different, but not very good, page headings, you probably won’t see any meaningful results.
Next Steps
Hopefully this blog has provided a few pointers in the right direction as to how you can start to get more from your site traffic. For your next steps, have a look at a few of the links below. Google Conversion University has loads of useful video tutorials on using the Google tools mentioned above.
Google Analytics: www.google.com/analytics
Google Website Optimizer: www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
Google Conversion University: www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
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