How to improve your conversion rate

In this article we will give you a list of tips to help you increase the conversion rate of your site. If at this point you are not certain what the term conversion rate means you can find an article we did on this subject here: Conversions? What does this mean for my website?

• Offer your customers a toll-free number to call you. Some visitors will prefer to call you but it also gives your visitors more confidence that you are legitimate and they can always reach you.
• Make sure you are reaching the right people. If you are selling shoes and are advertising shirts you are not likely to get much conversions.
• Reassure your visitors you will handle their information with care and will never spam them or sell their personal information.
• Use third party certificates (VeriSign, Thawte, etc.) to show your visitor he can trust you.
• Make sure you have a privacy statement and create clear links to it.
• Make sure you have your companies address on your site. This will show your visitor you will not hide from him.
• If you have any and think it is apropriate for your business use customer testimonials. Never use fake information but use real customer testimonials. If you have satisfied customers it shouldn't be hard to get a few.
• Make sure you have an "About us" section on your site with information about your company. Preferably have a picture with the actual people working there as this makes your company more personal.
• Make sure you site is easy to use and your visitors do not have to search for your "call to action" buttons.
• Provide clear and attractive photos of your products. Remember your customers cannot touch and examine the product before buying and only have the photo to see what the product looks like.
• Make sure your checkout process is as easy as possible. Remove any elements that might throw off a user or confuse them.
• Offer your customers the option to automatically copy their contact information in case billing and shipping address are the same.
• Show your customers how many steps your checkout process contains and at which step they are at the moment.
• Perfom a spelling check on your site. Having spelling errors may look unprofessional.
• Make sure your visitors do not need to install any additional software in order to be able to use your site.
• Identify your unique selling points (USP's) and make sure you are communicating them to your visitors.
• Make sure you communicate your products benefits aswell as their features.
• Make sure your customer knows exactely what each product costs before he finishes the checkout process
• Test if having free shipping has a positive effect on your sales.
• If you sell items that can go out of stock make sure you display if the item is in stock at the moment of purchase by the visitor.
• Display the expected delivery time. Delivery can also be an USP in case you ship very fast or to locations your competition does not ship to.
• Offer your visitors the posibility to buy on your site without having to register first.
• When placing links on your site try and use text in form of an action. For example: in stead of having a link: "Privacy statement" make one that says "Read the privacy statement".
• If you offer a large amount of products make sure you offer ways of sorting and searching.
• If applicable try to provide a way to compare diferent products.
• If you offer only one option don't make the visitor have to select it but don't offer the option or auto select it.
• If you have special offers or a sale promote it so your visitors are aware of it.
• If you offer payment using creditcard make sure you use a secure connection.
• If you offer payment using creditcard make sure your form allows every possible form a creditcard number can be written and offer explenation about the security code(Where to find it etc.)
• Consider placing a link "Click here for help with your order" and having it link to additional information about your order process and contact information.

Compare page performance to your site average

When trying to make sence of the statistics for your site most of the time you are looking at the statistics of individual pages and checking their performance over a specific time period. But sometimes a lot can be learned from comparing it to your site's average.

Let´s say you are looking at the "Content by Title" overview in Google Analytics. You see information regarding "pageviews", "time on site" and "bounce rate" for each page. This is usefull information but you would like to compare these pages to eachother in order to find out if some stand out in either a negative or positive way. And you would like to know how these pages perform against your site´s average.

Click on . This graph shows you the selected metric of each of the pages compared to your site´s average. This gives you a good idea if there are any anomalies you should pay attention to.

The graph contains two dropdown lists you can use to select diferent metrics. In the first dropdown you can select a metric to sort your results by. The second dropdown lets you select the metric you want to compare.

This image shows an overview of bouncerates sorted by pageviews. You can clearly see there are two pages that have a relative high bouncerate compared to the site's average and these may need attention.

Interesting statistics to look at in this manner are for example:

• Time on page: Which of your pages are beeing visited longer and which shorter?
• Bounce rate: Which differences can you spot compared to site average?

My site has a high bounce rate, what do I do?

Bounce rate is an important statistic to keep an eye on as it can tell you a lot about your pages and visitors. The bounce rate shows the percentage of users that leave your site after watching only one page. You might say they just bounced of your site as they didn't get past the first page.
The most prominent reasons for having a high bounce rate are:

• you are attracting the wrong visitors or
• there is a problem with your site

What you can do to lower the bounce rate

Try and identify pages in your site that have the highest bounce rate and do the following:

• Check if there are any errors on the page
• Check if there are internal links(links to other pages of your site) on the page
• Check if the internal links on the page are sufficiently clear and attractive

Besides checking your site you can also check to see if you can find more information about the visitors that bounced of.

• Through which external link did visitors come to this page
• Check which keywords were used to find this page and see if the page is relevant to those keywods
• If visitors came from your Adwords or other advertising campaign check if the page is sufficiently relevant to the keywords and text of the campaign.

The above video is a very interesting explanation of what bounce rate is and how you can use it to find problems on your site.