Conversion rate
A conversion occurs when a prospective customer becomes a buyer, user or member. A conversion rate is a measuring unit and shows in percent how many prospective customers turned into actual customers. Most often conversion rate stands for a buyer acquisition. So, conversion rate is an indicator that points out the success of Online Marketing methods.
But how can conversion rate be optimized? The basis for the optimization of the conversion rate is a good tracking and analysis tool. It’s important for the website operator to know where the visitors come from, what they expect from the website and how they act there. This behavior needs to be analyzed in order to get to know where the process of conversion was interrupted.
Causes for a low conversion rate
Below are some examples of causes expounding why users leave a web page without having finished a conversion and don’t contribute to a higher conversion rate:
- The website is not visually pleasing or does not look professional
- The category and product page navigation is confusing
- The search function doesn’t deliver what the user searches for
- Buttons and links for the order process are not easily found
- Too much personal data are being requested
- The website doesn’t appear trustworthy, for example, information about the seller and/or shipping charges are not easily found
Optimization of conversion rate
Certainly, there are more causes for a low conversion rate, but the main aspects of the conversion rate optimization are clear: be interesting and trustworthy, take your user by the hand and present him things he might be interested in an uncomplicated way.
With A/B tests it can be tested, whether a conversion rate would rise if the website was changed. It functions in the following way: One user group gets a website that has been modified and a second group is shown the old version of the web page. With the help of an analysis tool, it can be seen whether the modifications on the website result in a higher conversion rate. If so, it is worth making the optimized version visible for all users.
