A conversion rate optimization audit is worth the investment and effort when it’s genuine. Friction points on your site can be discovered that you might have possibly never identified without this, and it is the first step of the process of conversion rate optimization.
CRO (Conversion rate optimization) requires a good understanding of how visitors explore and experience your website, carrying out a thorough conversion audit is an important step in discovering the bigger issues which are present in your website and have the potential to impact your website’s performance negatively and the conversion rate itself too.
Using a conversion rate audit can help you learn more and more about the behavior of new users. Furthermore, it can help you identify the loopholes in your conversion funnels and next use that knowledge and information to find a solution to upgrade those parts identified as the main problems in your website.
An audit’s purpose is to locate the technical and usability-related errors that interfere with your site’s conversion rate. Mostly, a typical and basic conversion audit tends to focus on interpreting the end to end-user experience while also exploring deeper into a site’s analytics and reporting.
The fundamental requirement of the conversion rate optimization process is a proper conversion audit. The purpose of an audit is not to assist in increasing conversions but instead to highlight the potential errors that were involved in reducing your profit.
Solely the most important aspect for a successful conversion optimization process is data. Performing a conversion audit may help you collect the information you need to identify and prioritize whatever needs to be corrected and fixed on your site to improve the visitor experience and, eventually, the conversion rate. For those of you who don’t understand the process of getting through the conversion audit, here is a short explanation of the process.
A detailed conversion audit is essential in understanding what is interfering with your conversion rate. In this guide, I will outline five steps that will get you close to optimizing the correct conversion audit approach for your site.
The first point that needs to be remembered is the defining and understanding of what you want to accomplish with a conversion audit. The selective goals may depend on several factors that may or may not include the current site performance, the maturity of your brand, and the long-term business objectives that you’ve assigned. The conversion goals may obviously differ depending on the type of organization you’re running. For instance, if sales are your final objective, you may have minimal conversion goals that can help you know whether you’re reaching your goals smoothly through your funnel or where is a potential to fall out.
Some examples of defining the right goals that you may want to accomplish are listed below:
The best method to go about this would involve setting up 1-3 primary focus objectives. They should be ranked according to most important to least important. Making an increase in conversion rates may be more important to your fellow workers rather than improving the number of sign-ups or registrations. Therefore, knowing where you want to invest your efforts and time and then aligning across your teamwork (and other stakeholders) is a crucial step.
Defining your target audience is an important step that must be done clearly. In order to conduct a successful conversion audit, the client’s experience and interests should be kept in mind. Despite how you defined your ideal client earlier, it is a possibility that since there is a shift in your customer personas, then your target audience might have changed. At the same time, it is also likely that the ideal client is not the one that is currently purchasing items from your website.
It is important to take the time to look into your site’s analytics to find out the demographic information that defines your clients, as it is a crucial step. Those demographics could include who the customers are, where they are from, and what they are most attracted to on your website.
Next, it’s time to focus on doing quantitative research to find out where your clients are having issues so you can prioritize those aspects as part of the optimization process. A technical review should start by examining your analytics tools (this can be Google Analytics or any other analytics software) to determine drop-off points in your buying process. It must be asked, which specific websites have a high bounce rate? Most of the top analytics make it simpler to see the steps in your conversion funnel and pinpoint exactly where site visitors are probably going to drop off (but you are not likely to know why, but I’ll get to that later in the conduct of qualitative research). There are two things you need to have a good understanding of when analyzing data: baseline metrics and optimization areas
Advanced reports may include how those parameters or metrics are influenced based on a traffic channel, type of device, seasonal fluctuation, or landing page. Additionally, it is unfortunate that most clients tend to have this kind of information but are not able to make use of them in the correct manner. Therefore, one of the first things I would like to teach you would be the process of putting the data analytics research into your daily routine in the short or the long term.
If you want to tell a story based on the information you’ve gathered from the analytics data, it’s time to trust qualitative research. Qualitative methods such as conducting user tests, cataloging session recordings, analyzing eye-tracking heat maps, and designing surveys in an open format are all crucial aspects for conducting comprehensive and thorough qualitative research. While data can show you where your potential client leads are dropping off, qualitative methodologies can show you why this is happening.
