How a Conversion Rate Optimisation Process Can Help your PPC Campaigns
My name is Kevin McCaffrey from Conversion Rate Services. What we do is help businesses increase the profits they get from their Marketing Campaigns and Websites. We do this using a technique called conversion rate optimisation.
Every single business in the World could increase sales and leads on their Websites by at least 10% but by as much as 100% or even more by following the process I’m about to show you.
This process is the reason that companies like Amazon, Google and Ebay dominate their markets.
You can achieve fantastic results for your own PPC campaigns by putting in place a conversion rate optimisation process.
You need to implement a conversion optimisation process because it has been proven by businesses worldwide to increase sales and leads and it is cost effective, easy and reliable to implement.
What is Conversion
Look at the image below. A conversion is turning one of these guys on the left into one on the right for any given goal. There’s 100 people in the image here and we’re saying that if 2 of them completed a goal then that’s a 2% conversion rate you. 2% is a fairly typical conversion rate for selling something online.
A goal can be an
- Order going into your ecommerce system
- a subscription to a newsletter
- a lead going into your CRM system or
- simply a click on a button
And the objective of Conversion Optimisation is to get one more of the guys on the left over to the right. Because if you have 3 over there instead of 2 and you can keep that on a consistent basis then you’ve just increased your business by 50%.
So how does this sit with all the other marketing activities we’re doing.
Well there’s a very simple equation in online business. And here it is.
Traffic is the sexy part these days. And most business know and understand the value of traffic and have an understanding of the ways they can drive traffic to their site through SEO, PPC and Social Media. when a site goes up the first thing the business owner wants to know is: are prople visiting the Website.
But a Website is useless without conversion.
And here’s the thing about traffic. Once you get your conversion sorted out, traffic is easy. You just write a big check to Google Adwords or hire the best SEO & PPC guys in the world (like Jordan here at PPCNI) and you’ll get all the Visitors you want. Because you’ll know that when these people get to your site. They’re going to convert.
So how do we do it?
Split Testing
Well the key is to use a technique called Split Testing.
This is where you create a second version of an existing page on your Website. You run a test using some easy to set up software. The software sends 50% of the traffic to original page and 50% to the new page. At the end, the one with the most conversions wins.
The example below is from a company that provides event management software. You have an original version and a new version. The conversion we’re tracking and trying to optimise is Sign Ups. So can you guess which page got 90% more people to sign up?
It was the version on the right that converted 90% more signups than the original. That’s almost double. As you can see it’s not very easy to tell if a change is going to be better or worse, so you should always split test when making big changes to your Website. Because the changes you make could do more harm than good.
But conversion rate optimisation isn’t just about A/B and multivariate testing; it’s about building a process for consistently improving conversion over time.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Process
This is the process you want to strive for
So what Split Testing gives you is Step 4 and 5 Test & Release. But that’s the easy bit. It’s doesn’t take long to set up the test and once the test is concluded you can Release it so that 100% of your traffic is going to the winner so you get the full benefit of the lift in conversion rate.
Taking a step back is step 3, the implementation. That’s where the graphic designers, content developers and software developers get to work implementing the changes you’ve decided to make (though you don’t always have to involve these guys to make big changes).
But it’s the first 2 steps of the process that are most important and the place where you should spend 80% of your time and that’s Analysis & Design.
So what are we looking to Analyse and why? Well we’re looking to analyse our Website and our customers to find good opportunities for testing.
The analysis takes the form of
- Looking at how easy the Website is to use (Usability)
- Measuring the right things in Google Analytics
- Understanding the questions the customer has in their mind when buying
- Analysing the benefits of the product or service
- Getting customer feedback
- Understanding what people are actually doing on your Website
- Studying your competitors to understand how you can beat them
- Overcoming the customers objections
- and lots of other things
Once this analysis is complete, you’ll have lots of ideas of things to change on your Website. These will form the basis of split tests. And so begins the process of increasing your conversion rate and increasing your profits.
To find out more about how to implement a conversion rate optimisation process, download my Conversion Rate Optimisation White Paper titled “How Your Online Business Can Make 20% More Money in The Next 10 Weeks”. It outlines in more detail how you can analyse your Website and has lots of recommendations on how to persuade your customers to buy.