Based on the weaknesses identified in the quantitative and qualitative research section, it is time to start testing your website (by making user test scenarios) and optimizing the website’s customer journey or path. After reviewing the data, I will be able to see and identify patterns and trends in customer behavior. The research will point out to you the specific parts on your website that are influencing your conversion rates and I will investigate them further.
These test hypotheses then tend to become the basis for most future A/B tests that you will carry out on your website:
In the end, the conversion audit provides valuable information and clearly defined results and outcomes that are very helpful.
A priority list will be created which will point out and describe the issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Furthermore, there will be a description of solutions and strategies of hypothesis you should be testing or which should be implemented in the future to help you make your conversion rate to another level.
It is also without a doubt that I will assist you throughout the process of implementing these findings or, if anything is left unclear, directly from the conversion audit. Additionally, I can help you and your teams understand everything in detail. For e-commerce industries and projects, I would recommend conducting a 360-degree analysis. Your time and money should be invested in a thorough and comprehensive conversion audit of your e-commerce website.
Finally, now that you are aware of what the process of a conversion audit looks like and what makes it essential for your site, would you like to know how much it’ll cost you?
It is very individual, the price for conversion rate audit varies from client to client – some clients need more complex conversation audit (as their site is much bigger or gathering the data from their team is more time-consuming – it is typical for bigger corporate companies :-)), some need to just polish small details or get them to the right track. Some need full-time dedication and care. It really depends.
So basically said – I will tailor the price of my services to your unique needs and will be depending upon the size and scale of your business and for sure the number of tasks we need to solve or hours spent on your project.
As large-scale projects require extensive working hours and consequently more time, smaller ones sometimes need even more time because I have to simply set up everything from scratch (and educate you, your team, or the people involved).
Therefore, I evaluate the cost of the conversation rate audit after a detailed review of your project and possible KPI (which we will define together). When I will have all the necessary information about your website/app/project, then I can let u know the price – it can be based on fixed price/hourly rate or monthly fee + success fee.
The percentage of the people that visit a page and perform their desired action is known as the conversion rate.
To calculate the conversion rate, one divides the number of conversions by the number of people who visit that page. For example, if you run a beauty products company and in a month, it receives 200 visitors with 100 sales.
The conversion rate will be 100 divided by 200, which is 50%.
It is okay if you want to increase your conversion rate but you shouldn’t make it your priority. Primarily, because conversion is just a part of the entire process, not the whole process.
For example, if you run an e-business of highly luxurious leather jackets each of which is $500 USD, the conversion rate will only be 5% for this business.
Now, if you produce the same products with much cheaper goods, let’s say, each jacket is now for $10. You apply the same concept of conversion rate.
Seeing the relatively cheaper price of the products, people may purchase more. The conversion rate will be higher in this regard and it can be as much as 100%. Because of much affordable price, everybody can buy this product whenever they visit your online store.
Now, multiply 100 with $10, you will earn $1,000.
This means that you earned less even though the conversion rate was much higher.
Therefore, it is better to focus on revenue generation rather than focusing solely on the conversion rate. It is nice to increase your conversion rate but this shouldn’t be your ONLY goal.
As a client, you can do a lot to increase the conversation rate. But most of the people don’t know how to start or what to do. Most of the work depends upon two primary things – data and common sense. When I talk about data, I mean gathering the information regarding the blockages in your marketing funnel. On the other hand, common sense refers to the ways to get rid of these blockages.
It’s quite easy once you get the hang of it, trust me.
But, for your ease, I can provide you with several hints. Let’s start with some mistakes that most small and sometimes, even bigger companies commit.
In today’s times, most companies are still operating with prehistoric and ancient website systems. These systems have extremely outdated UX structures which makes the website too complex to understand. Surely, the owners of these websites weren’t aware of the big role played by the structure of the websites.
This can all be explained by one example – the whole process of ordering. This process can be divided into several steps such as the configuration of the product, inserting name, surname, address, and contact information (phone number and your email).
Now, if we switch some of the steps, for example, put the contact details first. What difference will it make?
The first and the most important difference will be that you will be getting more leads.
The second impact will be that you can pinpoint that person who hasn’t completed the entire purchasing process. You can send them a reminder with a catchy phrase such as “your items are still waiting for you”.
There are also some e-shops that utilize time-limited reminders. For example, you can send a reminder to your customers saying, “Hurry up! You’ve only got 24 hours to keep your items. Finish up your order before it’s given away.” Imagine, if you want to buy PlayStation 5, I’ll suggest you to finish your order as soon as possible because many people want it.
We have many indecisive people amongst us. Most of them will reconsider their purchase, leave in the middle of the order, or some will not return at all. In these matters, filling out the contact details first will give you a chance to persuade them to buy your products. You can approach them through their contact details and provide various incentives such as special discounts, remarketing campaigns, etc.
Other than that, you can avoid asking/using special characters such as slash “/” or dash “-” because most of the people don’t know how to type it or even locate it on the keyboard.
Adding such characters can make you lose up to 20% of the customers, saying that they will do it later but they never get back.
Do you remember the last time you ordered something from a website like a regular customer – from start to finish? When you had to fill out all the details necessary to complete the purchasing process? If your answer is “I don’t remember” then I guess, you need to work on this part.
There are several things that can go wrong during the ordering process. Some errors and critical bugs may show up that can hinder your conversion funnel.
To get rid of this problem, you must regularly test your site on your personal computer and mobile devices using various browsers. You can check Google Analytics to understand what kind of browsers your users use the most.
Plus, once you go through your website like an ordinary customer, you will definitely see some of the areas that need immediate improvement.
Another most important thing in a company is its blogs. A lot of money and time is invested by the companies into building good quality content and blog posts. But their prime focus remains on increasing the number of visitors instead of transferring their traffic into leads.
To increase your conversion rate, you can start by adding CTA’s into your blogs in the form of old-fashioned text links. If you want to gain more attention from your visitors, you can also highlight these links. But before going on with this hack, you need to test its working and answer some questions such as what kind of color contrast is the most eye-catching? Where it should be placed in the blog post to enhance CTA performance?
This is the spot where text links of CTA will work much better than the CTA images.
This is because many people turn a blind eye to all the images present in the content. They’ll skip through them without batting an eye because they’ll think that it’s one of those galling advertisements, even I would skip that part. Any information written on those images can go to waste.
Now, when it comes to the text links, they don’t hinder the reading of the readers. Instead, these text links seem like a header that sparks up the interest of the readers and they’ll read much more carefully.
We can take the example of HubSpot when they experimented with the CTA banners and text links to see the increase in the conversion rate in the blog posts. The results suggested that only 6% of the leads were generated by the CTA banners present at the end of the blog while the bigger percentage (93%) is generated by the text links.
It is quite surprising that some solutions can be right under your nose but you just can’t seem to pick up. For instance, you have a business of selling computers with a drawn-out warranty. The only setback here is the CTA button is not visible to the users.
This problem can be resolved by highlighting the CTA button. There can be various ways of emphasizing it such as enlarging it, utilizing good color contrast, or even by making several but cleaner graphics around this button. It can help to boost up your sales, resulting in increased revenue.
When it comes to CTAs, it is best that you opt for buttons instead of images or texts because people are quite used to looking and clicking on buttons. If you put images or texts and ask them to click on them, they will get confused and they will leave your website. So, it is better if you work with the traditional-looking buttons.
Some of the businesses generate revenue from taking calls. In that case, you can make your company’s phone number bigger and clickable. An increased convenience can result in increased revenue.
If you want to increase your sales, instead of posting sign ups or buy signs, you can post the benefits of your products. Try telling your users what you have in store for them and how it can benefit them.
Stop highlighting the things or facts that your users already know. Describe the positive consequences of buying your products and services.
Blank texts are quite boring and your users can lose interest. So, you should go with some visually formatted texts such as in the form of videos.
If you’re offering a good deal, people will never want to miss it, especially where there is a lot of fuss created over the internet.
So, if you want your customers to make quick decisions, you can always tap their fears by placing a countdown on the offer.
Plus, if you’re running an e-business, you can always perk up your customer’s interests by making a product prominent. You can do this by highlighting it as the “Deal of the Day” or “Buy one get two free”, etc.
Looking for conversion rate audit? Then you can email me at info@krcmic.com, call at +420 722 829 579 or use the form below. Would you like to expand your business network? Then don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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